HR - There is a 2 years gap on your CV!
Candidate - I was in jail.

HR - Why?
Candidate:- I killed the guy who told me : "We'll call you back".

HR :- Welcome on board, You have the Job.

Interview with a candidate. He calls himself "C++ expert" on his resume. I think: "oh, great, I love C++ too, we will have an interesting conversation!"

Me: let's start with an easy one, what is 'nullptr'?
Him: (...some undecipherable sequence of words that didn't make any sense...)

In my mind: mh, probably I didn't understand right. Let's try again with something simple and more generic

Me: can you tell me about memory management in C++?
Him: you create objects on the stack with the 'new' keyword and they get automatically released when no other object references them

In my mind: wtf is this guy talking about? Is he confusing C++ with Java? Does he really know C++? Let's make him write some code, just to be sure

Me: can you write a program that prints numbers from 1 to 10?

Ten minutes and twenty mistakes later...

Me: okay, so what is this <int> here in angle brackets? What is a template?
Him: no idea

Me: you wrote 'cout', why sometimes do I see 'std::cout' instead? What is 'std'?
Answer: no idea, never heard of 'std'

I think: on his resume he also said he is a Java expert. Let's see if he knows the difference between the two. He *must* have noticed that one is byte-compiled and the other one is compiled to native code! Otherwise, how does he run his code? He must answer this question correctly:

Me: what is the difference between Java and C++? One has a Virtual Machine, what about the other?
Him: Java has the Java Virtual Machine
Me: yes, and C++?
Him: I guess C++ has a virtual machine too. The C++ Virtual Machine

Me (exhausted): okay, I don't have any other questions, we will let you know

And this is the story of how I got scared of interviews

Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

wk87 is a dangerous topic for me, i've been through a lot. I apologise for what I am about to inflict on this network over the coming week.

Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 1, "T".

T was an embedded C developer who talked openly about how he's been writing code since he was 14, knew all the C system libraries and functions like the back of his hand. For the most part, he did ... but not how to actually use them, as (based on his shocking ... well everything) he was inflicted by some sort of brain disorder not yet fully understood by medical science. Some highlights:

- Myself and the CTO spent 4 days teaching him what a circle buffer was and how to build one.
- His final circle buffer implementation had about 3 times as much code as he actually needed.
- When the code was running too slowly on the device, we didn't try find any performance improvements, or debug anything to see if there was anything taking too long. No not with T, T immediately blamed TCP for being inefficient.
- After he left we found a file called "TCP-Light" in his projects folder.
- He accused the CTO of having "violent tendencies" because he was playing with a marker tossing it up in the air and catching it.
- He once managed to leave his bank statements, jumper and TROUSERS in the bathroom and didn't realise until a building wide email went out.
- He once .... no hang on, seriously his fucking trousers, how?
- He accused us all of being fascists because we gave out to him for not driving with his glasses, despite the fact his license says he needs to (blind as a bat).

... why were his trousers off in the first place? and how do you forget ... or miss the pile of clothes and letters in a small bathroom.

Moving on, eventually he was fired, but the most depressing thing of all about T, is that he might not even be top of my list.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

When they want an honest candidate

Interviewer - so what's your email ID?

Candidate- sir, abc@xyz.com

Interviewer - and password?

Candidate- 12345678

Interviewer - you shared such a confidential information so easily for the job. How can we trust that you will not share any confidential information of the company for some better offers?

Candidate - Sir, I might have shared my password with you but I don't think you can still login to my email account. Let's look for the possibilities. My password can be

12345678

Or

Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneight

Or

1twothreefourfivesixseveneight

1twothreefourfivesixseven8….. so on

Or

2444666668888888 (one 2, three 4….)

13355557777778 (1, two 3, four 5……, 8)….. so on

Or

Combination of all of these…

By the way, did I mention use of capitals? 😂

Finally that candidate was offered with the position as
" HR Manager"

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

*sitcom audience cheers*

Thank you, thank you. Ok so far we've had a developer from hell and a CEO who shot to fame for being the first rectum to receive a passport and be given a job.

2 pretty strong entrants if you ask me. But its time to slow it down and make sure everyone gets a fair chance. Its not all just about the psychopaths and assholes, what about the general weirdo's and the stoners who just made life awkward?

So here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 3, "A".

"A" was a bit of an unusual developer, despite having a few years experience in his home country, he applied for an unpaid internship to come work with us ... probably should have rang alarm bells but hey we were all young and dumb back then.

I had to say I felt very bad for A, as he suffered from 2 very serious, and job crippling personal conditions / problems

- Email induced panic attacks
- Extreme multifaceted attachment disorder (also known in layman terms as "get the fuck away from me, and do your job" syndrome)

While he never openly discussed these conditions, it was clear from working with him, that he had gone undiagnosed for years. Every time an email would come in no matter how simple ... even the services team asking to confirm his staff ID, would send him into a panic causing him to drop everything he was doing and like a homing missile find me anywhere in the building and ask me what to do.

Actually "A" also suffered from a debilitating literacy issue too, leaving him completely unable to read our internal wiki's himself. Every week we had to follow a set of steps to upgrade something and every week to mask his issue, he'd ask me what to do instead ... no matter how many times I sat with him previously ... must have been truly embarrassing for him.

But "A"'s finest moment in the company, by far, was the day where out of the blue, at the top of his voice (as if wearing headphones ... without wearing headphones) he asked

"DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO SELLS POT?"

... why no, manager of the entire department standing behind you, I do not

... why no, tech lead talking to manager, I do not

... why hello 50% of my team staring at me ... no "A", I do not!

Needless to say all our team meetings were a little awkward for the next few weeks after that but hey who doesn't like being thought of as a stoner / drug dealer by their team mates huh?

Will A make it to the top of the list of most incompetent? Well he has some truly logic defining competition yet to be announced.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.

Some context first and then the rant!

Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.

Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)

He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.

The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.

Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).

Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.

Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!

Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.

Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).

Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.

From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.

I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.

Heard a CEO say at a conference that they hire the most competent candidate. Unless there is a woman in the candidates. Then they hire the woman.
That seems pretty sexist to me.

Roughly 180 days, 5 months and 29 days, 4,320 hours, 259,200 minutes, I devoted myself to a client project. I missed family outings with my daughter and my wife. People started asking my wife if we had broken up. My daughter became accustomed to daddy not being around and playing with her. Sometimes only sleeping 4 hours, I would figure out solutions to problems in my sleep and force myself to wake and put them into action. My relationship with my wife became very fragile and unstable. I knew I had to change but I just needed a little bit more time to complete this client project.

Finally, the project was ending there was light at the end of the tunnel. I “git add –-all && git status” everything looked good. I then “git commit -m “v1.0 release candidate && git push beanstalk master”

I deployed the app to the staging server where I performed my deployment steps. Everything was good. I signed-up as a new user, I upload a bunch different files types with different sizes, completed my profile and logged out. I emailed the client to arrange a time to speak remotely.

“Hello” says the client “How are you” I replied. “Great, lets begin” urged the client. I recited the apps url out to the client. The client creates a new account and tries to upload a file. The app spews a bunch of error messages on the screen.

The client says

“Merlin – I do not think you really applied yourself to this project. The first test we do and it fails. If you do not have the time to do my project properly please just say so now, so I can find somebody else who can”

I FREAKED THE FUCKOUT on the client!!!!!!! and nearly hung up. My wife was right next to and she was absolutely gobsmacked. I sat back and thought to myself “These fuckers don’t get it”. All that suffering for nothing!

Thanks for reading my rant….

BTW: I did finish the project, the client was amazed on how the app worked and it is has become an indispensable tool for their employees.

Today's my lucky day for job rejections...

"Unfortunately we have decided not to proceed with you as a candidate because the salary range you expect lies outside our budget."

That's very interesting indeed because in the very first interview (phone call) you asked me about that range and I gave it, straight and simple.

Then I had to do a coding challenge, which I usually refuse, but did anyway. It took about 15 hours. Let's not forget that it had nothing to do with the job I was applying for, but OK.

After that, a second interview, which took 1.5 hours and a third, which gobbled up 2 hours of my time.

Then you tell me that you're not willing to fork over the dosh, after having wasted 18.5 hours of my time!

Thank you very much, you anus blossoms!

Interviewing a candidate for a dev position.

Interview is over and handshakes commence.

After the interview we have a debrief in a room that has hand sanitizer in it (just coincidence).

I squirt some and it comes out like a rocket ship; getting all over one of his resumes we printed. It looks like jizz...

One of the head guys walks in a says:

“I hope he didn’t hand you the resume like that.”

To which one of our ops people, let’s call her Sara, says...

“No, leanrob just REALLY likes his resume!!!”

> I almost fucking died from laughter

I just reviewed a resume that has 18 pages. I thought I've seen the worst. I have three stories so hopefully, the people having a hard time finding a job would get something out of this. Some people just don't make sense.

Candidate no. 1: The guy has a specific section for "Personal Details" with information that includes the following:

Gender: Male
Race: <citizenship>
Nationality: <name of his country>

In the work experience, he indicated his responsibilities and one of them was "protect the name of the company at all costs". Wow, my pee pee hard. He has a shitload of Apple certifications and cancelled an interview before. On the date of his re-scheduled interview, the recruiter couldn't contact him. Probably died from an overdose of whatever drug he was on. Thank god, I did not want to waste both of our time.

Candidate no. 2: One of those "proactive" egotistical junior developers. So eager to trash other languages, elitist little fucks, and one of those "Windows bad, reeeeee" types. He said he only uses Linux but he can also use Windows because he would run a virtual machine in Windows that has Linux in it. Big brain 2020. I checked his LinkedIn profile and voila, the most recent of his activities was a shared post saying it should be illegal to push code that doesn't follow PEP8 standards. I crossed my fingers not to see an "HTML is not a programming language" shit in there.

I checked his portfolio, bloated piece of shit that has one of those rounded boxes in the middle. 50% nothing and 50% box that has all the details. He has menus named "Face" and "Emoji Events". He says there "I'm a pedantic programmer" and right after that statement are grammatical errors in various states of decomposition.

Interview day, he didn't miss the chance to tell me about how he wants everything to follow the standards and that his current company doesn't have good documentation so he's looking for other jobs. Strict about standards such as naming conventions but doesn't know data structures and algorithms. Epic priorities.

"Okay." I give him the assessment exam and left him alone for 30 minutes. I told him that he doesn't have to answer all of it and it's just a way to assess his knowledge (hint: try your best and be honest). I came back and he's browsing on his phone. He said he's looking for answers in SO but the connection went down.

"Okay." I checked the exam, no answers for most of it and the ones with answers are all wrong. Technically, you already cheated and yet you didn't get to answer all of it and you didn't even get anything right.

"Okay." He asks, "Do you use a lot of Math in the project?" I was confused. He then said that the exam has a lot of Math in it. The exam was a basic programming exam - how to swap the values of two variables, data structures, what is the time complexity of this and that, method resolution order, etc.

Candidate no. 3: A "full stack" developer. When you see that title, you know you're in for a carnival ride. Senior developer, almost 20 years of experience, has a Master's degree in a reputable university. Every page has a small box with some artsy style on it and a small chunk of information like where he graduated and shit. It's like a scrapbook of pain. This pattern repeated for the rest of the pages. I feel like I read a whole book and got nothing. Like you can ask me what the book I've been reading all day is about and I can't answer you because I don't fucking know. The amazing part is he would often have titles that look like this:

Software Develope
r

System Administrato
r

The fuck? I checked his LinkedIn and of course, I see that "Dear recruiters, if you're looking for blah blah blah, that's an entire IT department" cancer.

"Okay."

Lads, I will be real with you: some of you show absolute contempt to the actual academic study of the field.

In a previous rant from another ranter it was thrown up and about the question for finding a binary search implementation.

Asking a senior in the field of software engineering and computer science such question should be a simple answer, specifically depending on the type of job application in question. Specially if you are applying as a SENIOR.

I am tired of this strange self-learner mentality that those that have a degree or a deep grasp of these fundamental concepts are somewhat beneath you because you learned to push out a website using the New Boston tutorials on youtube. FOR every field THAT MATTERS a license or degree is hold in high regards.
"Oh I didn't go to school, shit is for suckers, but I learned how to chop people up and kinda fix it from some tutorials on youtube" <---- try that for a medical position.

"Nah it's cool, I can fix your breaks, learned how to do it by reading blogs on the internet" <--- maintenance shop

"Sure can write the controller processing code for that boing plane! Just got done with a low level tutorial on some websites! what can go wrong!"

(The same goes for military devices which in the past have actually killed mfkers in the U.S)

Just recently a series of people were sent to jail because of a bug in software. Industries NEED to make sure a mfker has aaaall of the bells and whistles needed for running and creating software.

During my masters degree, it fucking FASCINATED me how many mfkers were absolutely completely NEW to the concept of testing code, some of them with years in the field.

And I know what you are thinking "fuck you, I am fucking awesome" <--- I AM SURE YOU BLOODY WELL ARE but we live in a planet with billions of people and millions of them have fallen through the cracks into software related positions as well as complete degrees, the degree at LEAST has a SPECTACULAR barrier of entry during that intro to Algos and DS that a lot of bitches fail.

NOTE: NOT knowing the ABSTRACTIONS over the tools that we use WILL eventually bite you in the ASS because you do not fucking KNOW how these are implemented internally.

Why do you think compiler designers, kernel designers and embedded developers make the BANK they made? Because they don't know memory efficient ways of deploying a product with minimal overhead without proper data structures and algorithmic thinking? NOT EVERYTHING IS SHITTY WEB DEVELOPMENT

SO, if a mfker talks shit about a so called SENIOR for not knowing that the first mamase mamasa bloody simple as shit algorithm THROWN at you in the first 10 pages of an algo and ds book, then y'all should be offended at the mkfer saying that he is a SENIOR, because these SENIORS are the same mfkers that try to at one point in time teach other people.
These SENIORS are the same mfkers that left me a FUCKING HORRIBLE AND USELESS MESS OF SPAGHETTI CODE

Specially to most PHP developers (my main area) y'all would have been well motherfucking served in learning how not to forLoop the fuck out of tables consisting of over 50k interconnected records, WHAT THE FUCK

"LeaRniNG tHiS iS noT neeDed!!" yes IT fucking IS

being able to code a binary search (in that example) from scratch lets me know fucking EXACTLY how well your thought process is when facing a hard challenge, knowing the basemotherfucking case of a LinkedList will damn well make you understand WHAT is going on with your abstractions as to not fucking violate memory constraints, this-shit-is-important.

So, will your royal majesties at least for the sake of completeness look into a couple of very well made youtube or book tutorials concerning the topic?

You can code an entire website, fine as shit, you will get tested by my ass in terms of security and best practices, run these questions now, and it very motherfucking well be as efficient as I think it should be(I HIRE, NOT YOU, or your fucking blog posts concerning how much MY degree was not needed, oh and btw, MY degree is what made sure I was able to make SUCH decissions)

This will make a loooooooot of mfkers salty, don't worry, I will still accept you as an interview candidate, but if you think you are good enough without a degree, or better than me (has happened, told that to my face by a candidate) then get fucking ready to receive a question concerning: BASIC FUCKING COMPUTER SCIENCE TOPICS

* gays away into the night

Just interviewed a guy with ~8 years of experience:
Me: *Asked him to write a simple algo logic on a paper*

Him: I don't do much of algo design. I'm much of a design patterns and software design guy.

Me: How would you design a singleton class in Java?

Him: *writes a sloppy code*

Me: Hey, thanks for your time. Our HR will get back to you with further updates.

Moral: Interviews can be very short when the candidate doesn't code.

Me: *listening to some random semi-obscure track on spotify, liking it, add it to playlist*

Come home, girlfriend playing the same track. "Yeah I've had that in my playlist for two weeks now". Our accounts are not linked in any way, and I only use Spotify on a PC at work, while my girlfriend only uses it at home.

It might just be coincidence, or us having similar tastes.

But the issue is that it's getting more and more difficult to know whether me and my girl are spiritually linked unique snowflake soulmates who are so perfectly in sync with each other, or whether an algorithm suggestively linked us both that song based on scraped location and behavior data.

And whether it matters. Maybe it matters. I don't know yet.

In twenty years maybe humans will be unsure whether it was a wonderful coincidence bordering on cosmic fate that you ran into your new love, or whether Google purposefully drove you towards the same lunch cafe at a specific time because it calculated that she was the perfect candidate to strengthen your susceptibility to advertisements over the coming decade.

Malicious AI will not come into lives bearing guns.

It will not instantly take all of our jobs and enslave us.

It will just know you better than you know yourself, it will know everyone around you better than you know them, and it will play incredible mind games. It will not be designed with malicious intent, just perfectly execute on top of the malicious systems we already have, and even arise as an emergent property within new systems.

It will rarely be clearly visible, but you will increasingly say to yourself: "That's odd, I was just thinking about that". It will detect depression from a smile, physical attraction from a glance, reliability from patterns in your voice and illness from the bloodflow in your cheeks.

It will not just make our cars autonomous, it will make our lives autonomous. It will protect us, decide for us, keep revenues and human satisfaction in a "balanced maximized" state, it will make everything feel easy, slightly abuse us, and when one of us suddenly crashes at 140 mph into depression, debt or addiction it will prove impossible to know whether the humans or the algorithms were at fault.

I'm incredibly afraid and excited about the coming 10 years.

Funny😂😂

My current one. When I was chosen for my current job as the final candidate, he went for me partly because we've got the same favourite music and that made us click very well.

Now, a year later, it's still going awesome.

We can be serious but most of the time (when we see eachother) it's (savage) jokes, 'rekking' eachother and we keep eachother up to date on new music releases and festivals.

I remember this convo about music:
Boss: Heyy, this is a track I go hard on: Rejecta - Followed 😉
Me: oh yeah that one is awesome! Have you heard his other tracks?
B: HE HAS OTHER TRACKS?! 😍
M: Yaaaaas! He's got 'deserve to die', ''let my tape rock" and 'move my body'
B: OH MY GOD THIS IS FUCKING AWESOME 😍
M: enjoy man 😘
B: thankies 😊

He's not that much older than me and actually listens to advice.

Just an awesome boss in general!

So yet another follow up rant on the Linux job hunting! (yes hello this is @linuxxx).

Got send a list with questions (for candidate screening) and was literally mentally preparing to answer all the questions (I expected shit like Linux commands, kernel stuff etc etc).

Then I saw the questions. Mother of god.

1. Have you ever worked with a Linux distro and if yes, which one(s)?

😶. Uhm I expected some more difficult stuff.

2. Have you ever worked with a hosting interface like CPanel etc?

😶😶. Alright I should adjust my view on the difficulty level of these questions.

And so it went on and on. I think I make a pretty good chance 😆.

I'll hear more at Monday and if all is good then I will get an interview through Skype with their American office!

How can they think that anybody falls for those ads?

Honestly. = != ==
Also: German and English mixed? Choose one, best stick to English if you want to look serious about looking for developers.
What does Job == interested even mean? The job is interested in the candidate?

I had a prospective employer be late to every single interview we had scheduled. I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, but they simply didn’t value my time.

I was in the process of moving and a recruiter called me to tell me a job I had been submitted for wanted to do a phone interview that day. Even though I was driving across the country in a box truck, I agreed to the interview. We arranged for the employer to call me at 2 PM. I figured it would give me a break from driving in the middle of the day anyway.

I pulled over at 1:45 and waited. At 2:15 I called the recruiter to verify the time. He said he would get in contact with the employer and call me back. At 2:45 I called the recruiter and told him I needed to get back on the road and we’d have to reschedule.

We rescheduled the call for a few days later at 1 pm. This time I got the phone number of the employer, so at 1:15 I called him. He apologized and said he lost track of time. Whatever, let’s just get this interview going.

He liked me on the phone, so he wanted to meet in person the next day. I was a bit irritated by the situation, but I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I showed up for my in person interview 15 minutes early and checked in with the receptionist. 30 minutes later I asked the receptionist when they were going to be with me as my interview was supposed to start 15 minutes ago. I was finally seen 5 minutes after that.

The interview was supposed to be a several hour affair where they were going to have me sign an NDA and show me some of the issues they were having to see if I could solve them. I had cleared my scheduled meetings for the afternoon so I could attend this lengthy interview.

After about 45 minutes of interviewing, the manager suddenly said that they needed to cut the interview short because he had just realized they needed to get something done that afternoon. He asked me if I would come back the next day to finish the interview.

I shook his hand and left, shaking my head the entire time. When I called my recruiter after I had calmed down, I let him know that I would under no terms be interested in a job with them. If they refused to acknowledge my time was worth something as a candidate, they would never respect it as an employee.

They still offered me the job and couldn’t fathom why I was upset about the situation. I’m very glad I didn’t take that job.

LinkedIn is an alternative reality unhooked from the rest of the world, where hypocrisy and arrogance meet, creating Leaders, Experts and Analysts.

- Every company is an industry leader globally.
- Every offer is life-changing.
- Every normal person suddenly is an expert in his field
- Each candidate is an expert in time management, customer relationships, and software development priorities.
- They are all happy to share their achievements in a disinterested way
- They all deal with important issues, with great reflections on the meaning of life and reality around us
- Each written post usually starts with a question followed by a life experience
- Companies are dynamic, they change their internal processes on a daily basis

Please shoot me, I've had enough of this shit.

- Few companies are leaders globally
- The offers you make are traps and I always have to look for where the bullshit is.
- You're not an expert in your field if you've been doing the same thing for 10 years without moving your ass out of that chair.
- If you were a time management expert, I wouldn't have to call you every week for unresolved tasks, and I wouldn't even have to do 150 meetings to postpone the goals set. Exactly what is your experience with the customer? Because by heart shutting up and always saying yes is not a good way to get the job done.
- I have great news for you. Nobody gives a shit about your work successes. At most they're envious.
- If you really are such a deep and introspective person... how the fuck is it that working with you is hell?
- Copying a quote from a website and then building a narrative on it doesn't automatically make you a superstar
- Companies, especially the largest ones, take years to change and if they do it is because there is the economic motivation behind it, not because they are visionaries.

This rant was written by scrolling through my LinkedIn feed.

const NewJobAlert = (candidate) => {
skill: "Flutter",
experience: "5 years"
}

Hopefully the last part of my job hunting for now! Had a good call with the boss and heard from the recruiter that I'm the preferred candidate because we had (the boss and I) a real 'click'.

It's now between me and one other person.

Man I am nervous! Will hear it today or tomorrow!

Sometimes it just feels really good to see recruiters getting burned. A stupid one recently posted:

"When you find the candidate that has 15 years of experience in AWS, has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, speaks 6 languages and is under budget... "

The comments immediately mentioned that AWS was formed 12 years ago.

Haha, what a stupid fuck!

My biggest pet peeve at the moment is people without any development experience using version numbers.

Me: "Communicating a release date for the feature towards clients is dangerous, we have a developer shortage, and currently don't really have enough capacity to..."

Manager: "What we release next month doesn't have to be perfect, it is just a v1"

Me: "You mean it's a beta? If that's the case, could you maybe differentiate the requirements of the beta, let's call it a 0.1.0, versus the 1.0.0-rc, the release candidate?"

*Feature is eventually merged into production, barely in a beta state*

Manager: "So I have some ideas for the v2"

Me: "You mean 1.0.0"

Manager: "Let's compromise and call it v1.5"

Me: "Let's compromise, you stop communicating release dates, AND you stop using version numbers..."

Manager: "That's not a compromise..."

Me: "...I wasn't finished... And I won't respond to the recruiter who just offered me a better paying job"

Me: So how do you handle conflict
Candidate: I use git kraken to highlight my conflicts and walk through them one by one

Probably the most developer answer i've ever heard hahaha

Always tell junior devs the same.

You'r not going to become the senior dev or architect you have in your grand vision by sitting around this company fulfilling mundane tickets.

Start thinking through new ideas, possibilities, software that you think could really help a specific niche Or pick a model that already exists. The ideas prior existence doesn't matter but having a new idea that has potential has always inspired me to keep pursuing it.

Break out lucid charts, learn how to map out your domain objects and their relationships. Build out a service map of how you want things to work together. You dont have to know how context boundaries or demilitarized zones work or any that technical jargon. At the end of the day those concepts <should> develop organically and then the jargon will come to you like "oh thats the term for this". Some people learn better from knowing and then implementing. I usually come to it organically then learn about it later. Thats the point of this though. Read up on it, understand enough to map it out and then start building them out.

Use a language you want to be proficient in but are not. Use a framework you want to understand but do not. If theres an auth protocol in high demand that meets your needs but you do not understand, run with it. You'r proficient with mysql; mongo would also be a good fit for the business needs but you've never used it. Perfect, use mongo then.

Find avenues of improvement down the line. Maybe the simple records resource server would be a good candidate for GraphQL. Pull in a pub/sub to increase service communication/aggregation, learn websockets to maintain a vital client interface. If you dont know what the fuck im talking about, perfect! Jump in there. Start small, build up, tinker.

You'll meet soul sucking blockers all along the way and thats the biggest thing that separates seniors from juniors is having worked through these issues before, time and time again. Embrace failure, embrace change, maintain initiative because you can be another miserable dev that keeps the cogs turning making a decent 50k salary or you can be a positive catalysis.

HR - There is a 2 years gap on your CV!
Candidate- I was in Yale.

HR - Oh wow that's great! You're hired!

Candidate - Yay! I got a yob!

***Interviewing potential sys admins so us devs don't have to build everything and run everything***

Coworker: Do you know how to use cron and cron jobs?

Candidate: Yes I'm familiar with setting up users and permissions.

Me: 😳

Coworker: 😳

Boss: We will give you a call have a good day.

If you had just admitted you didn't know but we thought you could learn we might have been open to teaching you but brazenly acting like you know something when you don't is dangerous if you're running a multi thousand user production system.

My girlfriend said when she first started doing tech recruiting she asked a candidate "How many years of experience do you have in C.... pound sign...?"
I would absolutely die if I had a question like that haha

HR really are the scum of the earth. Especially Indian HR.

I tech interviewed this guy on Friday and rejected him. And I told HR to tell him so. Apparently he was "too busy" to type a darn message.

This poor sod who was apparently laid off and was pretty desperate and so he'd been calling every HR he'd interviewed with the past week and no one picked up, including my HR.

Now this lad had my work number because that's what I did my phone interview on. I don't attend work calls on the weekend, especially not interviewees but I had to tell this poor sod that he didn't make it (it was a bit obvious).

This is the exact same HR who rejected a candidate just because they were 2 minutes late to a video call.

Today, I interviewed a candidate for an entry position. I noticed our job post had a requirement of 30+ years of experience in C++.

I fixed it to "Basic implementation skill in C++".

Are you fucking serious! 😈😈😈

Is this what a Junior Dev nowadays needs to know to be a successful candidate?

When you're interviewing a candidate, who works on Linux, for a senior position & he refers to the Terminal as "MD-DOS"!!

*receive candidate profile from HR*
Give it a quick read, spot a link to a site the dev made for a clothing company.
*click*
*get blocked by the company's firewall*

mfw the sysadmin now thinks i'm shopping lingerie during work hours.

I was interviewing a candidate for a senior UI dev position and I began to ask him stuff about closures, contexts, design patterns and others.

At some point, after failing to respond to most of the questions, the candidate looked at me and said something like: ‘I am amazed. You didn’t have a lot of toys when you were a kid. The PC was your only toy when you were a kid, right??’.

I looked at my junior colleague that was shadowing the interview and we couldn’t believe what the guy was asking. He was extremely serious and he was looking for a way to find an explanation for his failure.

FUKING RECRUITERS:

Good Day <NAME>, Hope this message finds you well.. One of my clients is currently looking for 6x C# developers and i strong believe you are the right candidate for this position. Are you open for new opportunities?

FYI, I have never used C#, it is not listed in any way on my LinkedIn profile, do these fuckers not fucking read.

Interviewer: Do you have any questions?
Me: When can I expect to hear back?

Interviewer: The HR will inform you
The HR never contacted me

4 years back I interviewed with a big bank
Neither the interviewer nor HR got back to me

Initially I had hope so I mailed them
Even then I didn’t get any revert

It is understandable that
I might not be deserving of that job

But I felt I deserved a feedback why?
The experience was really disappointing

Recently, a colleague & I were interviewing
“You don’t match our current requirement”

“We will send a written feedback
in a couple of days”, I told the candidate

Later my colleague: “Isn’t it unprofessional
to directly reject the candidate?”

Me: “I feel that an honest no is much better
than false hope from a delayed feedback”

“The candidate can move on
& focus on other interviews better”

Thoughts? Did I do the right thing?

Have you ever got a delayed feedback
or no feedback at all after an interview?

— we want a candidate not to be just a yes-man, you understand?
— ...no

A very experienced PM/WebDev came to us. His resume was fantastic but a bit strange. He wrote he had been working for 15 years but his experience in C# was 18 years. Though I was sceptical about this guy, others expected him to be a .NET guru. So, the interview began. The candidate described his brilliant career, then he said he wanted to move forward as a programmer and work with the newest technologies. It wasn't easy to ask him basic questions but they were in the list, so we needed to start with questions for juniors. I asked him to tell us about value types and reference types, and the answer was: about what? I repeated the question, and he said he didn't know about such complex things. I knew his resume was strange but I was disappointed. It turned out that our candidate didn't know C# at all.

Roommate: "Hey, man, uh, I know you use computers a lot or something; do you know off the top of your head how to use the touch screen on my computer?"

Me: "Uh, your laptop doesn't have a touch screen."

Roommate: "Yeah, but I thought you might know how to use it as a touchscreen."

Me: "...Your laptop does not have a touch screen."

I swear, this is the dumbest man I have ever come into contact with.

That'd be fine if this was a one-off type of thing, but he seriously has approx. 209.8 brain cells in total.

Once, with no argumentative basis, he told me that, if Mickey Mouse got enough votes as a write-in candidate, he could win the Presidency of the United States. I showed him Article II of our Constitution, and he said "why does that even matter here?"

Three more months, school'll be done, and I never have to see him again.

I found this posted by a recruiter and I liked it:
| hired someone that didn't shake my hand firmly during the
interview - he rocked as an employee.
| hired someone with three typos on their resume. - She was
the most detailed oriented person l’ve ever worked with.
| hired someone without a college degree- He was way
smarter, innovative, and creative than mel!
| hired someone with four kids- Never met someone so
devoted and committed to her career.
| hired someone who had been incarcerated as a young adult.
- He's a VP now.
| hired someone over 60- she taught me some tricks on excel
that | use to this day!
Can we please throw out all those silly assumptions and rules that we've made up in our head about what a person needs to
be, look like, have accomplished, and do, to succeed?
In my experience, as an HR leader and as a hiring manager, it's those that typically don't get a “shot” who tend to kick butt
in the workplace!
So before you throw that resume away because they don't have every certificate and degree - or - don't call back that candidate because they didn't give you a firm handshake - think about trying something new. Someone new.

!rant

So I have been recently hired at my current job for leading a product team. We're a small team working in a big company which have other teams working on other projects. I like my work and I have been appreciated for my work which I did since my stay here.
So I and my manager were discussing about how more can we automate our workflow to reduce the time to get the final builds. It was late in night. Suddenly someone asked, 'did I hear automation?'. We turned to see our CTO listening to our conversation. He told us that he's having trouble with automation in his project. I was new, so I didn't know what did he work on, so I asked.
Me: So what did you guys work on?
CTO: well, we work on automating stuff for clients and save them money. We earn 100x revenue than your product (In a more humble tone). I am currently looking for someone who can lead a team of developers for handling the automation scripting part. *Provides description of the candidate* Do you guys know someone like that?
Manager: (pointing towards me) It looks like his description.
CTO: I want him in my team then.
Manager: That can't happen, he's required in very important stuff and you're not allowed to poach.
CTO: I think I have the right to poach 😉
Me: OK, so how much raise am I going to get to switch teams (to the manager) and how much am I going to get to stay? Whoever gives me more I am theirs.
CTO: I like this guy

It's day three, I am still awaiting for one of them to tell me who won 🙁

PS: They both are friends with each other.

Email subject: Urgent need for developers!

Email body: We found you in our database, and think you're a match for this position! Requires 5+ years of C++ experience

Apparently C# == C++. Good luck finding an appropriate candidate, buddy. I was tempted to send them an email pointing out their error, but I'm not too good with "pointers"

As a full-stack dev who has been looking for a full-time role for over half a year now... How the fuck can it be so difficult to land a job as a dev? I'm a passionate, capable, and proven dev; it shouldn't be this hard.

And why the hell are coding/whiteboard interviews the de-facto standard for deciding if somebody is worthy of a role? Whiteboard interviews are as inadequate and unencompassing a means of determining the quality of a candidate as asking a dentist how well they know the organ structure of the human body.

I've applied to an endless number of positions, so far-reaching and desperate as to even apply to international positions and designer roles instead of developer roles (I've been a graphic designer for over 13+ years). Even with this, most don't get back to you, and the few who do most often just notify you of your rejection. On the rare occasion I land an interview, my chances get fucked up by the absurd questions they ask, as if the things they are asking about are at all an appropriate, all-encompassing measure of what I know.

Aren't employers aware that competent devs are able to learn new things and technical nuances nearly instantaneously given documentation or an internet connection? Obviously, I keep learning and getting better after every interview, though it barely helps, when each interviewer asks an entirely new, arbitrary set of questions or problems....

Honestly, fuck the current state of the system for coding job interviews. I'm just about ready to give up. Why the hell did I put myself through 5 years of NYU for a Computer Engineering degree and nearly $100K in student loan debt, if it doesn't help me land a job?

Did an interview this morning. Candidate had JavaScript on their resume but was mostly backend. Called themselves "senior" after 3.5 years of doing CMS upgrades and no coding.

Since JavaScript was on the resume I asked "what is the difference between == and === in JavaScript?" candidate completely failed.

Please offshore devs, don't put tech on your resume if you can't answer the most basic of questions. Don't call yourself senior when you've never even coded anything from scratch yourself.

A new type of dev hiring strategy:

I'll pick some selected rants from devRant and show it to the candidate on a white board. Their reaction will decide their chances of hiring ;-)

“Arya” and I were classmates in college. We were in the same year and did the same major. We’ve known each other for 16 years and have worked together twice; one time she was my manager and the other time I was hers. We often attend the same work-related conferences and exchange thoughts on articles that appear in industry publications. Our relationship is a professional one, although I did attend her wedding because her husband was in the same fraternity as me, and she did introduce me to my future husband at a networking charity event. Besides her wedding, we have never talked outside of work or a networking event.

I was hiring for a position and one of the promising candidates was working for Arya and had put her down as a reference. Arya sung her praises and told me she was the best employee in the department. The position I was hiring for would be a promotion for the candidate, and Arya said there was no room for promotion in her department at the moment. Based on Arya’s glowing review and the same from another manager there (and her strong resume), I hired her.

It was a catastrophe. Her work was sloppy and disorganized. She struggled to do basic tasks, missed deadlines, and was sometimes cold to her coworkers and clients. She was asked to take point on a project because her resume listed a similar project, and it went so far off the rails we had to bring in outside help to get it back on track. I know a promotion and new company can be an adjustment, but she was incompetent beyond having to adjust to a new place. Her mistakes cost us so much money she had to be fired.

When I spoke to Arya the first time, she played dumb. The second time, she admitted to lying about how good the candidate was because she was tired of dealing with her mistakes and wanted her gone. She told the candidate she wouldn’t fire her if she quickly left on her own and promised a good reference in exchange. The other manager agreed to do the same thing when Arya asked him to. Arya also told the candidate to lie about how long she worked there to make it seem like she was there longer and to put the project on her resume even though she wasn’t point on it. Arya said it was business and nothing personal.

After she was fired, my boss told me the bad candidate is being investigated by federal authorities for regulatory violations from her time at Arya’s company. The investigation started just when we were interviewing her, and Arya knew about it and didn’t tell me. The other manager is also being investigated for the same violations, which is how Arya got him to lie about the candidate. If the candidate had not left her job there, she would have been fired when word of the investigation got out. We had another candidate who worked for Arya, and Arya told me he was a mediocre employee who does the bare minimum. He just won two different prestigious industry awards. Arya also admitted to lying about him because she didn’t want him to leave. He still works at the same company as her.

I’m angry. She knowingly lied to me. I put stock in her opinion because of our relationship. I feel stupid and duped. I’m afraid making such a bad hire and passing up a good candidate will make me look bad and affect my career. My boss and her boss are upset about this debacle, and everyone knows something is up because the regulators came in when they found out the candidate worked here. They haven’t found anything yet but everyone is still nervous. The other manager who lied about the bad candidate has already been arrested and, based on what the bad candidate is accused of, she will likely be arrested soon also. (Arya cooperated with authorities, isn’t being investigated, and isn’t accused of doing anything against regulations.)

I don’t plan on talking to Arya again beyond being arms-length and professionally cool if I run into her at a conference and others are present. I’m not even sure if I can go to her boss because I don’t have any proof beyond her telling me verbally. Whether I knew her or not, the lie was egregious. Do I tell her boss? Do I confront her or leave it alone? She didn’t show any guilt or apologize to me.

So this candidate came to an interview for a sys admin position. I didn't give my approval on the CV before, the HR department just sent him to the technical interview.

I began to ask him different questions related to Linux, bash commands etc. but he didn't know what to respond. Then i asked him about his past experience and he just replied me: "this would be my first job. I have some experience with administrating some Counter Strike servers and I was admin on a Metin server".

>.<

!(short rant) && (long story)

So these last 2 months of my life have been quite topsy turvy. Everything was pretty much unexpected and now I am on my way to Banglore, which is referred to as the Silicon Valley of India.

All this started in mid Feb when one day my ceo dropped a mail to all of us saying he wants to covey something important. A little background story about my company before I go on. We were a bunch of 6-7 tech guys working on a location based analytics product and had a decent client base. I had joined them in November 2017 and I was very hopeful that I would get to learn a lot owing to the good seniors from reputed universities and their experience. Coming back to the day, the ceo called us and dropped a bomb on us that the funding is depleted and we only have enough money to pay you salaries for this month. "We didn't anticipate that this day will come but currently we are in talks with some companies that are looking to acquire us. I am very much hopeful that we will figure something out by the end of this month(Feb). Until then, I can't stop you from applying to other companies but don't reveal that we are in this situation." So, keeping my fingers crossed I was waiting for the acquisition and wasn't looking for any other opportunities.

The company work was under hold and during this time one of my friends approached me with his idea. Since I had nothing else to do, I agreed to work with him. I was living in Mumbai, the city with one of the highest living standards in India, and I was paying exorbitant rent without any income. There was no news until mid March when the ceo called and dropped bomb#2 that an Indonesian company is looking to acquire us and he had scheduled an interview for the entire team. This isn't what I had signed up for. Indonesia wasn't a country I had even considered, let alone leave the country. Still I appeared for the interview and it went very well.

No news from the company or the ceo after that. One of my friends advised me to start applying to other companies and not rely on this acquisition. Now the problem was I couldn't reveal about the acquisition in my interview, so I used to give some bullshit about me not liking the work here. The company didn't buy it because how can someone judge a company in just 4 months. So obviously I didn't clear the interviews, also partially because I didn't meet their technical requirements.

March end, I moved to my hometown in Gujarat because obviously I had started to get broke in this expensive-ass city. The friend with whom I was working with also didn't have any issue since it was just tech and coding and I could do it remotely. Comes mid-April when the ceo called and said the acquisition is done and gave me some details about it. For confidentiality sake I can't reveal the details but I figured enough red flags for me to go with it.

*Eye of the tiger playing in the background*
Now started my quest of finding a decent job. The edge I had now was that I could reveal about the acquisition to the other company. I started applying left right and center to any company I could find. Amazon, saavn and some good-ass Indian companies. The thing that now came in my way was my experience. I am 23 year old(soon to be 24) with around 20 months of experience. Everyone wanted a 3-5 year experience guy/girl. Soon, my entire optimism was draining and I even considered going back to my first company.

During this time, I got a call from this company in Banglore who were looking for a candidate which best suited my profile. I went all guns blazing and appeared for the interview. I had 6 rounds of technical interview plus 1 logical reasoning. And since I was giving the interview remotely, I had one round on each alternate working day. Everyday was a challenge and I spent the nights in anxiousness and anticipation. Meanwhile I was appearing for other interviews too, since I wasn't too hopeful about my chances in this one.

Cut to April 27, I got an offer from this company and without negotiating they offered me the package I was hoping for.

After this entire ordeal, I realised one thing. Whatever happens, happens for good. Looking forward to this new city, new company, new people and new environment.

Real story at a screening interview:

Me(interviewer): how do you convert a string into a number in Javascript?
Candidate: what do you mean?
Me: (writes "123" -> 123 on paper) How do you convert "123" to 123 in JS?
Candidate: (starts writing program on paper)

str.replace(/\"/g, '"")

mind==blown!!

An interview scene today:

Me (interviewer): Ok so tell me this.

Candidate: Umm, aaaa, blaa blaa blaa blaa, this and that.

Me: But I didn't ask you this.

Candidate: I don't know the answer to that but I know blaa blaa blaa blaa, this and that.

Me: It's okay if you don't know the answer to my questions, we will skip to the next question.

Candidate: Ok.

Me: Asks how "X" works and why should we use.

Candidate: Umm, aaaa, "X is a .." blaa blaa blaa blaa, this and that.

Me: Okay, I already know what "X" is, please tell me how it works and why would you use that.

Candidate: Umm I don't know, but I know X is blaa blaa blaa blaa, this and that.

I hate interviewing..

The first sentence of the candidate was, that he wanted to speak in english instead of german. Great start if you stated something else in the application.

And his english was even worse than mine.

And as expected from his tags in the application, he had a broad knowledge base. From IoT, LTE, node.js TCP, Java, Ruby, Python, to VLAN and firewalls.

Guess what, he had no in depth knowledge for the required job. Suprise!

As a senior developer, I introduced a bug in the hiring system at the company I worked at and it took HR nearly 2 years to fix it.

Bug: Every candidate I interview on Wednesday between 12:30 PM and 4:15 PM gets selected irrespective of performance.

Impact: 270 candidates got a job

1st Fix [1.5 years in]: Add multiple developers to conduct a single interview (still did not fix it completely after all I was a senior developer)

2nd Fix [2 years in]: Removed me from the hiring committee

3rd Fix [though was not needed but for HR's extra safety]: Started recording all interviews

It was a good time.

> scrolling through facebook feed
> see ad to apply as an app developer at carrefour
> "you might win 300€ to spend at carrefour"
> "we're searching for an app developer"
> apply
> first test is to make a button that adds stuff to an HTML list, very basic
> pass the first test
> get an email: "you can candidate to the next phase and might get a job"

MFW I just wanted to get 300€ and not a job

Resumes don't mean jack shit!!

I just got off an interview call with a candidate for a hardware role. On paper this guy is absolute gold, having worked for some of the best robotics companies and research groups(in India at least) It took me an hour to realize that the was just spitting out buzz words. So I started asking him some very fundamental questions, like ohms law and such.. high school stuff. But, phrased in real world terms. And it took me another half an hour to realize that the guy is dumber than a sack of peanuts!

I can't believe how easy it is for people to coast by on paths paved by seniors and teammates. By any objective assessment this guy would be lucky to get a job as an electrician and instead I'm wasting my time interviewing him for a six figure salary (well, the Indian equivalent). Gaaah!!

HR: Do you have any questions?
Candidate: Yes, In case I'm not selected, can you give back my resume? I have another interview on 3rd floor today.

About 2 years ago, our management decided to "try outsourcing". I was in charge for coordinating dev tasks and ensuring code quality. So management came up with 3 potential candidates in India and I had to assess them based on Skype calls and little test tasks. Their CVs looked great and have been full of "I'm a fancy experienced senior developer." ....After first 2 calls I already dismissed two candidates because they had obviously zero experience and the CV must have been fake. ..After talking to the third candidate, I again got sceptical. The management, however, started to think that I'm just an ass trying to protect my own position against outside devs. They forced me to give him a chance by testing him with a small dev task. The task included the following statement

"Search on the filesystem recursively, for folders named 'container'. For example '/some_root_folder/path_segments/container' " The term 'container' was additionally highlighted in red!

We also gave him access to a git repo to do at least daily push. My intention was to look at his progressions, not only the result.
I tried the task on my own and it took me two days, just to have a baseline for comparison. I, however, told him to take as much time as he needs. (We wanted to be fair and also payed him.)

..... 3 weeks went by. 3 weeks full of excuses why he isn't able to use git. All my attempts to help him, just made clear that he has never seen or heard of git before. ...... He sent me his code once a week as zip per email -.- ..... I ignored those mails because I made already my decision not wanting to waste my time. I mean come on?! Is this a joke? But since management wanted me to give him a chance .... I kept waiting for his "final" code version.

In week 5, he finally told me that it's finished and all requirements have been met. So I tried to run his code without looking at it ..... and suprise ... It immediately crashed.

Then I started to look through the code .... and I was ..... mind-blown. But not in a good way. .....

The following is what I remember most:

Do you remember the requirement from above? .... His code implementing it looked something like this:

Go through all folders in root path and return folders where folderName == "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container".

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Alone this little peace of code was on sooooooo many levels wrong!!!!! Let me name a few.

- It's just sooooo wrong :(
- He literally compared the folderName with the string "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container"...... Wtf?!?
- He did not understand the requirement at all.
- He implemented something without thinking a microsecond about it.
- No recursive traversal
- It was Java. And he used == instead of equals().
- He compares a folderName with a whole path?!? Wtf.
- How the hell did he made this code return actual results on his computer?!?

Ok ...now it was time to confront management with my findings and give feedback to the developer. ..... They believed me but asked me to keep it civilized and give him constructive feedback. ...... So I skyped him and told him that this code doesn't meet the requirements. ......... He instantly defended himself . He told me that I he did 'exactly what was written in the requirements document" and that there is nothing wrong. .......He had no understanding at all that the code also needs to have an actual business purpose.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

After that he tried to sell us a few more weeks of development work to implement our "new changed requirements" ......

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Footnote: I know a lot of great Indian Devs. ..... But this is definitely not one of them. -.-

tl;dr
Management wants to outsource to India and gets scammed.

So I got an e-mail from a recruiter (a.k.a. recruiter spam) today looking for a candidate with four "essential skills" and my head almost exploded when I read what they were. I have regained my composure just enough to be able to write this rant, but I'm still not myself. I recommend sitting down for this. Are you ready?

The four "essential skills" were:
Java, Jenkins, Eclipse, IntelliJ

I don't know where to begin. Motherfucker, where do you get off telling me which IDE to use? Oh wait, you didn't, you expected me to be an "expert" with two completely different ones, you numb nuts. Why the fuck would I be? I swear to fuck these idiots would probably screen out the best programmer in the world because s/he uses VI/emacs/Atom/Sublime/fucking-Notepad.

I can hear them saying "oh, you don't know IntelliJ? Sorry, we need an expert in that."

Fuck off you filthy cunt! No, sorry, I take that back, I shouldn't be mean to the mentally disabled.

Also, Jenkins? Really? Any developer can pick up how to use Jenkins to its full effect in a matter of hours, or a couple of days at most.

Why do companies hire these jackasses to do a job as important as recruitment? Why do they write job specs that are so incredibly stupid? I almost replied to express interest so I could go to the interview and throw a bucket of red paint on them (because they're making me bleed inside).

Where's the Tylenol?

In an interview, when you throw a simple piece of code to a candidate...

Candidate: ...

ME: (maybe I'm too hard on them)

Candidate: ...

ME: (ok, I definitively have to simplify this little pattern example)

Candidate: ...

ME: ...explaining the short piece of code and give'm the answer

Candidate: haaaaa that's what I was thinking but I used that long time ago...

ME: (Yeah... nice try)

Dev: Ok refactor this following block of code to make it more readable/maintainable while still ensuring the tests pass

*** Block is an absolute mess of nested ternaries, poorly named functions, single letter variables and outdated comments. An underhand pitch if there ever was one ***

Interview Candidate: Why would you refactor code if the tests are already passing?

Dev: …… NEXT.

Taking IT classes in college. The school bought us all lynda and office365 accounts but we can't use them because the classroom's network has been severed from the Active Directory server that holds our credentials. Because "hackers." (The non-IT classrooms don't have this problem, but they also don't need lynda accounts. What gives?)

So, I got bored, and irritated, so I decided to see just how secure the classroom really was.

It wasn't.

So I created a text file with the following rant and put it on the desktop of the "locked" admin account. Cheers. :)

1. don't make a show of "beefing up security" because that only makes people curious.
I'm referring of course to isolating the network. This wouldn't be a problem except:

2. don't restrict the good guys. only the bad guys.
I can't access resources for THIS CLASS that I use in THIS CLASS. That's a hassle.
It also gives me legitimate motivation to try to break your security.

3. don't secure it if you don't care. that is ALSO a hassle.
I know you don't care because you left secure boot off, no BIOS password, and nothing
stopping someone from using a different OS with fewer restrictions, or USB tethering,
or some sort malware, probably, in addition to security practices that are
wildly inconsistent, which leads me to the final and largest grievance:

4. don't give admin priveledges to an account without a password.

seriously. why would you do this? I don't understand.
you at least bothered to secure the accounts that don't even matter,
albeit with weak and publicly known passwords (that are the same on all machines),
but then you went and left the LEAST secure account with the MOST priveledges?
I could understand if it were just a single-user machine. Auto login as admin.
Lots of people do that and have a reason for it. But... no. I just... why?

anyway, don't worry, all I did was install python so I could play with scripting
during class. if that bothers you, trust me, you have much bigger problems.

I mean you no malice. just trying to help.

For real. Don't kick me out of school for being helpful. That would be unproductive.
Plus, maybe I'd be a good candidate for your cybersec track. haven't decided yet.

-- a guy who isn't very good at this and didn't have to be
have a nice day <3

oh, and I fixed the clock. you're welcome.

Im gunna get a lot of flak for this but just hear me out:

People keep asking me what it's like working in a male dominated industry. They have conferences for women in tech empowerment and I get forced to go to them because I'm the only female in the office.

The thing is. I don't feel oppressed. I get that we "need" more women in tech but from my experience and from talking to various women at my old university, the reason women are avoiding the tech industry isn't because it's male dominated and they feel out of place. It's because a) it doesn't interest them or b) they never thought of it as an option (like myself).

Computer programming should be in grade schools and highschool's just like math and science to help educated not only women but people in general that it's an option. That's what's going to help more women get in the tech industry. Not these bullshit conferences and women's rights in tech movements, and hiring women over men (even if she's worse than him in skill level) just because she's a woman.

Frankly I think it's downright shameful that companies that are male dominated feel the need to hire women over men just because of gender. If I'm applying somewhere and there's a better male candidate, hire him! I'd much rather your company have a good team then a "balanced" team. Great tech teams are what will bring along new and better technologies, not balanced ones.

Keep in mind I'm talking about Western Civilization here, I get that a lot of countries are still struggling with the balance of women's rights at all but this is Canada.

I also get that there are probably some women who want to join tech but won't because it's too male dominated but frankly that's a shit poor excuse. If you really wanted to join tech then being surrounded by make co-workers wouldn't deter you from living your life the way you want to. If you feel so uncomfortable around men that you won't go into an industry you love because it's male dominated then I'm sorry for you and you should probably see a councillor to get that worked out.

I feel more oppressed by having to put aside my programming and being forced to go to these conferences than I do in the every day workplace. My boss is literally more offended that I don't feel offended about being a woman "minority". He spent a week pestering me about how I would feel about this, that and the other thing if it happened to me.

I'm not saying nobody ever says anything even remotely sexist to me but frankly I could give two shits- I'm here. I'm coding. I'm good at what I do and I'm comfortable enough with myself that I can just blow off the comment (which probably wasn't even meant to offend me) and continue working. But you're going to get that wherever you go, this isn't a flaw of the tech industry. This is a flaw of the world and it goes both ways (men get flak too).

Interview:
Candidate claims being seasoned "senior".

Him: i don't know how the solve this
Me: you have to use binary search
Him: ahhaaa
Me: do you know binary search?
Him: yes
Me: can you please explain binary search?
Him: eghm, hmm, sorry I can't

Browsing job postings, and some of these requirements are just crazy, and/or wtf. Here's an example:

Front End developer wanted, junior to mid-level. An ideal candidate will be an expert in PHP, C#, and Java. Minimum experience of 10 years. Estimated compensation 30,000 per year.

Entry level full stack developer. Must be an expert in SQL. 5 years experience, BS in computer science required.

Web Developer intern - must have 3 years of experience. Must be an expert in x, y, z. This position is unpaid.

Sheeit.

Sent my application and got the first interview. However there were 2 months between when I sent the application and got the first of 2 interviews. In that time I had booked and paid for 3 weeks of vacation.
I went for the interviews, and told about my vacation, which meant I could not start immediately as I wrote in the application. My soon to be boss said that should not be a problem - great.

Next day I got an email saying that they went with another candidate.

I called the now x-boss an asked what had happened. He told I submitted my application twice, and that was the reason I did not get the job.

True. I did sent my application twice, but only because I made a mistake when typing in my email the first time.

Apparently that was a huge mistake.

team is hiring interns and one candidate put “googling” on their resume as a skill - appreciate the honesty

Recruiters trying to grab my attention by using my name in the subject line - only they forgot to change it from the previous candidate. Ouch!

We need another developer to our team, but my team leader wants someone who is familiar with our stack. A week later HR comes to our room :
"Look I have a perfect candidate! He knows all things you have listed, plenty of experience. Please take a look and I will organize an interview".
Team leader took a glimpse and started to laugh: "This is my CV from before I started working here"

Tl;dr: I do not care. Just read it or fuck off.

A friend of mine who is a paki classmate, as well, had applied for the same "Ausbildung" offer as me half a year ago.
The company is based in Germany, but is working in the US, France, UK, Turkey, China, [...], too.
After 2 interviews, they told us to contact us back within the next week. We have had our interviews on Sundays.
In the list of all candidates I was the second best. The top candidate was my classmate. The third best candidate was a guy who was involved in the last interview with both, me and my paki friend.
The candidates list was not shown to everyone else, but my paki friend.
They wanted to give him the job. [That is a big company who is creating a new dev team and expanding their IT building. Nonetheless they only accept only one candidate.]
My classmate had been given a letter that he had to sign within the same hour he was with the managers. He discussed it and said that he has other offers open and want to compare them first. They gave him a timespan of only 1 day afterwards to sign it.
He told me he is going to decline it and he did.
Normally, I should have been the person who gets the letter to sign to be accepted for the job, but no.
After letting me wait for almost 2 weeks, they sent me an mail (they usually sent ordinary letters to invite me to interviews lol) in which they said that I am unfortunately not taken for the job yada yada yada and that they wish me luck for my future.
Fuck yourselves. How about that?
I was the second best candidate. The best candidate did not want the job yet you fucking morons do this type of shit. You want the best for me?
I want the worse for you. Death to both of you managers who sucked all of my energy, patience and time.
I am really fucking pissed rn

How quickly into an interview is too soon to tell the candidate goodbye?

some people are fucking idiots.

i remember one time - i made a website which ended up having a slightly major security flaw.

the big isnt the point though. this guy told me to just "write secure code."

i consequently told him, "how about you go fuck yourself?"

well, he was a painter, so i then told him "maybe you should fucking draw better," and promptly left.

well, here i present what that would be like if other people were told shit like that.

depressed person - "just be happy"

teacher - "just make your students smarter"

homosexual - "just like the opposite sex"

presidential candidate - "just win the election"

homeless person - "just get a house"

idiot - "just stop being my client" (sorry had to vent)

well you get the idea.

devs should be treated as functioning members of society.

How can a candidate have 10+ years or experience with C++ and let alone struggle with the most simple exercise!?

Thoughts from the inner me during an actual interview:

FOR FUCK SAKE, DUDE, PUT THAT "std::" IN FRONT OF YOUR "vector" AND IT WILL COMPILE!

USE ITERATORS GODDAMMIT INSTEAD OF THOSE FUCKING INDEXES. YOUR CODE IS FULL OF DAMN OVERFLOW ERRORS!

HAVE YOU EVER REALIZED THAT ARRAYS CAN BE EMPTY SOMETIMES?

“Although we had a click during our talks, another candidate fits the profile we’re looking for better.”

MOTHERFUCKER THIS IS REJECTION NUMBER 57 FOR ME. BETTER GIVE ME A GOOD FUCKING REASON THEN THE STANDARD PROFILE EXCUSE YOU FUCKING IMBECILE OF A GODDAMN FUCKING ASSHOLE!!!

Disclaimer: i’m truly sorry for my language but i’m going through a though time. I’m gonna go and cry in a corner now and continue being jobless for probably another three months.

Interviewing a potential candidate...

Me: So, how would you rate your JavaScript knowledge?

Him: Pretty good, although I still don't really understand prototypal inheritance.

Me: Yeah, it's hard to understand something which doesn't exist.

...let the flaming begin 😈

Two of them, both are not very extrem.
Positive one first:

Meetings were usually not dead serious (unless there was a problem), everyone just joked around a little, made their actual points and got back to work.

Now the other one:
A client's QA staff commented "this bug is still occuring" on 5 tickets, without checking if they ever deployed the new release candidate.
They didn't deploy the new RC, so of course, the bugs couldn't have been fixed on their side.

Recruiter: Hi! I'm a recruiter, and you have a position similar to jobs I'm trying to fill. What are you doing at your current company right now?

Me: Uhm. Working?

Recruiter: Oh! What would make a good candidate for positions like yours?

Me: Uhm. A dedicated employee?

What if....

Interviewer: how do you find the height of a tree?

Candidate:

Me talking with my manager for handover before I leave. Just found out, there is an interview for my position, full stack dev.

No one bother asking me or the manager for tech interview and general manager from business interview alone by herself.

Manager: Do you code?
Poor soul: Yes, I do.
Manager: You are hired!

Shit, now I want to know what they ask to tech candidate without tech ppl.

Time for a REAL fucking rant.

io_uring manpages say you can set the CAP_SYS_NICE capability to allow SQPOLL to work. You can't, you still get an operation not permitted errno result.

Why? I checked, it says 5.10 mainline is required. Pretty sure I just manually downloaded and installed the Deb's myself. uname reports that I am at 5.10. So what gives?

Maintainer submitted a patch because they fucked up and made the *actual* capability check look for what's basically root permissions (CAP_SYS_ADMIN... c'mon...) and is now trying to rectify a glaring security shortcoming.

Patch hasn't been accepted or even addressed yet but they already updated the manpages with the estimated mainline kernel release as if it had made it into the release candidate. Manpages have made it into latest debs but the actual change has not.

Where the fuck is the Linus Torvalds that would ream the fuck out of shitty developers doing shitty things? The political correctness climate has discouraged such criticism now and the result... this. This fucking mess, where people are allowed to cut corners and get away with it because it would hurt their feelings when faced with pressure.

I'm not just guessing either. The maintainer has already said some of the "tone" of criticisms hurt his feelings. Yes, sorry, but when you claim 90% speedup over a typical epoll application using your new magical set of syscalls, and nobody can even get 1-2% speedup on a similar machine, people are going to be fucking skeptical. Then when you lower it to 60% because you originally omitted a bunch of SECURITY RELATED AND CORRECTNESS CHECKING CODE, we're going to call you the fuck out for fudging numbers.

Trying to maintain the equivalent of academic integrity within the computer science field is an exercise of insanity. You'd be fired and shunned from publishing in journals if you pulled that shit in ANY OTHER FUCKING FIELD, but because the CS scene is all about jerking each other off at every corner because the mean people keep saying mean things on Twitter and it hurts your feelings therefore we're all allowed to contribute subpar work and be protected from criticisms when others realize it's subpar.

These aren't mistakes anymore, it's clear you're just trying to farm clout at Facebook - maybe even FOR Facebook.

Fuck you. Do it right, the first time. Sick of shitty code being OK all of a sudden.

Five minutes before an interview and my manager started demanding for online coding exams and gathered everyone in a group chat to choreograph the whole interview as if it's a gay pride parade. This is the first time he was actually involved in interviewing a candidate and he dragged everyone into it, it's a fucking conference call.

I bet when you eat ass, the ass eats you instead. You fucking simp lord, I am exhausted.

Went to a job interview for ASP.net even though I don't know ASP.net since they asked me to come. I got the job since I was the only candidate that knew what OOP is.
I don't really want to work there.

had to reject a junior candidate today. Couldn't really write an if else statement.

Always feels bad, I remember being mortified when I was at that level.

One of my colleagues held a very short, literally 5 minutes, interview today. The candidate was looking for an android developer position.

Me: Done already?😕
C: Yep. Had enough.
Me: How come?
C: I asked him if he has any apps on the store? No. Any public git? No. Any apk? No.
C: Ok what experience do you have?
Dude: I worked on a app similar to imdb 4 years ago. I made a page for it.
C: *Page* *triggered* *internal screaming* 😂
C: Ok and since then?
Dude: Nothing.
C; Ok, we'll call you.

Best ot luck in your android dev career mate. Never gonna hear from us.

How can you come to an interview and be so unprepared. Was he delosutional or something?😕

I was co-paneling an interview with my manager a while back. After the usual rounds of chitchat we decided to give the candidate a coding test. The problem was not challenging really and there candidate seemed quite confident to show off his coding skills.

This, however, was quickly interrupted by my manager who insisted to describe the actual algorithm for the answer verbally. The act of being helpful confused the hell out of the candidate who increasingly grew nervous.

Eventually my manager decided that there candidate was a failure on the grounds that he being too slow to formulate a solution.

When pressed that there candidate could have completed the test swiftly if he had been left alone, I was told that the company was looking for "drones who can carry out instructions" instead of "creative rebels like you (me)"

I will give you a reverse rejection. Went to two interviews on site with company. They asked me a question, and I struggled. Solved the question one hour after the interview :) asked me to come for a second hands on interview, make some changes to sample code. Did that reasonably well. I rejected them because in both times the engineers we're sitting behind their laptops and were working. 0 interest or engagement on their side about the candidate.

That startup failed some years after.

Applied to a company as an electronics technician for work starting in the summer of 2019. This application was back in October 2018. Got a quick reply that they already have a candidate and are willing to look into mine if he isnt the right guy. Two months later I hear back from them. They will look into my application now and I will receive their feedback after the christmas break. K. Finally a response. Ended up taking them a month longer with following reply. It appears we have forgotten about you we will have some more info by next week. This was on a monday. Thursday I receive a call. Errr. I accidentally sent you the wrong message. It should have been an interview invitation. Are you able to come by tomorrow morning?
Meanwhile I was in military service during this time till april 2019. This was written in the application with a statement, that anytime I have to ask for a day off, I need to apply for it atleast three weeks in advance. Ended up saying I have no more interest in their offer as I had signed my current work contract the week before they called me.
BTW: During the call some girls were constantly giggling childishly in the background. Which gives them even less credibility for being a serious company!

Okay so I have a lot of experience in UI/UX, graphic design, and Front End dev, but I hate it. My github and resume are full of front end shit because it makes up most of my experience, and so when I apply to software dev things I often don’t get interviews because of lack of exp.

Well today I got an email from a big company that I applied to over a month ago and they told me that I was an excellent candidate and that they’d like to interview me. I say “the position is still open? I applied over a month ago!” to which they respond “well, the position you applied to has closed, but we are looking to hire a UX developer and had your application in our UX pool of applicants”

I did not fucking apply for this. They saw my application and threw it into the pool for future UX gigs and I’m mad because I’m not in a position to not interview for this job but I also really want to work in software.

Do you think, assuming I got the job, that it would hurt my prospects further to work in UX?

Apply for a job, pass the application stage, pass the practical demonstration and get invited for interview.

2 other candidates dropped out before the interview. It was an internal position for me, the other two were externals.

I still got made to interview for the position even though I was the only suitable candidate and everybody in the organisation knew me from my current role.

Why HR? Why?

P.S. I got the job.

I was reading a discussion between recruiters in LinkedIn, they were talking about wether or not it was a good idea to contact a candidate on Facebook when he/she is not responding emails or LinkedIn messages. Most of them agreed it's OK to Facebook stalk a person if that's what it takes to reach the candidate. I don't know what to think: maybe they're really serious about their job and I should admire them, or perhaps being a passive-agressive stalker is part of the recruiter's psychological profile and I should be scared.

There are a lot... I am going to pick the interview dialogue (incl. test) with the government.

Following situation:
-5 recruiters
-3 candidates (including me) who have all passed an online test that did last for 3 hours
The online test was for the government to see how every candidate is good at math, English, situation adaptation, historical questions, a little bit of techy questions like "What does fps stand for?" and basic questions like that.

Even tho I did apply for a job as a software developer, there was not a single fucking question about programming. I shit you not. Anyways...

After everyone did introduce themselves. I was given the following question by one of the recruiters:"How do you think will the regular work look like to you, if you were to schedule it? We will be starting with you, <myName>"
Me:"Since this is hopefully going to be my first job in software development, I can only assume it for now. Based on my knowledge about this specific topic that I have made by reading other software developers' work experiences in form of textual content, I guess that I am going to do this [...] and that [...]. Oh and after this comes the planning phase (I had mentioned the sprints and agile "frameworks") and meetings of how the projects are doing so far.
After this comes the phase of sitting down and getting to work on the project I am assigned to.
At the end comes the "see you tomorrow, xyz" phase and everyone leaves."
Somebody else from the 5 recruiters:"I am sorry to interrupt you right here, but we are not offering you a dev job. It rather is a mixture of dev and sysadmin. You will be working most of the time fixing someone's problem with their PC and not sitting in a dark and empty corner of a warm room."
This was such a disrespect that I could not give an answer to. I was deeply shocked. Developers need more respect. Most of the fucking things you use, are created by developers, you asshole.
"We will be very happy, if you can call us by tomorrow to let us now if you are still interested."
Me does not even bother anymore and blacklists that government as a "trust me. You do not want to work there" type of job offering place.
Since I did not sign any NDA. It is the government of Germany.

PS: I did apply for a *dev* job. But somehow they did decide to create a new job and assign me to it. That is not professional.

Why do recruiters say you need 5 years of experience for a certain framework when the framework was released 2 fucking years ago. Don't they consult with engineers what they want or do they just think of a random fucking number and write it down. And why do they think the OOPs concepts are totally different for all programming languages?? Also the job descriptions are usually very vague and ambiguous.

JD for SDET: you will work with engineers and help build scalable solutions bla bla

JD for SDE: you will work to build scalable solutions bla bla

Is this deliberately done so that a poor candidate wastes his or her time applying for a wrong position or even giving an interview??

Found this gem today while looking through confluence.

Goals:
Can the candidate use Slack?
Ask follow up questions if missed anything.
Ask the questions that tell a lot about someone without directly asking it (i.e. Have you ever met someone famous? (Telling what the candidate values in life) What are your hobbies? (Telling if candidate has a work life balance). If you were a crayon, what color would you be and why? (Highlights prominent aspects of candidate’s personality) Please don’t just use these, be creative.)

A crayon???? Das when I hang up

Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.

Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.

I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.

Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.

Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.

Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.

So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.

Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.

I have seen in a lot of forums (here, Imgur, reddit, LinkedIn etc) that there are a lot of developers without a job.

And most of them live in USA. I have not seen a person who is struggling to find a job in EU or some other place.

Why is this the case? In USA where the demand for developers is very high.

I read a post on LinkedIn: "40 INTERVIEWS and no one HIRED! Yet another friend telling me she can not find good talent. My thinking - If you interviewed 40 people and did not hire someone, then it's time to look in the mirror. The problem is recruiters and hiring managers are looking for the 'PERFECT" candidate. NEWSFLASH! There is no 'perfect' candidate. If you have someone with the right attitude and skill set, and they fit in with the team, why not HIRE them? There are so many qualified individuals still job searching. Yet I see the same jobs re-posted, over and over again, being left vacant for months. Who took a chance on you? Maybe it's time you a took chance on someone."

I don't think it is the "competition" because I see everywhere. I have seen entry-level or JR. open positions that are not filled for months.

It took me 1 month, sending nearly 20 applications every day to find a job in USA.
And the second one I got lucky. I applied in Europe and after some month I got transferred in offices in USA.

I do not know how true this is, but seriously, what's wrong with companies in USA that require the PERFECT candidate. Or is it something else?

This one recruiter keeps calling me and leaving me messages on different phone numbers (mixed landline and mobile phones) and I have to block them all.

How unprofessional of an agency to continue harassing a candidate if they're not interested. I've muted their numbers now.
And this is not about being interested either on their side - I know them. They're full of recruiters whose sole purpose is getting their fat ass promoted by use of candidate database and track record filling. One of them even had the nerve to tell me he got promoted and how wonderful it is.
I think I'm gonna make a request to delete my data.

Can you guys believe this?

TL;DR The prodigal son returns.

A long time ago my partner in crime left the company. So I was a "one man army", until management gave me 2 newbies to train. We'll call them X and Y.

X was new to the company, while Y was moved from a different area. During the time I was training them I realized which of the two had potential, or at least was paying attention.

Some more time passed and X was showing signs of being a good candidate to join the team. Y, on the other hand, well there were stories from his previous team. Not good.

Guess who was added to my team. It wouldn't be a rant if it was the capable one. Y was added to my team, while X was sent to a completely different area.

Time passed and I suffered many misfortunes. But this week, I saw him sitting next to my desk, X is back. I'll probably have to get him up to speed, but my little prodigy is back!

I got my first gig as an android developer a couple of months back.

Today, my changes got merged into candidate, soon to be released.

Although they are mostly bug fixes, I feel proud that code written by me will be rolled out to 400000 users. :')

Ya sure 0-2 yes experience with all those requirements + 5 more items hidden cuz of my tiny screen.

What is even more interesting they would like that person to know Swift UI.... It's not even out of beta ....

Also must know C#? For real... Those people do xamarine and native projects and they r not even a software company, they sepcialize in architecture

I hate it when people do this, like take the best at lowest price, that poor Dev is busting his ass to get your job done and you take the profit and give him the remaining change?
Hope this world doesn't get worse than it is....

By the way, job is for Full stack iOS developer 🙄

>be me
>go to a job interview
>company said to wait 1.5 weeks
>wait 2 weeks, after that ,I message them
>the company writes back, tells me they haven't decided on a candidate yet
>two days later the company writes me a letter asking me if I'm interested in a fulltime position, and if yes they will send me more info
>I reply yes
>they don't respond in 3 days
>successfully troll a candidate

I don't understand why there is such a hypocritic professionalism in tech industry.

In the careers page ,these companies show smiling people, party images , slides and shit. And while selecting resumes, they want to scan buzzwords to select a particular candidate and hate "actual" introductions.

Like, how would you like to meet someone in a bar , who introduces himself as " a super enthusiastic 10x engineer and a tech enthusiast with a knack of building scalable and industry recognized softwares in x tech for last y years". Dude, introduce yourself as a human not a bot.

There is a clear difference when we are talking about personal stuff and when we are talking about tech in real life, why not maintain that in your resume?

But no, just write a single sentence in first person p.o.v and next thing you know, you see tons of LinkedIn post about "how to write a 'professional' resume"

I was conducting interviews today. There was a candidate who impressed me a lot and i was about to hire him but one question turned the interview into a hilarious situation.
Me: what are delegate events?
Candidate: events that are fired even if you click on the side of the button

For those who had already followed my story here, a while ago I was in bad hands having several employers not professionally consistent (unfortunately).

Soon like any professional, I went in search of other jobs and looking for something better for me. I did several interviews with several recruiters around the world (massively trying to go to Europe).

Some never gave me feedback, they never wanted to at least respond to messages, emails or direct messages on LinkedIn.

Until one day a company whose owners are of the same nationality as mine opened the doors for me I came to Europe to work for a client of theirs and that client absorbed me in his company and today I am their CTO.

And magically all those recruiters from different nationalities appeared with the old man "hey, remember me ?! So about that interview, it really didn't work, right? But now I have another *** opportunity ***, how are you? Available for a conversation?"

I have already made several selection processes in my professional life, and I never failed to answer a candidate (that's right, everyone, even negative feedbacks) and I am proud of that. I am a dev and I still did the only job that HR should have done, it gives feedback.

With a lot of joy in my heart I say that the game has turned.

!rant

Just had an interview for a position similar to mine in another company.

It was a breath of fresh air that the team lead was open and honest...

It’s not the best position but it’s stable Work that I’m good at, he was up front that it’s not the shiniest thing to work on but that there’s huge opportunity to grow.

His behaviour alone is why I’ll give the position strong consideration.

When you’re interviewing: don’t sweep anything under the rug, be up front about the job and at the least you’ll gain the respect of your candidate.

After two interviews at same company,.. I'll just cut to the email and my response to them..

Company X: "...blah blah blaaah, sorry but unfortunately, we decided to move forward with a candidate that we see fit for this role. Thank you for your interest and interviewing at X company."

My reply: "....don't be sorry. Fortunately, I have already accepted an offer where I see my skills fit at an even higher level at a company."

I was lying. I didn't have an offer yet. Just had to let them feel a little regret. 😂😁

I worked for a streaming company where I was interviewing a candidate for a device position. I tried digging into his passions and hobbies and he told me he was using rasp pi:s to automatically download torrents and stream to Kodi.

He really wasn't reading up on which company he applied for.

Candidate for VC Principal role: "I thought you were flirting with me" because I laughed at this dude's jokes.

The HR called me and told me I shouldn't flirt in job interviews afterward and that he was disappointed in me.

Interviewing a 7yr experienced c++ guy, started with an ice breaker.
Me: when would you use std::list and when would you prefer to use std::vector
Candidate: vector for sequential elements and list for sequential but sorted elements
Me: why list for sorted elements? I didn’t say anything about sorting
Candidate: you’re rude

Real telephonic interview

This happened a couple months ago, but I wanted to share this one, since it still baffles me.

We were hiring and had this weird candidate. The team said no to the guy after the interview, management still hired him and pressured us to train him, which cost us tons of hours we had to somehow squeeze in during a hot phase of our project.

After almost 3.5 weeks training he had to hand in a small component. What he handed in was brainlessly duplicated, half of the stuff in there wasn't even used, the other half wasn't working properly. At the review we asked questions about the code he handed in - he could not answer one of them.
We then had a big argument with management to let the guy go, which they eventually unhappily agreed to.
The icing on that cake of a story: Turns out, the guy was hired as a senior dev with a way higher paycheck than most of the devs on the team. Wtf?!

Will be having first experience as a interviewer.
I pledge that I will ask practical and fair questions and pull the best out of the candidate.

Q: Tell me about the app you made

Candidate: ahh...umm..tooot.toot

They make me feel like they just copy paste code to get the working version.

I feel bad when see people like this, collage costs a fortune and yet they don't teach students how to start and organize requirements

I want honest opinions. Do you think the following is a good or not so good interview question. Why or why not? Defend your argument.

Define a function where the input is a list of integers. It should find and return all the unique sets of three within the list that sum to x.

For example, given the list [1, 3, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10, 13, 15] and with x = 16, the function would return [(10,5,1), (13,2,1)]

If the candidate presents the trivial solution with time complexity of o(n^3), ask if can be done in o(n^2) or better.

Craziest prep for an interview?

Way back when I interviewed devs, I prepped a bank of Simpsons and Star Trek trivia questions if the candidate answered one of the softball questions ("What are your hobbies?", etc ) that related to either subject. On rare occasion a candidate claimed to be a big trekkie so I asked..

<Deep Space Nine was in it's 5th season>
Me: "What was the name of Captain Sisko's ship?"
C: "Sisko? Was he from the original series?"
Me: "No, Deep Space Nine"
<awkward silence>
C: "Is that the new series?"
Me: "Not really, but lets do an original series question. What does the middle initial 'T' stand for in James T Kirk?"
<awkward silence>
C: "I have no idea. I don't think it stands for anything."

He didn't make the cut.

My boss at the time said I should not document any of those questions/answers just in case we are sued for discrimination.

Microservices is a buzzword and everyone is using it to modernize their company and themselves.

Add a cloud in the context and boom, you are equivalent of some Tech gaint.

Well then, if you say so why don't you implement or try to implement in proper way. Use the right tools, "opensource" if you have heard of it has a ton of stuff right for the job.

But no, all you do is write the same old services in Java, put a label of "cloud native" and stick it out so proudly that clients think "oh a new shiny thing".

Putting out poster of "Immediate job requiment for Microservices" and staring blank when the candidate tries to explain how the Microservices work, but you know only about EJBs and you are sitting in interview room wondering what he is really talking about. I dint hear a single word of Java because that is all I know. Then finally rejecting the candidate because he dint say EJB in the interview.

The point is, some shit people don't want to improve themselves nor let anyone improve. Fear of being replaced by a younger generation of developers has plauged the seniors in ways no one can think of.

This is real rant, not one of these funny stories!

So, I spent 4 years to get a Computer Science degree, and did two specializations, 3.5 years more in Uni. I have 6 years of experience working in IT, from support to programming. I also speak 3 languages.

I'm from a South America country, and now I'm living in EU.

I'm 30 now and earning a little more than a MacDonald's cashier earns in the US. I have to live in a shared apartment like a fucking Uni student. I have nothing, no car, no house, no girlfriend. WTF!

IT is a fucking lie! Profession of the future my ass!

In Uni they said that finding a good job was easy, that companies would literally grab us by the neck to work for them. LIE!
I did found a low paying job though, where at least I could learn a lot more.
People were really satisfied with my work and I even received a proposal of one of our clients to work for them, but the offer wasn't good enough.

I tried entering some big companies as a Trainee, but it was so ridiculous, they said they were looking for an IT person, but they asked things related to economy and other stuff that had nothing to do with IT. I always failed in the group work/interview, it was so ridiculous, I remember one candidate saying her dream was to work for the company since she was a child, SERIOUSLY!

When the opportunity came, I moved to EU and now I'm working as a dev. But as I said, I'm not satisfied with it! In the US the yearly average software engineer salary is about 100K, I earn less than 1/4 of it. And don't come saying that US pays more because of the cost of life, here the cost of life is the same or even more expensive, a super small apartment/loft is at least 180K, a simple new car 18K and a Big Mac costs 4€.

In the US, the average salary of someone that just graduated from uni is 60K to 70K! LOL

In EU, it's super hard for someone to earn 100K, that's why many companies are creating offices here, good workforce, 2 to 3 times smaller salary!

IT also sucks because it's too volatile, there's new stuff all the time. Someone always has to come with a new language, new framework, new library, etc etc. And you have to keep learning new stuff all the time.
Also job openings always ask for experienced people, like you must have at least two years of experience with VUE.js, or something.

Do you remember the last time you went to a doctor for a checkup, did they use a new tool, or did something different during the checkup? Probably not, the medic don't have to learn new stuff all the time, he is still using a stethoscope, he is still placing a wooden stick in your mouth to check your throat...
But in IT, almost no one nowadays is going to create code using CoffeeScript, they instead will use TypeScript.

I read an article saying that an IT professional must study 20 hours a week to keep up with new trends. So I must work 40 hours and study another 20? LOL
It's not that I don't like learning new stuff, but this sucks, I want to maybe learn something different or have a hobby.

Today I regret going to uni, I feel it was a waste of time and money. They taught things like calculus and physics that I never had to use professionally, and even programming stuff like linked lists I never had to use.

If instead I had studied dentistry or studied to be a ophthalmologist I think I would be earning more, would be working more independently and wouldn't need to keep up learning new things so much.

Also to work in IT you don't need a diploma, I read an article by a dude that learned programming by his own, did some software for his portfolio and got a job at Google.
When I read these kinds of story I regret even more going to uni, It really feels I wasted my time.

For these reasons I can't recommend going to uni to study IT, if you want to go to uni go study something else!
If you want to study programming do it on your own, there's everything you must know online for free, create a portfolio, and look for a job or even try working for yourself!

Living the life I have now, there's just no incentive to keep going.
Should I keep learning new stuff so maybe I can get a better job that will still pay low, or quit and try creating something on my own?
Or even ditch IT all together and go back to uni? LOL NO!

Interviewing for Senior Web Developer role, candidate: I have 16 years experience in JavaScript...
Don't know anything about addEventListener... FACEPALM

Worst recruiter experience wasn't mine, but it was one I overheard:

Buddy of mine who, like me, was older does a couple rounds of interviews at a nice place and gets a call back from the company recruiter. He puts the recruiter on speaker phone so I can hear too.

They are very nice and tell him they selected another candidate, bummer but no big deal.

Hey I the age of ghosting at least they called right?

He is still upbeat and asks if there was anything he could do better interview or technical stuff.

She tells him "We weren't sure you would fit into the culture."

This is a bit odd as this guy is outgoing and one of those folks that everyone loves being around and working with, just a naturally likeable guy.

He asks what she meant about culture fit and she responds "Well you're older..."

He thinks he misheard her and asks again "Your older and we don't think you will fit in that way."

Founder: Are you sure you want to join this startup?

Candidate: 100% sure Sir

Founder: Startups are risky, what if we shut down next month?

Candidate: Sir, I will do whatever it takes to not let that happen

Founder: That’s what I was looking for. You can join at 90% salary cut. That will give us 2 months more runway

I envision a website where you can review individual HR personel on the basis of;

1. Knows technical aspects enough for hiring
2. Respects the candidate
3. Respecting the messaging time limits, ghosting vs
4. Skill to bring best verdion of the candidate etc

What else would be the criteria?

!dev
This thing is eating away at me so just shut up and listen.

I have started applying for this uni for PhD (don't judge me) and for that, I will need recommendation letters, right? So I emailed two of the people who have already agreed to write me recommendation letters, to confirm the details that I'll give the said uni to contact them. Emails were sent out on Thursday. It's now soon to be Tuesday and I haven't heard a thing back. And this is abso-fucking-lutely killing me!!!! (There's still another to be emailed but he's a bit high and mighty and I'll email him after I get feedbacks from these two about my motivation letter and CV.)

Like, when you know my whole future depends on a single email of yours, saying that I'm a good PhD candidate (and oh boy, that is a joke; considering that I'm applying for literally one of the best unis in this particular subject in the whole world... I'm well over my head, aren't I?) why would you keep me standing on one leg just to confirm your contact details? I mean I know I'm overreacting a bit considering the deadline is yonks away, but still, urghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

As it may be known, when it comes to job applications, experience is overrated. The simple reason is that years of experience doesn't mean expertise. You can be doing something the wrong way for 15 years, that doesn't make you a suitable candidate.

HR.. meh.

Interviewer at Google: How did you come across this open position?

Candidate: I saw a student's post on LinkedIn where he got rejected in the first interview. I am active on LinkedIn so that I can learn from others' mistakes.

Interviewer: I will give you a chance to learn from your mistake. Please apply to Microsoft.

Interviewing candidates for a middle/senior dev position:

Me: Imagine you have this button, but whatever it's doing when you click it, it's taking too long to load. How would you improve the speed performance?

Candidate: Redis!

Me: Okay... but how would you find where the bottleneck is?

C: Redis!

Me: How abo-

C: REDIS!

"The job description requires Java, and this candidate knows Javascript, are they interchangeable?"

No they are not, lawyer handling H1B immigration cases. No they are not.

So I had an interview with Amazon, I had 2 technical rounds and 2 managerial rounds. Now I am waiting for the HR to call, this guy is not picking up the call or replying to my emails. Its almost 3 days now and I am FREAKING OUT!!

How difficult is it to tell the candidate that the application is in progress/accepted or you have been rejected!!!

HR PEOPLE :(

Had an interview last week set up by a recruiter. Interview went well, aced the tech part, got on well with the interviewers, etc. They had one more interview the next day and would make the decision. Got feedback from recruiter the next day. I was in the top 2. Was told I had the best experience and skills. Thought I had this. Later that day got told they went with the other candidate because my recruiters presented me for $5000 more than the employer's posted upper limit. The employer just felt my salary requirements would push their budget too much so they went with the cheaper, less qualified candidate.

Not happy with my recruiter at all!

Companies : we cannot provide sponsorship.

Me: I can pay for my visa.

Companies : we don't provide relocation.

Me: I can arrange my own ticketes.

Companies never reply back.

It's incrible how many openings for developers I saw around the world and when we apply for them we have to face this issues.

I know some countries is a pain to sort out the documentation, but another countries is very easy and always I face this bulshit and this stupid behavior.

The worst part is they made us waste time with assessment and don't give any shit for feedback.

I made by myselft my own recruitment process for each company that I worked for and I answered each candidate when they didn't pass on the assessment and why and in interview without fear of hurt feelings.

It's best being sad for not passed in the process for any reason that they would could told me than get this limbo.

!dev (maybe slightly)

I went to a CV Workshop organized by my first school. The presenter was the slightly-arrogant/know-it-all/cool type of guy who's a recruiter and also has his own company he runs. The presentation was OK, even though it took longer than announced. However, there were some things that bugged me. He expects everyone somehow to be extraordinary. Granted he works as a recruiter and his clients would like only the cream of the top, but some of the examples he gave from his personal experience, he seemed to give more gravity on other traits of the candidates than their achievements and qualifications (e.g. rejecting a candidate because she had posted a photo of her clubbing on Facebook). Also, somehow he judges candidates based on their parents profession. Lucky me that I fall into the category he dislikes. Now the fun part (sorry for the long post):

Next week there's a career day. I sent my CV as soon as I got the mail and then I also phoned the person in charge (as per the instructions). Yesterday on the workshop it was said we should resend our CVs by tomorrow on another mail? No problem you may think, but that said recruiter will take a look on them and that means I will have to rework mine just to make sure it is to his liking. I'm no fan of writing mission statements, nor trying to guess what my qualities (aka soft skills) are because what I think I am doesn't mean I actually am.

So now, I'm in a dilemma. Just send the CV as is or get a mental breakdown just so to please that person?
Thanks everyone for your patience and time, I just wanted to pump some steam out me...

While taking the basic JS interview:

Me: what are the different data types in JavaScript

Candidate: We have a 'var' keyword

Me: :|

I'm facing a conundrum. I saw a job posting for <Company A> weeks ago, but wasn't really interested and moved on.

Got in touch with a standalone recruitment company today who had an exciting job offer. The recruiter refused to tell me the name of the company until he spoke to me as they directed him to not disclose the name of the company or any details until he has verified the candidate is genuine. To my absolute shock and disbelief it was <Company A>!!!!

So heres the conundrum. External recruiters don't lie, why would they? Clearly this company MUST keep their hiring top secret, and some poor employee didn't get the memo before posting that job publicly. Should I report the <Company A> employee?

I don't want to report them and get them in trouble, but feel I must in order to help the company fix this leak ... before its too late ... and people find out the are hiring!

Thoughts?

HR departments really really annoy me

Firstly, they take an age and a half to respond to job applications. Now I understand that there are multiple steps in choosing a candidate, gotta look through their cover letter, resume etc, maybe talk to a lead somewhere, but 4 FREAKING MONTHS? SERIOUSLY?

HOWEVER, if they DO ACTUALLY REPLY then that makes them better than most HR departments. If I've gone to the effort of filling all of your application forms with strange questions in, and I've written you a tailor-made cover letter, the LEAST I expect is a simple copy pasta email saying setting like "Sorry, but you don't match what we're looking for". That's all. Don't even need to include my name. 100% copy and paste. 10 extra seconds in the 4 months it took you to read half a page of text and some nicely formatted bullet points

So incredibly annoying

When I interview a super cocky candidate:

"Write a merge sort algorithm that works in linear time complexity."

[at the end of a coding interview]

Me: Do you have any questions for me or the company that I can help to answer?

Candidate: Normally I have many questions to the future teammates, but you're not from the team I'm interviewing for so no I have no questions.

🤯

There's nothing wrong with asking algorithm and data structure questions in an interview if the employer calls for it.

If you're hiring a junior and/or you desperately need workers, then you can lower the bar, but if you want to be picky, then asking them leetcode-tier coding questions is fine.

THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH ASKING A SOFTWARE ENGINEER CANDIDATE DATA STRUCTURES AND ALGORITHM QUESTIONS

If they complain that asking ds&a questions is unfair for a position where all they're going to do is shit-tier frontend work, then blacklist them for 10 years.

If people argue that Doctors don't get asked chemistry and biology questions for interviews, tell them it's because medicine is much more regulated than software and that doctors are vetted technically even before they're allowed to go job hunting. Since software doesn't have the same regulations medicine does, employers have to do the technical vetting themselves.

If you think it's unfair to ask software engineering questions to a candidate applying for a software engineering job, then find a different career.

When you get the big enter button & can't stop slamming your fist on it.

So I'm a junior candidate & keep getting senior , way senior job reqs. There's no way you can put job preferences on Dice so I had to put "Jr/Entry Level only" at the end my name lol & still keep getting these.

I think they don't even look at your resume. Just blast out emails hoping they get something.

Its like shooting a rifle in the sky all over & hoping you've hit the target.

Happened today... one of the senior devs was supposed to take an interview...
After a while I see a fb friend request from him while he's taking the fucking interview...
I asked him later about this he said the candidate was taking too long to solve the problem and while he was at it, I was surfing fb 😂😂

Most of the companies visiting my campus for placements are hiring people with high CGPA and less knowledge and leaving (not even allowing for taking tests) the ones with good technical knowledge with less CGPA 🙁. So I hacked the placement portal developed by a PLACED, HIGH CGPA Candidate using SQL Injection and got access to all the student accounts 😄

@dfox - Idea for weekly rant - worst candidate that showed up to a job interview.

Had a solid resume, claimed to be a Java king, top notch. First question after he sat down: How to create a thread-safe singleton in Java using double-checked locking?

Guy didn't know the answer. - NEXT!

"The culture here is one of success based upon academic excellence, studying, learning, practising and having a good job and a great life. For upper India, not the lower. I see two Indias. That's a lot like Singapore study, study, work hard and you get an MBA, you will have a Mercedes but where is the creativity? The creativity gets left out when your behaviour is too predictable and structured, everyone is similar."
Steve Wozniak on Indian Talent.

As an Indian, I agree with him. In this day and age, where education is so easy to come by, We live in a country where from the beginning we're told that education is about getting marks and writing stuff down 10 times. We live in a country where we're asked to cram up answers to questions which start with "what are your thoughts on..". How can we expect to be creative?
Can marks be a metric for good candidate in a country where the thought is, "first complete your engineering with good marks, then think what you wanna do in life".
Should academic excellence really be about the amount of shit a guy could cram up?

Sure it's easier to filter out people on the basis of marks in a country with 1.3 billion people, but is it justified?
Can we justify "success" as a good job for a guy who's life's only achievement has been getting into a good engineering college?
Can we really consider a guy successful, if his only "effort" has been reading and rereading books twice, thrice, a million times. Is this person, who has literally crammed his way into life, and has no practical experience, really successful?

This is the very reason Woz giving such a statement is justified. As long as we as a country gives up the stupid thought that patriotism is all about abusing the guy who says something negative about the country, and we actually start taking an action and change our thoughts on education, we won't succeed.

doomsday out 🤟

Recruiter on LinkedIn:
"Hi *dev*,
I hope you don't mind me contacting on LinkedIn but I couldn't find your contact details. I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't share this awesome job with you. Can U have you're phone number? I think you are a great candidate for this job.

If it's not quite right for you, please refer your contacts!"

Where do I start...
There's a good reason why I don't have my contact details in my profile. I also have a note saying I'm not looking for any jobs at the moment. If I'm "great candidate" what would you ask me to refer my friends? I know they're doing their job, but honestly it feels like they're retarded or something.

Companies are laying workers off these days like it's nothing.

My company dismissed (just within my department) 90 out of 129 workers — that messed me up.

However, though, my team experienced just a partial effect: 2 Senior devs are needed out of 3 — mid and junior devs are going. I literally had to re-interview for my role again, since they need to keep only 2 senior engineers.

To cut the long story short, I was the first selected candidate — grateful I still have my job. But, I'm sad to see the disruption.

I understand that at the end of the day, it's all business, but mehnnn ...

Is anyone going through the same thing here?
How y'all coping?

Decided to get myself a new phone as the 2013 model is getting morally obsolete. I can still flash Lineage/Android10 and it will run it. But the apps (e.g. Google Maps) nowadays are such a performance hog it can't cope.
So I've searched through gsmarena, prioritizing smaller phones, picked myself a candidate and had it on my desk after few days.
The 2013 mindset still the same "do the backup before touching the phone in any way". How do you do backup? Unlock bootloader, boot/flash TWRP, run backup.
I've realized only after the unlocking and some googling, that the unlock automatically deletes TA partition and stored DRM keys. So advanced licensed features of the phone are gone. Also there is no way to lock the bootloader again, so I've lost the SafetyNet validation too.

tl;dr: I've fucked up my new phone as a first step after I got it.

A job that I wanted so bad, I had went to 3 interviews in one day, plus one phone interview before this. AFTER this, I went to yet another interview. 2 weeks later I get a phone call letting me know ow that they chose the other candidate because that person apparently had more passion for programming than me.

How the fuck do you measure passion?

Any JavaScript developers out there willing to help me out with something?

I have an interview question that I like to ask candidates that no one ever seems to get right. But, to me, it seems pretty basic, so I expect MOST JavaScript developers at almost any level of expertise to get it, and I like it generally because it demonstrates some core knowledge of JavaScript concepts and syntax.

But I want to verify that my feelings about it are reasonable, because give how few ever seem to get it right (and I'm talking across literally hundreds of interviews, MAYBE 2 people have ever gotten it right), I'm starting to wonder if I'm right or not.

Look at this code, and then answer the question after. Please do so off the top of your head and without testing anything since that's normally the experience a candidate would have. I'll give the answer after some time for anyone who gets it wrong but is curious.

But this isn't about YOU getting it right or not, and it's not about whether it's the best way to do something in JavaScript or anything like that, it's just about whether it's a reasonable question and whether my expectation that MOST JavaScript developers should get it right is fair.

const O = {
sayHello : function() { alert("Hello"); }
};
const S = "sayHello";

Question: using ONLY the variables O and S (and you MUST use both), write code that executes the sayHello function.

Thanks!

Does anyone have a true measure to recruit freshly graduated? yesterday I had a technical interview with a candidate, the problem is he didn't know even the basic of coding in Java, like String equality and hashcode, he also didn't have a solid understanding of basic design pattern. But what made me want to give him a chance is that he seemed highly motivated and eager to learn. So I don't know what to do guys?

You will get far more rejections than acceptance. A lot of the time it has more to do with the interviewer and not the candidate (assuming the candidate is a genuine hard worker). The job search process is similar in this regard to finding a mate or compiling your code.

Keep moving forward!

Went in for an interview today and left my brain at home. Never been so tongue tied. And as it were I was the only remaining candidate. FML!

I'm leaving my team and looking for someone replacing me. The HR gave the number of a candidate for a call:
- me calling: hi, we are looking for a backend dev with at least one year experience on a jvm langage.
- the guy: oh, I was doing some java, but I don't know jvm langage.
- me: :/

In Switzerland, when you are unemployed you need to candidate for a certain amount jobs per month in order to get money from the insurance...

So I applied to complete my list, but never intendet to actualy go to this (FUCKING) company... And here I am, and I want out :-(

As a person who never took any CS courses, I don't really see the market value of them, apart from getting through ignorant degree gating at companies with backward corporate philosophies.

As I understand, even a degree isn't really that helpful in getting your foot in the door.

That said, the week 92 question assumes there is something wrong with the nature of CS instruction. College is not trade school. The point of it is to get an education, not a job. Many employers require that education, and that's their prerogative, but for a number of reasons, chief among them being the rapid pace of the advance of technological concepts, most employers do not.

A candidate having a CS undergraduate degree is far less attractive to an employer than one without a degree, but who has a year or two of experience with the technologies the position involves.

That said, I personally think that as college is for an education and not career building, computer science curricula should focus on theory, and not on applied technology. A focus on the latter just guarantees that the subject material will be dated and irrelevant.

But as many people (maybe even most) think college is trade school, I think it's absolute madness to enter into debt slavery in exchange for expiring qualifications.

A bit late for wk61 but here goes:

Does anyone have any advice for an older dev (just turned 50) during job hunting?

One of the devs on my current project was let go some years a go, and hasn't found a new job yet.

He keeps applying to positions, but keeps getting rejected and being told "we went with another candidate".

Choosing the young buck who will leave in a year over a older dev who still can contribute for ten years seems like the most common descicion.

I hired him on the current project I'm doing for a client, which is on iOS, and I've thought him swift and the general process of development on ios. And he's taking to it really well :)

I hope this will better his chances, but the current client won't have the resources to hire someone full time now.