So because of the sheer number of interviews I’ve been doing I’m starting to get a bit brazen with them since I’ve started to really not give a fuck about most of them and I’ve started to notice patterns in common lines of questioning resulting in this unexpected gem today:

Interviewer: So we always start our devs off on the bottom end of our salary band.

Dev: Either give me the top or I’m not interested.

Interviewer: 😡. But if we start you at the top of the salary band we’ll have nothing to give you later. 🥺.

Dev: No need, I’ll take the money up front. Companies don’t give raises these days anyway, it’s just a carrot to dangle in front of the naive.

Interviewer: 😡. Well if all you care about is money so focussed on money you’ll just leave if a better offer comes around!

Dev: All the more reason to give me the highest number possible to defend against that possibility.

Interviewer: 😡. But there are other devs on the team with similar experience that will be making less than you.

Dev: Sounds like they fell for the negging and guilt tripping you are currently attempting on me in order to save a buck. Salary is not based on your skills or experience anymore, it’s based on your ability to negotiate. Here’s mine.

Interviewer: ………………. I’ll pass you along to the hiring manager.

Dev: ???? wtf

HOW THE FUCK DID THAT ACTUALLY WORK ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME I WAS TRYING TO GET THEM TO HANG UP FOR SHITS AND GIGGLES AND NOW I’M LOOKING AT A 20K RAISE ALL BECAUSE I CONTINUALLY TOLD THEM TO GO FUCK THEMSELVES??? THIS IS ACTUALLY WHAT IT TAKES TO BE TREATED PROPERLY BY A COMPANY???

Oh you're a frontend guy? Good, we need one of those.

Oh you're a backend guy too? Good, we need one of those.

Oh you're a security guy too? Good, we need one of those.

Oh you're a devops guy too? Good, we need one of those.

Oh you're a QA guy too? Good, we need one of those.

Oh you're an SEO guy too? Good, we need one of those.

"Well, sorry to say fullStackCraft, but we found your cloud architecture skills just a little too lacking for this position. We really need someone who can do frontend, backend, security audits, QA assessments, SEO, AND build scaling cloud architecture. Oh and while you're at it, can you turn fucking water into gold? We need that at our company too. You didn't get the position, but it'd be great if you could refer us to someone who is very advanced in fucking alchemy. Thanks!"

Absolutely toxic the way software people are treated I swear. The money may be the only good thing that is left.

The most disappointing (not so sure about upsetting) rejection was from none other than Google.

I was ecstatic when Google respond to my application by inviting me to an interview. If I recall rightly I had two pre-interview screenings, two technical interviews, and about four interviews with people. The people were great and the HR person I was dealing with was open that the feedback was all good.

And then the rejection came! I called the HR guy and asked what happened. He said there’s a central group somewhere who approve all hiring and they decided I hadn’t worked for a “big enough” company in the past.

Yet - my potential colleagues and manager thought I could do the job, I passed the Google-scale technical tests … and then some faceless person somewhere says “meh” and that’s that.

It’s not like they didn’t have my resume that whole time, or the opportunity to ask any questions they wanted !

So that sucked.

Me talking to a recruiter (even though I am not looking for a job)

Me: If I walk into an interview, and they ask me to reverse a binary tree for a frontend Reac or Vue position or something along those lines, I will end the call and/or walk away from it.

Him: I get similar feelings from other programmers, I don't quite understand why the notion is as common

Me: Because it is fucking useless, it servers no purpose to a dev to know about that when building frontends with react, I link my github profile, for which they can find advanced backend-frontend related projects, compiler and interpreter projects, plus the title I currently have at my workplace and a bunch of other shit, I am not interviewing for a teaching position at an institute, but an actual place of work, for which if they want to know about DS and A they can review my profile which has a repo of DS and A in about 5 different languages including plain C++. I do not need to be offended by such notions since they server no purpose on the frontend, and neither do other devs. If anything it should be a casual conversation during the interview, not a basis for employment.

Recruiter: .........thank you for explaining this to me, I am sure I can bring it up to the agencies doing the reviews and interviews. Are you still interested?

Me: Are they going to give me a coding assignment for a project or a bs question like what I mentioned?

Him: I don't know

Me: then I am not interested

"Do you easily get offended?"

"We have a bro culture here. [Some other stuff and examples] So do you think you can fit in here?"

"Tell us about a time you had to communicate with people who are not as technically capable as you."

I can remember more but cba tbh.

My college organised some interview with a company, with the whole demn class. We went there, it was quite far away (50km) and the CEO invites us to a meeting room.

Where he bores me for 2 hours talking about their projects in argiculture and NSA like spying systems at tankstations.

They were caputuring license plates at gas stations and with that information gather data about the person, such as salary (by looking at their car), house adres ect. All without people knowing. And than targeting them with specific ads and offers.

The class of sheep were super excited but it pissed me off. Because he told it like it was some awesome advancement in technology that none of us could probably ever do.

He was demeaning us, saying we would do some simple wordpress sites there and other things. We are probably not good enough forc te big stuff.

Asking him some really hard questions about his projects made him so pissed he almost wanted to kick me out.

When it was finally over, there was some test that you have to do if you want to work there. If you were good enough at the test, you could!!!! (YEEY)

Uhm, I said; no thank you I dont want to work here.

Later I talked to my classmate and friend who always thinks he's better then everyone in class even tho he barely understands OOP programming. He was asking me if he should try to get the internship. I told him; dont. They have no value for us and they think they are the greatest company on the planet.

The fucking idiot go so pissed, he stopped talking to me alltogether and blocked me everywere. I AM NOT EVEN JOKING. Just because I gave my FUCKING opinon about a company he likes for no reason.

So this idiot does the test (which was fucking simple btw, I did it too and compared the results and I had 95%) He gets invited for another interview and gets told he will be paid 200 euro's per month 😂. and a free meal everyday!! 😪 hahaha . That doesnt even cover commuting costs!

My "friend" told him that the train costs more every day. You know what the CEO said? "Yeah but you can learn so much here the also brings value and you're just a last year student. But I think you are really brave for asking more"

So in the end, he couldnt take the internship and I was fucking right. Really I hate these kinds of companies thinking they are heaven on earth when they are clearly not.

I am happy I told them no before putting my dignity on thd line.

Recently, our team hired an arrogant trainee-junior to the team, who turned out to be mean towards the other developers and in a habit of publicly mocking their opinions and going as far as cursing at them. He steals credit and insults others. He openly admits he's an offensive person and not a team player. When someone from the team speaks, he might break into laughter and say demeaning sentences like "that's so irrelevant oh my god did you really say that? hahaha". Our team consists of polite and introverted engineers who cannot stand up to bullies. Normally this kind of behavior won't be suitable even if you work in a burger shop especially not from a trainee. Let alone trainee, the rude behavior of Linus Torvalds was not tolerated, despite him being in the top position and a recognized star talent in the IT field.

I personally no longer feel comfortable speaking up during teams meetings or in the slack team chat. I'm afraid my opinions will be ridiculed or ashamed - likely will be called "irrelevant". I respond only if I'm directly addressed. We have important features coming up, requested by the customer, but I feel discouraged to publicly ask questions - I sort of feel having to regress into contributing less for the product. I also witness that other younger developers speak less now in meetings and team chat. Feels like everyone is hiding under the bed. Our product team used to have friendly working atmosphere but now the atmosphere is a bit like we're not a team anymore but a knot.

Lesson I learnt from here is: There is a reason why some companies have personality tests and HR interviews. Our proud short boarding process was consisting of a single technical interview. Perhaps at least a team interview should be held before hiring a person to the team, or the new hire should at least be posed a question: are you a team player? Technical skills can be taught more easily than social skills. If some youngster is unable to communicate in a civilized manner for even five minutes, it should raise some red flags. Otherwise you will end up with people who got refused from other companies which knew better.

During the interview they asked if I had other interviews or offers. I had one more interview and am offer. They emailed me the next day and say "we don't like to be strong armed". I'm assuming it's because I told them the truth about having an offer? We hadn't even talked about salary yet so it's not like I somehow "bullied" them into giving me more money.

Part of me didn't care because obviously this company was garbage and I dodged a bullet (plus I had an offer that was decent anyways). But the other part of me couldn't believe how fragile they were and how entitled they felt. Why ask the question if you don't want to know the answer? Where I'm at now, I got another offer before they made a decision. I had to decide within a couple days. I told them, and without any further conversation made me an offer 10k above the originally discussed salary. It was clear they were decent and so far I've been right.

I recently gave an interview in a software company, and was rejected cause I took half a minute to connect my webcam and turn on my video 🤷.

I had just moved into an apartment at that time, so my place was not well managed. I attended the meeting in time but didn't have my webcam turned on. They asked me and it just took half a minute for me to turn on and start the meeting. Everything went well there, and they asked me to complete their coding challenge which was a development task. It was a huge task where I had to build a full-stack app (frontend + backend) with basic crud and auth features. I completed that in 2 days and presented it to their tech lead. He loved my work, he was impressed that I was able to complete their challenge in such a short time.
They said they will get back, and after a few weeks, they said that I was rejected. I reached out to ask for constructive feedback on why I was rejected and they said:
“Communication during the interview - interview
preparation: the video wasn't available at the start and needed to check the headset at the start of the meeting” 🙈

Post after a long long time...

Wanted to reply to so many comments and mentions, rant about a bunch of topics, do a face reveal after I went for a vacation with family and got some pictures, update y'all on my job hunt, but was busy like hell.

Anyway, time for a story.

After my rejection with Meta and Booking, I started preparing like crazy and my interviews started going well. Refined my LinkedIn further and recruiters started reaching out as well.

Over time, with efforts and feedback, I was able to build a good pipeline.

One of my dream companies reached out to me and I got hired in just 1 round and all others were merely a formality. I was euphoric, but at the same time didn't get over excited as this seemed fishy.

They made a very good monetary offer and I didn't talk to my manager yet regarding resignation. They are pushing me for an early joining.

Read a bunch of Glassdoor reviews and also spoke to a friend who just recently quit that organisation.

He confirmed that the company has 3 months of notice, has sandwich leave policy, and some other XLT political mess.

I decided to decline the offer tomorrow.

Day saved? Not yet.

Because of this I slacked off work a lot. I am super screwed with work items pending because I thought I'd quit.

My boss resinged and new one isn't that supportive yet. He is trying to change everything overnight. Typical.

I ended up performing poorly in other companies because I was confident I'll pick this offer and didn't prepare for upcoming good companies.

Moreover, we have our offices opening up from April and I might be asked to relocate to another city which does not have a team but just because it is on paper, they might force me to be in office 50% of the time.

And what's worse is, my relationship with tech is deteriorating and they are putting the entire product team in bad light.

I have a planned weekend trip coming up, so I won't be able to prepare for interviews or work on case studies so that shit will pile up more.

I am sooooo fucking screwed. Life was stable and then all of a sudden too 180° flip.

I am hysterical right now.

I finally landed a job as a self taught developer. After countless rejections, ghostings, interviews and assessments, I finally did it. The HR literally called me back 5 minutes after the second interview with a job offer. It’s honestly is just so surreal.

I rewrote my resume. It is getting shorter and shorter. Scary.

But I was thinking, that during interviews, I never get to ask the important questions. Like, I do need to ask a few things that are important for me. Those that are not written in their websites, and they will do their best to hide.

So I came up with a list of questions:

1. Do you pay for overtime work? what is the basis of pay? hours or work-module? how realistic are the work-modules?
2. Have you ever had issues with employees from minority groups?
3. How do you address employee's professional concerns? for example, about technological debt.
4. what's the policy for meeting and daily interruptions during brain-work? Are people ever forced to participate in meetings that could be summed up in emails? what's the company policy for initiating a meeting?
5. Who designs the software? Are the requirements always non-negotiable? do the direct developers have a say in design matters?
6. How close are job requirements (as advertised) to actual tasks I need to perform?
7. What's the company policy for motivating the employees?
8. How does the company deal with mental health issues? is it acceptable for people to take leaves due to mental health issues? Has anyone ever done it?
9. How does the company deal with individual needs for working methods and space? Specifically, how does that apply to meetings? Do you have company-wide meetings? How often are they? What's the impact on productivity? Can employees not participate? Do they have to have an excuse to not participate?
10. Do developers get to develop their skills during worktime often? Or is it a "do it in your own free time" kind of thing? Are there any resources available to those who want to develop their skills further? Is it included in the career planning and employee performance review?
11. Assume I work for your company for a year. What are the benefits I can potentially gain in a year from working here, aside from adding a line of work experience to my resume?
12. Does the company provide any form of free feminine hygiene products in the bathroom?

Any questions I should add?

So I was interviewing at company X, through recruiter A. It all went well - one of the best feedbacks I have ever received actually, but then they went quiet for a bit... only to have the recruiter A call me about 3 days later and tell me that apparently the project they had planned to get me on, was a no go for a while and that they would contact me again within a month or so.

Meanwhile, recruiter B called me up and sent me to company Y and asked me what my situation was at other interviews. I said that I was interviewing at company X and that they came back to me and said the project is delayed and they'll contact me within a month or so.

Recruiter B starts a rant about how he hates when companies do that and that he, as a recruiter, would loose trust in that company if something like that happened.

And now company Y goes quiet for 2 days. Recruiter B calls me and says exactly the same thing.

So naturally, I say - "ah that's a shame, you must be loosing trust in company Y now."

He pauses and says - "Well umm"... another big pause. "I see what you mean, but umm..." another pause and this awkward silence.

"thanks", I said and I hung up. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

- Get invited to apply to job
- Technical interview, guy shows up late starts small talk wasting time and gives me the exercise
- Start implementing the first algorithm, finish it passing min test cases then realize there's a solution that would make both algorithms a breeze
- I pitch my solution realizing there's no much time left, cuz we lost almost 20 min of my test hour talking about BS plus the almost 10 min he arrived late, and reassure the interviewer it can be developed faster
- Interviewer says it doesn't matter, we should finish edge cases
- Kay no problem, finish the first algorithm successfully and explain pitfalls on the second part with the current implementation
- I tell him there's a better solution but he doesn't seem to care, he says time's up

Now here's the funny part.

I get called by the recruiter today (2 weeks later) and she says "They are happy with your soft skills but feel there are some gaps with your coding, they would like to repeat the technical interview because they didn't feel there was much time to assess the 'gaps' ".
Interviewers, either I'm competent enough to work for you or not, your tests must be designed to assess that, if you see you can't fit the problem you want in the time you have left change the problem, reschedule or here's an idea...LEAVE THE BS CHITCHAT TILL THE END AND START THE INTERVIEW ON TIME. When I do interviews I always try to have one complete free hour and a one algorithm exercise because I expect the candidate to solve it, analyze it and offer alternatives or explain it, I've never had someone finishing more than 2 an hour.

You can keep your job I'll keep my time. I'll write a similar problem on the comments to pass on the knowledge for people who enjoy solving these kinds of problems, can't give you the exact same thing, also tip guys don't do NDA's for interviewing it makes no fucking sense trust me no one cares about your fizz buzz intellectual property.

oh you want a code challenge for the interview? sure let me do that just like the 5 other companies i've had to do that for

like dude, look at any one of my multiple websites, saas apps, or mobile apps i've shipped. obviously i know what i'm doing

Got reminded of this job search bullshit they say after interviews, when they say you're not "fit for the culture" but they want you to be "challenging the status-quo".
Like, take a fucking pick. Either you want someone who follows and fits in, or you want someone who innovates and stands out. 😒

Ha ha ha ha. Fucking morons!

You brag about being a highly skilled company.

You tell me I don’t have enough experience despite three years of uninterrupted activity where I currently work

You’re willing to give me a chance (I just don’t know how to express my gratitude)

BUT among your super talented team members you can’t find anybody capable of conducting a technical interview?? And you’ve been looking for over a month for someone who could do it?

Thanks for wasting my time with three useless HR interviews you worthless DIPSHITS!

A couple of weeks ago, I got to the second stage of a recruitment process with a relatively big fintech in the crypto space (I know) - all went well and although I did not think much of it at first, with all the information I had gathered I came to realize this might as well be the best opportunity I've had in my pursuit of finding a new job (i.e looking for high technical challenges, unsure of where I see myself in 5 years, wanting to give full-remote work a try, etc.).

Cue to the end of the interview;
"That's great! I really enjoyed speaking with you, your technical background seems excellent so we would like to move to the next stage which is a take-home test to do in your free time.", said the interviewer.

"Wow! Much amaze, well of course! What's it gonna be?", said the naive interviewee.
"I'm sending you the details via email, please send it back in 48 hours, buhbye now", she hangs up.

...

"48 hours?? Right, this should be easy then, probably some online leetcoding platform, as usual.", thought the naive interviewee, who evidently went through this sh*t numerous times already.

A day later I receive the email: this was the whole deal. The take-home test supreme with bacon and cheese. A full-blown project, with tests, a project structure, a docker image, testing and bullet points for bonus points! The assessment was poorly written with lots of typos and overall ambiguity, a few datasets were also provided but bloated with inconsistent comments and trailing whitespace.

What the actual fck??? Am I supposed to sleep deprive myself to death while also working my day job? What are you trying to assess? How much of my life I'm willing to sacrifice for your stupid useless coding challenge? You are not all Google, have some respect, jeez.

I did not get the job.

Story time on my job hunt: Currently interviewing with Google during my notice period.

I always had a love hate relationship with Google. Unlike my hate towards Meta or Amazon, where I had a reason to hate them for how ill intended they are, I never had a valid reason to dislike or hate Google apart from the fact that they steal my data.

That's it. That's my only reason why I hate Google. But I fell in love with their products during my trip to Istanbul and how throughout my journey, Google products were there for me to solve all my needs.

As y'all know, I was treated badly during my Meta interview, last October. With Google, the experience is on another level.

People are fucking smart and ingenious, but at the same time very polite, humble, and respectful.

During my 3 interviews so far (2 more remaining), each one of them made me so comfortable that I was more anxious before the interview than during or after.

They supported me during each question they asked. They made me felt heard and focused on my strength, instead of the weaknesses (or trying to break me down unnecessarily).

The interview syllabus is so fucking vast, and recruiters know so much that they helped me not only with preparation material, but also guided me personally. Haven't seen such knowledgeable recruiters.

The questions were dynamic in nature and thankfully because of my preparation, I was able to answer them most.

Overall, the culture at Google seems brilliant and an environment where one can flourish. No wonder companies are trying to copy every aspect of how Google operates and no surprise that Google is doing well at scale.

I feel so high on emotions (positively), after these interviews that I wonder how would it be to work at Google with such phenomenal people and exceptional environment.

Several hours ago decided to quit my job due to insane manager (more in the upcoming rants) without a new job lined up.

An hour ago I got an interview invite from Uber.

WHAT IS HAPPENING

P.S. Anyone working at Uber? Did you have to do much LeetCode? I’ve done two LC exercises in my entire life. Not sure what to expect.

Had a panic attack during a coding assignment and now every time I think about that problem I just start spacing. Noice.

Also dear companies: if you wanna ask your interviewees about trying to deduce a theorem out of nowhere, maybe do it in the first test and not in the last one. Cause that’s a shot in the dark to someone who’s not a mathematician and id feel waaay less frustrated if I didn’t give you 6 hours of my life just to end up with an arbitrary task like this.

Me: *Gives second round in an interview, didn’t go as expected, waits for the result (at this moment we can’t go further with your profile kinda result)*

HR: *calls after 2 weeks* Hi, hope you’re doing good, your last round was declared CNS (Candidate no show)

Me: was it this bad, that the guy interviewing me simply wiped off my existence?

HR: let me figure out something. *Calls back after 5 mins* since it was a no show, we’ve decided to not go with your profile further.

Me: 🥲 it didn’t have to be this brutal of a rejection

I am conducting technical interviews for about 10 years now.
I swear to god, the applicants keep getting dumber and dumber.
Getting more and more ashamed to talk about data structures, design patters or even the most basic algorithms, everyone with a graduation badge from udemy is now a software engineer. Fuck this shit.

This was interview in so called startup.

BTW I don't get point in company calling themselves as startup when they are 5-6 years old, just call your self small sized company.

1 - online interview with HR, Normal.

2 - online technical interview - 1 hour of discussion with Lead.

3. On-fucking-site technical interview - ~1 hour of detailed technical discussions.

4. Coding task- submitted successfully

5. Zoom meeting to discuss on coding task - just told it was good and started discussion on their dead project which was unrelated to job position but I've worked with that kind of thing so it was fine.

6. Trial Day Onsite - Gave me to draw a fucking BPMN chart - fuck you motherfuckers - I knew it was waste of time.

Fuck this kind of Hiring process which takes >1.5 month.

2 leetcode hard questions in 60 mins. That's what I faced in few company interviews. Trust me, if that's the expectation you're having from candidate, you're looking for a leetcode monkey but not a software engineer!

To the interviewers who have such unrealistic expectations, please change your mindset. It's literally impossible to come up with optimal solutions to 2 leetcode hards in 60 mins if I haven't solved those problems before! It just becomes a memorization game not a problem solving round!!!

:)

Nothing quiet like the feeling of choking an interview. 😞

Related note. Trying to program with 8 people staring "over your shoulder" (even virtually) is. the. worst.

Why do employers lie during interviews!? Because they can get away with it?

This is my second job after graduating where the job was falsely advertised and misrepresented. I absolutely hate this, it hurts people's careers.

"not sure if we can meet those salary requirements, but I'll get back to you"

JK they just send me the code challenge, no idea of what salary to expect. scratch that one off the list.

meanwhile in another prospect i have had not just multiple interviews, but then add on two additional 'prep' and 'post' interviews for each of the ORIGINAL interviews i have to do with the recruiting company REEEEEEEEEEEEE

honestly it's not a good reflection of what is really valued at these companies - paper pushing over getting to work... ok

WEVE ALREADY TALKED FOR HOURS JUST MAKE A DESICION: GIVE ME AND OFFER, OR DON'T AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I FUCKING HATE CODE INTERVIEWS

HR is getting so desperate they are prescheduling me interviews attached with CVs in the hopes that I will interview the candidates for a senior, even though the candidates have no experience whatsoever in embedded software programming. Workday, JIRA and Excel does not count you absolute fucknuggets.

For fuck sake, I asked management to hire new grads or juniors, at least I can get a person motivated to learn, but I swear they just don't listen.

They just are content with wasting my time lol

A big company owned by a bald cynical guy selling stuff especially during the black Friday offered me a job, all I had to do is 5 interviews.
So I found real job instead.

Most upsetting interview rejection?

Back when I graduated college, I did the usual rounds of interviews with insurance companies, banks, various other institutional businesses set up by the college's career center.

One local insurance company interview I thought went great. Usual 'Where do you see yourself in 5 years?' type questions, told her about my job history, very high level type stuff.

Couple of weeks later I get a letter in the mail and after the usual 'It was great to meet you blah blah blah', it ended with
'State Farm will never consider you for a position with our company.'

Never?! My then fiance (now wife) yelled "WHAT DID YOU DO?!!!" and I racked my brain for anything I might have said or done. The HR lady was attractive, but I didn't stare at any body parts and I didn't make any weird sexual advances (I was nervous enough without *that* going thru my mind).
The college career center floods the local companies with graduates and I was #5 in the waiting room that day. My only guess was they got me confused with someone else.

My fiance wanted me to call them immediately to straighten out any misunderstanding, but I knew what was done, was done. It's not like they would realize "Oh, that's right, it was Bob that kept looking at Karen's breasts, not you...come work for us!" Besides, why would I want to work someplace that didn't know/care who I was?

Interviewer Mail: Build this complex project in 2 days
Me: Ok working GOD Mode Submitting.

Ghosted!!!!!

Fucking A.I. resume filter bots.

As if tech interviews weren't hard enough, I have to fill my resume with keywords to get past a bot! Every damn application and cover letter has to be unique.

And when I get past a bot, a hiring manager replies with "Sorry, you seem to have more experience with Typescript than JavaScript, and we can't take that risk."

It's the same.damn.language.

Yes, I spend my spare time with C and Python. Why does that say "unsuitable candidate" instead of "versatile"??!!

$#*%!?&@ tech industry.

Take your "Good luck with your future endeavors" and stuff it up your ass.

Times I have run into event loop / closure related issues in my 10+ years of JavaScript app development: 0

Times I have run into event loop / closure related issues in my 10+ years of interviewing: Uncaught RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded

SHEESH

I am feeling little fucked up.
I talked to one of the female employees from my new company, I'll be joining next month.
She asked manager to hire a girl in the team, I know she casually asked but after knowing this, I know my interviews were surprisingly easy, I mean I know already that no one asked me to optimize anything... did the fucking hired me for diversity, pay is good, people are good, work is good but seriously if I'm getting hired for the fucking diversity my manager is going to have a good speech from me and I'll move from his team for sure.

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

ffs, can someone tell me why i know so many ppl (and me) that have interviews that drag on for MONTHS. 1 interview, 2 interview, 3, 4, oh we have to hold off for some bs/biz reason. 5, 6

clearly you dont need anybody that bad do you

So my google assistant keeps bugging, my amazon app keeps glitching, my mac's display config get shuffled every time the computer wakes...

And we're supposed to do 10 rounds of bullshit whiteboarding interviews to work with these morons?

INTERVIEWER: Let’s say client wants a gif in the EDM design but older outlooks don’t support it. How do you solve it?
ME: Maybe we can try using iframes if outlook supports them and host gif somewhere and use iframes to show it.
INTERVIEWER: Any other solution?
ME: We can probably also detect the email client and just show gif for all other email clients but a picture for outlook.
INTERVIEWER: No but the client wants the gif to show on all email clients
ME: But outlook doesn’t support gifs!!!
INTERVIEWER: yeah
ME: …..
INTERVIEWER: …..

I thought maybe I missed something having been a junior dev and never developing edms. So jumped on the internet after the interview and my second answer is literally how everyone does it. What even was the point of that question? At no point she said yeah that’s a good solution and that’s how we do it in the industry. If outlook doesn’t fucking support gifs then what the fuck kind of solution am I supposed to bring to the fucking table in 5 fucking minutes.

I dedicate this to all of those hr gurus from top tech companies that rejected me cause they think I won’t fit their culture despite me crushing all their technical interviews, fuck them and their soft skills stupid questions.
I won’t fit there anyways cause I can express my own thoughts using sarcasm and irony and I’m not scared of doing it cause I don’t care about your amazing company culture that prefer robots not people with a little sense of humor. I don’t care about my failures cause there was so many I don’t give a fuck. And by the way if you ask me why I want to work in your amazing company I would always say cause you asked me to work for you and now you treat me like shit. Then 10 years later you blame everyone for toxic culture lol.

“Practical” tech interviews for senior roles (from my experience): DONT worry! We won’t give you any “leetcode” problems!! Instead, we’re giving you only 40 minutes to do this huge laundry list of tasks that are simple but hella time consuming. We want to see how fast you can type. So you have 40 minutes to write a mini app while we take note of the shit ton of simple errors you make due to the time crunch as your fingers burn through the keyboard and then wonder why no one can pass our “simple” tech exam!!!!

DAMMIT!! the only tech exams I enjoy are ones that involve refactoring existing code bc everything else is a fucking speed test! I’d also MUCH RATHER take these exams WITHOUT someone there taking notes like I’m a fucking lab monkey!

Got some detailed feedback from Booking.com, upon asking.

I answered all the questions right. But they said I am not ready for a Sr PM role (which might be true).

Here are three points that I captured from the feedback:

1. Focus on details
2. Clear and better reasoning for WHY
3. Realistic over idealistic scenarios

While it makes me feel low that I didn't make it but this feedback will surely help me overcome the challenges and clear interviews in future.

On to the next one now. Let's see what comes my way..

One thing for sure, there is lots and lots to learn for me yet.

One thing I surely lack is articulating my thoughts and keeping things crisp while conveying the information aptly.

Anyone has any tips/resources on how to improve in this area?

After working with a bunch of people it occurred to me that almost anyone can work and learn for most IT positions. This is something that most people will realize, especially if they work with newbies that learn on the go. There are exceptions of course, but most companies are just making crud apps with their business logic.

What I wonder then is, why is it that the way hiring is done seems to be completely against this idea? Rather than whining about recruiters and bad interviews, I am curious about why this is so common. What is it that a lot of companies think or see that make their hiring process so bad or convoluted?

I have been trying my best to fix a broken process and a product that never saw the day of the light.

Aligning all the teams, trying to bridge all the feature gaps, and at the same time learning this new product and company culture.

Now this lady comes to me with a requirement. I have zero clue what it is and instead of empathising with me that I am new and should dumb down her ask, she kept throwing heavy product specific terms as if I have been working in this team for previous 9 lives.

Anyway, I take her ask into my product roadmap and try to prioritise it.

Now I connect with them again for some discovery and she is passive aggressive towards me that it's been more than a year no one is considering their request and started whinning.

I have just joined the org 6 months ago and you start attacking me for someone else's mistake?

What the actual fuck! Go fucking die bitch. Never again I am taking her request.

If she has a problem then just speak it up and take it with leadership. Don't fucking be passive aggressive with me especially when I am not at fault and infact I am trying to help her.

And in interviews they ask people whether they are a team player or not.

i have been applying for jobs recently, and after getting some HR interviews that evolved to tech interviews, i just cancelled them all...

Every company seems to have hacker rank, and online coding sessions as tech interview stages which really stress me out. Its like everyone thinks they are google and its ok to make people go theough this pressure to join them.

I dont mind being given 10 days to implement a complex project, after which im either in or not. But 20 mins to solve something online while either the interviewer is watching me or the automated test is waiting to filter my application out... i get anxiety just thinking about that..

so im gonna stick with my current job for now, and focus on building my own business slowly on the side. I really felt anxious because of those tech interviews these past weeks and i feel so much better after cancelling all of them.

if a decent company comes along with the project approach, id love to apply, but otherwise ill just stick to where I am for now. dont know if im being immature or irresponsible career wise or if this decision will blow up in my face

stay tune to find out !

concious inclusion training: we want you to talk and share about a bunch of shit that's illegal to ask in interviews: age,sex, orientation, family status, religion, values, gender identity, ethnicity etc

what the fuck do any of these things even have to do with the job?

im confused but whatever

My LinkedIn is usually pretty quiet. Recently I've received quite a few messages from recruiters. Some of them put numbers in and I look at them, well, the market looks hot.

I like where I am but doesn't hurt to have a look around eh? So I went through some interviews and shit. No preps, not trying to please anyone, being completely honest. And out of the 3 I tried, 1 got to the final round.

Before the final round, the recruiter kept harassing me (it's their job really) about what my "bottom line" is. She said they really liked me but I'm not up to their expectation as a senior role. So they want to proceed with a non-senior role, then climb my ladder up. I told her, I don't give a shit about the title. The she said for that, the salary will be "adjusted" (reads reduced). I told her, look, I said I wouldn't bother if the offer is anything less than X amount of money. Then she said but this company would offer 10% bonus, which will add up , mind you, "close to" X. She said she wanted to know so we don't waste the director's time (as the final round is to meet the bloody director).

I said, if I need to disclose my bottom line before going to this, which is pretty much my negotiation, then let's call it off. No point wasting my time either.

The next day I received the last call from her. They fucked right off.

I know everyone here already knows. But let me experience be another example of how a plague recruiters is. I don't have any experience like this before but this is probably a fucking lowball case too.

After a rough exit from one company, I was diverted into Ops just to continue to have food on the table and keeping the lights on. This, over time, unfortunately made me more or less unemployable as a dev again. Got stuck in that place 13 years doing almost no professional coding.

During the last 5 years I took courses, got side jobs writing articles and tutorials, went to interviews and generally worked hard to get the fuck out of ops and into development again.

After getting to choose between level 1 customer support and quitting in a re-org, I quit without having a new gig. I got a lucky break through someone I'd worked with earlier to start a junior position working on some legacy systems with legacy tech.

After all that work late nights churning away using up my passion for coding, I now can't make my self pick up even Advent of code or Hacktoberfest... My passion is dead... I hope I get it back, but for now I fill my spare time with my guitar...

HR: What is Java?
Me: Ah... OOP... uhm... is a programming language... *awkward silence*... Yep, that's all
HR: Congrats, you have bombed the interview

Source: Me from few days ago ._.

I got randomly PIP’ed by this small company I was working at. They claimed performance issues without referring to specifics so I’m sure it was a financial issue (I’m paid more than other devs). So I took the laptop home and claimed I broke my back and started working from home (they don’t appreciate WFH). I did this so that I can freely give interviews. And now after 2 weeks I got 4 offers (with more than 50% hike). I’ve started the necessary documentation work and communicated my last working day with my current company.

So what is the moral of this story? Creative comments only.

5 years of leetcode with no progress. I'm giving up.

First some background, I have an undergraduate degree in computer science and one and a half years of professional coding experience which ended when I got fired for performance issues. I have worked diligently at Leetcode for those 5 years (exceptions occurred when I got ill). I have been personally coached by a google software engineer for months. I have done and given 100s of mock interviews and paid for some to be done by professionals. I have spent 100s if not thousands of hours on Leetcoding and algorithms trying to improve in any way I can imagine. I'm still not good enough.
This all came to a head yesterday when someone on Leetcode made a post about being able to solve every single Leetcode problem in a year within a year while managing a post doc degree and having almost no programming background (link at bottom of post). It made it clear that Leetcode is a game of talent not hard work. The difference between someone like her and someone like me must be noted by the programming community. The majority of people would not ever be able to accomplish that. I dedicated myself for 5 years to Leetcoding almost exclusively and still am no where near what that person has accomplished. I have put in much more work than that person and have gotten much less from it.

I believe the programming community can learn from this contrast. The culture of always trying harder and thinking success stories apply to everyone that is pervasive in programming circles is toxic. The is reality not everyone is lucky enough to be intellectually gifted to succeed and not all hard work pays off. I am proof of that and this is the type of story that needs to be shared and heard too.

I am quitting programming out of humility and recognition of my limitations. It’s ok to give up and wise to do so when you aren't good enough for something.

New job is turning out to be kind of the opposite of what I was expecting, based on interviews.

I thought I had done a pretty thorough job asking the kinds of challenging and specific questions during the interviews and was pretty satisfied with the answers.

Three weeks in, I’ve more or less been turned loose onto my first project which is….installing patch updates.

Next few projects through the end of the year and into Q1 next year are similarly sysadmin-chore work, which I’m not going to act like is beneath me or unimportant but it’s not quite what we talked about in the interview when I applied to an SDET position.

Point of order to talk about once I wrap up these first few projects, it doesn’t exactly seem like they know where I’m supposed to be or where to even really put me (on the org chart I have a line reporting up to boss, but I’m also the only one not on a functional team) and reading through the wiki last guy just kind of did everything.

If that’s what this is….eh I need to know if that’s how they want to use me and find out soon.

I know that my job searching is just a small chunk of what grownups and people after school and early duties do, but what I've went through while searching for a job in the summer was a hellish nightmare: out of ~60 companies i ever nudged, only ~3 companies returned to me.

0 RESULTED INTERVIEWS. ONLY PHONE CONVOS.

unelated, but i am currenty working on the big altrant QoL update - the stupid visual glitch in the title in the profile screen is already fixed!

Turns out: Pearson VUE is bad at communication. After I reserved the Microsoft certification exam, it was adjusted with my accommodations. So I didn't entirely die (only a little) and was allowed to have my life saving fidget 'toys' with me and just be myself with my stims.

So after all that hassle, I am now certified Azure developer associate. \o/

Looks good on paper, doesn't solve the problem of getting through the project interviews. (To normies, I seem ever so slightly off and the natural instinct is to perceive me as a liar.)

Just keep getting the dumbest tickets from a client as a Frontend dev.

I told them I am a backend and even my contract says backend but I made the mistake to help them with some themes.

So fucking ready to take other interviews where I don't have to deal with bullshit colors and fonts anymore.

This weekend, I have been grinding a lot on leetcode. Even though I am grinding part of me believe that the interview process is broken for relying too much on those questions. I know it's a way to filter but I still think it's broken. But I guess I have no choice since that's how the interviews work .

I guess from now to next 1-2 months I will be busy with leetcode. I also have to read some system design questions.

Fuck, so many things to prepare

Ok so i got trolled by a company sort of, they gave me hope and destroyed it. I have two rounds of interviews and passed them both, they phone screened me before the interviews and i told them that i have 1 year of experience. Now after passing 2 rounds they mailed me and told me that their clients are looking for 3 years experienced candidate!!! I mean wtf!!! I mailed them and also called them and gave them a scolding, they should have told me that they require someone of higher experience before going forward with my interviews!!! :'( , THIS IS NOT FAIR, also guys can i post my story on linkedin mentioning the company's name? Can they sue me for this?

being ghosted after interviews is the most stylish form of rejection

Does anyone think tech recruiters are failed used car salesmen?

Bad experiences this week

One reached out to me on clearance jobs to apply for a job that I applied for, interviewed and was turned down for because of course they do not know Javascript is not Java and they were looking for a Java developer. She didn’t remember and then never responded. Out of spite I replied all to the last email that company sent me but of course no one responded.

This person who says that she is a recruiter for GOOGLE does not know the difference from UX designer and UX developer.

“ UX design still involves coding... idk where you got information that UX designers don't code but they absolutely do. UX designers are simply front end software engineers that work on refining the user experience of a particular program app or website.”

I don’t know because I used to be a fucking UX developer and used to work with UX designers??? Who didn’t code because figuring out what humans what is tough enough on it’s own. UI designers may know html/css but that is it.

I know we are going into a recession and I need to start being nice to these dumb recruiters because I may need them one day.

I've recently done 2 interviews in the past 2 weeks, I did 3 stages for the first one and failed the last stage. I felt devastated. I did the 2nd one Which had written and oral, I feel like I failed oral,results are yet to come out. I have 2 interviews next week and I have no energy to prepare. I feel lost and tired of preparation.

Not imposter syndrome but definitely a moment of self doubt.

Am I good enough?

Been applying for jobs and couldn't get through.

Most of my applications are in neighbouring continent and visa is the primary filter to get rejected. Thanks to COVID-19, it is even more difficult than ever.

And for those applications where I land interviews, I am being ghosted in final rounds.

Quite strange that teams don't even care to reject anymore. Just leave me hanging to assume the worst, the truth, the reality which I don't want to face.

And self doubt creeps in where I see people with average/below average capabilities and skillset are able to find better jobs.

I am not comparing myself, undermining their struggles, or playing the blame game.

All I am saying that luck plays a huge role in how things work out.

You can still fail even after doing everything right. Or am I just dumb enough to not know where I am going wrong to improve?

At this point, if I reflect on past, seems like all the offers I have got in past were purely based on luck.

I am aware that this is temporary and things shall change for good but boy, this feeling sucks.

Currently preparing for job interviews so I can leave this clownship of a company. I get extremely agitated when I fail so solve a leetcode problem.

!rant

The new end to the idiotic code snippet head scratchers interviews (awkward for both parties but nobody is willing to admit it)?

Hometasks.

Infinite internet access, use whatever tools you want, do as much as you can in 2-3 hours.

The best non-toxic way to see how someone works as a dev.

This is the way I expect you to work, so this is the way I will interview you.

Sorry silicon valley, we don't need people who can write up a binary search algo from rote memory.

Stopped studying DSA and for coding interviews, they legit rejected me even tho I did all questions right. Wtf is wrong with hiring.

I remember this another bastard asked me only DSA for a frontend job. :) he didn't ask me to give an intro even a straightaway question.

I don't care about God's existence but somehow I'm meeting the deadlines always. It's a new thing for me.
I have stopped paying attention to my work due to interviews and somehow my work performance is getting better and better each day.
All I needed was to work less and give estimation according my mood each day.

I did another interview yesterday. I knew within the first few minutes I wasn't going to get hired based on the questions they asked (all technical questions that I did not know the answer for).

I had to sit through the rest of the interview, trying my best to answer, knowing already I wouldn't be hired.

I hate the feeling of putting in all that effort, knowing I was already out of the running.

And before anyone says "you never know", how many of you have gone to an interview, not been able to answer any questions for the first 10 minutes, and ended up getting hired?

When HR says there will be 5-6 interview rounds 😂

Over the course of a few months I have concluded that the newly hired _experienced_ developer is… not so experienced. In fact, it is very unclear what he/she actually brings to the table at all.

How this individual actually got hired is proof that middle management has no clue of what they are doing. And it is poison to the organization. Bad management (middle/semi-upper in this case) is such a waste. More so than the newly hired incompetent developer. I am beginning to think she/he actually lied during the interviews. And I am not alone in my suspicions.

How often do you go for an interview? A senior once told me to go for job interviews regularly to know where you stand. WDYT of this advice?

I’ve been looking for a job recently since I am a student and starting my career.

I have a bunch of experience and I like to think I have pretty broad knowledge of programming concepts (web dev, ML, AI, software development).

I see these job postings for jobs that I know I am qualified for.

- I got my research published (which is related to the jobs I’ve been applying for)
- I have great grades
- I have a clear track record of doing well in teams (life long athlete)
- I am a complete geek for new tech and libraries so I always learn them super fast
- I have side projects that aren’t just shit I’ve done in school
- my past jobs show that I am an efficient worker who has real experience

However, I always fucking fail the coding challenges.

I’m never asked questions like “how to reverse a linked list”, just obscure questions that I don’t know how to study for.

What the fuck am I supposed to do? It’s not even like I get close to the answers. I usually get a couple test cases and then fail the rest of them, or I can’t figure out a solution to solve them.

This is all really disheartening and I fucking hate it I absolutely fucking hate it and when I am trying to hire people in the future, I’m never going to make them do coding challenges bc they’re fucking stupid

Please, can you give me tips on what to talk about when asked “tell me about yourself” during job interviews?

Anyone working at CloudKitchens a.k.a company bought by Travis Kalanick after being kicked out of Uber?

Got several interviews next week. Recruiter that I was working with really overhyped everything. From tech to culture.

They want me to do 4 technical interviews (live coding, DSA, home assignment, and something more). Not sure if its worthwhile.

i have a very casual and boring job. it's a b2b company and you can get an idea of how less work we get (or how fast i am) that it's day 1 of the sprint and i have almost finished all my tickets. my manager always praises me as someone fast whereas i see myself as pretty slow and this company even slower.

i feel like quitting, but the relax environment and stability of the company on paper makes me wonder of that would be a correct decision.
It's a deep tech company (not just meat e commerce or car rentals, a proper b2b analytics giant startup with good profitability) , our sdks are used by major startups and yet i find it boring.

I am an android dev who would love to stay at top of the game. my previous company used latest jetpack libraries, kotlin, modular architectures and stuff. everyday was a hectic chaos of life where there were deadlines, new requests coming in every few days and i was becoming the awesome fast android dev that i am now.

in this company there is no challenge for me.But the amount of free time has helped me grow beyond a single domain. i am currently hustling in 3 areas : my body( i started working out regularly, got my tummy under control), my technical skillset( started taking web dev classes) and my physical skillset (started taking driving and swimming lessons) . the amount of self growth time increases since company has a good leave and PTO policy

it all feels pretty good but the constant feeling of being left out from the android domain makes me think if i should give interviews. am i being stupid or what? my friends are all growing up with better salaries and packages. i am way better than some of them and equally capable as a few of them, so i sometimes feel being behind in finances too :/

Am I the only one to think companies asking questions such as those for technical interviews don’t understand what software engineering/development is about ?

- How many layers does a webservice have?
- What framework do you use for unit testing ?
- How do you do dependency injection ?

Essentially questions that they deem black and white but really aren’t. Besides isn’t the core of the work to just adapt and learn while being smart about what things you implement ? I don’t get these questions for me it’s a sign that a company doesn’t understand the work I’ll be doing.

I think for a technical interview I’d much rather spend my time on a difficult algo question in the language of my choice for 30mins - 1h than 20mins answering close minded questions that don’t have to be.

This rant is mostly due to the fact I’ve done a few interviews with two companies and both behaved like that, I’m 100% certain I had the skills to do the jobs they were offering me (they both contacted me first) but both ended up denying me because my knowledge on their specific questions wasn’t detailed enough. I could have learnt their stack in about a week so I don’t know why that mentality exists.

I might be wrong about the core of the work though… what do you think?

!dev

So my company says they are paying the market rate, and I should be grateful about it. When I went for interviews at "some big companies", I got offers from 2 different companies with the annual pay x2.5 of what I am getting here.

My current company mentality is so shitty that they only want to hire undergrads or people from oversea so they can pay less.

I do not even know what my fucking role is at this point, I do DevOps, I fucking do infra, I also do SRE shit, then I also write fucking code for servers. Yet my pay is slightly less than just "dev" working at good companies. Fuck my company, I am leaving soon.

I am not the only one in the shit show here, our PM also has to write code because most of our developers left. Most of the time, CTO is not even in the office, the company is basically run by some managements below CTO.

How do you guys deal with looking for a new job while still working at your current job?
I’ve been having to sneak out of the office for phone interviews. Not fun…

Failed the interview I was hoping for.
I already had 3 tech rounds, this was 4th and god I couldn't solve anything. Other rounds were fine but only this one was bad. I feel so exhausted, I finally thought that I'm out of this shit hole but no I have to continue working day and night. :( :(

My weekend is filled with take home code interviews, pre workout, and no social interaction. I just want to sip mint tea by the Red Sea.

Interview questions: Tell us about something cool you did recently.

New dilemma. Now that I have some interviews lining up, I’m having trouble trying to figure out which direction I want to go. One is a company offering unlimited PTO (whatever that actually means), remote only, non-micromanaged work. If I want a nap in the middle of the day, cool. Just gotta make progress.

Another is in an industry that I really want to get into.

A third is with a major entertainment company that is contract to hire with a high probability of hire. Amazing perks and benefits from what my friends that work there tell me.

And it’s looking like maybe all three making an offer simultaneously is a possibility.

So I might need to choose between a comfortable situation, my ideal industry, and a big name on my resume that includes great benefits.

I should be happy but this is stressing me out!

I need to help out my manager to interview angular developer candidate which I don't have any experience on Angular development. I was darn nervous interviewing those people, relying on some reading on angular documentation, articles and tutorials but after few interviews. I manage to get into the momentum to conduct interview smoothly.

After two weeks of doing it, now I'm kinda understand Angular thanks to some great candidate explaining those concept clearly ( hope you get hired on the next round of interview).

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

To make something impactful. I don't want to be fully credited, though being able to point to it in interviews would be great.

While working, I constantly segment my product into tiny reusable abstract solutions, most of which I eventually publish. I want some of these to grow into popular solutions to the problem I had or some other similar issue. Or, I want one of my major projects to become either a tool or an inspiration in something significant, but frankly the point is that some people appreciate something I created.

C++ or Python for coding interviews?

I used to do a lot of developments in Python and JS/TS. But now I have been doing a lot of back-end stuff in Golang at work (1+ year) and C++ for some of my side projects. So when I started grinding leetcode, I used C++ all the way.

Today this question struck me and I keep thinking if I should continue with C++ or use Python, which will help me focus more on the question than the language.

Kind of a vague question but has anyone done the Google and Microsoft tech interviews ? I’m preparing for them at the moment and I’m curious how hard these would be

Worked as android dev for 2.5 year and then worked as java gameserver dev for 2 years.

Now I wanna go back to android dev so I spent the last month grinding kotlin/android basics and already have 2 interviews lined up this week. Applying for junior dev role because of my gap and because my confidence in my android ability currently is really low. Having ADD doesnt help because I suck in memorizing implementations, syntax and I suck at live coding under pressure.

Fuck it I will set their expectations low, will get lower salary and hopefully will impress the hell out of them during first few months. Wel see what happens...

Any tips/advices?

A new position is opened at my company and I am tasked to conduct interviews for the candidates. I have no experience whatsoever in this.

If you’ve had any experience, how did you approach this? How did you conduct technical interviews with the candidates? We’re talking about candidates that have 3+ years of experience.

The position is for front end, mainly ReactJS.

!tech (sorta)

I am a 24yo Software Engineer guy and had just started working professionally 2 years ago, and most of my work life went in WFH due to covid. Before that, my college was also near to my home, so i have never left my home for more than a few hours to do studies.

Life had went pretty smoothly so far but now I see a lot of hurdles coming into my path . i am 24 and don't have a license for even a 2 wheeler. I don't have a good idea of my own city (but fortunately it has a great infrastructure , so i know how to travel via public transport to anywhere easily). mainly I don't know how to live alone.

The worst thing currently happening for me is that my company is transforming from WFH to WFO. The office is in a different metropolitan city which is crazy expensive and short on space. I already am uncomfortable with the idea living on my own but the thoughts of sharing a room/bed with some other guy and having my savings cut from 90 to 50% is worse.

i am hopeful that the financial hit will not be that bad as appraisals are coming, but this picture of hustle is scary. will i indulge into bad habits (drinking, gambling, smoking)? will i loose my health? would i need to wash my clothes and cook my food everyday? would i even have time to think and watch some web series, video tutorial? would i cut cost everywhere? every thing is scary. the market is also very bad right now, i am not getting any interviews even after applying to many places.

how do you prepare yourself to live away from home? Also , how do you prepare your family to live away from you?

(for 2nd question, i am a single child of a nuclear family with rarely any relatives or friends. my parents , especially my mom have been super involved in my life and we both have an exteem8 attachment to each other. i have recently started going away for short trips and travels, but she gets super emotional and concerned on thinking about me living and managing things on my own , away from her)

Self-isolation takes its toll on people's lives and, naturally, on interviews for our platform . So, a technical interview with a DevOps engineer at Zoom. The candidate started to surprise us already in the first minutes of the meeting. To begin with he apparently decided that the formality was enough at the first stage of the interview and decided to talk to the technical experts in a T-shirt and lying on the couch. That would have been fine, but in the middle of the interview his caring wife came in and insisted that the husband should eat his sandwiches and drink his tea. The candidate tried to remain unperturbed and undistracted, but his short "no", "don't want to", "come on!" didn't take effect. At one point, the applicant's wife escalated the tone of the conversation and threw a sandwich at him, promising to do the same with the tea. The supervisor and I became worried about the candidate and already in the voice of his wife began to persuade him to take a break for an afternoon snack. And such stressful interviews happen, and not at the company's initiative.

Got an interview with Amazon in a week. I’m at the interview loop stage where I do 5x 1 hour interviews. Anyone work at Amazon and got any recommendations on what I should study or how I should prepare?

It all started with me attempting the interview at a bank only for exposure sake and I wanted to benchmark myself to see if I can make the cut because I was told their interviews are hard.

Before, I was sure I won't ever work for a bank because as compared to a tech firm, the general consensus think banks are filled with red tape and work mainly revolves around their proprietary platforms/toolings which isolates the engineer from what the real tech companies are using.

But when I see what they are offering me, the money is really swaying me now. I never imagined to be offered this much... What should I do or how should I process this...?

worst interview i think i've had was a looooonnnnggg drawn out, almost half a year, back and forward cluster-fuck of a hassle

so it starts off with this recruiter guy calling me, forgetting he called me and emailing/calling me again... uh ok, w/e. he says he'll set something up and then i have a pre-screening type interview and dont hear back for a bit. reach out and he says he had a medical issue and was in the hospital, yada yada. but i felt like he was just on meth because of where he was at and how he was acting. like wtf

finally get a proper interview and it's with a nice enough team but their job postings were all copy paste garbage and idk if i applied to the wrong thing or they just failed to describe shit properly. so they set me up with a secondary interview with another team more suited to my skills, even though they'd have no problem hiring me. so this is like my 4th interview at this point.

interview for the other team goes well, sounds like what i want. dont hear back for a while. some girl recruiter gets back to me and idk if the other guy left, or got fired, or what the hell. i reach out to the 2nd guy i interviewed and we have another 'interview'. a few months in at this point, looking for another job because i wanted out of where i was at. so 5 or 6 interviews and months later they closed the positions, i guess because of covid bs? supposedly?

i hate going through more than a few interviews in the first place but my god.

ill post another couple in the comments x-x

How many keywords are appropriate to put in a "skills" section on a resume?

Technically I've played with a lot of tech and stacks, and done tiny one offs, tutorials and independent projects but nothing that wasnt more than a day on any one of them.

Basically im fast at picking up a language and api and just rolling with it and getting something done, even without tutorials or tons of googling. Though I find myself constantly relying on manuals and reading apis.

Is this normal or should entry level be familiar with the api of something from the get go?

I see a lot of people say to game the system just to get your foot in the front door past the automated keyword filters and on to an interviews where the real requirements are listed.

But I'd rather not list under the skill section something I only used for all of ten hours in one or two sittings.

Also is it acceptable to list a "learning", "would like to learn/know more of", or "planned skill additions" section?

Also what do I add for extras? "Achievements"? "Volunteer work"? "Hobby projects?", "past times?"
Is any of this seen as necessary or well rounded?

If it is really just about the numbers I'll just go scrape junior and entry level positions and take their keywords and automatically fill out template resumes to automate applying.

Could even use SQLite to store the results and track progress lol.

I've never worked as a professional programmer, but it's the only thing I ever enjoyed doing for 12 hours a day.

been doing interviews left and right. a lot of unknowns there, doing nothing today bc work is slow and my mind slipped and i missed an interview .-. trying to learn vulkan and it's a bit overwhelming for how meh i feel. got a notice yesterday from a recruiter/contractor place that the direct company put the job i was interested about on hold until question marks. feel burnt out yet unutilized at the same time. ... ya idk

why would you have 3 people interviewing a candidate if you all are gonna talk half as much as a normal person

It's just awkward to be there

Should I point out on an interview, that I've been approached by other companies too? will that help me or not? what do you think?

Why recruiters are sometimes taking so long to answer? I did my final stage of interview with the companie's client (out of 4 stages in total) last Thursday.

Client came back with positive feedback at Monday at the end of workday. Today is Tuesday and internal recruiter was supposed to call me to make an offer and discuss starting date.

Now again workday is nearly over and no contact from her. Tomorrow is a national holiday so she will get back to me at best on Thursday.

Goddamnit why it takes so long, if Im starting next Monday I need to prepare myself. Im seriously getting second thoughts such as even about declining the offer if they will try to lowball me. Previous week they really rushed the process and I had to do 4 stages of interviews and this week they are wasting my time. Am I being impatient or what?

Seems like the company is going through some trouble. The sheer anxiety of having to deal with recruiters and interviews if it kicks the bucket gives me the shivers. Made me force myself into overtime.

!Rant?

Hey, have been having several job interviews, does anyone have any advice on how to approach being interviewed by people from India, have been doing a lot of job interviews for a lot of companies in the US and seems like I'm interviewing for a position at India, it's very difficult to understand them and often they get offended when asked to repeat themselves... I try to be as positive and optimistic as I can but often poor audio on their part and very thick accent makes it difficult... any tips? this happen to more people? am I the only one?

Thanks...

Suggest a good platform for System Design mock interviews.

Can you tell some funny/serious war stories about interviews (as interviewer or as interviewee)?