It’s also funny because we seem to trust and select doctors by google reviews and assume they have a valid diploma and license to consult us for our lives, but we have to grill some poor software engineer previously working in faang with another 10 leetcode interviews to be ‘sure’ he’s a good fit. lol
Funny thing is that i had a negative experience helping someone who was laid off. I reached out, offered help, provided excellent reference for them, covid hit and hiring froze for that particular company, followed up a few times, ghosted, never talked again.
It's you last phrase, that's the way the world and people works. It's people with their own troubles, insecurities and character. The most important bit is be yourself. If you are "built" to think and help others, keep doing it. If not, whatever.
I understand this for a dry candidate pool. I have been there as a hiring manager, you need some signal with take home or live interviewing. But on the rare opportunity that you find someone who is willing to talk in details about a similar project you want to do, you skip the pipeline and if he indeed built it, you hire him.
Why put the blame only on candidates? Interviewers are equally bad to interviewees. I have been to both sides of the table and can guarantee that 80% of interviewers would not be fit for my job or the process of hiring.
Companies keep ignoring the historical interview point. I have been to a few occasions when companies needed the exact thing i built in the past (e.g. migration to clickhouse), but chose to put me into a random take home related to a different technology (e.g. some bigquery assignment) and eventually reject me. Go off script and ask me details about the project which might solve your hands, why do i need to talk about something else?
That's a typical modern SaaS issue that all departments have to keep building just to appear busy and "meet goals". Product managers to find the new shiny features, designers to design them or redesign the whole app, engineers to build them or do some framework migration and so on.
I am not commenting on the interview effort-salary ratio, but the fact that credentials and experience mean nothing to the tech industry, also comparing to the rest of professions. I mean working in Google/Meta/Netflix, is like working on the best hospital if you are a doctor, in the best construction industry if you are an engineer, to best law firm if you are a lawyer, etc. Imagine having to pass a leetcode or iq test everytime you want to move to the next one. I definitely know that my cousin, who is an exceptional doctor in Greece with only 10 years of experience, laughs about it.
I trust they were really competent, but it's a bit depressing that these competent people will need to go through the leetcode rituals and 5-10 interviews to get a new job at Meta, Netflix, AWS or adjacent companies. That's actually the point of the original post; you are never judged by your (years of) experience or even your past companies, only by the results of a test from a random person/company.
Of course it's not right. Let's be honest, our profession is in the era where software engineer = factory worker, and the worst part is that we have been playing music chairs right for the last couple years. So yeah all these professions have some steady status/wealth/qol progression and upgrade while people gain years of experience, while in software development it doesn't matter how many years of experience we have, which companies we worked on, their sector, whether your company is using the saas we were working on, etc.; we are going to get judged by trivia questions and leetcode.
Let’s hope ai hacks mailboxes and google meet, and eventually replace c suite and managers as well. We might get more ‘reasoned’ and deterministic engineering roadmaps or financial strategies by claude ceo/cto/cfo/vp/director agents than current leaderships. lol
TBH the product team in whatsapp needs to find some way to be meaningful. What could justify being a head of product or product manager in a chat app? New emojis? Gif support? New backgrounds? No, let's just make whatsapp like instagram. She's going to get a promotion now or move on to some new business as chief product officer.
No offence to the product team, i know that this is how it works in tech. It's the same for engineering and design teams in every single b2b/b2c business. There is no concept of feature completeness anymore, every single service has to copy from others or be something instead of 10 other services.
Congratz to neon team (i like what they built), but i don’t see the value or relation to databricks. I hope neon will continue as a standalone product, otherwise we lose a solid postgres provider from the market.
This also matches my experience so far, but tbh top 10, group by, etc. queries are too easy. Llms produce terrible results on queries requiring multiple CTEs or complex tables. e.g. i still have not seen an llm able to calculate any stats on top of an intervals table.