Comment by giantg2 a day ago
The part that's really sad is that we have tons of out of work devs right now. This sort of thing only makes it harder for the legitimate people to get hired. An easy fix for this is for a place like Pearson to set up verified interview centers, which will allow for verified virtual interviews (on both sides of the table).
At least in the US,
I like that software engineering doesnt require/encourage unions, contrary to other big industries.
As unions mature they protect the employment of their members, not prospective members who are unemployed applying for jobs.
One great thing about being a dev in the US, u dont need a degree, learn a lot, can apply and get a great job.
Ive previpusly been in a union for a company and the experience did not encourage a competitive working environment. When layoffs came, Jr employees get sacked before more senior union members (not neccesarily the best technical staff just becuase they worked there long time).
I have family/friends in unions (non software devs) that have had similar experiences to mine.
And in an unlikely case that there were a union, US would lose competition to China and the union will be involuntarily disbanded.
"One great thing about being a dev in the US, u dont need a degree, learn a lot, can apply and get a great job."
And on the other side, you can have a degree and experience and still not get a job due to the wild criteria and games that get played in various interviews.
You trot out all the familiar retorts. None of this is a reason to not organize to better represent the interests of labor.
A retort being familiar does not mean it isn't true or real.
Millions upon millions of ppl at every income level have experienced working in and around unions and not all of them came away with a positive experience.
>None of this is a reason to not organize to better represent the interests of labor.
unions restrict the supply of labor and this results in (price increase) better wages for the union's members. However, overall the total dollar amount transferred from employers to labor goes down (employment decrease), so the "class" of all workers (employed and unemployed) see their per capita wages go down. and if that's not enough, the industry grows more slowly so the problem only gets worse for everyone in the future (trickle down) this is the underlying reason for europe's lower year over year economic growth compared to the US
is the reason. it's not a moral or ethical or even income distribution issue, it's just how markets operate.
I've been working in the tech industry for about twenty years now, and I desperately want unions. Sticking your neck out alone sucks to begin with and only sucks harder the more time goes forward.
Same. Back when I first got into IT, I was surrounded by (similar) nerds whose self-esteem was defined by being the smartest person in the room. Compensation was often higher than other white-collar jobs, so they (we) were happy to overlook the long hours and non or poorly compensated on-call shifts.
Most IT work now, whether dev or admin side, is not rocket science. It’s mostly approachable work and no one should settle for being abused by employers for some outdated, ingrained, cultural baggage.
> As unions mature they protect the employment of their members, not prospective members who are unemployed applying for jobs.
This is true in the same way that it’s true that all democracies turn into the majority oppressing everyone else, or get captured by oligarchs, or vote to raise taxes to fund social until the economy collapses, etc. – which is to say not at all. Unions CAN fail that way but it’s not a given. We shouldn’t give up on a useful tool because it can be failed, we should talk about how to keep it healthy.
For example, I’ve seen the no-degree route you talk about made easier by unions because it forced merit hiring rather than hiring more dudes with social ties from certain colleges. Again, that’s not guaranteed – you’d be forgiven for wondering if the Teamsters were a deep cover operation to discredit the concept of unions – but social institutions aren’t magic: they work to the extent that we make them work.
These people are using stolen identities of real people in many cases.
Or they’re applying as international remote workers, where you wouldn’t expect them to be members of your country’s union anyway.
Widespread union membership with verifications wouldn’t solve anything.
The interview process in US is already insanely ridiculous, but this would only add an additional level of crazy to it. Honestly, licensing would be less bad by comparison.
Can you describe what you see as the insanely ridiculous interview process? Most of the interviews I have initiated are something like:
- 30 minute recruiter call
- 30-60 minute manager call
- 2x 60 minute leetcode easy/medium
- 1x 60 minute STAR behavioral
- 1x 60 minute systems design or maybe doubling up on a previous category
I'm not sure if we are experiencing different processes, or we have different opinions about what kind of time / reward tradeoff is reasonable.
Everything except the 30-60 minute manager call is a waste of time and money for everyone involved.
You just need to ask a couple of open-ended questions about the candidate's preferred programming language and/or some technical details of a past project they've worked on to get an idea of whether they are reasonably competent or not. It shouldn't take more than 10-15 minutes to go through. The majority of rest of the meeting can consist of the candidate asking you questions and/or chit-chatting to make sure the vibes aren't off.
What you are trying to judge is whether or not they can do the job, which you can really only tell once they are actually doing the job anyways. So you pay extra attention to what they do for the first couple of days/weeks after you've hired them and if it's obvious things are not going to work out you let them go. Most places have laws that are amenable to hiring someone on an initial trial period before stronger employee protections kick in.
In general, most of the pathologies of the hiring process can be solved by treating it as a satisfier problem instead of an optimizer problem.
There's a wide spectrum between "extremely efficient" and "insanely ridiculous". To keep it short, I think the incentives are pretty well aligned here. There's not much of an incentive for either party to waste our collective time.
I would be interested to explore a "quick hire, quick fire" philosophy, but I'm not sure it would lead to overall greater satisfaction. Employers don't like to fire people and employees don't like to be fired.
6 hours per application, plus another hundred hours of leetcode practice.
Because, let's be real, not a lot of us are writing leetcode type solutions in our shitty web devs jobs where we center a div. So we need to practice, and more importantly, memorize. Companies don't want a solution, they don't even want a good solution, they want one particular solution. That requires memorization.
The part where I have to rehearse solving ridiculous problems for a few weeks in my free time so I can perform them to the interviewer and then never use the skills again. It’s typically 2 medium/hard problems solved optimally in 20 minutes each with no errors if I want to beat the competition.
I don't think I've rehearsed for an interview ever. (And to your question in another thread, yes, I've interviewed since 2015. Multiple times, thanks to a layoff.)
> It’s typically 2 medium/hard problems solved optimally in 20 minutes each with no errors if I want to beat the competition.
I have also definitely made errors in interviews, and gotten hired. If I had to guess, it is a lot more about how you handle those. (To a degree. E.g., in one question, which was a coding challenge, I could solve it, but I was pretty sure my solution was not efficient. I voiced that, voiced why my gut was thinking it could probably be better, but I didn't ever get the full solution. In another one, I was just asked for past experience; I didn't think I had much to offer, voiced what I did have. I still to this day like the question, because it was a tough question, and the person who asked it really pressed me — in a good way, in that I could see that she took her own role/work seriously — on why I thought I was qualified.)
I've also had a call where me & the interview were definitely not connecting, at all. That wasn't going to work out, so nothing was lost?
As an interviewer,
> It’s typically 2 medium/hard problems solved optimally in 20 minutes each
… add 5 min for entry pleasantries and padding, 10 for questions for you at the end, and that's an hour, which is often all the time the recruiter schedules. And honestly, that's usually enough.
I don't ask hard problems. Easy ones sift out candidates. Where I ask coding questions, the first is almost always designed around "can the candidate write a for loop?" and the second is around basic datastructure comprehension. (Can you recognize situations that require a hashtable? a queue? and apply those to the problem.) Often a parsing question. Essentially CS 201, or easier, though I do not care if you know big-oh notation.
Most interviews I've been a part of fit that MO, and I've done interviewing with startups and with FAANG-sized companies.
> each with no errors if I want to beat the competition.
It's not about beating the competition. SWE hiring IME is never zero-sum. Two phenomenal candidates are two hires.
It can suck. I've definitely had some low points where I screw up an easy question and lost out on a place I wanted to work. I also understand that companies can't afford to make a bad hire often. My experience has been that interviewers are interested in the ability to recognize and fix mistakes, communicate about the problem, etc, and have had multiple occasions where I never even got around to filling out a couple pseudocode comments and still got passed.
> Wouldn't the issue be that an interview center could take money to lie/etc? When I start a job I would have to go through I-9 verification - if that process is not good enough to weed out fakes, how would another verification work better?
You just need to have a US citizen's SSN and birthday to beat the I-9 verification. And "beat" is a strong word. I-9 is just a form that the employer asks the employees to submit, there's no requirement for the employer to do anything with it.
So you can just say that your SSN is 555-55-5555 and your birthday is 01-01-2001 and you'll "pass" the verification. It'll be detected only when the employer submits the Form-944.
There's E-Verify that requires a picture ID and more information, but it's not mandatory.
Not sure why that comment got downvoted. It doesn't seem to detract from the topic at hand.
Not sure if it's feasible, but it's definitely something to consider.
I don't really see north korean workers as any less deserving of work
That’s not the question: it’s about trust and honesty. The problem with North Korean workers is that they are a huge security risk because they aren’t working as free people but as agents of their government. That might not be a guaranteed disaster if they’re just generating cash revenue but it’s a huge security risk if the North Korean government has any reason to subvert your company or customers.
Eh we're all victims of where we were born. I'm not about to hold someone's state against them. Unless i suppose it's a certain state that didn't exist 100 years ago and had to forcibly move people to make room.
>Eh we're all victims of where we were born.
It's a very profound statement (perhaps unintentionally so). Most of us wouldn't even be doing the work we do if we did not have to pay ransom money to our rulers. And then there are unwanted children and all of that...
The problem isn’t the people but the government which controls every aspect of their lives. If I hire a remote worker from England, I don’t have much reason to worry that they’re secretly working for MI-5 and plotting to infiltrate our systems unless I work for a drug cartel or military supplier, and I have a high degree of confidence that if they engage in misconduct they’re subject to a real legal system. If you hire a North Korean, abuse is far more plausible since the invention of cryptocurrency has helped them immensely when it comes to getting and laundering ransoms – and with nobody actually in a country subject to the jurisdiction of a government which cares what you think, they’re going to see it as a safe operation even if it brings you considerable harm.
Why make the exception for that state? None of the people applying for jobs were involved or even alive when it happened.
Just like I don't blame people for hating me because I'm a symbol of ongoing colonization, I expect people to be ok if I blame them for ongoing atrocities carried out in their name in public with no shame or believable justification.
If North Korea is just as bad, at least they're smart enough to not let me see evidence that invades my dreams.
Another solution might be UNIONS that would have __membership verification__ including things like citizenship (which country(ies) are they a citizen of?), skills tests and training, etc.
Just like competition requires 5+ similarly sized entities for a healthy marketplace of companies, my informal opinion is that unions probably similarly shouldn't have overwhelming market share. However my feeling on contracts between unions and corporations is that the contract should be negotiated between multiple companies and multiple unions to produce the most level playing field possible.