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necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost

Paolomania posted:

AOP questions = "pssst, kid, don't work here we run Byzantine spaghetti systems."
This is more or less the point of that question. It's a question about "what's the worst Java code you've ever seen? Explain what was so bad about it and how would you improve it?" as a loaded jargon question.

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Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.
A circular reference in production code would be my answer to that

B-Nasty
May 25, 2005

Blinkz0rz posted:

Developers who go far and advance into architecture and management positions are the ones that know how to think in terms of the overall vision of a project where the decision as to the language it's written in is entirely secondary or even tertiary.

I agree in principle, but I find it somewhat humorous that the few posts following yours talk about how an interview for a non-Jr position programming in X language would involve specifics of said language up to and including deep framework trivia, non-obvious best-practices, and opinions on various libraries/tools.

I guess once you've moved on to a management position (e.g. <30% coding), that stuff is not really relevant or necessary to get the job, but if you want to stay close to pure engineering, I don't see how you can be well-versed on many stacks at the same time.

Mniot
May 22, 2003
Not the one you know

B-Nasty posted:

I agree in principle, but I find it somewhat humorous that the few posts following yours talk about how an interview for a non-Jr position programming in X language would involve specifics of said language up to and including deep framework trivia, non-obvious best-practices, and opinions on various libraries/tools.

I guess once you've moved on to a management position (e.g. <30% coding), that stuff is not really relevant or necessary to get the job, but if you want to stay close to pure engineering, I don't see how you can be well-versed on many stacks at the same time.

I don't see that as incongruous. If you've been working in Java for the past 3 years then you should have developed some depth in the language. If you apply for a Java job with zero Java and "5 years Python" on your resume, then you should expect trivial Java questions and deep Python questions (or just algorithm questions if they don't know Python).

I don't think most people can be well-versed in many stacks at the same time. I did Java for 3 years but haven't touched the language for the past 3 years. I don't know the answers to necrobobsledder's quiz, but if I was applying at a Java shop I could study up pretty easily because I used to know them. And if someone described a problem to me and asked "why would Java be a good or bad fit for this?" I could probably still give a good answer.

FamDav
Mar 29, 2008

B-Nasty posted:

I agree in principle, but I find it somewhat humorous that the few posts following yours talk about how an interview for a non-Jr position programming in X language would involve specifics of said language up to and including deep framework trivia, non-obvious best-practices, and opinions on various libraries/tools.

I guess once you've moved on to a management position (e.g. <30% coding), that stuff is not really relevant or necessary to get the job, but if you want to stay close to pure engineering, I don't see how you can be well-versed on many stacks at the same time.

if you're getting asked trivia in an interview - especially if there's no context beyond "used java" - then either the interviewer or that company just doesn't know how to interview and they're worse off for it.

Steve French
Sep 8, 2003

Paolomania posted:

AOP questions = "pssst, kid, don't work here we run Byzantine spaghetti systems."

Most of what I know about AOP (not much) I learned from this: https://areallygoodrantblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/13/the-aws-java-documentation-is-hosed/

FamDav
Mar 29, 2008

Mniot posted:

I don't see that as incongruous. If you've been working in Java for the past 3 years then you should have developed some depth in the language. If you apply for a Java job with zero Java and "5 years Python" on your resume, then you should expect trivial Java questions and deep Python questions (or just algorithm questions if they don't know Python).

I don't think most people can be well-versed in many stacks at the same time. I did Java for 3 years but haven't touched the language for the past 3 years. I don't know the answers to necrobobsledder's quiz, but if I was applying at a Java shop I could study up pretty easily because I used to know them. And if someone described a problem to me and asked "why would Java be a good or bad fit for this?" I could probably still give a good answer.

Its more like his line of questioning (or the impression it gives off) is trying to disqualify people for what they don't know, rather than trying to figure out what a person does know and (more importantly) what they do. if your interview process is all the former then you end up hiring people whose predicted success is a total question mark.

EDIT: The explanation with the javadocs and a design problem is much better than "Whats the difference between Map X vs Map Y and why would you use one over the other?" or "Whats the difference between strong, weak, and soft references?"

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

FamDav posted:

Its more like his line of questioning (or the impression it gives off) is trying to disqualify people for what they don't know, rather than trying to figure out what a person does know and (more importantly) what they do. if your interview process is all the former then you end up hiring people whose predicted success is a total question mark.
It's smug narcissism. It comes down to the interviewer believing that only the problems they've solved on the job are worthwhile problems worth solving, and if you haven't solved them, not only are you not smart, you've also been wasting your time learning the wrong things.

baquerd
Jul 2, 2007

by FactsAreUseless

Vulture Culture posted:

It's smug narcissism. It comes down to the interviewer believing that only the problems they've solved on the job are worthwhile problems worth solving, and if you haven't solved them, not only are you not smart, you've also been wasting your time learning the wrong things.

Yep. "Deep" knowledge of a language typically only comes because a developer has run into unusual edge cases or problems, or is otherwise pedantically driven to learn the minutiae of the language. It's presence can be a positive, but it's lack is rather neutral. The difficulty lies in determining where the line lies between "professionally good to go" and "deep".

Blinkz0rz
May 27, 2001

MY CONTEMPT FOR MY OWN EMPLOYEES IS ONLY MATCHED BY MY LOVE FOR TOM BRADY'S SWEATY MAGA BALLS
And further, it's stupid. Who cares if I know a WeakReference or a SoftReference when a quick trip to the java documentation can illuminate the answer easily.

I've been around the industry for a while and I've been wondering for a while why our hiring practices are the way they are. As an industry we seem to take perverse pleasure in quizzing our interviewees on minutiae that probably doesn't even matter and then we wonder why our hiring practices are so hosed.

The more I deal with new hires and the hiring process the more it enforces my belief that an interview should be a multi-day affair, scheduled at as close to the convenience of the interviewee as possible, that lets them work on a real problem with the team and get paid to do it.

It strikes me that we'd see much better outcomes in hiring if we oriented ourselves around who performs best when presented with an actual working scenario rather than a quiz show and the secondary benefit is that during a hiring period it forces the team to have strong onboarding practices and documentation or risk paying for someone to do nothing.

moctopus
Nov 28, 2005

A big part of the problem of hiring practices is ego. "What do I know that I think others should know."

It's also coupled with the fact that engineers aren't the best at interviewing . Which is its own skill.

I'm with you in thinking you need to sit down and see someone work before you can make any meaningful conclusions.

It's frustrating to convince people to get off the trivia train. I wonder if chemists get grilled on knowing the atomic weight of every element....

Blinkz0rz
May 27, 2001

MY CONTEMPT FOR MY OWN EMPLOYEES IS ONLY MATCHED BY MY LOVE FOR TOM BRADY'S SWEATY MAGA BALLS

moctopus posted:

A big part of the problem of hiring practices is ego. "What do I know that I think others should know."

It's also coupled with the fact that engineers aren't the best at interviewing . Which is its own skill.

I'm with you in thinking you need to sit down and see someone work before you can make any meaningful conclusions.

It's frustrating to convince people to get off the trivia train. I wonder if chemists get grilled on knowing the atomic weight of every element....

I'm not certain, but there's a pretty solid, greater-than-zero chance that we're one of the only industries that actually does this kind of interview. No one else I know in other fields has ever had to whiteboard a problem or even answer questions unrelated to the things on their resume.

feedmegin
Jul 30, 2008

Blinkz0rz posted:

It strikes me that we'd see much better outcomes in hiring if we oriented ourselves around who performs best when presented with an actual working scenario rather than a quiz show and the secondary benefit is that during a hiring period it forces the team to have strong onboarding practices and documentation or risk paying for someone to do nothing.

It's not exactly the same, but our main skill test once past the phone screen is a pairing exercise lasting an hour or so with one of the team's senior guys (we're big on pairing in general). It seems to work pretty well for a) finding out which people can't code their way out of a paper bag and b) to some extent at least, finding out which people just can't work with someone else. Senior candidates get a whiteboard exercise too, but it's more 'how would you architect this thing' than code details.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Blinkz0rz posted:

And further, it's stupid. Who cares if I know a WeakReference or a SoftReference when a quick trip to the java documentation can illuminate the answer easily.

I've been around the industry for a while and I've been wondering for a while why our hiring practices are the way they are. As an industry we seem to take perverse pleasure in quizzing our interviewees on minutiae that probably doesn't even matter and then we wonder why our hiring practices are so hosed.

The more I deal with new hires and the hiring process the more it enforces my belief that an interview should be a multi-day affair, scheduled at as close to the convenience of the interviewee as possible, that lets them work on a real problem with the team and get paid to do it.
SoftReferences are very much a Java-ism, but the weak reference part is interesting. There's a lot of reasons why someone might be able to at least answer what a weak reference is even if they've never had to use them in Java. Anyone who's ever written production Perl should be able to get 75% of the way to a right answer here, for example, because Perl <6 doesn't collect cycles.

Blinkz0rz posted:

It strikes me that we'd see much better outcomes in hiring if we oriented ourselves around who performs best when presented with an actual working scenario rather than a quiz show and the secondary benefit is that during a hiring period it forces the team to have strong onboarding practices and documentation or risk paying for someone to do nothing.
No interviewing situation is perfect. I've ducked out of interview situations before because they wanted to give me a homework assignment that would take me at least half a day. I've got a job that's a full-time job and a half and an infant daughter, gently caress off, thanks.

That said, I've had a very good track record with open-ended interviewing styles where you get the candidate to show you what they're good at instead of playing process of elimination games and hoping you find the right thing.

Blinkz0rz posted:

I'm not certain, but there's a pretty solid, greater-than-zero chance that we're one of the only industries that actually does this kind of interview. No one else I know in other fields has ever had to whiteboard a problem or even answer questions unrelated to the things on their resume.
I don't think so. Maybe for non-creative industries. Software engineering is interesting because it lies halfway between hard engineering and a creative industry. Artists and designers bring portfolios and samples. Product and marketing people certainly get quizzed in interviews about how they would come up with a plan to market a new product.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Mar 1, 2016

Infinotize
Sep 5, 2003

Vulture Culture posted:

It's smug narcissism. It comes down to the interviewer believing that only the problems they've solved on the job are worthwhile problems worth solving, and if you haven't solved them, not only are you not smart, you've also been wasting your time learning the wrong things.

This is basically interviewing in a nutshell. Most interviewers are (subconsciously, or not) trying to hire clones of themselves.

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.
My biggest gripe with my current job is that the expectations for picking up new tech are sometimes unrealistic. For example, I had very little JS experience coming in but I picked up certain aspects of Node and became an "expert" (with the system flow not Node - probably the best on the team) with one of our very simple tracking systems and can fix bugs or help people add new endpoints very quickly. Now management is pushing me to work with a consultant with about 5 years of pure vanilla Javascript experience on an event-based video player and I'm struggling pretty hard cause I'm not a front-end person. I can write tests for it and make small fixes and understand the high-level flow, but it's confusing as gently caress and nothing like I've ever seen before. My manager has no idea how it works, but keeps pushing me to work on it on top of the other things I'm responsible for and expects me to be the point of contact when our consultant's time is done cause they don't want to hire someone full-time, even though literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a day are reliant on this system functioning.

Please tell me all management isn't this insufferably stubborn.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Good Will Hrunting posted:

My biggest gripe with my current job is that the expectations for picking up new tech are sometimes unrealistic. For example, I had very little JS experience coming in but I picked up certain aspects of Node and became an "expert" (with the system flow not Node - probably the best on the team) with one of our very simple tracking systems and can fix bugs or help people add new endpoints very quickly. Now management is pushing me to work with a consultant with about 5 years of pure vanilla Javascript experience on an event-based video player and I'm struggling pretty hard cause I'm not a front-end person. I can write tests for it and make small fixes and understand the high-level flow, but it's confusing as gently caress and nothing like I've ever seen before. My manager has no idea how it works, but keeps pushing me to work on it on top of the other things I'm responsible for and expects me to be the point of contact when our consultant's time is done cause they don't want to hire someone full-time, even though literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a day are reliant on this system functioning.

Please tell me all management isn't this insufferably stubborn.
Depends on the job. I mean, at a medium to large company, yeah, this kind of thing is totally unreasonable. At a small business or startup, it's par for the course. I did Rabbit's initial text chat implementation and a good chunk of the UI and I'm the furthest thing from a frontend JS guy (infrastructure!) you're going to find

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
People I've recently hired: a completely incompetent coder that's still a good worker that gives a drat, a network engineer that's beyond retirement age that I can hardly inspire into learning more about anything outside a Cisco manual, a well-rounded sysadmin / devopsy guy, a Java coder just out of school that's been writing Ruby and JS for months now. I literally can't hire anybody like myself because they all quit because they know better - they all have quit within months, in fact, or outright reject the offer. Hell, I rejected the offer initially as well.

Blinkz0rz posted:

And further, it's stupid. Who cares if I know a WeakReference or a SoftReference when a quick trip to the java documentation can illuminate the answer easily.
I actually don't remember off the top of my head the precise differences and don't care if a candidate knows them honestly - I care about whether they know you shouldn't just randomly allocate objects with no concern for the consequences (this is less relevant now with the recent Java GC improvements anyway and won't matter... until you reach into enterprise Dante's Inferno where we still have Java 3 deployed in prod). If you haven't deployed applications that run for a long time to need to think about GC, it just means I'm going to have to ask different questions to understand what you have done instead for those years (alternative JVM language, bytecode optimizations, microservices, Hello Kitty social fart collectors). If it's purely middleware and "write RPCs" I don't think I need to care much about your skill level honestly because a blogpost will show you everything anyway given their ubiquity, so I'll go elsewhere for an interesting conversation. I treat an interview like interviewing celebrities that I have little idea about what they do - figure out why they're famous, what their niche is, but tell me what you're like as a person, too. Does this measure competence? Not at all. But it gives me an idea of if I'd be ok working with them as a person, and life is too short to purposefully introduce conflict into our workplaces.

But another reason for asking for some form of tech trivia is that most places want someone to be productive right away (because they have crap for schedules) and have insufficient resourcing / timelines to accommodate training anyone even if they're self-trained. If you can't get that, you want someone fast at learning then. Still, a decent person in technology should at the least like learning things of some sort and be able to learn, so a measure of adaptability and learning-on-the-job must be determined yet is often impossible. Hence, "read these function / method declarations and tell me something interesting you just learned from it" is the closest stick I have to measure poorly with among other bad sticks for this metric.

Blinkz0rz posted:

I've been around the industry for a while and I've been wondering for a while why our hiring practices are the way they are. As an industry we seem to take perverse pleasure in quizzing our interviewees on minutiae that probably doesn't even matter and then we wonder why our hiring practices are so hosed.
Almost every other discipline of engineering, science, medicine, etc. has a certification process that, strangely enough, does not even measure ability as much as trivia (civil engineer exams, mech E certifications, etc.). There's a lot of engineers that are at desks approving paperwork for designs and there are entirely separate professions that implement what the white collar worker does (lab techs go analyze specimen samples, nurses help with taking care of a patient's needs that aren't relevant to the doctor's actual field half the time, construction workers implement an architect's designs, etc.). That kind of labor structure does not exist at all in technology really, even at large companies (I consider operations & support the "blue collar" side but treating it that way has produced abysmal results IMO because technology requires more critical thinking than what corporations want typically). Furthermore, most doctors and lawyers tend to be managed by other, more senior doctors and lawyers. In contrast, the great majority of those in software are working under people that have never written a line of code or even managed an IT project (I'm talking about non-software companies) - this changes dynamics considerably as well. Your doctor doesn't have to re-tool all his instruments and devices every 6 years either. Instead, your doctor is required to keep board certification by staying somewhat current - there's a lot of dinosaurs in software and depending upon the kind of software your company writes, you need something between "just pump out lines of code of low quality because it's not that important" and "people will die if you get this scheduler wrong." In software, your random 16 year old script kiddie can be much more effective than someone that's sat in an office for 25 years doing the same BS software job that consists of going to meetings and writing a few lines of code nobody cares about.

There's a great deal of things wrong with the tech industry though and its schizophrenic state corresponds directly to the fashion-oriented nature of pop-coding combined with a cultural clash of corporatism, arts (just from the design / UX / UI parts), and engineering / academic disciplines.

What's clear though is that there's a lot of people that are in supposedly coding jobs that can't write code in nearly any language to even solve FizzBuzz and there's no other industry with this kind of pay that has this staggering ratio of incompetence besides among the managerial or even financial caste which, also showing its bias, selects mostly for pedigree and taste in luxury goods when it comes to interviews despite few correlations with investor / trader performance (admitted even in some of the Harvard Business School courses and articles I've read).

Blinkz0rz posted:

It strikes me that we'd see much better outcomes in hiring if we oriented ourselves around who performs best when presented with an actual working scenario rather than a quiz show and the secondary benefit is that during a hiring period it forces the team to have strong onboarding practices and documentation or risk paying for someone to do nothing.
Most research (including Google somewhat) has come to the conclusion that we should look at two things in candidates (some emphasizing one more than the other) - selflessness (not a lack of ego, mind you) and a work sample. This is why if someone has something on Github I almost completely skip anything related to questioning the candidate about code itself and proceed to asking about their previous jobs and what they liked and didn't like combined with just hearing them out. Negativity in an interview is just bad manners anyway.

FamDav
Mar 29, 2008

necrobobsledder posted:

People I've recently hired: a completely incompetent coder that's still a good worker that gives a drat, a network engineer that's beyond retirement age that I can hardly inspire into learning more about anything outside a Cisco manual, a well-rounded sysadmin / devopsy guy, a Java coder just out of school that's been writing Ruby and JS for months now. I literally can't hire anybody like myself because they all quit because they know better - they all have quit within months, in fact, or outright reject the offer. Hell, I rejected the offer initially as well.

You should consider changing jobs

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.

Vulture Culture posted:

Depends on the job. I mean, at a medium to large company, yeah, this kind of thing is totally unreasonable. At a small business or startup, it's par for the course. I did Rabbit's initial text chat implementation and a good chunk of the UI and I'm the furthest thing from a frontend JS guy (infrastructure!) you're going to find

I totally wouldn't mind doing it if it was like "okay we want you to spend a reasonable amount of time getting familiar with this" because it is interesting to me and like I said a small bug could cost 100k in a day. But for me to just be thrown to the wolves indefinitely without any sort of time specced for it? I was already looking to get out but this is just icing.

piratepilates
Mar 28, 2004

So I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it.



At my current job they only asked me like one or two JavaScript questions (my best language was js and the position was mostly for js) and those were super easy ones that anyone with a decent enough amount of js experience should have aced*, one I remember being asked is the "var variable in a for loop with an event handler/callback using the var" issue. The rest was just general programming thinking questions and open ended questions (how do huge sites manage to serve media so well, i.e. Netflix or steam; what are some of your go to development tools and why; how do you approach testing; etc). I thought it was a pretty good model that gave a lot of leeway to different candidates and didn't corrupt the question from the interviewers experience too much. Of course I also say that after they hired me so maybe I'm a bit biased.




* yes I see irony in saying everyone should know it when it may just be that I was lucky enough to have seen that problem, but I think I would have gotten the job even if I couldn't answer the js questions perfectly.

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

Blinkz0rz posted:

The more I deal with new hires and the hiring process the more it enforces my belief that an interview should be a multi-day affair, scheduled at as close to the convenience of the interviewee as possible, that lets them work on a real problem with the team and get paid to do it.
Yes, let's force interviewees to use multiple days of their vacation time to interview with us. How could that possibly go wrong?

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.
Thread: help me evaluate a job offer. Boston, 92k base, some sort of bonus (historically ~10%), ESOP 17%, 5k signing/relo. Is this terribly low for mid-level? I have a somewhat :lol: job history; current resume skips around every ~10-15 months going back to graduation in 2011.

I'm not used to room mates, and I know housing there can be a shitshow. What would a 700-900 sq ft apartment/condo look like on the monthly somewhere close to where I would want to be? Where would I want to be?

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost

FamDav posted:

You should consider changing jobs
I'm literally writing my resignation letter at the moment. Only reason I'm not turning it in first thing tomorrow is that I'm concerned that my employer will withhold my rather substantial bonus considering their really lame accounting practices to save money (most of my colleagues don't seem to understand how taxes work, for starters...).

Cicero
Dec 17, 2003

Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

leper khan posted:

Thread: help me evaluate a job offer. Boston, 92k base, some sort of bonus (historically ~10%), ESOP 17%, 5k signing/relo. Is this terribly low for mid-level? I have a somewhat :lol: job history; current resume skips around every ~10-15 months going back to graduation in 2011.

I'm not used to room mates, and I know housing there can be a shitshow. What would a 700-900 sq ft apartment/condo look like on the monthly somewhere close to where I would want to be? Where would I want to be?
Seems low for mid-level in Boston to me, although if your experience has been spotty somehow maybe it would be appropriate then.

MeruFM
Jul 27, 2010

leper khan posted:

Thread: help me evaluate a job offer. Boston, 92k base, some sort of bonus (historically ~10%), ESOP 17%, 5k signing/relo. Is this terribly low for mid-level? I have a somewhat :lol: job history; current resume skips around every ~10-15 months going back to graduation in 2011.

I'm not used to room mates, and I know housing there can be a shitshow. What would a 700-900 sq ft apartment/condo look like on the monthly somewhere close to where I would want to be? Where would I want to be?

that's a pretty high ESOP.

If it's a decently old public company with relatively stable stock (not groupon/zynga), then the offer sounds okay. If there's any chance they're worth nothing, then don't bother unless the work really interests you.

edit: also make sure the contract allows you to sell soon so it's not all concentrated

MeruFM fucked around with this message at 09:57 on Mar 2, 2016

Munkeymon
Aug 14, 2003

Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.



leper khan posted:

Thread: help me evaluate a job offer. Boston, 92k base, some sort of bonus (historically ~10%), ESOP 17%, 5k signing/relo. Is this terribly low for mid-level? I have a somewhat :lol: job history; current resume skips around every ~10-15 months going back to graduation in 2011.

I currently work for an ESOP and I'm not sure how I'd put a percentage on its contribution to my comp, but it's a recent transition for the company so maybe that's due to my inexperience?

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.
17% ESOP seems high to me but I'm looking for a very tiny company to move to eventually and should probably educate myself in this realm before I start looking so I don't undersell myself (again).

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

MeruFM posted:

that's a pretty high ESOP.

If it's a decently old public company with relatively stable stock (not groupon/zynga), then the offer sounds okay. If there's any chance they're worth nothing, then don't bother unless the work really interests you.

edit: also make sure the contract allows you to sell soon so it's not all concentrated

Offloading the company equity would be somewhat difficult. Privately held/employee owned; fully vests after 5 years, they buy it out if I leave.

They also reimburse one course/semester which I could leverage toward a masters.

Forgot to include my present situation.. Right now I'm making a fair bit less (similar cost of living to Boston) making bad candy crush clones for a small games company. I anticipate enjoying the work more than my current job.

Seems like the consensus is that it's a little below market, but not grossly so. This is (sadly) a step up for me anyway, so I'm leaning towards taking it.

Thanks thread; if you want to follow the e/n I'm sure I'll eventually drop by the coding horrors thread. :smith:

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Munkeymon posted:

I currently work for an ESOP and I'm not sure how I'd put a percentage on its contribution to my comp, but it's a recent transition for the company so maybe that's due to my inexperience?

The org I have an offer from gets appraised yearly and drops a flat % value of your base into an account for you.

Not sure how others work, but it should be pretty easy to derive either by them stating explicitly they give you X% of your salary or by multiplying the amount of stock by the stock price.

e: I have no idea what happens when the stock pool runs dry.

leper khan fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Mar 2, 2016

Jeb Bush 2012
Apr 4, 2007

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Blinkz0rz posted:

I'm not certain, but there's a pretty solid, greater-than-zero chance that we're one of the only industries that actually does this kind of interview. No one else I know in other fields has ever had to whiteboard a problem or even answer questions unrelated to the things on their resume.

That's because other fields have even worse interviewing practices. "Tell me about a time when..."

MeruFM
Jul 27, 2010
yeah even though 6-8 hour technical interviews are pretty bullshit, 2-3 should be fine and plenty, it's better than going in and hoping they like your face (because they sure as hell won't like mine)

Munkeymon
Aug 14, 2003

Motherfucker's got an
armor-piercing crowbar! Rigoddamndicu𝜆ous.



leper khan posted:

The org I have an offer from gets appraised yearly and drops a flat % value of your base into an account for you.

Not sure how others work, but it should be pretty easy to derive either by them stating explicitly they give you X% of your salary or by multiplying the amount of stock by the stock price.

e: I have no idea what happens when the stock pool runs dry.

Ah, ours are allocated according to how long we've been with the company according to some formula I didn't memorize.

Probably split shares. Shares also return to the company when people leave/retire.

JawnV6
Jul 4, 2004

So hot ...

Jeb Bush 2012 posted:

That's because other fields have even worse interviewing practices. "Tell me about a time when..."

If you haven't had a rock solid technical candidate go off the rails when you get to behavioral questions, you're really missing out.

fritz
Jul 26, 2003

JawnV6 posted:

If you haven't had a rock solid technical candidate go off the rails when you get to behavioral questions, you're really missing out.

:allears:

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
Watching people have a meltdown from innocuous questions is somewhat entertaining compared to watching someone fail to write FizzBuzz after 30 minutes of wrangling what modulus does (and still getting it wrong).

Good Will Hrunting
Oct 8, 2012

I changed my mind.
I'm not sorry.
I still don't believe people fail anything that easy in job interviews. I just can't wrap my head around ever asking something that absurdly simple.

leper khan
Dec 28, 2010
Honest to god thinks Half Life 2 is a bad game. But at least he likes Monster Hunter.

Good Will Hrunting posted:

I still don't believe people fail anything that easy in job interviews. I just can't wrap my head around ever asking something that absurdly simple.

I don't understand it because didn't they need to pass some sort of screening before that point? How do you pass the written/phone tech screen and then completely dump core when asked a simpler question in person?
Or do some organizations not screen prior to the on-site? :ohdear:

B-Nasty
May 25, 2005

Good Will Hrunting posted:

I still don't believe people fail anything that easy in job interviews. I just can't wrap my head around ever asking something that absurdly simple.

It's unfortunate, but that's why *actually* talented developers have to be subjected to BS coding challenges during interviews. I've interviewed a number of candidates that are smooth talkers and can drop buzzwords with the best of them, but put them in front of a computer with a simple exercise, and it's a head-shaking level of embarrassment.

As an example, the last test I was using had a simple skeleton already laid out, and all the candidate had to do was implement some statistical functions (e.g. average, median - and the formula was provided) that operated on a list of decimals. The candidate also had to write some unit tests to ensure correct output.

While it's only somewhat real-world, it's about the simplest exercise I could come up with that didn't require any domain or deep background knowledge.

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mrmcd
Feb 22, 2003

Pictured: The only good cop (a fictional one).

In the Google interview prep presentation I went to, the presenter mentioned that they see a lot of people who have spent their entire careers doing something along the lines of "take the data out of the database and put it on the UI" and can't manage to do literally anything else when asked.

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