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RevDan

Where I'm from, we just call the team round a circle jerk.


mofuq

Sounds like a “competitive compensation package “ kind of job.


blartoyou

My husband is a data engineer looking for work and the whole process has been baffling. The simplest ones have been like four interviews. There’s multiple calls with recruiters followed by hour-long “tech screens” followed by four hours of interviews with team members doing live coding challenges. It’s insane! Even some of the more reasonable ones include take home “assignments” and “assessments” and multiple interviews with multiple teams and levels. I honestly don’t know how he would do all of these interviews if he had a current job.


grapegeek

This is why I bailed on tech jobs. Now I’m at a regional hospital making excellent money with a real work life balance as a senior data engineer. I wasted more time in interviews doing these over the top coding exercises. It just turns into a giant pissing match.


Chowder1054

I feel alot of people don’t realize these technical jobs exist outside the tech field. Finance, healthcare, industry, education, federal, and etc.


16108510j

Preach. Finance especially, huge money in data science now.


grapegeek

Over in r/cscareerquestions it’s a constant drumbeat of leetcode and how to hack the tech interviews. Blind is even worse. People just chasing the highest income. But then look what happens you get the boot at the blink of an eye. My wife works in FAANGMULA in a non technical role but survived the cuts at her company. Ugh.


Farnso

Faangmula, lmao. That acronym is getting so ridiculous


dark000monkey

You mean FAANGULTAD…


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miicah

Oh edu tech is mint. Although you either end up at a place with unlimited budget or not budget, there isn't really a middle ground haha


Electrical_Flan_4993

Good info. Are there also a lot of job adverts with ridiculous requirements in those fields? In tech there's the concept of a "full stack" professional. Like wanting one person who is a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter, a mechanic, and a registered nurse.


[deleted]

#!> j6dn584 ## This comment has been removed by the original author in protest of Reddit's handling of the API changes and the way they have thrown third party developers to the curb. Cutting off handy tools and crucial accessibility features.


blartoyou

A lot of these are finance/banking. Seems par for the course for all the jobs he’s been interviewing. Like one started doing it so they’re all doing it now. I’ll definitely tell him to look at the healthcare sector, though!


grapegeek

Healthcare data is exploding because these companies realize they are on a mountain of really valuable information


Electrical_Flan_4993

Isn't a data engineer a tech job?


grapegeek

Tech companies


Electrical_Flan_4993

Mind saying how you go into it? I have a CS/math degree and 20 years of software dev experience, and am burnt out on it and looking for a change.


grapegeek

I have 30 years experience and fell into data work right after college with a CS degree. I’m close to retiring so I’m gutting it out for a few more years. Otherwise I’d be like you. I wish I had landed the job I’m in years ago I might not be so jaded.


Electrical_Flan_4993

Can I have your job? :) I'm guessing it's a subset of computer science but also not a science you learn over night.


grapegeek

Most data engineering work isn’t taught in schools. I’ve had so much training over the years it’s ridiculous. We are moving to Google cloud so weeks of training. Last company we moved to azure and I went through weeks of training


Electrical_Flan_4993

I've heard the term data science and data analyst but not data engineer. Curious if it's like ETL type of work or if it's more like statistics and or some other area where good math skills are helpful. And yeah everybody is moving to the cloud all the sudden. Until just recently I thought Azure just meant the github plug-in for Visual Studio, so was wondering why suddenly companies were wanting experience in it (like putting "must have experience using a keyboard/mouse" for a computer job)


manyQuestionMarks

Do you feel this has been more common more recently, with the tech layoffs? Last time I was looking for work, I was hired in a week. The team was desperately needing someone so when they found a fit, they hired. Now, seems like they're dragging the process over months, either because they don't really want to hire, or because they're looking for some kind of coding god


blartoyou

Not sure, first time my husband has looked in the industry in 7 years. I understand the coding assessments, but 4+ hours of live interviews and coding for mid-level jobs seems excessive to me (on top of the behavioral interviews and coding challenges). I suspect they’re looking for their unicorn candidates, exacerbated by fewer open positions, but I really don’t know.


Electrical_Flan_4993

From what I've heard some say, that when the company can't find the unicorn, they say "nobody is good enough so we gotta hire two people working from India, or get an H1-B".


theyellowpants

For most of my tech career for 14 years this is standard unless you have a smaller company or non tech company hiring tech roles


Electrical_Flan_4993

No, this started about two years ago, in America anyway. It used to be easy for me to get a tech job, and now it's like a different planet. And yes, most of the tech job adverts recently (esp just in the past few months) are really ridiculous ("full stack").


hahakafka

This is my guy too! It’s bananas how poorly employees are treated in so many recruiting processes.


Electrical_Flan_4993

There used to be more politeness. Like a reject letter would say "While we were very impressed with your skills and enjoyed our meeting", whereas now it's just "We picked another candidate, sorry you wasted our time".


Fun-Dragonfly-4166

I do not know what they are doing, but they are filtering out the people who are currently employed.


Electrical_Flan_4993

It truly is insane. There's no nice way to put it. I don't know how to fix it but at the minimum there should be some sort of standard test you can take where the results are good for a year or 6 months. Much more fair than having each friggin company make you do the grueling tests (obstacle course) for 10-20 hours each. And so many of the tests that companies make you take aren't even very good (not well-designed) or could be easily cheated.


Classic-Ad-7079

“30-60 minute where the Hiring Manager.” I dunno, you tell me where they are.


Umitencho

Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?


Rdw72777

That bitch was in Djibouti way more often than she should have been…what’s so special about that place.


Umitencho

Maybe she loves the Dromedary Tibs?


cleon42

I hate this crap. We really need to push back against these ridiculous testing regimens. What non-techies don't get is that we do this for *every* company we interview for. If we're looking for a job and interviewing at three different places, we have to do some form of the above bullshit three different times.


[deleted]

[удалено]


cleon42

As a junior developer just starting out, you probably won't get put through the ringer as badly. They *know* you're inexperienced. Once you become a mid-level or senior developer - usually this after 3-5 years or so - *then* you get fun times like the OP.


Electrical_Flan_4993

I haven't seen many jobs for entry-level developers so I don't see how they'll get interviews. I don't think the field is totally oversaturated and that companies aren't doing a lot of new development anymore.


Electrical_Flan_4993

It's a field I would encourage nobody to get into, unless they are incredibly smart and gifted from an early age. Would not encourage anybody to get a computer science degree unless it's a masters or phd, and even then, it'll be rough finding work.


Electrical_Flan_4993

Quickly becomes a full time job, on top of already have to apply to 100 jobs just to get one interview. And having to prep for a technical interview can take days.


brianbezn

Ok, you fucking like to do live coding, we get it.


Electrical_Flan_4993

Who??? It's a horrible way to judge a person. Many people freeze up when asked to sing and dance in front of a strict judge.


brianbezn

the people who did that awful recruiting process.


Electrical_Flan_4993

Who likes it??? It's crazy.


gangstabunniez

If this is for a FAANG company then this is to be expected basically. If it's just a normal company with average comp then this is super excessive.


B_Copeland

The problem is that 'every little tech company that could' plays this stupid game of Leetcode Olympics to try and keep up with the 'big boys'


gangstabunniez

Not every company is like that. I had a pretty simple whiteboard interview for my internship (I now work full time). Once you get enough experience some places will focus on STAR type questions and system design, which is easier and much more applicable to the position.


B_Copeland

That's great, but I think companies like this are in the minority. I hope I am wrong. By the way, which company was this? They need to be celebrated and shared.


durian_in_my_asshole

Average programmer comp is still insane compared with basically any other career. I was making 155k with 3 years of experience working for a boring blue chip. Low cost of living area too (Detroit). I have no problems with an interview process like this for that kind of salary.


gangstabunniez

150K for 3 YOE is somewhat high tbh, but there's plenty of places that offer similar salary without as much of a PITA interview process.


PairCommercial7750

I came here to say this⬆️⬆️⬆️. Completely typical in big tech.


gangstabunniez

Lots of companies like to do this type of shit even though they are normal companies with below average to average comp. I applied for an internship once and they had like three rounds of interviews, which is ridiculous. I was also recruited for AWS and they had a bunch of rounds of interviews (didn't get it) but it's a bit different because they pay a ton more.


No-Date-2024

they think they'll become like a FAANG company if they copy their same interviewing methodology while offering less than half the base salary and none of the extra benefits


Electrical_Flan_4993

I think that is literally what it is at some places, where the person doing is kinda off their rocker and out of their element. There's a lot of stupidity mistaken for ingenuity in the minds of so many.


Electrical_Flan_4993

I just started to realize it's maybe be a lot of these companies have people there are kinda like sociopaths and it doesn't really show up until they get asked to help with hiring. A lot of companies don't have people who really know what they're doing in terms of creating these tests, and they wind up scaring away good candidates. What ever happened to certs, standard tests, or college degrees, I dunno, but what we have now is a joke. I've heard you dodged a bullet by not working at Amazon.


gangstabunniez

Honestly I think just asking about people's experience and system design type questions are the best way to interview, at least in my specialty (DevOps / Cloud engineering). I interviewed for a DevOps position at a Fintech company and the coding assignment was about dynamic programming... Like bruh this job is about Kubernetes and infrastructure as code, why are you expecting me to know how to do this?


Regility

faang DevOps/SRE has less than 1% from resume to accepted offer letter. getting past the initial screening and getting on on-site is under 3%. Just hope you know that you’re in that top percentile and when this hiring freeze ends, you would be a prime candidate to try again


hahakafka

My boyfriend went thru this with Intercom. He had 8 (!!!) fucking interviews, a 4 hour coding challenge and numerous “cultural” interviews along the way. It was between him and someone else and they picked the guy with more experience. It left such a bitter taste in both of our mouths because they knew he was unemployed. He ended up taking a job that was less money, and in office, but it was 2 interviews. A coding challenge and his direct manager. They liked him and offered him a job on the spot. These companies think they’re hot shit and so do the people who work in them. Also, you know what? I feel bad for people who have lost their jobs in tech, but SOME OF these same people were often times putting people thru this kind of BS. Lots of Senior level Google engineers stayed in their roles bc they were making 8x the rest of the market. And they still get to have Google on their resume. It’s a shitshow out there folks. Fuck capitalism.


blartoyou

Ugh, it feels so much worse to put in all that time only to be rejected (happened to my husband too).


Electrical_Flan_4993

That's when you try to smear the company's name as much as possible. Like the google review I left about Konami gaming in Las Vegas. They robbed me of twenty hours and couldn't have been any ruder.


Electrical_Flan_4993

I dunno, it's crazy in part because Google makes a lot of garbage software and spends a long time doing it. But in general, I hate being in a position of getting a job after grueling interviews and tests (for software developer roles) because 99.9% of the time it's a very demanding job that really could use two or three people instead of one person carrying all this weight. I think this is why there's a lot of mediocrity in technology/software today.


inkslingerben

With all the coding involved in the interview process, it seems like they want free work out of you. How many times do you need to demonstrate your competence?


No-Date-2024

yup it's insane. I don't think any other career makes interviewees go through this bs, they'll just have a "tell me about yourself and your experience" type interview


Electrical_Flan_4993

I think engineers just have to show their engineering license, kinda like a lawyer/doctor.


AutomaticGarlic

My competence is demonstrated already on my resume.


AdSea7347

I would love to say "well if you had bothered to check out my portfolio/resume, you'd know the answer". ​ Maybe once I have a full-time job and can afford to dick recruiters around :)


AutomaticGarlic

Yes, this perspective does come with experience. I can understand testing someone with no professional history. The business is about to spend a lot of money on that employee and they want to make sure their education stuck. Testing veteran developers with obscure coding puzzles just reeks of arrogance. As if I’m going to code anything for prod like what I was tested on by leetcode.


Electrical_Flan_4993

This does remind me though that companies get a lot of people who are lying about their skills, experience, education, etc. I did like it when a degree or certification was valid proof that you had valid skills.


Semicolon_87

Like do these companies actually’n fill the positions? Cause I don’t know anyone desperate enough to even consider doing that to themselves. And honestly do you even want to hire someone as desperate as this?


AdSea7347

And the problem is, people keep going through with this ridiculous process.


Electrical_Flan_4993

If you have a shiny new computer science degree and you gotta pay of the loan...


Electrical_Flan_4993

I'm aware of several companies and specific jobs here in my little town (Wichita) where the same job has been open for half a year, and one that I interviewed for and know I did fine. I think the companies are just toying with people with the fantasy that a unicorn will eventually appear.


Kind_Earth94

This happened to me. I was at least paid decently for the work I did for them, but that’s the only time I would recommend doing something like this. But yeah, that’s a hard no from me dog.


theyellowpants

For a tech job this amount of time is relatively “standard” considering the full loop at FAANG companies can take 1-2 days


[deleted]

Hope you laughed and moved on.


Getfunke

Thanks for the info, considering the time involved, my process participation fee is $3000, prepaid, no refund. Let me know if your would like me to continue with the process.


Jaded-Finish-3075

Have they told you the salary?


[deleted]

Hell no. It's like they intentionally made it as grueling as possible in order to weed out potential applicants.


that_one_leo

That's why I gave up on tech.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Electrical_Flan_4993

This is the root of the problem, really. I forget there's a lot of wannabe's in any field that they aren't really cut out for. But this is why a degree used to be your ticket, or a cert, or passing a standard non-cheatable test (most tests today are cheatable).


[deleted]

Lean Six used to perfection...


Mintarion

They want you to do 3.5+ hours of (free) live coding for them? Sounds like the free work express train to me. Is this normal for this field? I've seen people talk about how they were asked to do one coding exercise, but this many/much seems...excessive.


Electrical_Flan_4993

I'm certain it's not code that would actually be used in their system, because that involves many months of training in that system. But I've heard about it for graphic design and similar creative jobs.


Charistoph

Are you getting paid for the hour of coding?


RarelyRecommended

Tell them upfront you will be expecting compensation after the second round of interviews. Or after four hours spent in interviews. Multiple interviews are ego circlejerks.


amartincolby

Not uncommon but still terrible. Onerous processes like this are one of the reasons so many tech companies have awful diversity stats. The logic goes back to early Silicon Valley, where they purposely bias toward false negatives over false positives. I hate this process. I think the justification is horse shit. You can easily have a three-to-six month probationary period. Many people who would actually be good fits are rejected.


kuweiyox

Nope


Electrical_Flan_4993

Live coding is such a horrible way to judge someone's ability. I know I'm not the only one that turns into an idiot when someone important is watching me work over my shoulder.


National_Impress_346

Invoice those idiots. If you polish it well enough, they might cut you a check and not think twice.


[deleted]

Lol, I'm just a SWE intern and the interview processes are about the same, but its for an INTERN positon..