Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role

Re:Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering... by autokad on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @01:07PM (#16914465)

its kinda sad you think professionals should memorize useless tricks that dont generalize to the profession in order to be considered for a job.

The skill takes a long time to practice, and quickly evaporates once you stop doing it. Yet none of our work is anything like that. a more real world situation is reading documentation or SO for the function concat_ws that will turn an array column to a concatenated string.

however, the system that is, and one that you seem to think is ok, is one that discriminates people on many levels. Its a skill you do not get good at by working, so you must practice this in your free time. Now you just discriminated against men and women with families, people from less fortunate backgrounds, and others who otherwise do not have the time in the day to dedicate to a skill that is only useful to coding interviews.

as far as a comment above, I was a DBA for 10 years and can do pretty complicated queries off the top of my head, know how to optimize my indexes, worked with both structured and unstructured data in the multi tb size, ect ect, but I have no recollection on what ACID stands for. I dont really care. Sure, you may hire someone who memorizes useless crap, but then they have no idea why the IO has gone through the roof when inserting IDs out of order on a clustered index.

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Re:Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering... by bigtunacan on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @02:00PM (#16914944)

I didn't take the parent's post the same way. The situation is more that if you do leetcode or hackerrank then you pass the interview. So once again the interview process has failed; instead of identifying good candidates you identify candidates that do hackerrank in their free time.

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Re:Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering... by autokad on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @02:06PM (#16915015)

thanks for the clarification, i read it as "its sad they cant do it, whats wrong with them?" kinda way, but what you said is probably what he/she meant

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Re:Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering... by AndyNemmity on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @01:53PM (#16914855)

Exactly, I as well have been doing technical work for my whole life, and sitting here right now, I could more easily explain to you how to optimize the planner cache, and what hints are required to get a given result than I could explain to you which joins do what.

I just look up joins when I need them, and it's straight forward, but ask me in an interview and I sound like an idiot.

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Re:Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering... by achileas on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @01:21PM (#16914583)

I don't read anything about OP's post as saying they think people should memorize or that this practice is okay, as evidenced by their final sentence that it's sad that you could do so and pass many technical interviews.

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