Re:When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re s...
by pushrax on Monday January 21, 2019 @01:19AM
(#18958082)
It really depends on your domain. If you're into low level hacking and distributed systems, there is a lot more algorithmic work. There is demand for software that's cheap to scale and/or low latency. Some fields are bottlenecked by hardware (machine learning, realtime rendering, etc.) and so benefit from better software. Some production systems still need a large amount of optimization to satisfy economic and product constraints.
I don't think the number of jobs requiring fairly deep systems or algorithmic knowledge has gone down, but the ratio has.
Re:When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re s...
by dgreensp on Monday January 21, 2019 @02:43AM
(#18958486)
I’ve had trouble finding those systems or algorithmic jobs too, like the grandparent, where some kind of engineering quality matters, be it performance or correctness or something. Everyone wants to hire a “full-stack engineer” to write application code that a junior dev could write, but they want someone senior anyway.
Re:When hiring senior engineers, you’re not buying, you’re s...
by wolfi1 on Monday January 21, 2019 @04:17AM
(#18958940)
I once had a FizzBuzz question in an interview, The interviewer started, I interrupted him, "We are not talking about FizzBuzz, are we?". He apologized afterwards by saying that there was actually on applicant some time ago, writing 100 printfs.
> raw algorithmic skill
It's been ages that I've been asked anything remotely algorithmic. My interviews are mostly about frameworks, how you fit in a team and whether you know / can be "agile".
Not even a Fizzbuzz, much less so quicksort or more special algorithms.
> and willingness to say “I don’t know”
That never got me anything in any interview/company. To be fair, I found a few smart and cool friends because of this, but they themselves don't look as if they've found a good job either.
Being hired (valued?) as a senior engineer is really hard.