People Who Apply for Jobs by Showing Up | Hacker News Reader

People Who Apply for Jobs by Showing Up

wsj.com

57 pointsbookofjoe94 comments

That’s how I got my first development gig. Freshly moved to a new city and needing a job, I did the usual ‘apply to everything in the paper and online’ shotgun approach. After a week of that, I suited up and started driving around to various companies with resume in hand. At one office park, I got lost and went to the wrong building. Reading the names of companies on the lobby plaque, one caught my eye that sounded like a tech company of some kind. So I walked upstairs and into their suite, which I found out later was their remote engineering office. They didn’t have a secretary, so I just poked my head into someone’s office and asked about a job. “Go talk to Doug down the hall”, they said. Doug, it turns out was the company’s VP of engineering whose response was “well, we need a software tester - when can you start?”

First job always feels random.

I was shooting large amount of resumes into outer space until I finally landed an interview and job that I soon realized I was crushing.

But then after a while I realized the other end of the same scenario and that's interviewing completely unqualified candidates who literally can't fizz buzz.

> interviewing completely unqualified candidates who literally can't fizz buzz.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary I still struggle deeply with accepting that this is allegedly a semi-common occurrence. It'd be like applying to work for Uber without ever touching a car before.

Some people know how to put parts together but never learned algorithms and data structures. Most may have not learned discrete math, either. Those devs are still very effective but run into quadratic time problems a lot. I’ve met a lot of them in my work.

I have over 20 years in software, only a few as a developer. I can provide value, but I can’t fizz buzz. If I studied for it I could.

There’s a lot of stellar talent out there that won’t fit traditional boxes.

The point of FizzBuzz is that if you can't effortlessly solve it without studying for it in particular, then you're completely unqualified for any sort of software development.

So I'm not going to belittle you, I'd actually like to get to the bottom of what's going on here. You say you're a developer, but then ... I'm wondering why you think you can't solve fizzbuzz? Do you have trouble with loops? With conditionals? Do you have trouble knowing where to start? What kind of programming do you normally do (what languages or tools or frameworks do you use)? How did you learn to program?

Sometimes I've taught kids to program and they could solve it in a single lesson. Sometimes I've tried to teach people and they just couldn't learn at all. I'll probably end up teaching some more people in my time, so the better I understand, the better I can maybe help people in future. I hope you have a minute to help me out here!

I wrote network software in late 90s, including a cfengine replacement.

Probably wrote a few hundred apps. I’m old school. All in C.

Ok, that confuses me even more!

I was thinking maybe you relied heavily on javascript frameworks that do iteration for you. That might explain it.

If you've written a lot of C code, did you somehow manage to do so without using 'for' or 'if' on a regular basis?

(You can tell I'm very confused, because I thought 'if' and 'for' happen a lot in C).

Just to be sure: maybe you're confusing 'fizzbuzz' with something else?

Fizzbuzz was: print the numbers 1 to 100, but instead print "fizz" on every 3rd, "5" on every fifth, and "fizzbuzz" if both.

(That's it, there's no trick question, and we don't care about things like typos or off by ones, because everyone makes those if you just ask out of the blue)

Are you sure you've never written anything similar before in some function or other? (the original cfengine itself seems to have quite a number of functions that loop over something and filter it. )

Hi! Just wondering if you're still around? If you have a lot of C experience, haven't you written a lot of for and if statements? I'm still most confused.

A FizzBuzz is a for loop and if-elif-elif-else in the simplest implementation. If you can’t come up with code for it (given the full problem statement, of course), then you can’t program at all.

It appears to be so common because it's a self-selected bias of observation. The people who can't fizzbuzz are the ones who don't get hired and are continually circulating among the applicant pool. The people who can will get jobs and remove themselves from the pool.

If the question is why people who can't fizzbuzz keep trying anyway, well, Dunning-Kruger. They don't know what they don't know.

My hiring manager told me the other 2 candidates the interviewed (both of which allegedly had college degrees) didn’t even make it to the fizz buzz stage. They got stuck trying to calculate the rolling sum of an array.

The amount of confidence needed to drive people around at high speeds is much higher than the amount required to join a zoom meeting.

I had a friend at google who got so sick of people who couldn’t code his first question was “write anything in any language on the board”. About 50% of interviews ended there. I question if that was a reasonable way to start since it is a terrifying social question (what’s the hardest thing I can reasonably do that meets his unknown criteria). It is therefore probably a better test of professional confidence (though that’s really great to have too).

I went the opposite way. I got sick of adversarial interviews. (If you can do the job we’re on the same side. If you can’t you’ll be miserable here so we’re still on the same side). I started opening my interviews with “what did you have for breakfast?” To set the tone of at least everyone can answer the first question. The last guy I hired sheepishly said “I skipped breakfast” but I still counted it a pass.

It's better to actually give a dead simple question instead of leaving them guessing. When interviewing interns, we would start off with "print all the items in an array" - besides for instantly weeding out candidates who couldn't code at all, (and there were a surprising amount), it's also a great confidence booster for them before moving on to the real question.

I had an interviewer ask me "how do you copy a file in Unix". Which was a good intro to the rest of the interview... Which was, "let's brainstorm together other ways to copy files around until we run off the end of what you know". Was a fun one.

It was too long ago to remember details, but I suppose the interview got as far as "the data link supports 16kbps, the far side doesn't have compression software, but you have to move 10e6 zeros in less than 30 seconds, how?"

> write anything in any language on the board

That is a horrible question that tells more about him then the interviewee.

Why? When I read that comment I looked up and laughed, imagining what I would choose. I’d probably laugh in such an interview — and why not?

It would lead to lots of enlightening discussion.

Yeah, "no right answer" questions open up the opportunity to work together in a dialog, which simulates real work better than "test style" questions.

I also had great success hiring for IT ops by telling the person, "we use some systems you are not familiar with here, so I'm going to spend the next 10 minutes teaching you the system, and then we'll discuss how you'd diagnose it when you get your first page about it". This tests their ability to learn something new, to engage with an unfamiliar situation, but in the context of mentorship. The only problem with such an intimate technique is that when someone bombs it, they really really bomb it: There's just no hiding what's happening, as it's happening.

Because it is a question that can't provide a positive signal, only a negative one, and since the negative signal is kind of flaky. I.e. somebody "passing" this by writing some code doesn't actually give you any confidence in hiring them. It is only going to filter out people who can't code at all, and then you have to ask them a real question. But due to giving the candidates no guidance, some who actually know how to program will not just bang out something simple in as minute. They will think it is a trick question; or waste time choosing what to write rather than just do it; or start writing something far too complex for the purpose of just passing the quick filter.

It is a profoundly shit question, setting up candidates for randomly failing.

"Wow how'd you pass Google's lang interview so quickly??"

for(;;){}

10?"FSCK GOOGLE"

20GOTO10

I have given over 100 on site interviews for a large well regarded company, and I’d say about 20 percent can’t seem to program at all. I have only actually asked FizzBuzz once because it feels terrible to go with that simple a question, but they were failing another easy question and I wanted to calibrate if the easy question was too hard or they really couldn’t program. They completely failed fizz buzz - they started a for loop but couldn’t decide what to do in it, and the idea of directly translating each instruction in fizz buzz into a line of code in the for loop didn’t seem to gel with them. I know there is no way to know for sure, but it didn’t feel like just nerves - it really felt like they had no idea how to do word problems in math class, they couldn’t turn a description with a few bullet points into code implementing them.

So, for what it’s worth, I’ve definitely seen it. I don’t even think it’s particularly uncommon.

1/5 is the same ratio I was going to say. And that's people that make it past the initial pre-screen phone call.

I've also never asked fizzbuzz, but some similarly easy things. Like reversing a list. No memory or complexity constraints.

The candidate ratio I’ve seen has been all over the map depending on the company. At one place it was more like 90% of candidates who couldn’t write any code, another place it was closer to 50%, and I’ve worked at some places where nearly every candidate we got was at least somewhat competent as a programmer. The obvious answer is better pre-screening or candidate sourcing, but one of the places with generally high quality candidates was a small startup with no recruiting to pre-screen (although we mainly recruited from local meetups so perhaps that was good sourcing)

At that time I was at a relatively traditional company whose hiring and sourcing practices does not involve leetcode puzzles.

I'm not a fan of algo trivia either but fizz buzz is very far from leetcode imo. I genuinely would not be able to hire somebody who couldn't complete it, whereas some of the lc hards can be a bit problematic if your DSA is rusty.

I always figured leetcode was just a slightly harder version of fizzbuzz (because fizzbuzz really is a bit too easy.) You can often puzzle out a solution based on experience alone, if you've been programming long enough.

I guess the leetcode idea fell afoul of goodhart's law, and a lot of people just started memorizing algorithms instead?

Fizzbuzz is a basic competency check, it really doesn't require any "clever" thinking. I haven't looked at many leetcode exercises but the ones I have so far definitely go beyond that, and often place "unrealistic" constraints (e.g. not being able to use standard library functions). Which isn't to say they don't test anything useful, but as someone involved tech-screening hires, I doubt I'd ever bother with a leetcode exercise. Mind you I wouldn't use Fizzbuzz either, but only because it's too well known and easy to regurgitate a standard answer for.

A lot of people have the idea that “tech” (whatever that is) is the path to riches, and that they can just start out and learn as you go, just as you might for a manual labor job.

I don’t mean this in any way condescendingly or to imply these people are dumb. Often parents/partners are telling them “go get a job”. The process is discussed a lot on HN, Reddit etc, but most people don’t know that job searching is itself a skill in and of its own. They don’t teach that in HS or college.

I think you can learn as you go with tech. It depends on where you start. If you are a humble hobbyist with a few projects under his belt then a junior position isn’t too far out of reach.

As long as you pace yourself and are open to learn you can become a senior developer.

A lot of people learn on the job, and you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. I suspect that this occurs as many people work adjacent to software roles, and know some code/read code regularly - the gap is that they cannot recall basic syntax and if/else ordering on demand when asked to generate code.

My first real software gig was having a conversation with someone and them asking if I knew anything about making a flash program talk to a ticket printer. I described the approach I would take and they said they would pay me XX an hour if I could get close to my estimated time. So I wrote them a little python service to handle their flash games printing. It took a whole lot more time than I thought mostly because the flash games were written by a contracting group in India. But that started me out.

Mind, it was a completely shit service. I mean every time I think about it I think of more vulnerabilities. Unfortunately the contractor leading things had very little clue. So they were no good for guidance. It wasn't until my next job that I really got some mentoring.

My first job search was similar. I would send out resumes, not get responses, change cover letters, change out text in resumes, send out more. SO! I did what a good software engineer would do and automated it. My software would send out resumes, change out cover letters, link the incoming emails, keep statues up to date. The software became smart enough to catch "put in subjects" or use a doc vs a pdf. I would just play video games and get incoming phone calls about jobs. They would explain how I wasn't qualified to build CRUD apps. OH WELL! You wasted your time not mine lol. Then I got my first interview. They asked why I wanted to work there - I explained how my software worked and why it chose that company. It had already got my gf a job in accouting. The software scraped dozens of sites it was only a matter of time. The VP of engineering smiled.

I started work monday.

You could probably sell that software.

I have done this twice:

The first time was a complete failure. I walked into a place and hand-delivered a fancy paper application. The office lost the application because they weren't expecting to receive anything like that at the front desk. I know this because I ended up working there after applying online.

The second time, I flew across the country for a final interview where all other candidates were appearing by zoom. I was hired for that job. I'm not sure, but I think that (a) I was less qualified than other candidates and probably should not have been hired, but the organization really valued dedication so flying in was over-weighted; (b) I was more inclined to ignore red flags with the organization because I had committed so heavily to the interview process.

Strategies like this are risky because you need to know yourself well in order to judge whether e.g. you might interview better remotely. It can also lead a person, as it did me, to distort their normal decision-making process in ways which are not immediately obvious.

Isn't there a lot to be said about leadership qualities and initiative/confidence for just flying in? it's like you are the captain of your own ship, you're aware and human. There's a lot of value in that I think, depending on the role. What kind of role was it?

When applying for PhDs in the UK from elsewhere in the EU it was hard to get any response to the applications. So I booked a cheap flight to London and contacted the head professors of the departments I was interested in:

- Hey, I happen to be in town in two weeks. Can I give a talk at your group and present a paper I'm working on?

I believe it made all the difference, and got me through the door (with a lesser CV).

You are my hero. If you need to be lucky enough to get something you want, make it (the "luck") happen.

I did something similar. I told that I was not good enough to do a Ph.D., then was contacted shortly afterwards and asked to be a teaching assistant. Without the burden of grad studies, I ended up doing actual teaching, leading a team of teaching assistants, being one of the representatives of the department by doing public lectures, and (incidentally) earning more than most of the lecturers. In the end, I decided they were right about the Ph.D. thing. I learned enough in my years there to figure out that I didn't have the stomach for academic politics.

My father was working with an employment agency after he graduated from college. Having developed a relationship with one of the staff, she was relieved one day when he walked in. Apparently there was an executive from a national telco there and the person whoever they were supposed to be interviewing didn't show. They sent my father in just to save face because they didn't want that person to have come in for nothing. He ended up getting the job and working there for several years.

From The Onion:

Report: 95% Of Grandfathers Got Job By Walking Right Up And Just Asking

https://www.theonion.com/report-95-of-grandfathers-got-job-b...

For a minimum wage-ish job at a restaurant, supermarket, Home Depot, etc. that's probably about the situation today. Maybe a restaurant would want a server with a little experience but I doubt most casual restaurants are being terribly picky today.

Surprisingly not! 10 years ago, retail store applicants were already asked to apply online.

>The walk-in strategy that landed your first job bagging groceries or scooping ice cream just might help secure your next one.

ha. I remember ten years ago as an unemployed teen, trying this strategy in various pubs, shops, hotels etc. even for these minimum wage jobs, I was uniformly told to fuck off and apply online. my parents didn't really "get it", that things had changed since their day, they kept telling me to go out and try again. weeks of repeated humiliation.

My dad would drop me off in an area with 10-20 resumes and tell me to just try dropping them off everywhere.

Strange, as this has been my Go-To for finding meaningful work over wading through pages of stale, unsavory job offerings. I walked into a PLC shop last week & scored a tour and informal interview, on the spot. The owner is OoT ATM, waiting for their return for the real interview.

If a potential employer's priority is online applications & utilizing various on-boarding agencies, IMO, you dodged multiple bullets. They likely are content just feeding a stream of fresh meat into their grinder. As always, YMMV.

the comment you’re replying to mentioned 10 years ago — i’m guessing the companies who happily disregarded people 10 years ago might feel a bit different today.

my brother had a very similar “apply online” experience in 2016.

What works is a combination if the business is open to the public. You apply online because that is the only method to get into the system. Then you go to the location and introduce yourself to the hiring manager.

To all the people in the replies who got told to f-off: Who were you giving your resumes to? When I was working min-wage retail, the other staff were notorious for trashing any resumes that came their way. For "job security". The manager/owner never saw them. This was also around 2008-2010.

I remember applying to fast food places and for shelf stocking at grocery stores around 2010. Every place that wasn't a mom&pop joint would tell me they didn't even have a way to accept a paper resume. Everything needed to be done through their online system and they had no way of manually inputting one or hiring an employee from outside their online system.

I remember Publix had computers by the front of the store and their only purpose was for people without computers to apply. If you came in looking to apply in person you'd be directed to the computers and told you'll get a call if they want to interview.

Same haha

Agreed. Working for a major big box retailer for 12 years: never once have we accepted a hand-delivered resume or hired a walk-in. On the rare occasions fresh high school students try that (and it's never anyone older), it's always the same response: fill out the online app, because we literally cannot hand-key your paper documents and we cannot fill a hiring requisition without that digital record.

I had a different experience, 8 years ago I needed to get a job quickly and went round my local town pubs with CVs, had an interview the next day and a job the day after.

I did this in 2016 after graduating high school and it worked surprisingly well. I had been applying to places online and never heard back, went in and they had me working the same day. I was assuming every place would say apply online, but it seemed most employees were referrals.

depends on place and time I suppose. 2013 was the peak of post-recession unemployment, and this was in a deindustrialised area with limited job opportunities even in good years.

Same. It was the worst back in 2009. I was 19 and my dad couldn't understand why I couldn't get so much as a burger flipping job. I told him how many companies I'd applied to online, but despite how otherwise technologically savvy he is, it didn't compute for some reason. He told me to just walk in to businesses and ask the manager for a job.

So I did just that. If I was lucky, I just got the fluoride stare. Most of the time I was either told sternly "you gotta just apply online" or was actually laughed at a few times. I could handle all that on its own. The real bad part was my dad thinking I wasn't really trying.

Showing up IRL might work if one already has a resume full of experience, but I have to wonder how well that works when one either has no experience or is junior to mid level (in any field).

"Mr. Hazlett, 29, estimates he has applied unsuccessfully to 400 tech jobs, all online, since graduating from a coding boot camp in May"

Is this indicative of a bad job market, or instead perhaps a bad fit between the perceived skills/value the persons belives themselves to have, and the view of the recruiters?

Likely the latter. I've done O(100) interviews at big tech companies. There are some folks who went through boot camps and have been valued teammates, but there are many orders of magnitude more who went through a boot camp hoping for a big paycheck and can't code their way out of a wet paper bag.

I think it's more likely they're just applying wrong. Shotgunning applications on indeed doesn't work as a fresh bootcamp grad, you need at least some sort of relationship with the company. That's why referral mills like blind are popular, when there are 100 applicants for an entry level job literally anything that can help hr narrow the process is used. I even had success just calling the company as an undergrad and asking to speak to HR. Always at least got an interview after that.

Is it a bad job market? Everybody I know is desperately trying to hire, and finding that even decent candidates can afford to be really choosy right now. The place I used to work (not a terrible company, and competitive but non-FAANG salaries) has had an FE position open for 11 months.

Anyway, I think if they've applied to 400 places in 3 months, they're probably using more of a shotgun approach. I always got better results when I researched the company and customized my application to what I thought they were looking for.

> Everybody I know is desperately trying to hire, and finding that even decent candidates can afford to be really choosy right now

In the market that I'm seeing in London UK, everyone seems desperate to hire at salaries that no longer correspond to the cost of living. I don't see many actually putting decent numbers on the table, suggesting 1) they aren't that desperate or 2) those that are putting these numbers down have no trouble filling their positions quickly and they don't stay on the market for long.

Keep in mind that in most places, taxes have yet to adjust for inflation, and/or the government services funded by those taxes degraded beyond usefulness meaning you now have to use your after-tax take-home money to pay for services that you used to rely on the "free" (paid by your taxes) government-provided service.

It's a bad job market for those without the correct education or experience to get a foot in the door. If you already have the right credentials, it's probably a great job market.

Impossible to tell without knowing more. For our recent entry-level opening we could offer an interview to about 5-10% of applicants due to the volume of applications, generic "I've done a bootcamp/I have a degree" resumes in general did not fare well.

Around six months ago, I was a Staff SWE at Google with ten years there. I applied to a few smaller-than-FAANG public companies online...and never heard back from any. The only way I managed to get interviews, or even have a recruiter acknowledge my existence, was by pinging potential hiring managers on LinkedIn (or in one case, having a former Google coworker ping the CTO of the company, since they were connected on LinkedIn). I ended up with very strong offers from Coinbase and Roblox; I never heard back at all from Airbnb.

(I took the Roblox offer and am happy with the decision. :) )

A couch surfer riding a dirt bike across the country was staying on my coworker's boat. He came in one day and asked for a job. We gave him a silly microcontroller project to work on for a few hours, and then offered him an internship. The particular internship didn't pan out, but he made a lateral move within the company and has now been around 4 years or so.

One time I called him a hobo and he was offended, and then he looked up the definition and agreed that he was indeed a hobo.

After graduating university I got fed after a month of applying online and not hearing back.

I printed my CV as an A0 billboard and stood on the street in the center of the city for a few days. Got my first job like that and a couple of interview invites, including for a PE firm.

You gotta have balls to do that.

I don’t know when this happened, but if you work in the tech industry today, after 30 minutes a black car would stop, 2 guys would take a hood over your head and abduct you. You would wake up in a nice office, with a signing bonus on your desk, a new MacBook Pro and an open end work contract.

Job market in Europe is insane for the tech industry, companies buying smaller companies not for the ip, product or engineering knowledge, but just for the people that work there. And this was years ago.

Like „we need 30 engineers but get none, f** it we are doing it live, buy a company that matches“

Yeah I should try again. Currently not in the EU or US.

Intel plans to simulate this kind of old-fashioned hiring by hosting a job fair in the metaverse early next year. Tech workers—or people who want to be tech workers but have unconventional backgrounds—will strap on virtual-reality headsets, select avatars and pitch themselves to Intel.

“We’re still working through the details, but I’m assuming people will look like aliens or something,” says Intel spokeswoman Chelsea Hughes, adding that the goal is to prevent imperfect algorithms and unconscious biases from filtering out good candidates.

Brilliant. So they replace hypothesized implicit bias with ... an explicit bias for people willing to jump through whatever hoops the company puts in front of them. Like showing up to the interview dressed up like an alien, for example.

A VR interview isn’t that different from a video interview when compared to an in person one. My concern is this reads like an applicant must have a vr headset to be eligible for interview.

The phenomenon is simpler than described: differentiate yourself. You just might get the interest of someone who matters.

Back in the summer of 1999 I had finished college and an internship and was weighing my options. Many afternoons I was hanging around the office with a friend that had just been hired by a startup. One day there was some issue, I don't remember exactly what, I casually typed a Perl one liner solving it, and was hired the next day.

And some time later the people from the internship place called me just as I was becoming sick of the post acquisition vibes at the startup, so I left.

And so on... I have never sent a CV or interviewed, sometimes I think I should have.

Telling people to apply online and hiring people who show up anyway is an asshole filter (https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html ). You're preferentially giving benefits to people who are willing to break the rules rather than to obey them, so you are selecting for assholes.

You got it wrong if you thought there was a rule to begin with. Everything is a negociation. A job is not a reward you deserve.

This feels like an over-the-top microoptimization with very little data behind it. By the same reasoning, you're also preferentially giving benefits to people who are willing to be seen face-to-face which could counter a slight asshole bias (if it exists).

I thought that myself doing business: play by „the rules“, pricing is fixed, „this does not work with this configuration and that hardware“ on a phone call - I would take this as final, and so on.

As I‘m now in my thirties I realized, there are no rules (well or very few). 90% of success is just showing up.

„Well, you are here, let’s just have a quick talk“. It‘s not guaranteed that you get a job, a contract or something, but if your Risk is Zero, you can only win.

Curious Déjà vu moment: Why does the post claim '1 hour ago' when it & 2 comments are from yesterday. The comments also state '1 hour ago', but the posters' history says '1 day ago'. DB issues?

Maybe an admin/mod wanted to give this post a new boost... strange.

https://i.imgur.com/E01COOF.png

Bummer I cannot see it, as I really loathe Imgur. It has become the poster child model of what it was created to circumvent. I cannot, in good conscience, allow any of the following through UBO.

alexametrics.com certify-js.alexametrics.com ccgateway.net imgur.ccgateway.net consensu.org quantcast.mgr.consensu.org facebook.net connect.facebook.net google-analytics.com www.google-analytics.com media-lab.ai js.media-lab.ai quantserve.com secure.quantserve.com scorecardresearch.com sb.scorecardresearch.com

I use Imgur because it is still the only option in Flameshot ... what is you favorite alternative? I'll post it there (but this screenshot just shows the issue, so it's nothing you haven't seen already)

Use an extension to redirect Imgur URLs to a privacy-respecting frontend. I use Redirector[0] to redirect to one of the frontends listed at https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends#imgur.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/?u...

Second chance pool, when they get refreshed the timestamp is (temporarily) bumped to an earlier time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

The mods sometimes put posts in a 'second-chance' pool if they think the post was high-quality but may have been overlooked. These posts get randomly placed somewhere on the front page with the timestamp "reset". [0]

I have a sneaking suspicion that this manual curation is more common than we realize and could be the main reason for HN's high quality.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

> I have a sneaking suspicion that this manual curation is more common than we realize and could be the main reason for HN's high quality.

They manipulate submissions and comments A LOT... sometimes they write a comment about their modifications but often do not (maybe when they think it will go unnoticed?).

There used to be such a thing called a job fair where hiring managers could do a brief 3 minute interview, collect a resume, and follow up. These were great in that the last one I went to I bagged a developer position at a well-known contractor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com