Spreading a little Christmas job-hunting hope

I wouldnt worry about getting passed up by the bigger companies. Everyone knows their interview processes are highly dysfunctional jokes. Then most startup companies copy them because they all think they are going to be the next google etc.

My last interview at amazon went like this:

Stupid trick coding question over the phone that I did not understand at all. Followed by 3 memorization questions. followed by one question I felt was valid and i know i got it right.

I was being interviewed for a specific product that was right up my ally. I could literally build what they had built easily, but they never once asked questions related to the product or my experience.

I looked at the product a year later and basically nothing has been done to it.

I did the new grad assessment test last week for Amazon, I am more than positive I aced both sections, especially the coding questions (passed all tests). Yet somehow I still didn't advance. I have other interviews in the pipeline that were way tougher and I didn't get the solutions 100% yet I still advanced.

Could be worse. About five years ago I was interviewing at Amazon, and had gotten picked by the hiring manager and all that was left was a "trivial" HR screen. Lady there felt that since I had mainly done consulting I couldn't be trusted to stay at a full time job, and so overruled the hiring manager and I didn't get the position.

The rest of the story? A couple years later I had a chance to talk with the hiring manager while he was applying for a position at a place I was working - seems the person HR picked led to their whole unit being disbanded because they failed so miserably. He felt he had to take some of the blame for not keeping a closer eye on the person, but still...

During this period, my dad said something that stuck with me: "The interviewing process is very human. There are all sorts of reasons it can fall apart, many that have nothing to do with you. Maybe they've got an inside candidate or someone decides they don't like the school you went to or the tie you're wearing."

I've found this to be true in a small number of my experiences. There are certain positions I interviewed for where my history was 100% in line with their needs, the interviews all went well and I should have gotten the job. But then didn't. Have no idea why not.

Acing all tests and doing great with question and still not being hired usually means you weren't a "cultural fit" (usually an institutionalized popularity contest).

How can they tell i'm not a cultural fit from an online assessment test?

Unless theres some racism going on since they can see my picture. Thats the only way they can differentiate between 2 people who have the same score.

Ha yes 100x this!

I usually add these companies (and if possible, the team in question) and keep track of the position and project as well. They're not going to like it when the chip on my shoulder becomes too big and I decide to compete against them.

Just don't become a super villain like Guy Pierce did in Iron Man 3

I've been offered a job by one company and then later turned down for an interview. It happens.

>Followed by 3 memorization questions.

Did you mean memoization, the optimization technique where you cache intermediate results? Or were they literally asking you to memorize and recite minutiae over the phone?

I always get these two words mixed up, and it doesn't help that Firefox doesn't think "memoization" is actually word.

I meant memorization. Questions that if I could remember I would have the answer to, or if i could google it then i would easily find the answer.

For example implement some specific algorithm. If you remember some of that algorithm or memorized it you are good. Otherwise you suck at development because you haven't had the need to implement that algo ever in your career..

This reminds me of my Facebook interview. The coding question was "given an array of all the words in the English language, print an array of arrays containing all the anagrams". In studying for the interview, I'd just refreshed on recursion and, in my general nervousness + excitement thinking I'd just been asked a question I'd literally studied an hour before, went right to work generating all the anagrams of each word in the English language.

About 5 minutes after the call ended, my jaw dropped open and I slapped my forehead. To find the anagrams of a word, just parse the set and remove any words that are (a) the same length and (b) contain the same numbers of each letter in the original.

Fizz buzz. And I made it like 1000x harder.

A generous interviewer would say, "Well at least he knows recursion and can do it on the fly in a stressful situation". But this is Facebook and they don't have to be generous. I gave them a reason to say "no" and then they said "no".

But as for "dysfunctional jokes", I have to agree (and you can tell from my OP that I have plenty of experience with it). Asking someone to code on the fly is like asking someone to write a novella on the fly. You need focus and concentration. By demanding it with someone breathing into your ear the whole time, you're simply giving those who are better able to handle pressure an advantage and those who can't a disadvantage. If this were a bomb-diffusal position, you'd want to filter for that. But this is coding, so what should pressure-handling matter?

haha exactly. i mean my typical day coding is my boss runs into my office. Tells me the entire company is going to fail if i cant figure out this trick problem in 30 seconds flat.

I mean i never research or think about shit. i just code it man and release it like a boss because thats how coding in the real world works. You better be quick on your feet if you want to get into the big guys. This is real world coding after all :) ...

haha

Congrats on the new job!

> I suffer from crippling anxiety [...] foggy Xanax brain.

Consider asking your doctor about propranolol.

It's a safe, non-addictive beta-blocker often used to treat high blood pressure, but it also eliminates the peripheral nervous system response to anxiety, the "fight-or-flight" adrenaline rush feeling: racing heart, shortness of breath, inability to concentrate, shaking, sweaty hands, blushing, etc.

It doesn't effect your mental anxiety, but it'll cut out all of the physical symptoms, which makes the mental anxiety much easier to control, without creating any sort of brain fog.

I'm not doctor and don't do a good job on my self but theoretically I would try to do some meditation before trying more drugs.

The easiest way I found was the headspace app, although I didn't keep up with it in the long-run, but at the time I felt that I was feeling calmer, although it could very well be the ignition placebo.

+1 for Propranolol. As parent says, it does not affect your cognition! It doesn't make you sleepy or slow or happy or numb or relaxed or lightheaded or anything like that. It affects only your autonomic systems, eliminating the high heart rate and blood pressure, shaky hands, dry mouth, etc. These physical effects often push your normal performance anxiety over the edge, creating a cascading effect. Talk to your doctor if you think it could help, it might change your life -- it did mine, allowing me to become an influential voice at my company with an influential position to match. There's no reason you should allow a biological particularity put you at a career disadvantage compared to others. And it's important to realize anxiety is very often biological in origin, and non-pharmaceutical methods are often not enough.

While many people feel that other type of drugs, like benzodiazepines (e.g. Valium, Xanax) cause them to become somewhat of a different person, beta blockers like propranolol can better be described as making you a rock-solid version of yourself.

See my comment above. I don't really get nervous at the interviews... I'm actually fairly collected and confident in person. It's just that lonely, panicky night beforehand that gets me.

It's so torturous, I actually considered having a friend use my email to schedule the interview (or GMAT) for me, then only tell me I have an interview (or GMAT) the day I have the interview (or GMAT). If this situation had gone on much longer, I would have done this.

You might try meditation or imagining a positive outcome. The worst that can happen is they reject you. Apply at smaller places to practice. Places where even if you get the job you wouldn't take it. The best times to look for a new job is when you have one.

I tried propanolol. I also tried alcohol, Klonipin, Zoloft, Lexapro, marijuana, meditation, Ambien, Benadryl (by the boatfull), Nyquil... it's been a real struggle.

So far the only thing that has helped (besides the Benadryl for getting me to sleep but not keeping me asleep or making the sleep worthwhile) was Lexapro for one glorious month. Seriously. It was a religious experience. I felt like normal people for a few weeks. Then relapsed.

Hopefully I can get it working again at some point.

Also, I don't really get nervous at the interviews. Actually, I'm as cool as a cucumber. It's just the night before that puts me through the ringer. It borders on panic. Part of my decision to accept the current offer is based on the "Dear God don't make me sweat out the night before interviews" aspect of things.

But why? Why do you panic?

Why are your body or subconscious convinced you are about to enter a stressful, risky situation and start to react this way? What conditioned them to believe this?

It happened to me too by the way, both the night before and during the interviews, and what I walked away with was the realization: I disliked expectations.

I didn't want to be interviewing, or working for someone else, or generally doing what I thought I was supposed to be doing. I needed time to get on a path where I would be doing what was right for me.

If nothing was expected of you, and there were no restrictions (financial, societal, etc.) on what you could do, what would you rather be doing? You said in another comment you are pretty good at what you do, so could it be that the problem isn't you but the general idea of expectations?

How would you fight this without drugs?

A lot of software companies seem to have a set of conflicting beliefs.

1 Iterative/agile software development. YAGNI. Build the bare minimum, then iterate when you learn more.

2. Hire slow, fire fast.

A really agile org would be hiring fast too. Now... I know a lot of this has to do with labor laws - hiring an actual employee brings extra baggage. And in the US at least, more people may want to be employees for reasons like health insurance.

Even with those considerations, companies should be bringing on more short term contractors, and the ones that work out stay longer. The ones that don't, for whatever reason, move on.

The same teams that will say "YAGNI, just build XYZ, ship it, etc" - iow, just get stuff out the door - will hem and haw and take forever looking for a perfect candidate that, in reality, doesn't even exist.

It's early in the morning, this sort of makes sense in my head, but I may not quite be making sense. But it's still a seeming conflict that bugs me.

I agree with this sentiment

More to the point, they think employees have zero flexibility. That if the employee is hasn't worked with a certain technology (like Hibernate, but has Java experience) this doesn't matter.

Do you find this to be true of the hiring manager, or just the HR department that filters?

This. Above all else, this has driven me absolutely insane. I've immersed myself in and learned dozens of technologies in my past but because I didn't use one lousy framework I don't qualify? Something I could pick up in a week or -- at most -- a month?

This is especially true of startups. They feel like they're under pressure to produce yesterday and don't have time for someone to get "up to speed".

Worst is when they say "Well you don't have any Ruby experience. Maybe you could do a Ruby coding assignment for us." Then you spend the whole weekend cranking out a Ruby application only for them to say "This is great. Well done. But we really need someone with Ruby experience."

desk smash

I think this is something that would mostly be taken up by people trying in the early stages of their career. The revealed preference of more senior people is to not push for these kinds of contracts.

A shorter trial period makes a lot of sense, especially as more and more people with weaker tech backgrounds are drawn into software development by the strong job market. That said, internships fulfill this role for a lot of companies. Especially at the larger tech companies, internships seem like primarily an extended job interview.

Maybe the lesson here is "quit trying to get jobs at tier 1 name brand companies". There are, by definition, only 500 companies in the Fortune 500. There are hundreds of thousands of smaller companies around the country that could use your skills.

A friend of mine has been trying to get me to start a consulting company along those lines. For companies that need computer help sporadically, a lot of automation to their tasks, and regular checkups. But not full time staff. I think it would be particularly appealing to older engineers who have other things they are interested in and want to be able to scale their hours to their schedule rather than the other way around. Certainly something to think about.

Many companies on that list like thoughtworks are not tier 1 companies.

What post did you read?

"Smartling* Cloudflare AppDynamics* DigitalOcean Placemeter* Hatch AppNexus* OpenX ThoughtWorks* Roost"

They may not all be 'tier 1' companies (I just made up the phrase 'tier 1' - 'top tier' may have been better), but there's a commonality to many of these - they're largely well-known names in many communities.

I knew Google, Facebook, Amazon, Samsung, Cloudflare, appdynamics, DO, openx and thoughtworks without even batting an eye - the others sound familiar, but I can't say definitively if I know what they do.

"Midwest-city tool and die cutting" probably needs someone with this person's skills just as much, perhaps moreso, than digitalocean needs yet another devops guru.

Congrats! Good luck!

Re crippling anxiety - I highly recommend improv classes.

I indirectly second that. A colleague took improv classes for vaguely similar reasons, and he had a positive and helpful experience.

<reddit>Great username for this particular post.</reddit>

Well if you're going to use silly tags like '/s' on Hacker News, you may as well make them SGML compliant

I created this account to comment on an article of a sexual nature the other day but never did. So I reused it. I freely admit it is very weird in the context of my post.

I think the job market is eating itself up.

This year I sent tons of CVs, very few responses, a lot of technical tests, some interviews where "you don't fit the profile"

Companies usually like me when I start working for them, but to "cross the chasm" is hard.

This is how I feel. I've been a badass at everything I've ever done, including being an employee. My last employer begged me to stay and I did for a few months longer.

So to have my fate determined by a short interview over the phone by some arbitrary questions just seems... suboptimal. Inefficient. Stupid.

Someone has to fix the incumbent resume-based hiring process. It is fucked beyond belief.

So many sad recruiting stories ...

Some thoughts/tipps: Start your interview with: "I happy to be here ... am really nervous, i couldn't sleep last night." ... that removes questions marks in recruiters had about your eyes.

Don't tell em about xanax, better, don't use it.

@pookieinc 3+ years are not impressive ... i code for 15 years and possibly the guy who are you talking about your job too ... so don't behave like the god of coding.

@pXMzR2A 270+ job applications ... hmm your resume must be shit or you apply for jobs you are not qualified for ... i would love to see it, there must be a major bug in it :)

... and btw. congrats and merry christmas

Congratulations. Regarding the crippling anxiety: I was the same way from college until a couple years ago. I couldn't, for the life of me, get a good night of rest on the nights before an important event. But simply changing up my diet[1] fixed that problem very quickly. It's worth a shot for you to look into doing that. I know how destructive and terrible it feels to be unable to rest properly.

[1] Specifically, I cut out wheat and corn altogether, reduced my carbohydrate intake to less than 50g a day, and never ate anything with added sugars.

Being chronically sleep-deprived is the worst and I appreciate your sympathy.

However, I just can't get behind your dietary suggestions. Corn and wheat are not psychoactive substances. I don't think there's any solid science to support the idea that adding/removing them would affect your general anxiety levels.

As I said in another response, Lexapro gave me one amazing month of clarity away from my condition and it was a near-religious experience. I could make plans again. I became interested in girls again. I wanted to scream from the mountain tops and work as a door-to-door salesman for the pharma company that changed my life. Then I relapsed.

In other words, for some people (like me), there is a serious physiological issue at work that needs a pharmaceutical fix. No amount of vitamins or yoga or whatever is going to change that.

JS + Ruby/Rails dev here w/ 3+ years experience under belt. Currently looking for job myself and have been for about 3 months. Funny how, like OP, my resume and exp. is "very impressive", yet it doesn't lead anywhere, not even to a phone interview sometimes.

I'm attempting the numbers game approach (apply for 100 companies, 5 will get back to you, select from those 5), but I've hit the edge of: what if there are none that are willing?

Thanks for the luck, will keep banging head against wall until a job is found. Happy holidays!

3 years are impressive?

Given that Rails started 9 years ago, and the whole fad with JS frameworks nowadays, I'd imagine 3 years exp could land you a mid-level job.

Well it is not the years but what you do in those that matters. I hope parent comments doesn't means 1 year experience repeated for years.

I wish I could downvote this. Maybe the guy went to Stanford or MIT. Maybe his Ruby work is available on Github and is solid. Maybe he did an independent project that showed remarkable creativity and drive. There are any number of reasons his resume could be "very impressive" with only 3 years under his belt. Don't be a dick.

You're the one who wants to downvote me.

I didn't say anything offensive, just asking a question.

Learn the difference between other people saying something offensive and yourself implying some offensive meaning into a neutral statement.

Hi,

We are having problems finding local devs so we could consider remote hands on deck. Drop me en email on jobs (at) nopio.com if that sounds interesting.

Merry Christmas!

Two of our best engineers came from Hacker News. I'd be more than happy to chat if you're looking. Drop me a note at vivek@entelo.com!

where do you live?

I don't suffer from anxiety.

In the last 8 months, I have submitted 270+ job applications, received 3 interviews, got rejected by all three, none of which were high reputation companies.

Great to hear you had a success! :)

Did you ask for anyone to look at your CV and help you improve it maybe? For what it's worth, I'm not in HR but I interview a lot of people and see a lot of CVs (not hiring currently though). You can send me your CV privately if you want some feedback.

Congratulations! It sounds like you've landed somewhere really good.

Thank you for reminding us not to give up. A lot of your story sounded familiar, although you were way more persistent than I was. I'm 33, and recently got rejected from two different bay area "dream job" companies after making it through several phone rounds in order to fly out for in-person interviews. The more recent of which, I got nervous the night before and only got three hours of sleep. The hardest part of that rejection was wondering "what if" I had been just a little bit sharper.

After the second rejection, I accepted a position with a small defense contractor near my home in Washington DC. The bureaucracy and mindless restriction are sources of endless frustration. The combination of billing by the hour and a long commute leave very little time and energy for keeping up the job search.

Reading your story reminds me I have very little to complain about. Thank you for posting. I'll use some of this time off to send out some more applications. Hope you have a great Christmas and good luck once the new job starts!

What's hard to stomach about the no sleep aspect of everything is that I think companies/interviewers think "Well if it's fair for one, it's fair for all. They're all under the same pressure, so we'll see who overcomes it."

But that's not true. I know it's not true because I used to be one of the people who didn't feel interview pressure. When I landed a dream-type job a few years ago (which ended up being a nightmare due to a psychopathic boss, but that's beside the point), I remember going into the interviews head-strong, cocky and almost arrogant... which they apparently loved bc they hired me on the spot.

Ha! It makes me laugh now. I'm twice the engineer I was then, but half the interviewee simply because my ego has been recalibrated to reality.

Congrats! And as a side-note, I think it is suitable for persons in your [before-job] situation - to ask for internship or contract-to-hire work instead of direct hiring. We all know interviews suck. And working temporally for 2-3 months would be much more effective (for you and the company) to see if you're a good fit or not.

Unfortunately, interviewees don't dictate hiring terms. And suggesting a short-term deal probably makes you look weak. I wouldn't recommend this approach to anyone.

tl;dr: There are lot of opportunities for software engineers!

6 weeks ago, I left my job and here's my share of the search experience. 1 week after leaving the job, I got a cold email by a company who is 25-min drive away in Foster City. I did initial call with the HR on Dec. 1. On Dec. 2, I did my first phone interview. I was asked to rate my competency in Python and JavaScript on the scale 1-10. Then the interviewer asked me questions that were targeted at that level. I did badly, but not horribly, with the Q/A on technical parts and ok on some of the basic ones. On Dec. 3, I did second phone interview, which went great in the first half and badly in the second half. In the later part, I just started to get nervous and lost my cool. They still felt I was competent, so on Dec. 4 I did a full day of interview. I did 5 different interviews from engineers to CTO and CEO. By the end of the day, I was offered the position @ 135K. This is where you expect the typical ending of me accepting the salary and living happily ever after. Not so fast there, reader. I pressed for higher salary - 25K more than they were offering. They didn't budge and neither did I, so no cigar.

In parallel to interviewing at that company, I also created my profile on Underdog.io. I spent Dec. 5 to Dec. 16 talking with 7 different companies in New York. I saw that their Salary range is lower than in Bay Area so it did not go far.

On Dec. 13, I created my profile on Hired.Me. Since then I have had 5 offers. I have made strong connection with one of the company and will be having in-person interview in a month (I have 3 week family wedding planned in Jan :)).

From my experience, there are so many companies looking for quality engineers. If you are having hired time getting hired, I am open to talk with you. I personally don't pursue working at big companies for the sake of them being big. I am looking for a company where I fit in based on my programming design sense and culturally.

I'm 27/M/Single/SF - so I don't have much constraints as someone who may be older with family or in non-tech savvy part of the county.

One of the co-founders of underdog.io here. Awesome to hear that you talked to 7 different companies through the platform but not so awesome that the salary numbers in NYC didn't line up to your expectations. $160K is relatively high for NYC. We'll be in SF soon so hopefully we'll be able to introduce you to more cofounders/hiring managers that can offer a salary that's more on par with your expectations. :D

'throwawaybcporn' congrats on the new job!

The key part of your story is that you've made it to SF. I got lucky in 2010 and found a company that would hire me and let me move to a tech hub from my home state. Once I left that job and then the big city (to reduce my burn and work on my independent project), I found it damn near impossible to get back. The fact that I wasn't in the city was a killer for almost all companies, especially startups (where I really wanted to be).

So I moved to the city again for a few months and had a dozen interviews in the first couple of weeks. Some I rejected... some rejected me (obviously), but the activity difference was stark. It was like the floodgates opened.

Everyone should keep that in mind when job-hunting. If you've left or lost your job in a tech hub make use of the time you have left in your apt.

Grats on the job!

I hear you about the anxiety. I managed to land an interview with nvidia in 2001 and was so nervous that I couldn't eat or sleep for the 24 hours before the start of the interview (then ate lunch with them at their cafeteria and was wolfing food down like an animal). Didn't fare well, but a year later of hunting and working as a substitute teacher, I ended up working with a great team at FedEx for a while and went to being a "computer scientist" at the army research lab after that.

Anxiety is a challenge, but it can be overcome! I'm even in the process of starting with "toastmasters" to get me out of my comfort zone and learn how to be "on" around strangers.

Again, congratulations and thanks for sharing!

Glad to hear a good story on Xmas day :) Well done you!

Congrats, and a very Merry Christmas to you.

It's a viscous circle with all the rejection. Don't take it personal. We live in a cruel world, but that does not make you less valuable as a person. Jesus loves you. Merry Christmas.

Congratulations! All the best! More good things to come for you.

About 7 months ago I interviewed at Twitter, making it through two phone interviews before failing to solve some tricky algorithms questions in the on-site interview. Recently a Twitter recruiter contacted me on Linkedin looking for referrals and I sent him my resume, only to be told that they were looking for people with more experience, despite significantly more relevant experience on my resume.

Is the BigCo interview process just that arbitrary?

"Hey we're looking for people. Just not you."

That's some cold shit.

Right? There was the obligatory 'we're keeping your resume on file', but that didn't make it sting any less.

Just curious, so this is a university staff position or are you enrolling in a business school as a student? Either way, congrats!

It's scary to see just how many talented folks there are out there, that are struggling to find some work.

It's not like most of you are blue-collar workers either. Those supposed job 'shortages' at those big tech firms seems more like a sinister collusion strategy to flood the market with cheap labour possibly.

Congrats and best luck for the future.

In a way it's kind of belwildering how radically different seem to be the job hunting experience for many HW users.

You see so many posts like "I had multiple six-figure offers", or "it's impossible to find enough candidates for the position" and then you see posts like this.

I'm a comp eng new grad with a bit of H/W exp. All I see when I look for entry positions are software?

You could look for embedded software positions.

I graduated in Electronics but it was clear for me that I liked software more, and embedded is a good compromise.

After a while, if you do ok with your job you could ask to move to more HW focused roles inside the same company.

I'm feeling this, too. I was out in the valley recently and talked to a guy in his mid-to-late-20s who said that Apple's signing bonus for him was near 6 figures. This university position I'm considering doesn't pay that in a full year.

I guess it's like anything else, the talent at the very top of the scale (or at least perceived to be at the top of the scale) is going to command the most offers and most money. I think that would be fine with me, but the frustrating/infuriating part is it feels like an image game and NOT a meritocracy. The names on your resume (universities and workplaces) seem to matter more than your actual skills.

I've seen this at work, first-hand, too. It's hard to describe without giving away an identity, but one of my friends fell ass-backwards into Google as a semi-early employee (pre-IPO) and, on top of a sweet cash nest egg, has been rabidly recruited by everyone under the sun ever since, despite suspect engineering skill. Even went through YC. The snowball effect has been amazing to see up close.

Just what I needed to hear! Thanks!!

Hey man congrats on you new job! I have one keyword for you: "mindfulness". Start practicing it.

Cheers, —A

You should get some help anxiety thing. I have seen people let ego / pride decide. There is no shame asking for help when you need it.

I have goosebumps reading this. Thank you so much for sharing. This is meaning.

Read the tao te ching my friend. Read and read it and read it and... Good luck

Good luck and all the best in the new year!

Good work! And congrats!

Congratulations!

keep rocking !