_throwawayyyyyy

just posting that i love this comment and thank you

idk about your "anti-labor" strawman here. promoting wholly unqualified internal people who have never managed anyone before and expecting them to take over a high performing team is not a good plan, nor is it "anti-labor". think about the people on the team who have to suffer as this internal candidate learns things that anyone with schooling or training in management would already know. at least send them to a course first or something. "historical context" and "product insight" don't count for anything in an engineering manager. they're not a product designer. that engineering manager should manage engineers, not plan the product. if they want to plan product, pick a C-level position where they can do that and hire a _manager_ externally.

no way. you'll take someone who is a great individual contributor and find they're a terrible manager since they want to turn everyone else into _themselves_.

if you're going to promote from within, please send them to a course or something. get them some real training first or you'll have a predictable outcome.

having someone cut their teeth on you as their first management position is BS and the rest of the team will probably resent your new 'hire'

what the heck with dr seuss? get your culture war BS outta here.

exactly - was on a team where an individual contributor got promoted vertically to manager and thought they could create a good product by code reviewing everyone to death and demanding that they be the only one allowed to code review. no more tagging other teammates; just this manager

like the tantrum that OP posted about not bitching?

Troll cave getting lonely, came out for some company?

Elon treats humans like cogs in his money machine.

Yes it follows. \

"Wouldn't it seem more likely that California latinos statistically disregard health officials advice" - No. For example: a lot of communities have intergenerational families living in close proximity due to lack of affordable housing, jobs, redlining, etc. Having many people living closer together explains being "most impacted" as well as (obviously better than but hey I'm being magnanimous) your thesis that people are choosing to "disregard advice". Just... no.

exactly - elon musk directly contributed to the rise of covid in the bay

what a useless comment - should be removed

before trump we used to do this thing called try to cajole other countries into having labor laws. something the TPP would have helped with, for example. MAGA amirite?

your entire thesis is more or less: "it happened, get over it?" night doesn't become day in a single instant.

your long list mapping products you use to the horrors of their creation shows that you obviously grok the gravity of the situation.

choosing to be flippant about it just damns you even more.

you could definitely stop buying nazi cars, conflict diamonds, child labor iPhones... pay reparations or return stolen land. you're choosing not to and shouting your choice into the internet expecting everyone to give you kudos for it.

your take is one of the nuttier ones i've seen during the pandemic

"Society chose to ban the vaccine, killing hundreds of thousands of lives that could have been prevented. This pandemic is effectively solely a problem caused by this decision."

you say this of literally the fastest development of a vaccine in the history of our planet. vaccines only work if people take them. people only take them if its safe. (and even when they are safe, anti-vax crowd actively works against uptake).

so your proposal is to give an untested vaccine to the entire planet, because the harms of doing that would be fewer in number in the short term while completely destroying the ability for society to deliver any vaccine in the future.

scenario plan for this: the next pandemic is 10x worse than this one and you blew all of society's goodwill on an untested vaccine this time around. nobody takes vaccine. everyone dies.

here's a new position you ought to see at FAANGs: interview engineer. imagine if they had actual engineers who didn't feel like doing interviews was a time suck from their actual jobs or a way to ingratiate themselves to a promotion committee. full-time, technical people who engage with candidates in meaningful ways as their actual job description.

they can put you on 'salary' to get you to work unlimited unpaid overtime, not give you specific days off so that you can have 'unlimited' (no) vacation, fire you at will any day for any reason, and make you go through a vicious gauntlet of dystopian interviewing for the privilege.

i think it's obvious that we're already pretty tolerant

one of my in-person interviewers at Google forgot they had to do this - I spent like 38 minutes of our interview whiteboarding and then he said, "oh crap you're supposed to do this on the computer" - i furiously typed for a few minutes to try to replicate what i'd done.

when i later talked to HR there was no mention of this in the interviewer's report.

Thank you, I appreciate your sentiment.

Agree that individually it doesn't make a lot of sense to get upset about it, but this has been my experience with all of tech interviewing for years now.

Their behavior is pretty standard, from what I've seen: super drawn out process, unpaid projects, ghosting.

You'd think with all that "gold" from identifying these shitty companies that I'd be rich or something ;)

I'm just not sure about tech. I've been working in tech in San Francisco for 8 years since graduate school and in addition to all the problems with hiring and interviews, I have: been fired by startups a month before the equity cliff, had patents filed on my work with me as an inventor without my signature (company sold to Facebook on strength of those false patents; FB tried to get me to assign later; I refused and they dropped the patent),had to buy and pay taxes on options that ended up completely worthless when the startup folded, worked for a full year without a 1-on-1 meeting with a 'manager', been silenced by separation packages that require 'non-disparagement' in order to get the money you need to pay rent, etc.

You'd think the big companies would be better but they're not. I once spent 6 months interviewing with Google. Then they called me the next year to apologize for how shitty their interview process was.

I graduated college during the great recession so learning to code was a skill to survive and make money, but it's been almost impossible to make a stable career out of it.

I think maybe it's time to get out of tech. I have multiple degrees from Ivy League schools in liberal arts fields but I guess I believed the Silicon Valley dream. I'm not independently wealthy or anything - I'm the first person in my family to go to college at all and have had to figure everything out through some pretty painful and expensive lessons. I've got a lot of grit but this stuff is getting out of hand.

I've generated millions and millions of dollars of "value" for my overlords and have nothing to show for it.

Anyhow... thanks again for your post. I really do appreciate it.

Thanks for your response. Obviously it says more about how terrible their process is than it does about me as a candidate, but you can't help but internalize some of it. Appreciate the input - will keep chugging. Choo choo!

thanks for your response, it really made me feel a lot better. it was TikTok, btw.

it's a stupid game but you're smart to play it.

but if DS&A puzzles are a de-facto standard, why not have an actual standard? the whole thing is pretty haphazard.

it's like hiring someone to be your defense attorney because they're decent at the NYT Crossword Puzzle, or to be your doctor because they're good at Sudoku.

interesting observation! makes sense. i wonder if it's because engineers are generally salaried instead of billed hourly. given all the 'crunch' and unpaid overtime, we'd be a lot more expensive hourly - folks might realize their real value. instead we give free overtime and then extend that into free interview time

kudos for giving options; too bad the candidates didn't appreciate that. once they spend some more time in the wild, they might!

How many companies have paid you?

"3. the project is explicitly meant to take at most a few hours (we even use this as a way to gauge whether a candidate tends to over-engineer things)"

i think this is great - time limits help both sides, but companies don't tend to use them that way.

People lie about their credentials in every profession, why do you think in tech you're going to somehow be able to stop that?

What do you mean? You can whip up an invoice in Google docs or use a service like Wave or something for free.

The trick is: who do you send the invoice to, and will they ever pay it?

I've invoiced companies that made me do unpaid projects and while it makes me feel better it has never once gotten me paid.

no, doesn't sound ideal to me. you probably don't need a take-home.

how much time are you expecting / "giving" candidates to work on these take-home programming tests? it sounds like you're wasting lots of people's time by putting a gap in between your certitude that someone who finishes in X amount of time will be hired and not "fail later", and the Y amount of time total. If you're not going to hire someone beyond the X value, you need to downward adjust your Y until it is the X. Otherwise you're literally wasting people's time.

No, that's not ideal.

Also: do you pay them for their time?

A short technical screen to ask those things is reasonable. My post was originally about unpaid projects, although the discussion around interviewing in general has been interesting.

I wouldn't expect to get paid for a 20 minute tech trivia screen.

"The one thing you can't do is have a single process for everyone and pretend there's scientific rigor behind your decisions."

Right on.