I don't think she was lying either. But I admire her blunt honesty.

I mean you were there and I wasnt so Id defer to your judgement, but it sounds like a pretty standard case of she didnt think you were the right person to push through, and then you pressed for a reason so she threw some stuff off the top of her head.

I believe what we do is reset state every so often to a new base state and then purge all migrations before that. I don't think I'd bother cleaning intermediate steps like you're talking about doing because it seems like not much benefit for the risk of messing it up.

Google recruiter emailed asking me when is a good time to call and give me an update on my application. Had onsite 2 weeks ago. Think this is going to be a rejection call.. sigh

Yup. The reason someone gives you over the phone is rarely going to be the complete truth and often is going to be nowhere close. When the reason given is one as silly as the one she gave it's never the whole truth.

If they're interviewing you with that resume they'd keep going if that was the only 'problem'. But simple explanations and more or less objective explanations are always going to be used to cover up for many more complex reasons for not hiring someone.

They set up a call just to reject? That seems like a waste of time. Maybe you made it dude!

That's their policy for both rejection and acceptance. The suspense is killing me.

Well good luck man! You made t a lot further than any of my friends did

For further context, I would never ask this sort of question under normal circumstances. I mean, really, just never as "why."

But sometimes, recruiters or hiring managers offer me a bunch of unsolicited advice on how to proceed, how to find that first job, in the spirit of "what I ought to do for the next 2 years if I'd like to reapply later" sort of thing. In these cases, I think the conversation turns very honest.

I have a certain project that people have a hard time understanding because it "shouldn't have been possible to build if you have no programming background." It's a little more nuanced than what I'm describing. I suspect that many applicants may have a contract here and there they don't add, or they have a prior job that didn't go very well and they prefer not to put that information on their resume for whatever reason.

Update: Got the call that I got rejected for Software Engineer role and but google is willing to interview for Software Engineering in Tools and Infrastructure. But that means 2 more phone interviews over google doc. DJFL;KAFEJF;AIHF;ADFJA;LKDJ GAH

Looking and reading online, the SETI role was formerly SDET(Software Developer Engineer in Test). Which if I am correct, it going to be mostly writing test frameworks. Which doesn't sound too exciting since I really do not want to be pigeonholed.

Yeah i dont fully understand that role. I was offered an interview for Dev Eng in Test and all they said it was was writing unit tests for other peoples code. Sounded pretty miserable

What really bug me is that the recruiter really emphasized that this was not a testing role yet they title was formerly know as software engineer in test

If the SETI role is really the new test engineer, don't do it. I'm knowingly going to get chewed out by candybar because this is how much I care about giving you this advice, my friend.

Wait, google doesn't have devs write their own unit tests? Isn't that... you know... bad?

Dave, these conversations still aren't honest. They may seem like it, but they aren't. The vast majority of people are going to stay away from awkward/uncomfortable topics with someone they're interviewing - especially in formal interviews but even in informal ones as well. Telling people what they need to do to re-apply in 2+ years is just one more way of softening the "we don't want you now" message that they're actually giving you.*


I have no idea what the quoted means. Like I can't even think of an example of what the quoted could mean.

I don't mean to pick on you, and I'll let it go at this point if you'd like. But you probably need to do a very deep and harsh self-evaluation if you want to move forward. And you need to not rely on what other people say and look at what they're actually doing.


* That's not to say they might not want you to re-apply in 2 years. But its basically a freeroll for them. If you apply again in 2 years they can reject you again just as easily or if you've improved enough they'll happily hire you.

Thats exactly what I dont get. Is it literally just hiring people to up the test coverage on legacy code? Do they write all the tests for new code? Its weird either way, but lots of big places do it

Googlen SETI Role

Seems like it encompasses more than unit testing.

I'll allow that you are correct here. I find it strange though that some interviewers like to give further advice on this or that, especially when I don't ask for it. The advice is all sort of the same, but ultimately nothing helpful.

This is a strange product I have, and one that I think adds a little into the mysterious ideal of "skills." The feedback I've gotten on this project is like this:

"That's impressive. I looked through the code and it is very well thought-out."

"Amazing functionality! You didn't mess up security either."

"I though you would have had some experience working if you created this."

"So, who helped you with that? You didn't do that alone."

"What a waste of time."

"You are just looking to get sued."

"You had developers in India do this for you."

"You didn't do all of that alone. You're a liar."

That project gets considerable attention and it draws out extreme reactions like this. It's either I managed to pull of some "improbable" feat or I'm a snake oil charlatan, and my "skills" are often evaluated based on opinion and nothing measurable. Yes, I've had people say incredibly rude things to me as well, but that's another subject.

Personally, I don't know what is so "impressive" about it. It's the 3rd large project I've done, I've been working on it off and on for 2 years, and it had a ton of false starts. What's truly amusing is how few people get the fact that it is nothing more than a collection of tools, and the web interface is about 50% of what it actually does (because I haven't pushed everything together yet).

I certainly can't answer how I did it, because, honestly, it is pretty simple and straightforward. I certainly don't understand why it would cause companies to suggest I try for more difficult positions or why it would make people think I'm some sort of middle / senior level programmer.

In any case, this project is the main reason I tell anyone that is looking to get started to just create a simple app that is 300 LOC, stop there, and start applying. My impression is that no one really cares what you are able to do and "good enough" or "skilled" is a very low bar.

I honestly don't know what the other issues are, and trust me, I invested a lot of time in counseling for this. No one understands it, and my ultimate conclusion is that it doesn't really matter.

I think possibly I got my current job on the strength of a few projects I showed them. I convinced them to let me demo some projects instead of doing an at-home coding exercise, because one of the interviewers expressed interest in one of the projects (which used an area of his PhD research in an unusual way)

They only asked to look at the code of one part though (the part that he was familiar with via his research)

I did get a really hard round of laughs though when I explained the really trivial problem that I had that caused me to spend hundreds of hours writing a program to solve.

My second internship twenty-seven years ago (at the Evil Empire in Redmond, WA) was as a Software Test Engineer. And the "system" was firmly in place then, so it obviously started some time before that. It's actually preferable to have a separate unit do these things.

Hmm yea.. I will probably have to touch back on this later. I don't even have the offer yet, but I will evaluate when the time comes.

Going to be doing the phone interview in January since I'll be out of the country for a good month. Then it's back to grinding leetcode! About to hit my 200th question on the website and I'm feeling that I am getting better!

How the H-1B Visa System Can Hurt American Workers

Quote:

Visas Are Used to Replace American Workers With Foreigners
...
Americans Have Had to Train Their Foreign Replacements
...
Foreign Workers Learn Skills, Then U.S. Jobs Move Overseas
...
Visas Are Given to Foreigners Who Lack ‘Specialized Knowledge’
...
Global Companies Game the Visa Application System
...

How H-1B Visas Are Screwing Tech Workers

Quote:

A few years ago, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer informed hundreds of tech workers at its Connecticut R&D facilities that they'd soon be laid off. Before getting their final paychecks, however, they'd need to train their replacements: guest workers from India who'd come to the United States on H-1B visas. "It's a very, very stressful work environment," one soon-to-be-axed worker told Connecticut's The Day newspaper. "I haven't been able to sleep in weeks."

Insourcing: American Lose Jobs to H-1B Visa Workers

The H-1B Visa: Helping America’s economy, hurting America’s workers

Quote:

There is evidence to suggest that the H-1B visa program for skilled workers has proven itself effective in helping the U.S. economy. The H-1B visa is intended to enable companies to hire skilled workers where there is no pool of talent capable of filling a new job. Demand for H-1B visa workers is highest in metropolitan areas where tech sector activity is heavy and where unemployment for engineers is already low, places such as New York City, Silicon Valley, Boston and Chicago, according to the Harvard Business Review. Further, those jobs exhibit stronger wage growth than jobs taken by native workers, at least in part because of wage requirements mandating a high wage for H-1B workers, but that still proves that American businesses are willing to pay more for talent.
Exports and foreign markets are also of increasing importance to American businesses. U.S. exports hit a record $2.35 trillion in 2014, having increased by more than $760 billion since 2009 according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. There is some anecdotal evidence which suggests that foreign workers have shown some ability in improving foreign sales for U.S. companies by being more knowledgeable of the economies in which American businesses want to compete.
Of course, if we’re to explore the good inherent in the H-1B visa program, we must also expose the bad and speak to the at-times heartbreaking effects of this program on American workers, especially in instances where alleged abuses of the H-1B visa are involved. Large American companies like Disney (NYSEIS) and Toys “R” Us have been accused in recent months of using workers coming over on H-1B visas to aid in the outsourcing of American jobs. In some cases, there are stories of employees being shadowed by foreign employees whose only job was to copy everything the U.S. employee was doing, raising questions over the skill levels those workers are bringing here. The New York Times quotes unnamed sources in an article from last September indicating that American companies were using these foreign workers to transfer knowledge to sites in India or elsewhere and then laying off the American counterparts.

Silicon Valley Chiefs Notably Absent From Trump’s Cabinet of Business Advisers

Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers

Quote:

We don’t need to rely on complex statistical calculations to see the harm being done to some workers. Simply look at how employers have reacted. A decade ago, Crider Inc., a chicken processing plant in Georgia, was raided by immigration agents, and 75 percent of its workforce vanished over a single weekend. Shortly after, Crider placed an ad in the local newspaper announcing job openings at higher wages. Similarly, the flood of recent news reports on abuse of the H-1B visa program shows that firms will quickly dismiss their current tech workforce when they find cheaper immigrant workers.

Immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer.
But that’s only one side of the story. Somebody’s lower wage is always somebody else’s higher profit. In this case, immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows. I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in the total wealth of the native population—to be about$50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year. Immigrants, too, gain substantially; their total earnings far exceed what their income would have been had they not migrated.

When we look at the overall value of immigration, there’s one more complicating factor: Immigrants receive government assistance at higher rates than natives. The higher cost of all the services provided to immigrants and the lower taxes they pay (because they have lower earnings) inevitably implies that on a year-to-year basis immigration creates a fiscal hole of at least $50 billion—a burden that falls on the native population.

There are a number of issues with most of those articles, but to keep it short and on topic I'll just point out that if you're talking about jobs that can be taught to other people in a month and/or by giving them a collection of screenshots/videos of what to do - you're not talking about the high skilled jobs I've been talking about ITT.

Recursion in prolog is off the charts weird