DaveT isn't applying at top end tech companies. So if you are applying at one of these companies or if you work at one of these companies your experiences are going to be totally different.

I'm pretty sure both are accurate, but we're not starting from the same shared context.

I guess I now feel fortunate to have never worked at the companies that Budweiser drinkers inhabit. Is that a Los Angeles thing, maybe??? I mean I just can't even.

Wait brogrammers are real??

Then my mind is officially blown. I really thought all of my experiences where totally normal. Granted, getting turned down for this many jobs isn't normal, but I seriously didn't realize that my contracting experiences are totally abnormal either.

Here's a few recent experiences with contracting.

A program has an error. The client called the company that created the program and the company said "idk." It was obvious from the error that this was an encoding issue. A bit of quick search on the database isolated the problem, remove the offending character, and hooray, fixed.

****

Another one is some database with more than 250 tables. Each table has multiple PK candidates. For example, a table can have an id and a uuid. Another table can have an id ; natural id, and another table can have id ; uuid ; natural id; modified natural id; and so on and so forth.

There are no PKs, no unique constraints, no FKs, no enums, nothing. My project is to add tables and have my fields reference the initial tables. Of course, I can't add FKs and can't modify the core database.

****

Are you going to tell me this isn't typical either?

Isn't the entire point of contracting to do what the regular teams can't do, to unwind stuff they can't figure out? Fix their stuff and make the world a slightly better place?

I know it must look like I'm being purposely dense here, but I'm truly shocked. I feel like I somehow ended up on Square Earth and had no idea about it.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy working through these quagmires no one else can seem to get to the bottom of, and hey, the more crazy and difficult, the better.

Definitely real. We shared a startup space with one ridiculous bro company.

Dave, basically this is my point. Top tech companies aren't contracting this stuff out. And the people at these companies aren't top talent. And top tech talent isn't taking these contract jobs. So it's a ****ed up situation but it's only normal in a certain context - and that's not the context of a lot of people here.

I was, temporarily, at one of the top AI companies in the US, fwiw.

I'd mostly grant that more well-known companies are typically less... unprofessional. Sadly, my worst interaction was from a company you likely heard of.

What are some of the top AI companies in the US? You don't need to name the company you worked at, but curious what you mean here.

And I'd like to hear about your worst interaction.

The worst interaction was a company that creates a tool many people use. I met three people, and to put it lightly, each next person was more rude and openly insulting than the previous. The last person called me all sorts of incredibly rude things to my face. He didn't listen to anything I said at all, and it... left me speechless.

More detail?

It's incredibly rare for people to just be randomly rude and directly insulting to people.

Also, still curious what you'd consider the top AI companies.

Interesting question. I've applied for job to companies out of LA, SF, and Austin. Never lived in SF, but was dipping my toes from a thousand miles away. Austin is, by far, the most uh... unique of the three.

If you were to contrast Austin -vs- LA on one single parameter, it is that Austin companies seem to have a larger emphasis on creating some community of people. I don't recall seeing a pool table or ping-pong table in LA, for example, and never once spoke of my alcohol preferences. I only recall seeing an open office plan once in LA. Austin, on the other hand, was nearly all open office plans.

LA treated work like a job. If you went to a meetup, you typically won't see the office filled with people working until 9pm. An interview was in the office, never over coffee or beer at a cafe or bar. Austin was a mix of the two.

Austin didn't really send out as many take-home tests. In LA, this is a guarantee. The process is much more time-consuming and intense in LA, going from take-home, live coding over the computer, to a sit-down and possible whiteboard. I'd typically blow 20 hours on an interviewing process (if you include the phone calls, travel, etc). An Austin take-home usually had a note to NOT take more than one hour on it.

SF was pretty much exactly like LA, though the style of programming test is very different. LA seems more focused on practicum, like string processing, *nix commands, pipeilnes, and so on. SF seemed more about solving tree-traversal, graphs, and matrix algorithms, and I don't recall ever getting a test from SF that would take more than 60 minutes.

The people are all rather different. SF was interesting because I was most likely to end up in more personal and chatty conversations, though there were some exceptions.

Austin is far more liberal in their attitude than you would think, and that's hard to explain unless you've seen it for yourself. I would not be surprised to get into a debate about Stoli -vs- Absolut during an interview in Austin. This certainly wouldn't happen in LA.

IME contracting is used when it's something that is... not very exciting or not directly in line with what the team does. For example, I once worked some place that wrote software, but didn't do any mobile stuff. They wanted an app. So we contracted it out.

Right now we contract out support and bug fixing for the older generation(s) of our software. It's something that, kinda, no one really wants to do. So, you get some contractors to do it.

When I did contracting myself, I was often called in to do stuff that the local team couldn't do, but that was usually because "the local team" wasn't a tech team at all - they were accountants or administrators or whatever.

There is a tiny tier in the contract world that is what you describe - gunslingers who specialize in something arcane and are called in to do wizardry. I used to work with some folks that used to do that. They did nothing but fix bugs/problems with the AIX kernel. But this is super rare, it's way less than 1% of contractors probably.

The biggest bulk of contractors is probably people doing the same kind of jobs as full time people, the next is probably what I described before, people who get the slightly less interesting or more annoying stuff foisted onto them.

daveT, have you interviewed anywhere in austin I might expect to have heard of? Homeaway, Indeed, Atlassian, Uship, Box, BazaarVoice, Athena Health, Umble, etc?

Since I've lived in Austin (11 years), I have interviewed at
* RGM Advisors
* Mapmyfitness
Broadway
Athena Health
Indeed
Snap Kitchen
* AlienVault
The starred ones are ones I took jobs at. I am probably leaving out 1 or 2 that I've forgotten. I applied for some other places, some didn't offer an interview, some I declined to interview at after talking to them on the phone.

No one has ever yelled at me, or been rude, or asked any questions about liquor or really any of the other stuff you mentioned. No one has been, like, in my face about something at all, at work, at an interview or really anywhere else. At least, not since high school. Almost every place I've worked has been what I would consider informal but (mostly) professional. Like the least professional thing you might see is some light cursing.

The most common reason for hiring contractors is the most obvious one and it's basic economics common to all industries - you need labor of some specific kind now but either your long-term demand for that type of labor is low or otherwise uncertain enough that you don't want to deal with hiring full-time employees, or the labor needed now cannot be hired quickly enough in sufficient quantity. It's similar to how you'd consider building a data center vs using public cloud though not in terms of cashflow/accounting. Or even whether to eat out vs learn how to cook any particular dish. The other common reason (more specific to tech and related industries) is offshore outsourcing.

Interviewed? I'll leave out the really bad ones (you definitely heard of at least one of them and they aren't on your list) and where I contracted. I'm not entirely sure if you heard of all of these, so some notes in case:

ShipStation -- Ruby API support

uShip -- Didn't get past the fact that I don't typically use Windows

Tango Health -- ETL of all databases and file types. Easily the most pleasant interview of the lot.

Ordoro -- Python + Postgres (competitor to uShip / ShipStation)

Apple -- Maps API, Node

Rackspace (a smaller company they where buying) -- Sysadmin

Spiceworks -- Forget what for.

Q2 ebanking -- Python

ETA: if it's not clear, I have no complaints about any of the above. They were all professional though on a sliding scale of casual.

A quick analysis of that list leads me to believe you are presenting yourself as a jack of all trades, expert of none?

If you have a technology you feel particularly strong with, why not focus more specifically on that?

Let's be brutally honest. It's not an issue of how Dave is positioning himself.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say:

* Dave does poorly on a fairly large subset of interview questions. (Note: this isn't even necessarily a commentary on his abilities. Many of us would do poorly on a relatively large subset of interview questions across a wide range of companies).
* Dave overestimates how well he does on these questions.
* Dave reacts poorly to people challenging him or critiquing his responses. This leads to a lot of the perceived and actual rudeness he encounters in interviews.
* Dave overestimates the quality of the places he's interviewing.


Edit: related to the points above, Dave probably believes a lot of rejections are based on cultural issues instead of pure skill reasons. Likely a lot of companies reinforce this by giving at best a vague answer on the rejection instead of explicitly saying that it was a skills issue.

It isn't unusual to apply to a job that specifically lists one tech and then have requirements change.

Apple only required a strong knowledge of databases (optionally PostGIS) and Python (I met the lead at SXSW). The actual interview was focused on Node.js. That definitely caught me off guard and I didn't do well at all, of course.

ShipStation was fair ambiguous in their job requirements, and the interviews didn't cover any technical topics. They really cared more on certain elements that they felt I wouldn't be able to offer, and that was pretty obvious and certainly wasn't anything personal.

And it's very common to apply for one job and then get called for an entirely different job. When asked, the interviewer will say that they felt I would do better at position B. This is how I end up interviewing for Sysadmin and DevOps roles or for languages I'm not super familiar with, though I would never apply to one myself.

It isn't unreasonable for me to claim that I'm very strong at Python, databases, and Clojure, It would be strange to claim expertise in less after these years of programming, and honestly, I should probably have added a new language by now.

Didn't mean any disrespect by ignoring this one multiple times. Of course, I can list the ones we've all heard of, but I wouldn't be able to name very many beyond those.

I suppose what I mean is that there are still competitions and stuff involving many companies you and I haven't heard of (not sure how familiar you are with the space). While self-driving cars is all the rage, I would have no clue who develops the AI for reading addresses on envelopes for USPS / UPS / FedEx. I would add that company(s) to the collection of top AI since whoever did that managed to beat out every other OCR company for that contract.

Yeah, there are a few that get me, and I'm okay with that.

With no comparison, that would be very difficult to tell. I manage to get to round 1, 2, 3, 4, so the best I can figure is that I'm not the worst of the bunch.

I couldn't possibly be an autodidact if I didn't have an unhealthy love for being wrong about many things.

I do understand the irony of disputing the fact that I'm challenged with a challenge, lol.

Sure, and many employer possibly overestimate the quality of the applicants they are talking to as well. I may be a part of that subset.

Same as above, I have no way to compare A and B.

Most of my interactions are cordial and professional. I assume most rejections are based on skill though I'm not always sure if that is a discrete or relative lack of skill. Sometimes it's obvious, and sometimes it's not.

I have also been told on a few occasions that I was rejected on cultural fit, but outside of one or two particular instances, I don't feel that meant they didn't like me.

To add more to my response to LarryLegend:

I don't really know what front-end work entails, but I'm guessing that the requirements are more straight-forward than backend or database work. This does not mean that I think FE is easy, as I find that stuff mostly impossible.

For example, if you apply to an ETL position, there are many subsets of what that really means. A binary view is:

a) take a bunch of file types, like .dat, .sql. .xls .txt and so on, write raw bash, python, and SQL to transform and load this information into a database. Write tests to confirm accuracy. No one uses a graphical tool.

b) Use a visual product like Clover, manually check, send the failed outputs over to the DBA assistants and have them do it.

I'm much more fitted to the a) and would fail on b) every time.

Sometimes "Python" means "maintaining a large DJango app," while other times it means "we don't use frameworks here" and other times it means "we are sick of RoR." One Python job could be doing some basic stuff numpy and pandas while others are really looking for a way to build a full-blown web-based ML app.

A "PostgreSQL" job could mean simply building and optimizing tables and functions, while other times they are looking for a full-blown DBA who knows ZSH and how to scale 100 servers.

There really isn't a lot of hints inside the job descriptions, and I've found quite often that they really don't know what they want either, but sort of are looking for a bit of guidance about exactly what more they need -vs- what they know they need. Sometimes they are considering a large sea-change and are looking for people who can cross those bridges with them. This isn't isolated to small companies. I suspect that Apple's decision to ask questions about Node was something like this.

Damn you Heroku!! Kaffeine worked great, until late this morning:

Looking at my logs I discovered that "cycling", like sleeping, involves shutting down all processes. I'm gonna just have to write a real session store.

Just use digitalocean. Took me like a day to learn the basics of nginx, let's encrypt, and production nodejs (pm2). Really doubt I could get a containerized solution to work that easily.

I want to add a small part to this. I've never ever once interviewed for any position that didn't "require" at least 5 years. I don't apply for these jobs, but I get the phone call and decide to just go for it. This isn't from recruiter calls.

Anyone with 5 years of professional experience should absolutely destroy me*. In addition to (hopefully) being less skilled than someone who's done FT work for 5 years, a major sticking point is not being able to show in any form that I know how to work with other developers.

* contracting is making me really question this, but I'm not able to accept this world view.

so I just spent like 3 hours trying to validate a date entry. used a mask so that invalid dates couldnt be entered. that was easy enough. only problem was that you could tab off or click off the text box with an incomplete date and it would not trigger a warning and the confirm button would appear. so like 09/__/____ could be entered.

ok no problem, just use Validators.minLength. but no, that never triggers an error. I guess the text mask counts as the length.

so, since Im stupid I googled a bunch of stuff and then tried a bunch of other stuff and eventually Validators.pattern(regex) worked.