That's the real thing for me: how painless is it to live with long term? After I've installed a couple of weird things, and configured some stuff custom - is this a distro that keeps rolling into the future, or is it one that makes me wish I had the time to re-install from scratch every 6 months?
I was recruited as an R&D engineer by a company that was sales focused. It was pretty funny being recruited like a new sales hire: limo from the airport, etc. Limo driver didn't work direct for the company but she did a lot of work for them, it was an hour drive both ways to/from the "big" airport they used. She said most of the sales recruits she drove in were clueless kids, no idea how the world worked yet at all - gunning for a big commission job where 9/10 hires wash out within a year. At least after I arrived on-site I spent the day with my prospective new department, that was a pretty decent process. The one guy I didn't interview well with turned out to be the guy who had applied to the spot I was taking and had been passed over. As I was walking in on my first day he was just finishing moving his stuff out of the window-office desk he was giving up for me, into a cube. I can understand why he was a little prickly.
Yeah, I was an EE in college so I took the Smith's chart class, did the exercises, then promptly started using newer tools when such things were called for... mostly I worked in software after school so all those exercises were... academic.
That tracks with expectations. Many larger companies don't use external recruiters at all, I'd guess the threshold is probably around 10,000 employees - more or less - above that they'll have it vertically integrated in-house.
I've worked with a 100,000 employee company where HR will pre-screen candidates at job fair type interviews, just to file them away against potential future openings. They won't usually task actual staff with doing interviews for openings that aren't funded, though sometimes it feels like they are doing that - sending so many bad-fit candidates that it takes us 8-10 to find one that might possibly be a net-positive asset to the team.
Suspension of disbelief, or belief in suspension tech?
Start with land speeders... what holds them up? If you're in a universe where it's simple to make anti-gravity devices, why not use them to "fly" your big space ships too?
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, they knew things we still do not, and apparently they did not know many things that we do.
I applied to a place that asked "experience in SquirrelScript" - that seemed like a personality test, I told the truth: 0. Surprisingly, when I got hired there, they were indeed one of the three places in the world using SquirrelScript at the time. Manager said that over half of applicants professed deep experience with SquirrelScript, but none ever had it for real. It wasn't hard to learn.
Our entry test should have been dead simple for anyone applying to the position. Position: C++ computer graphics programmer, 1-2 years experience implementing technical graphics displays in C++ language. All resumes submitted, of course, claimed this and more. All interviewees, of course, professed great confidence in their abilities. 9/10 candidates, when presented with "the test" failed spectacularly. The ones who passed, generally, did it in less than 10 minutes - with a couple of interesting quirks which revealed their attention to and/or willingness to follow directions. The failures ranged from rage-quit and stomping out without a word, to hours of pleading for more time to work on it - which, in principle, we granted freely, but after 30 minutes if they didn't have it they never got it.
I think 4 years experience gets the "Senior" title in our company now. I can understand having 3 years experience and being frustrated when you can see how much better you are at your job than your "more senior" middle managers, but... there are plenty of things that you continue to learn in your first 10-20 years of experience, and having diversity of experience brings even more value that's rarely acknowledged in any ranking scales - actually the ranking scales usually reward stay-put loyalty over diverse in depth experience, and that's just backwards in my experience. Although, I have also known plenty of "job hoppers" who got around from place to place every year or two and it was clear after working with them that was because they didn't really contribute adequate value anywhere they went.
In 2006 I had a hard time finding C++ programmers in a university town. 9/10 who responded to the ads were just clueless. Of the remainder, we had a simple test - here's sample code in an IDE that draws a straight line on the screen (you'll be doing graphics programming in the role) - take that code and turn it into a program that draws a sine-wave in the same space... Everyone put computer graphic on their resume's, expressed confidence in their ability to perform in the role, deep former experience, but 5/6 who passed the clueless test couldn't manage that, given unlimited time and resources - the computer has internet access and a browser window open right there beside the IDE- USE IT!!!
Sadly, today we'd probably have to shut off the internet access aspect, or make the test much more difficult. Even AI can draw a sine wave.
That's what's happening, and it's diminishing the quality of candidates - dramatically. Getting past HR isn't a valuable skill except for getting hired.
You were at screening level #1. When I applied for work in Manhattan in 1988 it was like that: 9/10 jobs you applied to weren't the actual employer, they were agents building a pool of candidates to be able to present to the actual employers at a moment's notice if the employer should ever actually call asking for candidates.
Today I bet it's rare to get hired without at least 3 screenings before you actually meet the people you might be working with.
now it takes 6 rounds of interviews for an entry level position at a startup.
I think it was 1996 vs 2002... 1996 we advertised in the Miami Herald for an engineer and got about a dozen applicants, 3 worth interviewing, none worth hiring and had to continue to search through personal networking to fill the role. 2002 we placed a nearly identical ad in the same classified section of the same paper, but by this time the Miami Herald was "online." We even added the line "only local candidates will be considered." Within the first week I had over 300 resumes on my desk, half of them from far afield - even overseas, so they were easy to sort... Still, plowing through the remainder, after about 50 quick scans I found one former employee of a company we did regular business with for over a decade, the question to his ex-manager was "if you had the chance, would you rehire him?" That yes shot down the rest of the applications dead - we just didn't have the resources to even read all the applications, much less sort or answer or interview them.
I can only imagine the flood of candidates applying for every opening today. Take your resume, e-mail it to 30 recruiters, they each apply to 30 positions for you...
I like to understand what I work with, but I also like to keep my tools (like: Docker container images) as close to "stock" as possible, because that way they benefit the most from security testing and patching that others do, and make as little work for me as possible when I install upgrades.
Having said that, some tech (especially Bluetooth) is best "reinvented locally" IMO, simply because so much effort is being put into breaking Bluetooth security, and nobody really cares to break our products, but if we use Bluetooth we will be slapped with CVEs to patch constantly. So, yeah, use the Bluetooth supporting hardware, but roll your own reasonable security appropriate for your applications and get the hell out of the firehose of whack-a-mole security patches.
To be fair, when you're in Gambukistan and you don't even know what languages are spoken, a smart phone can bail you out and get you communicating basic needs much faster and better than waving your hands and speaking English LOUDLY AND S L O W L Y . A good human translator, you can trust, should be better - depending on their grasp of English, but there's another point... who do you choose to pick your hotel for you? Google, or a local kid who spotted you from across the street and ran over to "help you out"? That's a tossup, both are out to make a profit out of you, but which one is likely to hurt you more?
That's the real thing for me: how painless is it to live with long term? After I've installed a couple of weird things, and configured some stuff custom - is this a distro that keeps rolling into the future, or is it one that makes me wish I had the time to re-install from scratch every 6 months?