Clojurians Log v2

And for Clojure, I’ve used it for my own projects but I lack professional exposureI have exposure and here I am. It's not about your experience. > , and most job posts ask for senior roles and to be in the US or UK/Europe I am in EU and it's not that either. I think that the war has led to large interest rates and IT as we know it isn't sustainable with large interest rates. This is why people don't do startups and everything is stopped. IMO US+UK were too slow to react to war (they had a direct agreement to protect UA) and didn't provide enough help to stop it at its start. And the war became a huge wound for everybody (and if they'll stop the help now then it will be way worse long-term (e.g. if Trump is elected and pulls the plug by letting russia get away for free which would lead to attack on other countries)). Also everybody (world) were overextending with their loans and p2p business models that break down when any kind of economic shock happens (for example below-market pricing to ensure monopolies is kind-of dependent on... loans). I actually believe the recruiters who write that they needed to do a reorganization... and this interest rate thing may be a good reason to be forced to reorganize. So no, I don't think it's Covid -- it's long gone. The effect is still happening and the world can't cope with it. And the only effect that I can think about is war and unstability because of it. And not only in UA but also with Palestine+Israel, China+Taiwan and maybe other places. Even Africa.

Also I'd say that even though I hate the situation that I'm in I still also hate the p2p business models where terms can be forced on a consumer by flicking a button. Maybe it's a good thing to have a correction to kill-off these businesses.

> but recently it has become simply unbearable Yes, indeed. I just landed a Ruby job two weeks ago - I spent three months sending CVs, mostly to be ghosted. Surprisingly, most Clojure companies did answer my requests (three denied immediately, others simply didn't have an open position for me, two paused the hiring process). Others simply ghosted me, and only three Ruby jobs actually decided to start interviews.

I think I actually interviewed (like, initial interview) for only 5 or 6 companies, and the only ones that decided to continue the process indeed gave me take-home assignments, but they were very simple and could be done in one or two hours or so

depends a bit on how long it takes IMHO.

and I assume they have some sort of exercise... not actual work.

Share the assignment

Here it goes

They seem to have accidentally copy/pasted the spec of their MVP into the take home doc 🤔

Wow.

There's no indication of how long they expect you to take on it. Optimistically, they're using this a strong filter for employees willing to be walked all over.

Ah, they asked me to deliver it in the next 7 days

Maybe they expect you to generate it with a LLM 🙃

The appropriate amount of time to spend on a takehome is proportionate to your desperation levels but there's nothing wrong with politely refusing

Yeah, I think it's too much. Idk if it's bad luck or what but last week I spent a day working on another challenge only to be rejected with no reasons.

The role for this one, is for full-stack web developer, Node and React, I'm new to LLM stuff

I also searched for the company in LinkedIn, it has no members. The contact, I also found him but no signs that he works in that company.

That's a lot of red flags!

Personally I'd expect a take home to be a very constrained problem with a specific duration estimate given, like 2-4 hours

yeah... this looks like a weeks work, maybe even more. I don't think I'd do this.

Also funny how they mention modern technologies and the first one they mention is 10 years old.

redux is 8 years old already.

This isn't just a job; it's a legacy.

Heh, their PDF seems as if it was created by one person but then edited by a different person. Mostly because of some font differences and because of the background that's irregularly obscured by the text. Maybe they've "outsourced" the creation of the PDF as a take-home assignment as well? :) > funny how they mention modern technologies and the first one they mention is 10 years old Might be the difference in how the word "modern" is treated. I personally mean by it not "the most recently created thing" but "a thing that is still one of the things to pick up for a new project". I'd say that the whole assignment isn't too bad and 7 days sound completely reasonable if it weren't for these parts: • Signed-in users can explore historical changes to a dataset, follow datasets, combine datasets, and view impact assessments. • Impact Assessment Methods [...] (except maybe for the naive method) • [...] integration tests for frontend components. Some weird things: • Asking "Advanced System Design Questions" in advance • Asking to refrain from using GitHub • Asking for "proof of local deployment" Given their LinkedIn profile, I would definitely not apply. If they were a relatively known company, I would ask for a clarification about the above items before starting on the assignment.

> Might be the difference in how the word "modern" is treated. > I personally mean by it not "the most recently created thing" but "a thing that is still one of the things to pick up for a new project".

that is a good point, I hadn't thought about it that way.

That's suspicious to me. The most time I ever spent on homework was 4 days, mostly due to desperation, and it was regrettable. My experience is that people on the other side evaluating your work often don't read anything you write. They don't have time to review PR s from a coworker, much less an invented problem from a stranger. This is probably because their employer has such poor hiring practices that they are overworked and understaffed. Also, working in node/react and redux is usually a painful existence.

I once did a programming exercise and I didn't get the job because I didn't use a trick to get rid they had thought of.

I spent 11 hours of unpaid time for this (1m ago):

We attentively checked your code. It's quite nice but have some tricky moments:

  *
    it isn't a Golang style;
  *
    you aren't using interfaces;
  *
    default http client.

We really appreciate your time. But unfortunately we're not ready to proceed 
with a technical interview right now.

that sucks

was it suppose to be in Golang?

weird

This is the task that I did (other person shared theirs so I think it's good to share it too):

Imagine if you'd got a job offer and had to work with a team managed this way...

rather minimal description IMHO

-- Your task is to implement a trivial job manager in Clojure. -- Cool, here's the result. -- Your code doesn't use transducers, you're not a good fit for the position.

-- Your code doesn't use transducersYour code uses transducers. Our team decided that junior developers must be able to use Clojure with debugger therefore we can't proceed with your submission as your code is over-engineered by our standards. We'll have to choose a second candidate who's code is 1000x slower but the encapsulation is preserved.

Serious question to people who use these to filter candidates: why not just ask to show something they've done in the past? If the candidate didn't just finish download VScode for the first time in their life, surely they should have countless examples of work you need.

Some people worry that the existing work might be stolen. Some worry that looking at someone's projects might skew the candidate comparison. It's not hard to imagine how someone would select a candidate with an exciting project over another with some mundane showcases. It might also be hard to judge when an existing project has a long history or is simply too unfamiliar to what the company is doing. E.g. at my last office job, my take-home assignment was the only of its kind - they decided to experiment on me (with my approval) with that particular kind of task, and ended up never giving it to other people because it was too hard to reasonably quickly judge whether it was up to par or not.

I don't know what the heck is going on with our field, job searching was always very stressful, but recently it has become simply unbearable. Most applications you send out will likely get ignored because for one reason or another your resume will fail to pass ATS, even if it does, someone untrained will glance over it and if they don't see the keywords they want to see, they'd probably skip it. Homework assignments used to be my favorite type of test to demonstrate my skills. But now it's gotten to a degree of sophistication that nobody wants to deal with. I recently submitted three different homework assignments, one of them required a series of Leetcode-like challenges and in addition to build a prototype for an API proxy with two routes. I solved the puzzles and instead of submitting a simple prototype, I made a whole framework, with backend and front-end, with tests and documentation, with GitHub Actions, I even dockerized the whole thing and published it. And did all that within less than three hours. I was so excited. And then... they ghosted me. Similar thing happened with other submissions. I kindly reminded them about them, and only one of the recruiters had the decency to call me five weeks later to tell me that for some organizational reasons they decided the position is no longer open. That's it. No feedback whatsoever. Nobody even bothered reviewing my work. That's just some BS. You waste a day of your life to prove your worth, only to be simply ignored afterwards. Honestly? Fuck that shit.

My own answer is that, after the pandemic, the remote/dev jobs supply surpassed the demand by several orders of magnitude. Maybe it has to do with the fact that we are going through an economic recession (or close to it?). In my case, here in Latin America, everyone learned to work remotely and "learned to code". I've been searching for a job for a few months now and I can only get attention from recruiters that offer me less than half of what I earned before. So I'm trying to get away from NodeJS/React but that's where most of my professional experience resides (unfortunately). And for Clojure, I’ve used it for my own projects but I lack professional exposure, and most job posts ask for senior roles and to be in the US or UK/Europe (even remote) and I'm discarded by default. I feel I'm trapped and yeah, it sucks. But let us keep hope that the market will bounce back, the question is when.

Yup, it seems like right now, just like during the pandemic, the root of the problem is not with the virus itself but with the strain on our healthcare system which was a lot. It looks like a similar thing is happening. It's not that there's no demand for good talent, it's just the number of jobless in the tech sector creating huge bottlenecks for the recruiting pipelines. The economy is doing fine, but the recruiting practices need to change.

Send them an invoice for 7 days work and tell them you will submit once payment received