Ask HN: Technical roles without technical interviews?

Honestly, I think it's a sign of the times. We might be at the peak here. I have recently interviewed at a couple of "AI" labs at banks and some MLE positions at insurance companies and one startup, and they are all requiring leetcode. Most of them have asked dynamic programming questions and expected working solutions in 20 mins. IMO it's a sign of higher supply than demand. I think it's about to get much much worse with many companies moving to remote work, meaning we are competing with folks in countries like India (no offence meant here, it's just a product of the education system) who are much hungrier and will literally do every possible Leetcode problem out there.

I think we are about to experience a tech bubble bursting type of situation (especially given the over inflated valuations + ridiculous stock prices of FAANG), meaning much less jobs, much higher competition and a whole world of pain, which will result in many folks leaving this profession (especially those with little experience and with no real formal education).

Now with the emergence of things like GPT-3 expect further automation of annoying software dev tasks and a lot of front end roles transforming or going away entirely. I think future devs will need more ML exposure and experience as that will become a standard part of the job soon enough, and we might enter an era of growth after the bust with much more ML integration into products and new companies forming around that.

In 5 years, the world of software dev will be a different place.

In the meantime, take a vacation, relax your brain, understand that most of us are getting rejected and it has little to do with our skill, and get back to leetcoding if you want those high paying cushy jobs. Use the smaller companies who insist of pretending they are FAANG as practice, and aim for FAANG my friend.

That's the best advice I can give because I feel the same pain and that's what I'm doing.

Makes sense to me, thanks for the perspective.

You too! Something will come along. In the meantime I think the industry is about to have a lot of algo experts lol

Yes I’ll second this. I’ve been through interviews recently and, given the current climate, it’s pretty gruelling compared to this time last year.

Most of them had 3 stages and a technical task that was expected to be your best work ever.

You’re not alone in feeling this way so just stick at it until the right role comes along. Read, study and improve in the meantime while you prepare for each interview. You’ll come out the other end a stronger engineer.

I've been interviewing non-stop for a few months. For a few months prior to interviewing I watched computer science lectures online, read CTCI, and had a premium Leetcode subscription with a good amount of practice.

I haven't done mock interviews with a friend, but I did pay for a few mock technical interviews.

I much prefer technical assessments that are related to the day-to day. In either case, I'm much more comfortable working alone than I am with someone watching in an interview. I've only ever worked alone and in these interviews I have a hard time concentrating.

I'm not someone who can talk out loud and code at the same time. When I'm coming up with a solution I think about a potential solution, recognize why it won't work, and then go on to the next idea. I feel like this happens rapidly in my head, but if I were to "talk out loud" I would just be constantly saying why things won't work and it would take so much longer to get to the final idea.

It's kind of like how if you were to loop through 100K items in the console. If you don't output anything to the screen it's really quick, but when you start printing the number it takes longer to run.

But really, I just feel like leetcode style interviews don't touch the surface of my working experience and capabilities at all, and only focus on a very narrow thing.

I realize this is where the industry is right now, so I'm looking for roles that aren't a "programmer" but still benefit from my programming experience.