121–130 of 169 posts
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Anyone can do it right now.
OK, I'll bite. What's the secret? Because nobody yet has E-mailed me out of the blue with my next job offer.
You could start open sourcing some of your work right now and build your self up on GitHub. Maybe start a blog too.
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You need to get one of those two. Which means getting the experience somehow . Unpaid work is one (expensive) way of doing it, but so is getting into a related position and working your way across. QA is potentially a good path for this: hired to do simple things without the degree requirement, move into test automation, move across into development. Then you have it on your CV.
It's actually pretty tough to go from QA to dev.
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> stupid toy problems in minutes. What sort of toy problems are you talking about?
Anything you could write in less than a half hour. Lets take fizzbuzz for example. These types of problems almost always require manipulating strings and dumping them to the console in the simplest scenario possible. Usually the main method or equivalent in a console program. It would be easy as hell except they don't let you use google or an IDE, so you need to memorize the syntax for the main method and string mani…
And don't assimilate fizzbuzz with half hour problems. There are for sure some difficult half hour interviews questions; they are not comparable to trivial exercises like printing the numbers from 1 to 10.
P.S. If you never use console, strings or regex. I really wonder what kind of applications you're writing.
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> stupid toy problems in minutes. What sort of toy problems are you talking about?
I'm going to be snarky but I'll say it anyway: you know, stupid stuff like balanced binary trees and shit like that, when nothing's going to fall apart if the user's browser shows a spinning wait animation for 7 seconds (45 seconds at peak times but that happens for just a few hours per week at most) while you iterate through the data sequentially. honestly, who ever needed an algorithm or data structure. /s (I'm sor…
In your daily life, you use tools to do your job. Over time, your tool set has sufficient coverage that it can handle most jobs. However, because of this "good enough" coverage, you may not realize the existence of other tools that may be far superior. I believe "applied math" is one such tool. (Translate to "algorithms".) Its applications are everywhere, including at least 50% of your daily life in my experience. However, you fail to see them because you may not have that tool in your tool belt! This is no different than wearing x-ray glasses - you get to see almost every problem in a different light. Google and others who realize it want to make use of these versatile glasses.
I do not mean to be obtuse but a different perspective may be helpful!
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You need to get one of those two. Which means getting the experience somehow . Unpaid work is one (expensive) way of doing it, but so is getting into a related position and working your way across. QA is potentially a good path for this: hired to do simple things without the degree requirement, move into test automation, move across into development. Then you have it on your CV.
It's actually pretty tough to go from QA to dev.
First, you can publish them as apps, which is fantastic for resume building. But also its the best way I've found to practice all the algorithms you'll eventually be asked to implement in coding interviews.
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Anything you could write in less than a half hour. Lets take fizzbuzz for example. These types of problems almost always require manipulating strings and dumping them to the console in the simplest scenario possible. Usually the main method or equivalent in a console program. It would be easy as hell except they don't let you use google or an IDE, so you need to memorize the syntax for the main method and string mani…
Say that you dont remember the exact arguments for main and move on. It will be fine. And don't assimilate fizzbuzz with half hour problems. There are for sure some difficult half hour interviews questions; they are not comparable to trivial exercises like printing the numbers from 1 to 10. P.S. If you never use console, strings or regex. I really wonder what kind of applications you're writing.
Regex really never. Unless you're munging data in Python it's usually a bad idea to use regex. Clean strings? Use a library. Parsing? Use a parser. Raw regex implies filtering stuff or banning certain characters in strings which breaks all kinds of multi language compatibility
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It probably varies from place to place but in the Bay Area at least you pretty much have to get a degree of some sort. There are so many programmers out there that the degree/no-degree has become an easy filter for recruiting types and no-degree + no experience (which means no one to talk to about how you work and what it is like to work with you) makes it doubly difficult. That said, it doesn't have to be a degree f…
Silicon Valley used to be famous for the exact opposite: the story was always that formal credentials were less important than demonstrated competence. Have things really changed that much? Anyway, at least here on the East Coast, I find that many (most?) companies don't have a strict requirement regarding a degree. At least, not if you have real world experience. Maybe it's more crucial if you're going for your firs…
It still is and same for the other tech hubs.
The tons of complaints are likely from people who have no degree AND no experience and want to break into the industry and the 100k jobs. Of course, they have troubles, for good reasons.
Simple maths; For every experienced HN dev, there are 100 redittors with nothing who wants in.
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> Remember Google infamously rejecting Max Howell, the original Homebrew author If Donald Knuth interviewed with Google, he would fail too because he would need 24 hours to solve a hard level leetcode question[1]. Unfortunately, Google loves throwing those kind of questions at interviewees and expect them to come up with solutions within 1 hour interview, lol. [1] - http://keithschwarz.com/interesting/code/?dir=find-…
I thought the trick with this one was to sum all the entries and subtract the sum of 0 to N-2. The remainder is the duplicate entry. It's just a trick though; I don't think skill in coming up with these is particularly well-correlated with being a good programmer, and for that reason Google claims not to do teasers like this any more.
All google does is teasers like this.
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From what I remember so far at Airbnb it used to be tough when they were small. I don't know today if they still attract a lot of rock stars. But still, all I had to do was to write up a mini-web app and connect to their API in order to pull out some data, in about 2 hours. Then after this interview they had an onsite with classic CS and culture fit. They were very tough on culture fit and you had to meet with the 3…
Interesting. What does "tough on culture fit" mean exactly?