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Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

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Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#51

Seems like you are taking your interview rejections to heart. Don't do that. Most companies go with the mode don't hire unless the candidate is a great fit, because they don't want to bear the cost of a mistake. I have failed a decent number of interviews, some on technical ground, some on personal ground. I still think I am not a bad programmer, despite the failed interviews. Like you I also have doubts about my abi…

Is Zuckerberg really considered to be a genius programmer? He's a very shrewd businessman alright, but Facebook is just a php website

Is it better to be a genius programmer, or an average programmer with an good understanding of the problem domain?

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#52

Seems like you are taking your interview rejections to heart. Don't do that. Most companies go with the mode don't hire unless the candidate is a great fit, because they don't want to bear the cost of a mistake. I have failed a decent number of interviews, some on technical ground, some on personal ground. I still think I am not a bad programmer, despite the failed interviews. Like you I also have doubts about my abi…

Is Zuckerberg really considered to be a genius programmer? He's a very shrewd businessman alright, but Facebook is just a php website

genius programmer? Not at all.

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#53

> It does what it needs to do, but there were no smart decisions behind the back end. I never had to use design patterns nor data structures. I just pieced it together. If you have shipped this or finished this project for a customer then this is more worth imho then being good in those coding tests. For most tasks it isn't necessary to to make smart decisions. Just piecing stuff together so that a job gets done and/…

I agree. Call it lean, and sell it as though you are solving customer problems via prototyping.

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#55
This is my experience after working at quite a few large companies over the last 4 years since uni.

You should optimise for passing the pub test not the programming test, and you probably don't want to work at a place that hands out codility tests.

Here's some anecdotes from my hiring experience:

My team and I once rejected a lad because we thought he would get bored after a couple of weeks. He got 100% in his codility, flawless technical interviews etc... He was too good for us and our trivial domain (this was a FTSE100, our services were consumed by 90% of the companies teams, in a very buzzwordy area).

Same company: two candidates, the first was technically better than the second. However no one who spoke to the first said they would be keen to go for a pint with him. The second was an absolute mensch so he got the job. He even said in the interview that he thought it was going terribly...

Once I interviewed two Devs on the same day, HR sent the offer to the wrong one and he accepted. Our team didn't know until he turned up on Monday morning.

Before my current gig I interviewed for a contract at a startup. The product was simple: just applying tech to a sector that is all man power based at the moment. This was the hardest technical interview I've ever had to give. I was asked to write the longest common subsequence algorithm. I did not write one line of code: eventually it turned into me watching the interviewer write the code. I was sure it was a disaster. The guy said he loved me, and wanted me to do the 'pairing' test again... All because of the pub test. I declined.

The interview for my current gig was a 30 minute chat on Skype. A team mate told me it was between me and another, but he was boring.

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Zuckerberg really considered to be a genius programmer? He's a very shrewd businessman alright, but Facebook is just a php website

Is it better to be a genius programmer, or an average programmer with an good understanding of the problem domain?

I am biased, but real understanding of the problem domain will beat programming genius every time. Very few problems require genius programming, but most require an acute understanding of the problem [1].

1. What works really, really well is pairing people with deep domain knowledge and some programming ability with those who just have great programming ability.

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#58
Just to encourage you, and everyone else who feels this way sometimes, including myself, is the following. It's also true.

Sometimes the best performers start out as the ones who naturally are weak at the skill.

Take swimmers. How many top medalists came up from being kids with bad asthma?

So you do have some amount of control over your performance long term. Some amount of that is determined by the reaction you choose to hardship.

Another divergent point is, sometimes top performers don't get recognition in all arenas... So if an interview fails you, by all means see it as an opportunity to improve yourself ( one of many such opportunities, for sure ), but don't go imagining interviews are perfect.

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#59
post #43

Time to start thinking about your job hunt as a search optimization problem. When I first got started in my career I created 10 email addresses and used them to make 10 accounts on Dice.com I made 10 very different versions of my resume and started tracking the types of companies I got responses from. If I had an interview I would take notes about the style of the interview at that company and I tweaked the resumes t…

Truly a great answer.

Re: Ask HN: How to get a job when you suck at coding?

#60
post #43

Time to start thinking about your job hunt as a search optimization problem. When I first got started in my career I created 10 email addresses and used them to make 10 accounts on Dice.com I made 10 very different versions of my resume and started tracking the types of companies I got responses from. If I had an interview I would take notes about the style of the interview at that company and I tweaked the resumes t…

Great reply. You sound like a Data Scientist friend I know, I'm having the feeling like Data people are the coolest around.
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