11–20 of 538 posts
(Gigantic) thread on the previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22331804
The top comment is brilliant and sums up the brokenness in the best way I've ever seen.
FAANG won't stop, as they put people through hell on purpose. They want them to dread interviewing and switching jobs, so they can have them for themselves for longer and pay them less.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and posting more in the intended spirit of the site, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Assume good faith." That's not because people do always act in good faith (of course that's not so), it's because the assumption of bad faith leads to crappy HN threads and the assumption of good faith leads to better ones.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22393019.
FAANG won't stop, as they put people through hell on purpose. They want them to dread interviewing and switching jobs, so they can have them for themselves for longer and pay them less.
Honestly, I think until FAANG start doing something else, the vast majority of tech/semi-tech companies will just copy them. A few smaller companies might branch out and try some other stuff, but most people hiring at mid and large size companies are just trying to minimize risk more than go grab that great diamond in the rough. If the big guys are doing X, the medium guys are gonna keep doing X also.
Even sticking to the pure 'trivia' aspect, there's just so much of it that people are missing altogether. (Sure, maybe you can write out a nifty algorithm on the whiteboard, but can you sketch even a very rough proof that the algorithm is correct? I don't think many people can do anything like this. I'm not even sure that the topic of correctness comes up all that much in a CS/SE curriculum - which is surprising, since we are supposed to be doing engineering. And yet, someone who is familiar with what provably-correct code might look like in practice will likely be a lot more productive as a result.)
We tend to praise people who take the risk, fake it till they make it are go getters etc. And possibly these are trying for that.
And maybe it would be pretty cool to see a sociological study about who these people are. What demographic they belong to, what background they have, what kind of personalities and value they have.
Most jobs are not like that, and then you get extreme variance in expectation with little communication on how to prepare, which is a waste of time for both the interviewer and interviewee if the interviewee has no clue what will be asked or expected ahead of time.
When I interviewed at Google for a front end position they didn't ask me a single CSS question. It was all algorithms and easy JavaScript questions. It was just really weird, like at least ask me how to center something. They bothered to ask me how I'd deal with diversity issues if I was in HR, though. I probably didn't get the job because of my answers there...
This is surprisingly better than the usual "You won't believe what happened after my article got on Hacker News" post (yes, that's a genre) so I'm going to put it in the second-chance pool [1] after turning the knob down on the title. [1] described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 if you don't recognize the term
Speaking of the second chance, from the link you referenced https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380
In that comment you said
> I want to turn this system into something that's open to all users who want to take time to review stories. We'll make it a form of community service that will be a new way to earn karma. However, it's still an open question how to pull this off without simply recreating the current upvoting system under another guise.
Have you guys looked or thought about this any more since then? I'd love to see such a community service become reality.
I thought there was a shortage of software engineers right now? Although I just got an email from Glassdoor with estimated salary (in the Bay Area) being 5-10k lower than the last email, so who knows.