461–470 of 538 posts
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That's true, in our industry it seems that only leftists aren't assholes. So if you don't want to hire assholes who think "diversity" is a dog whistle, you hire leftists.
You seem real inclusive :)
Inclusivity does not mean having to include those that would exclude others.
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> FAANG-style coding puzzles These are not "puzzles". That makes it seem like there is some trick or clever concept the candidate needs to grasp that show "lateral thinking". There isn't. These are (or supposed to be) fundamental problems of computer science that require good understanding of algorithms, data structures, code performance, and can be solved in Yes, these exist, and there are plenty of them. A pretty c…
The questions are indeed puzzles; that's why Gayle Laakmann and others have made a living publishing books of the questions themselves. And the puzzles are distinctly different from the content in the majority of CSE curricula. What's more is problematic is that the construction and evaluation of the puzzles is highly subjective and nearly everywhere lacks rigor. Completion time is a key metric while quality of commu…
Nothing could be further from the truth at my company
> A true interest in improving the hiring process includes: * Making prep materials and courses freely available (helps industry candidates)
Recruiters share this with candidates. They ignore it.
> * Committing time to CSE outreach to better integrate company needs to CSE (helps new grads)
Go to any university career fair and you'll see companies with booths clarifying these positions working against the mis information of negative blog posts
> * Finding questions that reflect real tasks on the job (helps the evaluation have a chance of being predictive)
They do. You don't have to agree, but they do. The real task on the job is "disambiguate a complex problem autonomously, and come up with a plan to address it." The interview is a 20 minute constrained version of it.
* Closing the information gap between hiring managers and candidates: disclosure (in aggregate) of hiring rates, salaries, etc.
Semi-agreed. I do wish people and companies were more transparent about salaries. But there is already an entitlement complex from a bunch of engineers on this site and many others complaining why some dude at Netflix in California is making 500k, while he is making 80 in Oklahoma writing code for Bank of America.
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Interesting factoid for perspective - if you take the US and exclude every metro area at least as big as the Austin* MSA...you still have a majority of Americans. *I think Austin is the smallest mentioned.
Damn, you're right. I did the spreadsheet math quickly based on 2018 estimates on the top 314 cities by population in the USA. Apparently 100k minimum population is the marker of "city" according to this. Anyways, ~94m city dwellers compared to ~327m (2018) for the USA. "Big" cities are a minority. At 284, Boulder, CO is considered a "city". Don't get me wrong, it's a nice town, but you can't compare it to Austin (11…
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”Seeing that in over 20 years and very successful track record of getting jobs quickly that I’ve never done leetCode or had an algorithm interview - how did you get that out of anything that I said?” Well, first...you were replying directly to a post that was talking about whitebord/algorithm questions and how they’re out of control. On an article about same. So my answer is: ”because I bothered to read the post to w…
I’ve changed jobs frequently and haven’t had a unicorn career. You’d be amazed that the interview process for your bog standard enterprise developer/architect roles or your standard software as a service CRUD developers don’t have algorithm style interviews. It’s mostly soft skill and explaining your previous projects. Not everyone’s career has been the r/cscareerquestions “learn leetCode and work for a FAANG”.
These tests are ubiquitous. If you honestly haven’t hit them, you’re a unicorn.
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"I just set up my own gig, where I do the stuff I want to do." I think maybe this is the unspoken issue with interviews - if a candidate was any good, they wouldn't need a job at all! So it's a given that all the people who apply are no good - the interviewer just needs to find the reason.
I suspect there is an element of truth in that. After all the people who are most likely to apply are those who are persistent but have been rejected by previous interviewers.
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> Leetcode style systems are a lot of fun for people. That’s not true for everyone, especially in such high stress situations as an interview. I like crosswords, but I wouldn’t want to do them in front of someone judging me for a job in 45 min while thinking aloud.
All job interviews are stressful. Are you just scapegoating whiteboarding?
I've mentioned this before. I have a portfolio that consists of six figures LoC of code, across dozens of open-source repos; most of which I am the 100% sole author. I've written a fairly large open-source system that is rapidly becoming the world standard for a specific (rather small) demographic. It deliberately uses old and rather primitive technology (which is a big reason for it becoming a standard). I've writte…
> no one bothers to look at my portfolio [...] I usually send a couple of links [...] My portfolio leaves absolutely no question at all about what I can and can't do, technically. I hear this a lot from software engineers, but it might be worth thinking about the underlying expectation that anyone should spend time poking through repos on the internet, why they would, and how hard it might be to standardize a hiring…
How are performance reviews done where you work? It strikes me that you have to do all the same things to see if the portfolio of work an employee has done _for your company_ is up to snuff. Because i’ve seen a few places that just offload this to some numeric ranking based on the subjective (nay, political) perceptions of one’s peers through a filter of imperfect, variable understanding of how the numbers should even work, and I hated that process just as much as I hate most interview processes. In a way performance reviews are like interviewing to keep your job or get a promotion, so I’d find your approach to hiring to be a warning about how the culture operates there.
Everything about how a person works, in your subsequent paragraph, is true. But parent is talking about their currently existing body of work, vs every stupid take home challenge to do some menial transformation of a data structure wrapped in polished UI. Not as a stand in for their personality or culture fit.
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I’ve changed jobs frequently and haven’t had a unicorn career. You’d be amazed that the interview process for your bog standard enterprise developer/architect roles or your standard software as a service CRUD developers don’t have algorithm style interviews. It’s mostly soft skill and explaining your previous projects. Not everyone’s career has been the r/cscareerquestions “learn leetCode and work for a FAANG”.
Yeah, you’re exaggerating. I work in the same industry you do, for longer than you have. These tests are ubiquitous. If you honestly haven’t hit them, you’re a unicorn.
I’ve asked around about my coworkers experience over the years because I had never heard of algorithms style interviews until three years ago when I started reading HN and r/cscareerquestions.
I thought all interviews were soft skill, language trivia, diagramming models and architecture, and explaining past projects.
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> the gateway to a $200k+ job then it's a good thing for applicants, For most of us outside the Bay Area and NYC, it's quite unlikely that we'll secure a $200k/year job unless we go into management.
What a misconception. I know plenty of people in Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles, and even Pittsburgh, pulling in $200k/year in tech.
If you know plenty of people outside of the major tech big cities (and I should have included Austin and Seattle in that, for sure) making over $200,000 year, they you have a statistically unusual sample of friends.
All the data back up what I'm saying. Go look at the numbers. Look at salaries on monster.com or your favorite job site. Perhaps you and your friends don't realize how unusual it is (granted, you also have higher cost-of-living in those cities, sometimes by enough to eat up the additional salary).
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> Or we had people refusing to do the toy problem (not real work, same test for all candidates) unless we paid them hundreds of dollars to compensate their time. It's otherwise billable time, don't see why you'd have a hard time respecting that from a candidate.
> " It's otherwise billable time, don't see why you'd have a hard time respecting that from a candidate. " Sure, as long as the business gets to deduct the cost of the interviewers' time from that. Not gonna work out in favor of the candidate but respect is a two-way street. After all, once the candidate (or a candidate, anyway) joins the team, it's their billable time being spent reviewing and interviewing other can…
They can at tax time, whereas an employee can't. If an employer requests work from someone, they should pay them.