Oh I see it's time for this blog post again.
The technical interview is an ego trip
11–20 of 206 posts
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#12Of course it is, it's a way to gauge whether "someone is dedicated to the job by cramming the algorithms section they haven't touched in years" I've done dozens of interviews and after all of it, I realized there are only four qualities we quantify as useful: caring, ability to listen, ability to learn.
Also the ability to identify off-by-one errors
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#13Of course it is, it's a way to gauge whether "someone is dedicated to the job by cramming the algorithms section they haven't touched in years" I've done dozens of interviews and after all of it, I realized there are only four qualities we quantify as useful: caring, ability to listen, ability to learn.
And debugging off-by-one errors.
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#14I'm coming to the realization that there's almost no point in spending time on a lot of the things that I love about being a developer: learning new languages, studying best practices for your tech stack, reading software engineering books, becoming involved in tech communities, keeping up with the latest trends. Interviewers don't value any of that beyond lip service. The only thing worth spending time on is leetcode grinding, it can be worth 10s of thousands of dollars.
The attitude of the algorithm geniuses is that software engineering is easy and anyone can learn it, which might be true, but my point is that I already did learn it and I spent five years becoming an expert in it. That should be valuable to your business whether you look down upon it or not.
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#15Of course it is, it's a way to gauge whether "someone is dedicated to the job by cramming the algorithms section they haven't touched in years" I've done dozens of interviews and after all of it, I realized there are only four qualities we quantify as useful: caring, ability to listen, ability to learn.
I think "caring" is probably the only one that separates the best from the rest. Reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/7EmboKQH8lM?t=2165
If we care as a developer, we write better code, learn things and listen to our team, customers.
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#16Articles like this always underestimate how many bullshit artists there are out there. The technical interview is not perfect but it is still far more meritocratic than many fields.
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#17One issue is very few people get interview training. I have interviewed maybe 100 people but had to figure it out for myself what works. I wish I could apologize to the first few dozen.
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#18This is super true. I was interviewing with a Startup once, and we had an initial screening, and they had a lot of work to be done with AWS, some APIs and data pipelines. My area of work. When we had a "technical" interview, it was completely algorithms focused. And the interviewer dropped a few anchors, which restricted my thinking, and caught me cycling. It was super obvious the call wasn't going great. Odd enough, they acknowledged, that I was one of their best candidates, and were surprised. I didn't get the offer. It was a job I knew I could've aced, but the questions they asked didn't match up to what they actually needed done :/
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#19This was my take on interviewing with Amazon at one point a long while ago. The initial interview itself was pretty straight forward, but it seemed like every answer I gave was "wrong" because the interviewer was looking for key phrases instead of understanding of the concepts. We talked about hashing, and when he asked if I knew what hashing was I said sure, its a one-way function to create a unique identifier. He a…
I'm sorry you had to experience that, I know how you might feel :(
That data structures and algorithm book and course is the root of so much distasteful smugness in the tech world, it's really bizarre.
[Edit]: It's almost like it was the first course we found very difficult so we should that imprint of challenge on everyone else.
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#20Problem solving skill is a must.
Not saying to cram the algorithms. But using those in your approach shows the ability of the candidate's efficiency and quickness in solving them.