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Laid Off, Now What?

bharathpbhat.github.io

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Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#221

Post by bosie »

TrackerFF wrote: post #52
oDot wrote: post #7

The current state of job interviews is terrible. Just the fact that studying for a few weeks affects their outcome should raise eyebrows everywhere. And don't get me started on lack of job-related questions, false negatives and having to guess what interviewers want to hear

It seems to be a mostly US-centric thing. I live in Scandinavia, and I have yet to encounter the levels of rigor I see in the US (tech) interviewing process - which is kind of weird, as we have much, much more stringent workers rights/laws, making it more difficult to get rid of a bad hire. Sure, US companies, especially in tech hubs, operate on a completely different scale than companies over here - at least in term…

Mind expanding on how a regular senior SWE or analyst interview works? How many stages, what are the questions etc?

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#223

Post by PragmaticPulp »

speedgoose wrote: post #204
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone offered you a $100-200K bonus to complete LeetCode problems for a month, would you turn it down? There’s a lot of anger about the process, but it’s really impossible to beat the effort vs. reward balance.

The nice salaries are also there to attract talented people despite all this bullshit.

It’s funny that our industry lets anyone, from any background have a fair shot at top paying jobs with only a few weeks or months of practice against freely-available practice problems that can be done from the comfort of your home. If you struggle, there is an endless supply of tutorials and YouTube videos to help you out. Did I mention it’s all free and you can do it on your own time?

When I tell my doctor, lawyer, and finance friends about this they literally can’t believe it’s that easy. It’s bizarre that so many people would rather replace this with selecting people by pedigree or credentials.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#224

Post by PragmaticPulp »

nph5667 wrote: post #203
tomp wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than doctors who have to put 10+ years into a job interview...

Do you think so? I am not familiar with doctor's state of things, but do they have to prepare for 10 years for each interview during their career, or just once in a lifetime to get into a profession? Are they tested on irrelevant stuff to their job's duties every time they change the job? I am genuinely interested. I see that the current state of job search/acquiring in software industry is inadequate both for employ…

Trying to compare a few weeks of LeetCode to years of graduate school followed by years of underpaid 80-hour residency workweeks is out of touch.

Also, any programmer with a few years of experience shouldn’t have to completely relearn how to do LeetCode style problems every few years. The LeetCode easy and medium problems aren’t that difficult for anyone with a few years of experience.

Finally, I don’t understand how so many people are convinced that LeetCode problems are an entirely different domain than typical programming work. Sure, they’re toy problems, but the concepts are relevant to anyone doing things at scale that involves more than just connecting some APIs together.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#225

Post by ryandrake »

marcinzm wrote: post #118
TrackerFF wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the salaries are quite different, but at the same time - you're pretty much walking around in golden shackles, no? I can't imagine those salaries being relevant, other than a handful of places in the US. And for the price of a small 2-bedroom apartment in the SF-area, you can pretty much buy a mansion where I live. Then you have things like healthcare, school costs, daycare / cost of raising a child, etc. e…

The US is a large place, you can save money for a decade in one location and then use that $1-2 million you built up to move somewhere cheap, buy a mansion and not give much a shit for the next 40 years. Taxes are also generally lower so you keep more. Healthcare costs don't matter since your employer pays for that and gives you good health insurance. School/child only matters later, and you can either move away by t…

Sure, two engineers together technically can make $700k+, just like runners technically can run a 4 minute mile. You're not talking about average engineers at average companies here, so it's not really generalizable advice.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#226

Post by ip26 »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #123
marcinzm wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is a large place, you can save money for a decade in one location and then use that $1-2 million you built up to move somewhere cheap, buy a mansion and not give much a shit for the next 40 years. Taxes are also generally lower so you keep more. Healthcare costs don't matter since your employer pays for that and gives you good health insurance. School/child only matters later, and you can either move away by t…

I grew up with a dad working for 70-120k and a mom at home. I can’t even imagine how nice the lifestyles of Bay Area kids are.

The kids you are thinking of certainly enjoy nice cars, good food, and so on.

However, the housing stock is mostly old & run down even at two million dollar prices. Not to mention, a kid with two full time Googler parents? They are attending an academically rigorous private school with 3-4 hours of cram classes after, not sipping virgin daiquiris by the pool.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#227

Post by stack_underflow »

49yearsold wrote: post #157

This is mind boggling to see so much effort need to put into getting into FAANG. I am 49 years old and working as an engineering manager in a public company. I have spent decades writing large distributed, Saas, on-premise, enterprise application - many of which I helped implementing, architecting and supporting. Then I just went to leetcode and saw one of the "EASY" question about how to prepare for FB interview. It…

These types of questions basically boil down very cookie cutter patterns that generally bucket into graph traversal/search, being comfortable with coding/manipulating linked data structures, enumerating+pruning search spaces, and knowing little tricks to reduce an order of magnitude from the runtime or space complexity after having applied one of these patterns. These all generally require knowing all your basic data structures as a prereq (stack/queue/deque/vector/hash table/self-balancing search tree, then using those primitives to compose graphs etc).

My advice for people who wanted to prep for these interviews originally used to be to read through some books that prep you for algorithm competitions (e.g. ICPC, IOI, GCJ), but I find that to be a bit overkill and not as efficient a use of time (although some of these books do a much better job of explaining things than any of these interview prep books I've gone through). Today the advice I'd give is get a book like 'Elements of Programming Interviews' in the language you plan on using and a leetcode subscription and just get down to learning about a data structure/algorithm/problem solving paradigm and then solving a bunch of questions that fit that technique.

If you really want to go with the overkill approach, I'd recommend a book like Competitive Programming 3: https://cpbook.net/

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#228

Post by tus88 »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #218
tus88 wrote: post #69

Strange how HN is so keen on having millions of people come here to compete for your job and put downwards pressure on wages.

This has not happened, at least not in software engineering. Also, it is more desirable to attract talent to the US, where they will spend money and pay taxes, than just outsourcing.

That's because it has been prevented by immigration rules.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#229

Post by munk-a »

sushshshsh wrote: post #217
moises_silva wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an immigrant in another country (thankfully more immigration-friendly), I completely understand the frustration. I think however we must see beyond the incompetence of some front-line workers and turn the frustration and complaints towards who's running the country and its policies, not providing training and overall setting a bad example on how to treat immigrants (legal or illegal). I've declined good offers to…

Just marry an american lol

As someone who married someone abroad - moving to them is a far simpler and cheaper process than having them move to you. You may be thinking of the loophole of getting married overseas (which does exist) but the government is pretty strict with the requirements around that.

If you want to do thing legally and immigrate to the US then you'd better have a decade of your life and tens of thousands of dollars to throw at lawyers to guide you through the process.

I'm now a Canadian and I think the process in total (including the marriage certificate since I came over on a Fiancee visa) might have put me back about 1.5k. The process was reasonable, there were certainly requirements but people were available to guide you through it in English & French and, wonderfully, Canadians are quite nice to new Canadians so I didn't get much flack from my new coworkers.

America just doesn't want people to immigrate.

Re: Laid Off, Now What?

#230

Post by ip26 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #223
speedgoose wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice salaries are also there to attract talented people despite all this bullshit.

It’s funny that our industry lets anyone, from any background have a fair shot at top paying jobs with only a few weeks or months of practice against freely-available practice problems that can be done from the comfort of your home. If you struggle, there is an endless supply of tutorials and YouTube videos to help you out. Did I mention it’s all free and you can do it on your own time? When I tell my doctor, lawyer,…

The fatigue is over having to run the same gauntlet again, and again, and again. Proving yourself over and over gets really old.
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