“I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews” • Hacker News Board

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#41

Post by dcl » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:15 AM UTC

nulptr wrote: post #23

dcl wrote: post #17

Hear, hear! I've got a PhD in statistics and consider myself a pretty good data scientist, but I am not a computer scientist. The last job I applied for asked me to perform a coding challenge prior to a possible in-person interview. The challenge was heavily focused on algorithms and data structures, almost nothing about statistical inference, causal inference, experiment design, model fitting, etc. I didn't bother s…

were you applying for a data scientist or software engineer position?

Senior Data Scientist.

I've got a feeling that these large corporations have started to realise that the 'data scientists' (commerce and engineering grads that know some python) they are hiring are all pretty useless because they don't have the engineering skills to actually get anything done.

A lot of the job advertisments for 'data scientists' I see these days focus WAY more on things like 'AWS, Spark, building pipelines, etc' than statistics and modelling skills.

Slightly related note, I'm seeing a silly number of advertisments asking for PhD's in quantitative fields and experience with PowerBI. That'd get me running for the hills.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#42

Post by bweitzman » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:15 AM UTC

zug_zug wrote: post #8

A rather tired conversation in my opinion. Everybody likes to complain about interviews, but every single alternative I've heard is even worse: Take-homes are biased toward those willing to work hours for free, a "track record" is biased toward those who inflate their resume, a casual conversation is biased toward the likable and native english speakers, high-level whiteboarding is biased towards people who are good…

I've paid candidates and been paid by potential employers to complete take homes. I've also given candidates the opportunity to substitute a piece of open source code in place.

This is admittedly still biased towards people who have available time, paid or unpaid, but I think it's a step in the right direction.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#43

Post by sudeepj » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:15 AM UTC

decafninja wrote: post #12

Unless you've made it to your "endgame" company that you're happy to stay at for a while, I feel investing anything more than the bare minimum to get your assigned work done is worth less than just grinding leetcode and otherwise studying for interviews. Doing an actual good job, above and beyond, is not going to be worth much when you're looking for your next job. Thus we're now seeing the rise of Professional Inter…

> Professional Interviewers or Professional Leetcoders

That sums up very nicely. This reminds me of a quote:

"Passing an exam with good grades/marks only show that you are really good in passing the exam" -- By (don't remember)

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#44

Post by fourseventy » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:16 AM UTC

mberning wrote: post #5

I do sympathize, but there is a flip side to this. I have worked in large orgs with many developer and engineer titled employees that can’t code at all. Zero coding skills. And their title would be things like “Senior Enterprise Application Engineer”. Unfortunately their resume doesn’t read that differently than a similarly experienced engineer that actually writes code.

I've had people show up to an interview with a solid looking resume who can BS their way through some technical talk but can't even write a simple for loop.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#45

Post by eyelidlessness » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:16 AM UTC

decafninja wrote: post #12

Unless you've made it to your "endgame" company that you're happy to stay at for a while, I feel investing anything more than the bare minimum to get your assigned work done is worth less than just grinding leetcode and otherwise studying for interviews. Doing an actual good job, above and beyond, is not going to be worth much when you're looking for your next job. Thus we're now seeing the rise of Professional Inter…

This is so sad to read. I made my way into a tech career in what would properly be described as “hacker” in the traditional sense, though I never applied the term to myself. I came into a ton of formal knowledge and became quite talented through paths that opened with recognition of my experience and skills. I’m going into the job market for the first time in a few years and this is exactly what I feared.

That said, I’m still very talented and I’m not going to let it shake me. Y’all can have the rat race, I’ll go find myself a place I can be productive.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#46

Post by 908B64B197 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:17 AM UTC

zug_zug wrote: post #8

A rather tired conversation in my opinion. Everybody likes to complain about interviews, but every single alternative I've heard is even worse: Take-homes are biased toward those willing to work hours for free, a "track record" is biased toward those who inflate their resume, a casual conversation is biased toward the likable and native english speakers, high-level whiteboarding is biased towards people who are good…

I like take-home as a filter for candidate from institutions that have low signal to noise ratio (getting hundreds of applicants from "some technical institute" and then have a sub 5% hire rate).

But I know from college applicants that take-home end up at the bottom of the pile in terms of priority vs in-person interview with a real engineer. Unless it's FAANG of course.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#47

Post by Ragib_Zaman » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:17 AM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #29

I'm in the job market and I've hit a lot of these Hackerrank style tests. They're easy. They (the people writing and administrating) the tests bend over backwards to offer the same test in many different languages. They provide unit tests and examples. To be quite blunt: These tests just verify very basic programming skills. They're meant to filter out people who just can't code. Someone who's struggling with these k…

I'm assuming you have never needed to practice these problems as you already have basic programming skills and are thus able to do every Leetcode Hard within 30 minutes of first seeing the problem?

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#48

Post by colordrops » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:17 AM UTC

decafninja wrote: post #12

Unless you've made it to your "endgame" company that you're happy to stay at for a while, I feel investing anything more than the bare minimum to get your assigned work done is worth less than just grinding leetcode and otherwise studying for interviews. Doing an actual good job, above and beyond, is not going to be worth much when you're looking for your next job. Thus we're now seeing the rise of Professional Inter…

I've never done that and only focused on doing as great a job as possible, and landed jobs at multiple companies many would consider "endgame" without knowing the k-nearest neighbors algorithm. Some companies or at least hiring managers are wise enough to look for what makes a productive individual rather than someone who chases the metric.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#49

Post by WarOnPrivacy » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:17 AM UTC

tomcat27 wrote: post #7

> It's also an opportunity to excuse ageism. Yep!

That unintended benefit seems to be found in most every hiring process.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#50

Post by dnautics » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:18 AM UTC

decafninja wrote: post #12

Unless you've made it to your "endgame" company that you're happy to stay at for a while, I feel investing anything more than the bare minimum to get your assigned work done is worth less than just grinding leetcode and otherwise studying for interviews. Doing an actual good job, above and beyond, is not going to be worth much when you're looking for your next job. Thus we're now seeing the rise of Professional Inter…

When I was a hiring manager at the previous company I was at, I gave an interview where I gave an exact description of what I wanted coded. No algorithm tricks (you could solve it faster with a paradigm, but it wasn't necessary) actually this is a problem I remember having to solve for homework in intro HS CS class 25 years ago. I was checking to see if the candidate could

1. read documents.

2. ask questions.

3 identify corner cases.

4. identify why the problem was hard

5. actually try out their code instead of just thinking about it.

One candidate used a very troublesome technique to try and solve it, and proudly declared, "I am sure this works". I knew it didn't - but it took me one hour to find the bug, and in order to find the bug I had to write a property test. This is SUPER dangerous behavior IMO. Code Reviews will not catch everything, so if you have a dishonest coder you can wind up in trouble. He got hired for another team "this is literally the best hash table I have ever seen".

Unfortunately all of the candidates were clearly folks who had practiced their leetcoder skills. Nobody completed the problem correctly. However, I was okay with partial answers that fulfilled some of the softer qualities I was looking for The other folks who were interviewing gave one of the candidates who bombed my part rave reviews. I got steamrolled into hiring him onto my team, and sure enough he didn't read documents, he didn't try out his code. In the month that I worked with him he did not push any code. I left.