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

Post by dleslie » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:34 AM UTC

free_rms wrote: post #10

dleslie wrote: post #4

Generally, I'm more likely to hire someone with interesting hobbies than someone who has completed HackerRank tests. I don't find it compelling to see that a candidate has accomplished standardized metrics; but I am swayed by non-computing hobbies. Synthesizers, painting, rock climbing, volunteering, and so on are indicators of a curious mind that's happy to apply itself.

But do they still have to pass a bunch of HackerRank-style interview questions? The best interview question in my life, a few years ago, was one where they gave me an open-ended question, a laptop, and the whole afternoon with occasional checkins to see how I handled it. The evaluation was completely subjective. That's hard to standardize at an industrial scale, I understand why FAANG can't do that, but smaller shops…

Post by _9omd » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:34 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…

Post by MattGaiser » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:36 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #55

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…

Our industry feels like it's in the decline of the Roman Empire right now. Our craft is becoming arcane: Microsoft is building VSCode for the cloud. Few people own desktop computers anymore. Apple is locking down MacOS to signed binaries. Soon we'll all have thin clients and will write software in the cloud for the cloud. Few will be able to learn how to engineer at home anymore - you'll have to go to a university or…

Post by taeric » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:38 AM UTC

xiphias2 wrote: post #39

dleslie wrote: post #4

Generally, I'm more likely to hire someone with interesting hobbies than someone who has completed HackerRank tests. I don't find it compelling to see that a candidate has accomplished standardized metrics; but I am swayed by non-computing hobbies. Synthesizers, painting, rock climbing, volunteering, and so on are indicators of a curious mind that's happy to apply itself.

How many Petabytes of data are you working with? Maybe your company is too small for data structures and cutting every 0.1ms latency count. As an example at Google I needed director level exception to introduce 0.1ms latency to the ads server (which wasn't needed at the end, but the monetary damage for timeouts is real). Understanding basic data structures and how the computer works is important in these cases, even…

Post by tomcat27 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:40 AM UTC

dilyevsky wrote: post #96

millstone wrote: post #57

The author has been working as a developer for 15 years, and claims very strong technical skills. Why are they learning/re-learning Python, C++, SQL, C#, college math? Nobody will be fooled by that; at 15 YoE they will be evaluated on what they have done over a career, not over the last month. > it's all about how much time you can spend on Leetcode. The author is playing a game built for new grads. Here's a secret,…

Haven’t worked at fb but same experience at other big co. Also I question authors experience interviewing people - I’ve done literally hundreds coding sessions and there’re surprisingly large number of folks who claim 5-10 years of experience and several companies under their belt but aren’t able to code a simple for-loop in their language of choice