“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”

#101

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

caterama wrote: post #51

runT1ME wrote: post #26

I'm very sympathetic to the idea that a more objective test like interview format eliminates bias from the interviewer, as well as the idea it allows introverts or those not as well versed in storytelling to be successful opposed to traditional 'sell yourself' interviews. However, it's a huge waste of time when so many of the questions are the same. I get it, every company wants to know if I can turn a list into a ba…

This seems like a pretty good idea on the surface. I'm curious how the SAT and ACT standardized testing in the US came into the position of almost de-facto standardized college entrance exam. On the other hand, I've wondered why a similar thing doesn't exist in the real estate industry for home inspections. A good inspection costs a lot of money, and it seems basically every serious buyer needs to pay for it themselv…

"Why doesn't the seller pay for one up front and share the results with interested buyers?"

In the Bay Area they do. No one makes offers with an inspection contingency because it's so competitive but often the seller will already have done an inspection that they share with potential buyers

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

#102

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

jdreaver wrote: post #54

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 inconsistent with my experience in my most recent round of interviews. I interviewed at a few places at a senior/staff level, and most of my interviews were behavioral, architectural, or discussions about past work. The few leetcode-style or coding questions I had were easily prepared for from my ~40 hours of interview-specific coding prep. There is zero chance I would have gotten those interviews or passed t…

oddly (if you see my sibling comment) I just got a job where they didn't ask me any technical questions. They just asked me about my coding philosophy. I guess they just looked at my github? Dunno.

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

#103

Post by free_rms » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:42 AM UTC

dleslie wrote: post #91

free_rms wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We don't have any technical quiz as part of our interview process. We look at experience, education and creative outlets; then folks sink or swim upon being hired. So far we're batting fairly well. Folks don't generally lie about their experience.

In my youth I wound up in charge of hiring at a low-end shop due to a funny set of circumstances and absolutely got burned by people straight up lying to me.

If I were more experienced, I'd have been able to ask the right questions about their alleged experience and smell the BS.

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

#104

Post by Ericson2314 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:43 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…

And so productivity falls until we live in squalor amidst the old ruins but every person is busy.

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

#105

Post by dilyevsky » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:43 AM UTC

tomcat27 wrote: post #99

dilyevsky wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A simple for-loop? that's ridiculous. If that's really the case I wonder the screening abilities of recruiters more than candidates.

Literally a scan of string with some basic logic and three cases inside. People would take 30 mins+ and create a giant mess. This was easily 50%+ cases during phone screen and resumes all looked good so not recruiters fault (most of the time).

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

#106

Post by adrianN » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:43 AM UTC

liquidify wrote: post #81

echelon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are so many pieces of software that are latency dependent. Aspects of them can be in the cloud, but I doubt we will ever truly lose track of bare metal. Right now I'm hoping for a real time OS that has enough of the common apps that most people are happy, but that satisfies the speed requirements necessary for digital audio, lighting controls, and other tangible and interactive behaviors. Hopefully the natural…

Gaming is a pretty latency sensitive application, and yet Amazon is working hard on moving that to the cloud: https://www.amazon.com/luna/landing-page

While there are some things that are even more latency sensitive, I think that could become a very small niche in the near future.

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

#107

Post by landtuna » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:44 AM UTC

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,…

That's nonsense. I've got 20 YoE, an elite college degree, tons of experience in Python and C++, have single-handedly put together mission critical software systems, and I can't get my foot in the door outside my small area of expertise. The teams I've worked on are tiny, so I have no career network to draw from. I'm missing machine learning and cloud experience, and my resume gets no hits because of it. Age 44, and I'm starting to think I've been aged out. As far as I can tell, no one is interested in experience that consists of project successes. It's just years of buzzwords and coding challenges. (So I just signed up for Hackerrank. Maybe someone will notice me there.)

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

#108

Post by agumonkey » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:44 AM UTC

jdreaver wrote: post #54

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 inconsistent with my experience in my most recent round of interviews. I interviewed at a few places at a senior/staff level, and most of my interviews were behavioral, architectural, or discussions about past work. The few leetcode-style or coding questions I had were easily prepared for from my ~40 hours of interview-specific coding prep. There is zero chance I would have gotten those interviews or passed t…

I think we need a leetarch

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

#109

Post by alltakendamned » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:45 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…

Unfortunately I feel it is hard for me to disagree with the overall sentiment of what you are describing.

But I'd like to offer a little glimmer of hope from someone with too many gray hairs to count.

Computers are still machines, and we still tell them what to do by programming them. It is still possible to stay out of what you describe above, it is still possible to work on low-level code, on real products, on things that matter to people and companies.

The reality though is that the mundane things are where the money is though. While we all enjoy "cool" things, millions of companies need their accounting and payroll running, their truck drivers planned, their work schedules planned, ...

So you might find that more interesting things happen in e.g. industrial engineering companies or electronics companies, more so than in web companies. It's an entirely different world than what you describe above.

Hackaday might be a more interesting hangout than Hacker News for you ? So let's not lose our excitement and sense of wonder, after all it's all bits and bytes and we tell them how to behave.

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

#110

Post by sundvor » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:46 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…

Geez that was bleak. And I don't think you're wrong, either.