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

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

#151

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

adrianN wrote: post #106
liquidify wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The technology to "move gaming to the cloud" was around at least a decade ago, when Gaikai started doing zero-day "play this game in your browser via Java". It worked well then, it works well today (HN had a article several months back by a sort of follow-up to the Gaikai concept). The problem is convincing gaming companies to actually use it(they have some good reasons to be concerned).

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

#152

Post by jariel »

Swizec wrote: post #9

> Once in a while, though, I'd find someone exceptional who could approach problems differently, and those people would always turn out to be the best hires. They would have been filtered out by these systems. This is the goal. When you’re a large org, you do not need exceptional people, you need foot soldiers who do what they’re told. Yes even in engineering. Most of the day-to-day work boils down to JSON bureacracy…

+1 on 'Code Archeology'.

I wonder if interviews should consist more of reading a pile of open source and just trying to make sense of it.

There's some crusty open source I've had to deal with whereupon it took quite some intelligence just to get it to compile and work - absolutely nothing to do with 'algorithms'.

I'm half inclined to just say: "Here's a git repo, build it, modify this thing to do that" and if they can, they're gold.

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

#153

Post by twblalock »

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…

> Doing an actual good job, above and beyond, is not going to be worth much when you're looking for your next job.

After you've been in the industry for a while, you are likely to be referred for jobs by former colleagues, or even invited by those former colleagues to come and interview at their new companies.

If you excel at your job, your former colleagues will be more likely to do this, because they enjoyed working with you and want to work with you again. They very likely have no idea how good you are at Leetcode-style problems.

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

#154

Post by kmonsen »

decafninja wrote: post #140
kmonsen wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so at all. I have worked hard, and had a lot of fun at now two of the FAANG's. Sure the reward has not been like winning the startup lottery, but if you told myself 20 years ago I would have this impact and earn this much money I would not have believed it. I totally suck at politics, and have seen others rise quicker, but doing good work does get rewarded in my experience.

I would think FAANG would be considered as "endgame company" for many. Including myself.

I honestly think you can do it if you want even not knowing much about you. People there are not all special. If you want some tips or a referral let me know, email is my username @ gmail.

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

#155

Post by polishdude20 »

_9omd wrote: post #73
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…

Yup, I jumped into the if you can't beat em, join em camp with leetcode. I Did 160 problems (likely low for many people) before my last job search, and I now make 3x what I used to. I gotta admit it's a hell of an ego boost to crush coding questions in interviews; being completely in the flow and cranking out flawless code. It makes me wonder how much money I left on the table the last 10 years, because I went the ro…

Did you just start off doing leetcode questions online and learned from the solutions? I'd study leetcode stuff if I could even start getting interviews to show my skills :/

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

#156

Post by onion2k »

stevecalifornia wrote: post #11

I've always preferred to give very serious candidates some technical homework. Make an API that does this particular thing. You have two days. Then we look at what they built and talk about it. It's way more realistic because that's how we actually work-- nobody is coding algorithms on a whiteboard. To any extent, it has worked very well. The people that have done great ended up being great employees and the people t…

Multiply that by the number of jobs someone typically applies for when they want to change role and you're likely contributing to someone not seeing their family or friends for almost a month. Also... Is that 2 days total dev time, or a deadline that's 2 days away? Someone with few responsibilities and a willingness to forego sleep is likely to put in far more time than someone with a family of the deadline is two days away.

It sounds like your interview process is designed to push away people with families and friends. Let me guess... Those great hires really put in the extra hours?

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

#157

Post by agentultra »

Can confirm. Competitive programming is the new normal as we all hyper optimize our selves for the corporate overlords. Watch some videos from the top competitive programmers, crack a book, and crush leetcode. This is the way.

I think it’s a waste of time and boring as hell but 9 times out of 10 nobody is ever going to look at your accomplishments or work history unless you’re coming out of a FAANG.

Just memorize Two Pointer, Depth First, Breadth First, Binary Search, and Dynamic Programming. Solve leetcode problems. Most people recommend 200-300 before applying to FAANGs. Turn the descriptions into Anki cards and learn to site read them for TP, DF, BF, BS, DP. Keep a soreadsheet if your solve times and each puzzle’s solution type. Optimize, optimize, optimize.

I don’t think it’s a good system but that’s what we have.

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

#158

Post by johnnujler »

This culture eludes me. You don’t have to practice made up questions of varying difficulty for 5 months before looking for a job, there are great companies out there that are not Facebook or Google, and that will give you job satisfaction and a decent salary without grilling you, look for those:

1. Office friendships that last a lifetime are never to be seen anymore, all people seem to want these days is sh*t load of money. 2. What about contentment? No I need more, which eventually becomes a cause of restlessness, anxiety.

If employment is Organized slavery, interview is basically blackmailing.

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

#159

Post by landtuna »

29athrowaway wrote: post #138
landtuna wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recommend joining a Python meetup. It can be a simple way to grow your network and have free pizza and beer. Now, with respect to cloud... it's not that hard to learn. If you have system administration skills it should not be a real challenge for you. Now, people in the industry did not wake up one day and conspire to radically change how things work. It has been a gradual change over many years... that's why it's…

Oh, I'm informed. But that doesn't make experience. And neither does a side project, really. And what side project needs cloud scale?

The meet-up is a good idea.

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

#160

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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