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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”

#161

Post by Swizec »

jariel wrote: post #152
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 ca…

We do this! For the coding portion, candidates get a crappy React app we slapped together in 20 minutes. They’re asked to add a feature.

Really tells you a lot about the candidate.

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

#162

Post by Apocryphon »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #137
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…

> Our industry feels like it's in the decline of the Roman Empire right now. .... And here I am, writing a desktop native app that targets a small niche of users, with no marketing, no advertising, and we've had our strongest year yet, and overall usage just grows slowly year over year. Maybe it's how you think things ought to be that is misaligned with reality, rather than "the decline of the Roman Empire".

Rome took quite some time to decline, and to fall. And there were always pockets of stability. Maybe your app is Byzantium.

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

#163

Post by lambda_obrien »

tomcat27 wrote: post #31

30 years ago software engineering was probably a few bunch of technical skills. Now it's a very big spectrum, no individual knows everything. Someone applying to search quality team at Google that works on search algorithm really wants someone who knows algorithms.. but that may not be the case for a web of app developer. but the same app developer needs to know have algorithmic sense to do some performance tuning. T…

I agree and also don't get it: I barely write real code in my day job as the only coder on a project I own. I mostly go in, make notes on what looks bad, then fix it later, but the majority of the work isn't writing code and sometimes even I have to look up the proper `case` statement syntax or something. I can imagine being nervous, going in to do FizzBuzz, and bombing it, even as someone who has coded since I was 14 (I am now much older). We need to stop worrying about coding expertise and start thinking about how a programmer visualizes and thinks about data and code flow, that's the important part. Syntax can be forgotten, the semantics of programming are the important thing.

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

#164

Post by voodootrucker »

andrew_ wrote: post #88

Tech hiring is severely broken. 22 years in and it's only gotten worse. We still tolerate PhD Comp Sci algorithm questions for frontend developer gigs, endless series of array shuffling and sorting, canned problems intended to "measure your problem solving ability," ridiculous hypotheticals (e.g. whiteboard how you would build Slack), and a litany of other tactics that recruiters or old school management thinks are r…

Thank you, this is brilliant advice. Despite decades of experience I was nervous due to this trend and spent way too much time on hackerank. The company I ended up with didn't ask any of that crap (despite being founded by a PhD), and we couldn't be a better fit.

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

#165

Post by tomcat27 »

gameswithgo wrote: post #86
tomcat27 wrote: post #7

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

nonsense. its your one chance to defeat ageism by just winning the fucking game.

let me guess you are under 30?

when someone has a spouse, two kids, a mortgage to pay, a whole bunch of daily chores to finish, pressure from manager to finish under tight deadlines, a simple depth first search looks like a very big problem at the end of the day.

People pay cognitive tax that robs them from doing intellectually difficult tasks. This is well documented in behavioral economics. "Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir"

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

#166

Post by sunshinerag »

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…

Thank you for the truth glummy glooma.

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

#167

Post by kmonsen »

MattGaiser wrote: post #92
kmonsen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean why not both? I worked hard and do my best in my job, but I also do leetcode and others a few times a month just to make sure I can still get another job if I need to. I am not professional leetcoder, but good enough if I need to in addition to my experience that has been good enough so far.

His point is why bother do the former when the latter is how you get the next job?

Because leetcode is way more boring than making things? Also you learn a lot more by trying to do a good job and working with smart people, they are just not that easy to bring out in an interview.

That being said if you think it’s right for you, go for it.

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

#168

Post by colmvp »

I'm going through the process right now and I think my favorite one was an interview with a company that basically asked me to review some mock code which had nothing to do with their business just to get a sense of a) my thought process, b) see if I really understood the language I said I knew, and c) could communicate with another engineer.

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

#169

Post by voodootrucker »

lambda_obrien wrote: post #163
tomcat27 wrote: post #31

30 years ago software engineering was probably a few bunch of technical skills. Now it's a very big spectrum, no individual knows everything. Someone applying to search quality team at Google that works on search algorithm really wants someone who knows algorithms.. but that may not be the case for a web of app developer. but the same app developer needs to know have algorithmic sense to do some performance tuning. T…

I agree and also don't get it: I barely write real code in my day job as the only coder on a project I own. I mostly go in, make notes on what looks bad, then fix it later, but the majority of the work isn't writing code and sometimes even I have to look up the proper `case` statement syntax or something. I can imagine being nervous, going in to do FizzBuzz, and bombing it, even as someone who has coded since I was 1…

I was a teacher for a laughably short time, and I think what you are talking about would be called an "authentic performance task". Also, I think what interviewers are attempting is called "assessment", and I can say these tests are the absolute laziest version of it.

Genuine assessment is very hard. I worked at a leading bootcamp you would know the name of and was asked by $BIGCO to create a one dimensional assessment for all (guessing) 10000 of their programmers, so they would know who to fire. I refused. It isn't that simple.

I think a company like hackerank likely got that contract.

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

#170

Post by bentcorner »

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 optimist in me says that cloud gaming will expand the category, not move it from local to cloud. Cloud gaming can't beat the laws of physics, and cloud hardware isn't free. So action/fps games will always have a home on local hardware.

But cloud games have an advantage too and maybe we'll see new kinds of games/experiences that are not possible with local PCs.

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