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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”

#171

Post by hated »

throwaway_goog wrote: post #63
chii wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the "best" endgame is to obtain enough saved capital to found your own (small?) business to which you can generate and capture value directly.

I did that and found that I hated it. There's a lot of bullshit that you have to deal with in a small business: incorporation papers, taxes, staying away from the zillions of people who try to scam or extort small business owners, sales, finances, etc. If you're wealthy enough that you don't really need revenue and can pay people for that, you'll likely find that being wealthy just exposes how money won't make you ha…

I actually enjoy working with all that bureaucracy because at least I know I'm not serving ads to people.

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

#172

Post by landtuna »

alltakendamned wrote: post #136
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…

> my resume gets no hits > Maybe someone will notice me there. I'm not sure if expecting them to come to you is a winning strategy. But you could get someone to review your CV to see if the presentation of it can be improved ? I also have more than 20 years of experience, and if anyone asks me more than a fleeting question on what I did in college, that would be a massive red flag for me. I feel that even if I'm new…

Thanks! I appreciate the feedback. I'll de-emphasize the remote focus, since I'm close enough to NYC that I'm willing to split my time.

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

#173

Post by voodootrucker »

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…

As a consultant to large orgs who was paid handsomely to fix the situation you describe, I can say that is exactly what they think, and also exactly wrong.

[edit] Many people in these orgs are doing exactly that. Having come in, diagnosed the ultimate crap that kept them on that 1 button for six months, helped give them the autonomy to do what was needed helped everyone involved, from the devs to the PMs to the division itself.

It's a common and insidious pattern, but even big companies benefit when it's broken.

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

#174

Post by Gunax »

romanhn wrote: post #120

In order to prepare for eng manager interviews a couple of years back, I quit my job and spent several months on Leetcode and system design. This is with 8 years of management experience at the time and many years without hands-on coding. I landed a FAANG job as a result, something I would have 100% not been able to accomplish without the prep, so I suppose it was worth the effort. The not-at-all-surprising end resul…

Perhaps just the hoop-jumping is itself a proper test. It shows you're willing to work hard towards a goal, and are at least reasonably smart.

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

#175

Post by llukas »

ip26 wrote: post #100
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…

Companies are trying to hire more outside of California in order to lower wages across the board This could turn out to be a very good thing for the country. It's a social & economic problem if all the money & opportunity are squeezed into just one metro.

Why did you assume those jobs will stay in US?

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

#176

Post by svrb »

tinkertamper wrote: post #76
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…

Recently I started trying something new for our interviews. I start with a phone interview that is more about discussing their background, expertise, what they need to feel productive, and explain the role. If I think they’d be a good culture and expertise fit, I send them something like this (I’ve made a few): https://gist.github.com/tywalch/cf60e4c942ab6a80e481f4ba6754... . It’s a small “api service” that represent…

TL;DR: you're testing for likability and other emotional response.

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

#178

Post by heyoni »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #151
adrianN wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I think the real issue remains latency. Gaming companies are using it but the users don’t want it. Try playing call of duty or doom over the network and it’s going to be a terrible experience.

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

#179

Post by tomcat27 »

voodootrucker wrote: post #169
lambda_obrien wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 assessme…

ewwww

Sounds like they want to rationalize firings in a way the blame is on the engineers.

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

#180

Post by voodootrucker »

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…

I'm not sure what language you work in the most, but based on the build issues I might guess c++, in which case I'd say check out conan central. It's still sad compared to other package managers, but if you're building c++ all day, it's a game changer.

https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/tree/master/r...

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