Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.efinancialcareers.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 731 posts

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

#241

Post by asdff »

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.

I've tried out Google's beta with assasin's creed, and the results weren't promising. I had gigabit fiber and while it worked pretty well for the most part, I still got quite a few gamebreaking lag spikes and fps slowdowns. It stuttered like a youtube video: freezing, then resuming in 144p quality which made the in game text completely unreadable on my screen. And that's on a beefy internet connection, imagine the situation for the median American or someone reliant on a mobile data plan. People can scarcely tolerate playing a game with high ping as it is.

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

#242

Post by asdff »

jobu wrote: post #228
dx87 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I burned myself out really bad trying to go above and beyond for a few years at various companies. Just ended up frustrated, making no more money than people coasting in the same position, and still got laid off during downsizing instead of the people who spent time playing office politics and going out to happy hour with the supervisor. I feel kind of guilty now though, because I actually managed to get hired…

In my experience "going above and beyond" tends to get you more work and responsibility for roughly the same pay. I did get the occasional 5% annual raise instead of the standard 2-3% that most of my coworkers received. Even then the raises were usually more dependent on how well the company performed vs how well I performed.

I've noticed this a few times in my career and have had to start slowing myself down at times. If I deliver in a day instead of the expected two for example, I don't get that second day off, I get twice as much work and get paid the same for it. The harder I work, the less I make. If they want me to bust my ass and sacrifice sleep I need to be given hazard pay.

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

#244

Post by TeeMassive »

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…

Glimmers of hope:

* Webasm is becoming mainstream, everything will be rewritten or tweaked.

* Browsers and emails are archaic technologies.

* Blockchain based tech is changing the game in many industries.

* Miniaturization and portable / bionic devices will mean bare metal optimization will be a must.

* There is a growing movement of people getting tired and scared of centralized tech from both side of the aisle. Decentralization is coming and having neighbors connecting each other via underground Ethernet cables or Ubiquity bridge is becoming more and more common than you think. It might only be "a few university students", but that's also how the Web started.

* More and more applications will require real time processing. Examples: driving cars, drones, video games (lol@stadia), AR, VR and the fusion of scientific fields and tech from biology to military.

* There is an inherent collective and potentially civilization ending risk in having only a few corporations having the means of producing tech, especially with a more and more uncertain world. Initiative like Open Risk initiative is a sign of that. It will not be surprising seeing open fabs project popping up like it did for the 3D printing, especially with patents from the 2000s expiring. Remember, a 2005 machine is more than enough for email and Facebook.

* There are whole industries with unmanageable technical debt which failed to exploit the processing power of modern electronics.

* There are whole industries who need to get rid of their Java / Oracle stack.

* The performance gap only keeps on enlarging. A 2005 PC would struggle to run the Office suite, which is just a text editor with macros and UI.

* New solutions always provide new unintended problems to solve, that's just a fact.

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

#245

Post by thewebcount »

_9omd wrote: post #93
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…

Yes, it's extremely tired. FAANG companies are not dumb, they hire at scale and know how to find talented engineers using a rigorous/repeatable interview process. I think most of the complaints come from people who fail these interviews (I used to be one), and don't want to admit that maybe they're not good enough.

> FAANG companies are not dumb, they hire at scale and know how to find talented engineers using a rigorous/repeatable interview process.

Eh... maybe some do. My experience is that they hire people they already know. In fact that's how I got hired at a FAANG company. I had applied there many times and been rejected. Then I saw that a team where I was a great fit had hired someone I knew and had an opening. So rather than submit my resume through their job board, I sent it to him and he passed it on to the hiring manager. Most of the rest of the team got hired because they were all a team at another company that got cut. One of them got an interview and said, "Hey, I have about 20 coworkers who just lost their jobs and already know all the stuff you need for that new product you want to write. Why not hire them all?" And they did.

Sure, there are a few who went through the regular recruiting path. But many did not. I'd say on my team, most did not. (And they're all good engineers, too.)

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

#246

Post by Aeolun »

py_or_dy wrote: post #183
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…

Goodness, you and the OP have really hit the nail on the head. I spent the last 5 years quite happy at a simple dev shop. Then they hired a bunch of people, paid them more than me, and allowed them complete free reign to write what ever kind of code on some brand new projects. After a year of this, one person quit mid-project, another died mysteriously (covid?), and then another just recently quit. My boss expected m…

Yeah, this echoes my experiences interviewing. Spent 6 months looking a few years back

It’s just incredibly demotivating to hear all the self-professed hot shots shit all over your past 10 years of delivering unambiguous value because you don’t know that [] === ‘’ is true in Javascript.

I finally found a position that’s financially great, but it’s more in spite of their dev process than thanks to it.

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

#247

Post by [deleted] »

prh8 wrote: post #53

I was just griping about this earlier today. I'm in the interview process with a company, who has talked to me before, after being referred internally to do so. I've talked to them about technical problems I've solved in the past, discussed problem solving and approaches to optimization and architecture. Interview process has gone really well. They said the last thing is a code test, that they do through Hackerrank.…

[deleted]

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

#248

Post by tonyedgecombe »

gumby wrote: post #205
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…

> 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. I feel precisely the opposite: if you work somewhere with people you like working with (and who like working with you) then you will start t…

This is what I did for the first half of my career. It worked well for me because I worked in the same domain for my whole career. Shifting into consulting was easy because I had an address book of people who knew and trusted me.

I'm not sure if it would still work though as I've been working for myself for 22 years. It seems hiring has turned upside down since I last interviewed.

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

#249

Post by harimau777 »

aszen wrote: post #124
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 what about job satisfaction, not doing an actual good job and spending miserable time doing leetcode is not going to add much worth to my day to day happiness. I instead always suggest to do a good job regardless (note that doesn't mean doing long hours just working with care). There are more important things than career ladder like integrity, honesty, work ethic and meaningful work. Don't let societal policies c…

Life has a way of beating the ability to care about those things out of you.

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

#250

Post by runawaybottle »

jwmoz wrote: post #236

You don't have to do it. Depends on how desperate you are for it. I've had a successful 10+ year career in web dev in the UK. I've always avoided places that had a technical interview, it's a phobia of mine. I've landed multiple contracts without any technical interview, a couple of them from just an informal chat. I once kept rejecting an interview for a company that specified a tech test, then 6 months after they f…

The situation in America is that no name startups are doing the same type of interviews.
Post reply on HN