That is a very recurrent topic in HN first page, but it is, for me, the first time it was perfectly summarized:
"For the moment, then, experience seems to count for nothing: it's all about how much time you can spend on Leetcode."
“I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
311–320 of 731 posts
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#312A 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…
What about a pair-programming session? Even having failed some pair-programming interviews, I've felt at least like it was a fair assessment. It's an equal time investment between myself and the company, working on something pertinent to what I would be doing, in a realistic environment.
Contrast to whiteboard interviews where I've been assessed on how to calculate the number of moves of a knight on a chessboard given position X to position Y on a whiteboard in front of three people as a front-end developer. Contrast to take-home interviews which basically function as a way for the interviewing company to save on time and money by putting the whole time-investment on the interviewee.
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a point to "staying current" beyond chances in future interviews. Imagine working at a company that has basically found its niche, is doing well, just not growing much so only hiring really slowly. Everybody around you has been there for 20+ years. Everybody working like 20-30 years ago. This kind of bubble is dangerous, not just for the employees' future chances on the job market, but for the company itself…
I don't think it's a strong sign of complacency. I think people just don't do toy problems involve coding breadth first searches or determining bipartite graphs. How often to people really write dynamic programming algos in 45 minutes. They don't - they think and tinker. Algorithms can be beautiful to code but most of the time is not spent on this sort of thing. It's fixing null pointer exceptions or parsing json req…
Please. Neither the original article nor my comment where about interviews asking to implement a breadth first search. That's a different topic.
This was about him having to learn C# since it wasn't really around 20 years ago. And having to polish up Python cause it was very different 20 years ago. And other programming practices. You definitely need to stay up to date on the stuff that's relevant to your job. Not because of interviews, but because .. it's your job. If you prepare for an interview and notice that's what's holding you back, then you definitely started to grow complaceny in your job. And maybe your environment made you become that way, then it's not a good environment.
If you are up to date on this, then writing a BFS from scratch or debugging a null pointer issue or even json will be a piece of cake. Interview questions are an excuse to have a technical conversation, not to see if you remember some algo from school.
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#314It's easy to complain without giving a better alternative. I see these kind of articles on HN all the time. But nobody really gives a better alternative. Same in this article: "In the past, when I was interviewing myself, I would come across large numbers of really smart candidates all the time." So how did he know they were smart? So anyone with experience in interviewing candidates have a better alternative than le…
Pair-programming session building a small "feature" that's relevant to what you do for a living. It's almost like a mutual assessment between two engineers in a real-world scenario.
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#315The 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…
Have you tried the "Who wants to be hired section?" in HN, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25266287
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can't do a sort, how will be be able to do more high level complex things?
I think testing whether someone can recall the implementation of quick sort and has practiced writing it quickly is not really testing for building complexity or solving problems. It’s testing for practiced solutions of memorized algorithms and a bit of role play. I get there’s some IQ challenge to preparing this and it’s hard to evaluate skill, but I don’t think this tests much beyond that. Want to test true basic p…
Note that koonsolo never mentioned quicksort, only sort. You can easily make it a newbie question by just accepting any sort that returns a correct output, even with a quadratic complexity in the best case. Any programmer should be able to write that in less than 10min.
And as the post you answered to alluded to, the point of the question is really just to filter out candidates who can't even write simple code, just like fizzbuzz. That's the kind of question you could ask in a first round, and then proceed to more relevant questions.
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#317Unless 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…
> Professional Interviewers
It is such a tragedy for our industry. Personally, I don't participate. And encourage everyone to opt out.
I want, and do, spend all my efforts in delivering best performing, most secure real products, making customers happy and the infrastructure and code maintainable. I have as much impostor syndrome as anyone (or probably more than most) but very slowly over many years and long string of managers who gush about my performance and always give me highest possible reviews, I've come to accept (if not actually believe) that I'm very good at what I do.
And yet, no way I could ever "pass" one of these whiteboard algorithm monkeydance interviews. A company wants to judge based on nonsense that has nothing to do with the job? Then you don't get to hire me, a proven expert with a track record of success. Enjoy hiring a team of people who've spent their life doing artificial exercises and (as a consequence) haven't put much effort into building actual products.
I do what I can to improve the industry hiring. I do interview lots of candidates and will never do so via whiteboard monkeydance. I interview based on their experience doing real work, based on the resume. I encourage everyone to do the same and put and end (at least slightly reduce) the leetcode nonsense that's killing the hiring culture.
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#318Earlier 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…
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 thin…
> 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.
Yes it is possible, but in practice one will (sometimes have to) spend most of the time with devices/technologies that make one die inside a little.
Part of the problem is that "doing the right thing" is often not competitively viable.
This may not be specific to IT only, either.
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#319Unless 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…
> Google kills products that make customers and engineers happy and doesn't spend enough effort to make them better.
Small correction here: The non-paying users are not their customers. So it’s understandable that they kill all products where they don’t have any ROI. As another user here put it recently: Ads are like a hose where money pours out. And they’re desperately looking for another such hose.
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#320My personal low was when I applied to a big European fintech and they sent their standard “IQ test” right away. Mind you I was applying to a tech lead or engineering manager job. Needless to say I failed. But I’m not playing those stupid games anymore. Be aware that there’re plenty of jobs where interview process is sane.