“I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews” • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by Olreich » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:23 PM UTC

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 don’t understand this line of reasoning at all. There’s only so many tricks available in these interviews. I’m sure I’m biased, but if you know how to program, programming interviews are pretty easy.

I think if you are becoming a Professional Leetcoder, you’re still learning how to do basic programming.

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

#352

Post by alisonkisk » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:23 PM UTC

lambda_obrien wrote: post #181

voodootrucker wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am not expert enough to weigh in heavily on what's the best way to do that, but I feel like "software engineer" is just a title to make us feel great while we assemble our components much like the workers on an auto manufacturing line, but with a tiny bit more education and day-to-day work differences. However, with all the low-code and other tools which make it easier to write software and deploy it (crappy softwa…

If you ever met an assembly line worker or even watched a "how it's made" video you'd realize how absurd this claim is.

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

#353

Post by vonmoltke » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:24 PM UTC

twblalock wrote: post #153

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 workin…

> 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.

Then, once they put your name in, you get a Lettcode-style interview. That's the way every company I have worked for has worked.

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

#354

Post by exdsq » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:26 PM UTC

ra7 wrote: post #82

jdreaver wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is inconsistent with my experience in my most recent round of interviews. I interviewed at a few places at a senior/staff level, and most of my interviews were behavioral, architectural, or discussions about past work. The few leetcode-style or coding questions I had were easily prepared for from my ~40 hours of interview-specific coding prep. There is zero chance I would have gotten those interviews or passed t…

I completely agree with his, as someone who has recently completed several interviews for senior level. I used to think everything depended on Leetcode questions, but I was surprised to find out how much of the focus was on design, past experience and leadership. Leetcode is "easy" to crack with some (considerable) amount of hard work and they know that. But you can't make up past experience in behavioral interviews…

I've noticed the more experienced I get the less technical the questions are. My last interview was just a general chat about type systems, the good and bad of Haskell, why I have been using common lisp recently in my spare time, etc... No coding questions, no leetcode, no code walkthroughs -- I really enjoyed it.

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

#355

Post by kemiller2002 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:31 PM UTC

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 understand where you are coming from, but I honestly disagree. I always try and do the best job possible, but I don't do it for the company, I do it for me. I think of it as training to make myself better. I am always looking out for my skills and experience, so when the next opportunity comes around, I'm ready to take it. You could say that it's resume stuffing, but I don't think of it and mean it that way. I want to see how things work and practice what I know. I want to incorporate that knowledge and associate it with my past experiences to figure out new things.

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

#356

Post by andrew_ » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:35 PM UTC

koonsolo wrote: post #272

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…

You can't believe how many people are unable to do the basic things like sort an array. These kind of questions is not to see how smart you are, it is to weed out all the ones who don't event get the most basic parts of programming. And I can assure you as someone doing a shitload of interviews, that a huge part of candidates doesn't understand the basics of programming such as sorting an array. If all candidates had…

You're not interested in the candidate, you're interested in litmus tests. Not the kind of place I ever want to work.

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

#357

Post by verelo » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:40 PM UTC

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…

> Companies are trying to hire more outside of California in order to lower wages across the board.

California isn't the industry...

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

#358

Post by zcw100 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

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…

This is the result of a war that was fought two decades ago and the hackers/coders/sysadmins, the people to built things, lost and lost big. It was the dot-com crash. Looking back it's absurd. Everyone was convinced there was this big bubble and everyone got caught up in the irrational exuberance of the future of computing. But was it really? The real financial damage was done by the likes of Enron and Anderson consulting. If it was so irrational why did that supposed bubble give rise to some of the largest companies that now exist? Because it wasn't. That's why we spend the next two decades wringing our hands and fretting that there was another bubble right around the corner. This never happened. Why? Because there wasn't a bubble in the first place to worry about repeating.

What did happen is a ton of people lost their jobs and those people, passionate about what they do, kept right on doing it in the form of open source software. Google, flush with cash, hovered up talent for bargain basement prices. The board room got the message that software was eating the world and if they didn't do something quick the people to wrote the software and built the systems might want a say in how those companies were run. So they outsourced what they could and doubled up what they couldn't. The message was clear. I don't need you. I've got a second one of you ready to go. The waged a war on GPL calling it "viral" and "insidious" and convinced everyone it would be much better to use more liberal licenses that would allow them to build and sell products.

The war was lost when they convinced you that management was "icky" and you didn't want that boring old stuff. You wanted to be coding so they hired the MBA to be the scrum master. The result is you were cut out of the decision making process. Your only input was on a technical level and even there you were kept a close eye on. Some people would even proudly exclaim that they liked this system because they thought they were winners based on their slightly higher than average salary all the wile cranking out multi-million or even billion dollar software for someone else. Doug Cutting, the creator of Hadoop and basically everything that was to become Cloudera was only given a job. They made so much money even they were embarrassed but only embarrassed enough to allow him to keep working for them.

You lost and they won and this is the result. You're made to jump through these absurd hoops because it's cheaper to create these pathological systems and waste your time than to do something more efficient.

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

#359

Post by yodsanklai » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

I've just landed a job at a FAANG company. Some random subjective comments based on my experience:

- it was hard work

- there was no way I could have passed these interviews without all the work.

- my past experience and education barely helped me for the interview

- it's not enough to be able to solve the problems, you need to be able to solve them on the spot, without much thinking, in an interview context

- I passed system design quite easily, even though I have little real-life experience with these systems. It would have been easy for interviewer to catch me off guard on real-life technical details, but they didn't care

- these companies (FB and Google) gave me a chance (even several ones), even though my resume is slightly atypical, and I'm on the older side (mid forties)

- Recruiters and interviewers were friendly and respectful. Overall they gave me a very good impression of these companies

- The whole process is very random

- I did learn some things while practicing. Not the best use of my time, but not totally lost either

- Algorithmic questions were harder at Google compared to Facebook

- The whole process was more fluid at FB (team-matching at google took forever, I was even ghosted by a recruiter after she told me I passed).

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

#360

Post by castlecrasher2 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #102

jdreaver wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is inconsistent with my experience in my most recent round of interviews. I interviewed at a few places at a senior/staff level, and most of my interviews were behavioral, architectural, or discussions about past work. The few leetcode-style or coding questions I had were easily prepared for from my ~40 hours of interview-specific coding prep. There is zero chance I would have gotten those interviews or passed t…

oddly (if you see my sibling comment) I just got a job where they didn't ask me any technical questions. They just asked me about my coding philosophy. I guess they just looked at my github? Dunno.

I'm only four jobs into my career, and the two that didn't ask me any technical questions ended up being either boring or a quagmire of non-technical leaders attempting to manage technical processes. Hopefully yours turns out better.