“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”

#401

Post by toomanybeersies » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

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…

I have a (metaphorical) rolodex filled with contractors who I've enjoyed working with, which I will always check first before even thinking about ringing an agency.

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

#402

Post by SketchySeaBeast » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:27 PM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #162

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And hopefully it's not Byzantine.

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

#403

Post by bluedino » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:28 PM UTC

throwitaway1235 wrote: post #289

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…

"Few people own desktop computers anymore." I will own a desktop computer until the day I die. Excellent post too.

I was hired in at a company a couple years ago. My soon-to-be manager asked, "What should I order you for a computer?"

I responded with, "Whatever you guys buy - Dell, Lenovo. A 14" laptop and an external monitor would be fine."

He torted, "I've never seen anyone be productive on a laptop. Nobody here uses laptops. I'll get you a desktop with 2 monitors."

After I started, I notice he did almost all of his work from a conference room, using a Surface Book remoted into a desktop in his office.

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

#404

Post by throw1234651234 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

yodsanklai wrote: post #359

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 pass…

"and I'm on the older side (mid forties)"

Thank you very much for listing this. I wonder how life is for older candidates in these jobs.

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

#405

Post by decafninja » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #372

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…

>until I make it into such an "endgame" company. Unless you're close to retirement and don't really need the money, it's unlikely you'll know when you're there. Companies change and/or get into trouble, managers change, projects get canceled, etc. I've been at companies I spent quite a few years at and I still came close to quitting for various reasons (and eventually did). I'd submit there is no predictable endgame…

You're right that "endgame" is different from person to person, and also in the same person's lifetime.

My current company was something I would have considered endgame at the start of my career. Now it's not.

A company I'd consider to be currently endgame (say, FAANG), may not be 10 years later.

For the sake of discussion, as I mentioned in my original comment, I would simply define an endgame company as one where I'd be satisfied staying for a while without further ambition about finding the next great thing. Where I'd be content doing a helluva great job and not even think about leetcode.

My best friend ended up at one of the FAANGs a few years ago and is doing exactly that. Although he is now afraid that his leetcode skills have atrophied and he'd fail interviews horribly if for whatever (involuntary) reason he ends up having to look for another job. But he has no short term intention of leaving and thus hasn't been grinding leetcode for a while.

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

#406

Post by danjac » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

robviren wrote: post #361

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…

It's because the business people got interested and are increasingly taking leadership roles. As an engineer who has shifted over to the product management side I can safely say business people suck fun out of stuff for a living. Margins, cost savings, metrics to manage, each and every slow step of creating a new, less fun, normal erodes a culture built on making "Something cool" or "Just for fun". Worse yet is when…

Agile/Scrum was the biggest bait-and-switch con out there - developers thinking the methodologies would empower them while in fact being a vector for the worst excesses of micromanagement. I feel less empowered now than I did in my earliest days as a junior dev.

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

#407

Post by gwbas1c » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:31 PM UTC

runawaybottle wrote: post #262

gwbas1c wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I typically do assignments from prospective employers in half the alotted time. I don't waste my time trying to build a leetcode / hackerank profile. Edit: Compative coding has very little to do with industrial strength software development.

Honest question. Do you take adhd medication?

No.

I had to quit coffee earlier this year because a single cup in the morning was keeping me up at night.

But, let's be honest: One of the questions that I solved was basically "detect if a string is an anagram of another string."

So cat -> act: true, cat -> dog: false.

This was just a matter of treating the string as a series of characters, sorting them, and putting them back into a string. Then, if it's an anagram, the two sorted strings match.

Can you solve that in under an hour? Specifically, can you solve that in under an hour when you can choose from 20 popular programming languages and unit tests are provided?

More specifically, if you've been professionally programming every day for ~20 years, can you solve that in an hour?

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

#408

Post by programmertote » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

yodsanklai wrote: post #359

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 pass…

If you don't mind sharing, where do you learn/read-up about the system design questions? I am not a software architect although I designed and built small modules/libraries of my own, but I don't think it's sufficient to learn about system design questions found in interviews (not just FAANG's).

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

#409

Post by st1x7 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

emeraldd wrote: post #391

st1x7 wrote: post #380

- It's an anonymous source claiming 15 years of experience and technical proficiency but somehow still had to relearn basic concepts. I'm not buying it. - I would much rather do general computer science problems than have to answer questions about the framework that happens to be trendy this year or have to spend days on evaluation projects. General CS questions also allow people to transition between domains and sub…

I'd buy it. - 17 years ago I was pretty good with Microchip PIC microcontroller assembly. (Haven't touched it since.) Today, I'd have to pull the datasheets and spend a few days re-reading them to remember much of any of it. - 9 years ago I worked heavily with a large, legacy perl code base and wrote a bunch of internal web apps in perl. Again, I haven't touched it since and again it would take me a while to get back…

I think that you're being to generous to the author. Your examples are true but a job interview doesn't ask you to refamiliazire yourself with a codebase or a tech stack, it asks whether you're familiar with algorithms, data structures and basic logic in any C-style language. That's a way more general skill than the details of your old assembly codebase.

The article omits what the author's experience is and when they say "I've spent 15 years working as a developer and a strategist at leading investment banks", I suspect that their role was much heavier on the strategist side and only now are they realising that they haven't been a developer for the past 15 years.

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

#410

Post by _qulr » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

bananaface wrote: post #375

abj wrote: post #370

What if we form a group/site that refuses to do leetcode interviews? This seems like a classic coordination problem. If enough people refuse, companies will have their talent pool limited. We could use this group to help match companies and developers who don't want to leetcode. If it's true that leetcode filters out great developers, than companies who 'can't find talent' should be able to use our group to find some…

Won't work because there's a giant incentive to defect and no way to effectively police it.

Does individual defection even matter? The purpose of this isn't to put pressure on job seekers, it's to put pressure on employers. The whole idea of "policing" the members seems strange to me.

If you're the type of job seeker who has no objection to leetcode, you wouldn't join. And if you're the type of employer who refuses to do anything else, this would be the last place you'd look for hiring.

The goal is to publicly show employers how many "refuseniks" there are. The situation right now is that refusal only happens privately and anecdotally.