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

431–440 of 731 posts

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

#431

Post by dr-detroit »

sharker8 wrote: post #399
IanSanders wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Some of the most inspirational stories in tech are along the lines of "I had this terrible job where we had to use tech X so I wrote adapter Y in more cool tech Z and automated the whole thing and took long lunches."

Everyone on HN is gunning to be the next SF billionaire they abhor the kind of jobs/work that involve tedium.

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

#432

Post by Ragib_Zaman »

gwbas1c wrote: post #407
runawaybottle wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ok sure. This explains a lot. If that's the problem you're getting, then it is indeed testing basic programming skills. But the general landscape has gone far beyond this. Nowadays this solution would probably not get you the job. Instead of sorting, you should create hashmaps storing counts of each character and checking equality of the hashmaps. And if you didn't produce the hashmaps solution within 10 minutes, you would not be competitive with the hoardes of people drilling these problems and thus producing the hashmaps solution within 5 minutes. What most people here are complaining about are being expected to solve significantly harder problems within tight timeframes. If you are interested in what these ridiculous problems can be, go to Leetcode and browse the "Hard" problems.

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

#433

Post by driverdan »

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…

> What if we form a group/site that refuses to do leetcode interviews?

Why does it need to be a group? Refuse to do them, explain why, and move on to the next company. Talented developers are in high demand. There are plenty of other opportunities.

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

#434

Post by yodsanklai »

programmertote wrote: post #408
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).

A great starting point is "designing data-intensive applications". Then you can read about various designs here and there.

But you don't need to go that very deep. What they ask is very specific and (unfortunately) you're better off going through 10-20 typical interview questions and their solutions.

Typical questions are "how would you design Google News/Twitter/...". There are many resources available, all of this is discussed on leetcode or interview preparation sites.

It's not hard, but I'd recommend to prepare for this well-before your interviews.

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

#435

Post by neverminder »

okareaman wrote: post #376
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…

> - 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 Sounds like they're looking for assembly line programmers - crank out the code, pass it off, then on to the next piece of code without pause. This would be a nightmare for me. The high salaries and prestige of these companies definitely would not be worth it. I'm not neur…

It's because when companies get that big and famous they no longer need that many creative individual thinkers, they need obedient drones. With disproportionately large numbers of applicants they get, they are able to make you jump through all the hoops they put in front of you, because if you won't there are thousands of others who will.

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

#436

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#437

Post by carapace »

I think a big part of the problem is that a lot of folks who are okay at programming but not really really good get into positions of power one way or another and then sort of gum up the works.

Story time...

I worked (briefly) at a large company that had hit hard times and then found new investors, so most people had left and then they were hiring new folks (like me.)

One meeting the CTO comes in and sketches out his idea for our new infrastructure on the board and, lo and behold, he's reinvented ethernet.

My immediate supervisor gave me a piece of code he had written using a state machine. You know that feeling when you read some code and it's like "am I an idiot or is it this code?" The state machine graph was:

    A -> B -> C -> D
He used a FSM library for this. I replaced it all with about ten lines of code and bounced it back to him. I got the feeling after that that he didn't like me, but wtf am I supposed to do? Dude's my boss but he doesn't know what a state machine is.

(I was ready to quit, talked to HR on Friday, Monday they laid me off. Bullet dodged IMO.)

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

#438

Post by IshKebab »

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…

> We still tolerate PhD Comp Sci algorithm questions for frontend developer gigs

Go and look at some Javascript answers on StackOverflow, and then consider why lots of websites are so slow!

Some random examples:

* Deduplicating an array; top answer is N^2: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9229932/265521

* Deduplicating array again: top answer is still N^2!: https://stackoverflow.com/a/14438954/265521

I've seen loads of similar examples. Maybe there is code that doesn't use any algorithms at all but it's probably not very interesting code.

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

#439

Post by abstractbarista »

the-dude wrote: post #396
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…

You are describing a labor union.

I'm fine with voluntary unions that don't want to take my money. I just don't want to be forced to pay up to a mafia 'protector' just to work in a position.

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

#440

Post by dvtrn »

yodsanklai wrote: post #425
throw1234651234 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

This is also one of my concern. Most of the interviewers were in their 20/30s and so is everybody on their "career" web pages and presentation documents. However, in the team I'll join, at least two people are about my age or older. What I can tell is that never in the recruiting process did I feel discriminated against. Once you're in the loop, their main concern seems to be how well you perform in the interviews. I…

EDIT: not sure why you're down-voted. Ageism is a thing and a legitimate source of concern.

There’s some folks here who REALLY don’t like talking about true ways our industry can fail and in some cases has failed at being decent and fair and ethical to people of protected classes, or just in general.

Post reply on HN