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

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

#451

Post by shawnz »

abj wrote: post #413
the-dude wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are describing a labor union.

I agree, I avoided using the word union. In an ideal world, this would be a union. In (what I worry might be) the real world, the word union conjures unhelpful barriers to action. I'm less interested in fighting idealogical battles. I'm more interested in achieving a practical goal - getting a large group of people to say no to leetcode. My guess is more people will say no to leetcode if they think of it as a general…

In an ideal world the HR department would be considerate of every employee's needs and there would be no need for unions. But in practice the incentive structure of the HR department doesn't allow that, so you need a competing incentive structure to balance things out (the union). Neither can achieve the goal perfectly on their own.

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

#452

Post by emddudley »

astrea wrote: post #426
drchopchop wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big problem is that companies (especially FAANG) are wasting time having very senior devs do Leetcode-style shit, which is a false negative for people that don't balance binary trees and manually regex strings all day. This especially penalizes more experienced / older devs who don't have time to LC grind (of which I'm also one), and introduces unconscious selection bias. Certainly there are other ways to verify…

Your comment inspired me to ask a question I've had for a while. My background is not CS, it's computer engineering. So I didn't have any education in the fancy algorithms that you'll find in these interviews. Is that expected or did I miss something?

I also went to school for CE and although we did have some algorithmic and data structures classes, I don't think they were as in-depth as the CS curriculum.

For example, the only time I ever encountered red-black trees was in the context of prepping for software interviews.

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

#453

Post by abj »

fabatka wrote: post #445
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…

Why not just publicly collect the companies that are known to not ask applicants to "invert a binary tree"? This would generate an incentive for companies. The data could be community-driven, but of course that risks sufficiently big players fudging the input data (sort of like the fake reviews on e.g. Amazon). Even so, it may be possible to detect which companies are faking it.

A list is good idea. Here's one of the main lists. https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

This site would basically be the same list - with the added goal of explicitly filtering employees and employers who want to hire this way.

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

#454

Post by 121789 »

astrea wrote: post #426
drchopchop wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big problem is that companies (especially FAANG) are wasting time having very senior devs do Leetcode-style shit, which is a false negative for people that don't balance binary trees and manually regex strings all day. This especially penalizes more experienced / older devs who don't have time to LC grind (of which I'm also one), and introduces unconscious selection bias. Certainly there are other ways to verify…

Your comment inspired me to ask a question I've had for a while. My background is not CS, it's computer engineering. So I didn't have any education in the fancy algorithms that you'll find in these interviews. Is that expected or did I miss something?

I have the same background and I think you either missed something, or your degree was much more EE focused. I had the required data structures + algorithms classes as part of my computer engineering curriculum

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

#455

Post by the-dude »

shawnz wrote: post #446
abstractbarista wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you expect to establish/coordinate such a union without any funding?

In NL unions negotiate central contract terms for all employees in certain sectors. The unions are funded by their members, but the result is for everybody.

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

#456

Post by kyawzazaw »

fabatka wrote: post #445
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…

Why not just publicly collect the companies that are known to not ask applicants to "invert a binary tree"? This would generate an incentive for companies. The data could be community-driven, but of course that risks sufficiently big players fudging the input data (sort of like the fake reviews on e.g. Amazon). Even so, it may be possible to detect which companies are faking it.

You mean something like this?

https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

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

#457

Post by drchopchop »

astrea wrote: post #426
drchopchop wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big problem is that companies (especially FAANG) are wasting time having very senior devs do Leetcode-style shit, which is a false negative for people that don't balance binary trees and manually regex strings all day. This especially penalizes more experienced / older devs who don't have time to LC grind (of which I'm also one), and introduces unconscious selection bias. Certainly there are other ways to verify…

Your comment inspired me to ask a question I've had for a while. My background is not CS, it's computer engineering. So I didn't have any education in the fancy algorithms that you'll find in these interviews. Is that expected or did I miss something?

Depends on how much CS you were exposed to, I guess? Leetcode problems generally involve: DFS/BFS search, memoization, dynamic programming, various types of sorting, hash tables, etc... all baked into annoying edge-case-y problems that are difficult to rapidly solve under a timer when someone's staring at you.

Vast experience in compilers, embedded systems, functional languages, graphics, dev ops, or cloud technologies will be of no use. (Perhaps it will be later, if you get to a systems arch interview step.)

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

#458

Post by abj »

kokey wrote: post #421
bananaface wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm with you on this. That said, something like this is happening anyway it will just take a while to play out. If companies keep interviewing like this, it will keep on selecting in a certain way and basically exclude people who aren't willing or able to play this game. This will impact on the company's products in the long run but the problem will be hard to notice if the company sits on a lot of money still, until…

You're right that it's happening anyway and will take a while to play out. I'm interested in hurrying that change along if possible. I'd also like to give the people who aren't willing or able to play it more of an alternative.

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

#459

Post by kokey »

cambalache wrote: post #75
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…

The moment the MBA types discovered there were plenty of VC money to get if you exploit the socially inept nerds it was game over.

I guess for some people the social part is either painful or difficult so for them it's easier to just become masters at the leetcode game.

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

#460

Post by diablerouge »

emddudley wrote: post #452
astrea wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment inspired me to ask a question I've had for a while. My background is not CS, it's computer engineering. So I didn't have any education in the fancy algorithms that you'll find in these interviews. Is that expected or did I miss something?

I also went to school for CE and although we did have some algorithmic and data structures classes, I don't think they were as in-depth as the CS curriculum. For example, the only time I ever encountered red-black trees was in the context of prepping for software interviews.

I graduated from a CS program 6 months ago, and encountered red black trees in just one of my courses, so your experience isn't too different I think.
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