“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”

#461

Post by okareaman » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 3:32 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #420

okareaman wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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…

One of my big impressions of Go is that it's designed to facilitate exactly that. I've also heard comments in that vein.

Exactly: (from https://arto.s3.amazonaws.com/notes/go)

"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they're not researchers. They're typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They're not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt."

Rob Pike [1] "It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical."

Rob Pike [2]

[1] http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Fro... [2] http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article

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

#462

Post by myth_drannon » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 3:32 PM UTC

py_or_dy wrote: post #183

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…

Goodness, you and the OP have really hit the nail on the head. I spent the last 5 years quite happy at a simple dev shop. Then they hired a bunch of people, paid them more than me, and allowed them complete free reign to write what ever kind of code on some brand new projects. After a year of this, one person quit mid-project, another died mysteriously (covid?), and then another just recently quit. My boss expected m…

It's a numbers game, learn from mistakes and continue to the next interview. Eventually you have seen them all and you will pass the gatekeeping. Steel in forged in fire. After hundreds of bullshit interviews, nothing surprises me anymore and it's just all automatic process now.

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

#463

Post by ghostpepper » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 3:32 PM UTC

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…

To be blunt, most of my observations of traditional unions have given me the impression that they prevent the hardest workers from advancing and protect mediocre workers who do the bare minimum. The incentives appear to create a negative work environment for those who do want to excel, even in traditional union careers such as teaching and nursing.

I agree with you that the trend of asking Leetcode (or any rote-learning) style problems hurts candidates. I have no moral problem with software engineers bargaining collectively to reverse a trend that is harmful to the industry.

That being said, I think there is a tendency for organizations created around a cause to find themselves rudderless when that cause is finally achieved. The urge to not disband and instead look for another cause is often too strong, even if they don't feel quite as strongly about the new cause.

I genuinely would like to know how traditional unions obtained their negative stigma. My guess is they were started with equally noble aims.

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

#464

Post by SamuelAdams » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 3:33 PM UTC

throwaway201103 wrote: post #282

koonsolo wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would any company want me to write an array sort instead of calling the .sort() method on the standard array class? Is that really the sort of thing they want their devs to code and debug and maintain by hand?

It demonstrates a basic understanding of underlying principles.

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

#465

Post by driverdan » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

cableshaft wrote: post #297

bit_logic wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good strategy for senior engineers to avoid the leetcode interviews. And to any recruiters and hiring managers reading this, there’s the other side of this. If you want responses from high quality senior engineers, then start your LinkedIn email with “NO Leetcode”. Response rates will likely increase by a lot.

I very rarely respond to recruiters cold emailing me, but if it had NO LEETCODE in the subject line I'd probably respond to every single one.

Same here. I ignore all cold emails or mark them as spam. If I saw something like NO LEETCODE in the subject I'd be likely to read it. If it sounded like a reasonable place to work I'd share the job with my network.

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

#466

Post by mywittyname » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

vsareto wrote: post #441

neverminder wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NGL, I'd jump through hoops for 250k + other compensation Part of why this has stuck around for so long is that so many people are willing to do that because it's a life-altering amount of money

Plus the prestige of being able to walk into your next job and captain the ship. I've been at a few places that hired former Googlers, and they were all treated like gods.

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

#467

Post by SamuelAdams » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 3:39 PM UTC

alltakendamned wrote: post #306

jolux wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the only way it could possibly go away for good is database libraries that don’t support dynamic SQL. But you almost always need the flexibility at some point, and SQL is so powerful that taking it off the table is hard to justify.

just use prepared statements instead of string concantenation to build your SQL statements.

Yes, there's lots of ways to fix SQL injection. I'm more surprised that after knowing about this vulnerability for 20+ years, its STILL lost on many developers. You and I pick up on it immediately, but there's (apparently) a lot of developers who think the code is "good enough, works for me" and ship it to production.

So it needs to be asked for in interviews, and if you find it and discuss it you're apparently one of the "better" programmers. The bar for being a passable programmer is literally on the floor.

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

#468

Post by chapium » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 3:42 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…

Whats driving business types to think leetcode is a good test? This should be an easy conversation with HR. I think software engineers want this arbitrary barrier.

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

#469

Post by driverdan » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 3:44 PM UTC

millstone wrote: post #57

The 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,…

> Facebook's hiring pipeline is optimized for new grads, but its hiring needs are senior engineers.

The hiring process should be based on the position and candidate. If you're applying the same process you use for new grads to someone with 15 years experience you're doing it wrong. FB should be capable of doing this correctly.

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

#470

Post by snarf21 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 3:45 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…

This process is all theater. We really need some kind of certification process instead.

I'm a while out of school and one interview I went on had a requirement for a live coding session. The ask was to implement red/black trees from scratch despite the fact that they have an Angular app with MySQL on the backend. I took this as a blessing. I don't want to work at a place where they think this is a good way to hire people.