“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”

#701

Post by bradlys » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:13 PM UTC

cratermoon wrote: post #698

bradlys wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40 hours seems low to me if one wants to enter FAANG. Even if you’re familiar with the process and have prepped before. I’d expect 100 hours minimum for most candidates. Only exception would be those who interview regularly, do competitive programming regularly, and those who have to do algorithmic work regularly. Most people I know spend nights and weekends prepping for at least a month to a quarter.

I'm obviously biased because I don't consider FAANG to be a goal at all, either as a stepping stone or end game. There are much better things in life than a lot of money.

> There are much better things in life than a lot of money

Sure - but if you want to live in silicon valley, you will have to join FAANG or have startup riches (much more difficult) to have a "normal" life that you'd have elsewhere. You're not going to own a house in good school district with startup income.

If you live in BFE then whatever - maybe the 100%+ raise in income wouldn't affect your lifestyle. For most of us in SV, it has a very substantial increase in quality of life.

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

#702

Post by ddalex » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:24 PM UTC

okareaman wrote: post #594

shaftway wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the interviewer pool at Google. Other FAANGs might be different. I've had candidates ask me why we do this, and my answer is that once you're in the company, transferring to another job on the same ladder is fairly trivial and requires no technical re-interviews. I go on to describe how I've been around for 10 years and am on my 5th team. None of those transfers required any sort of technical re-check. Teams t…

I don't doubt that you're required to maintain your own code after you've checked it in for others to use ("pass it off") but have you always designed your own solution or have you had to implement designs by higher ups for some not insignificant percentage of the time?

not OP, but currently a manager at Google (full disclosure, opinions are my own, company is not involved, etc)

I fully expect that everybody at Google will create the designs for the problems they own, get the designs through peer review, work on implementing these designs, and verify that the solution is solved in process.

What changes with the seniority level is the scope of the designs - a junior may be expected to design their piece of code, only their module, a mid level is expected to design an entire subsystem while delegating individual modules, a senior is expected to design an entire system delegating the subsystems, etc. Of course, it's not so clear cut all the time, but the critical piece we have here is that - Everybody, at all levels, are expected to share expertise, knowledge and acumen in order to help others grow. When you put everything together it creates a nice cycle of constant growth pressure.

Absolutly I will not qualify anybody's work here as "droning", and if someone in my team would feel like that I would invite them to speak up and work together into making it better.

About the quality of people here, what has impressed me most is the uniform high level of competence and niceness. In other companies where I've worked the skills would more-or-less all over the place, but here it's uniform good. I'd rate Googlers consistently in top 20% of the teams where I've worked with before. Also everybody is so very nice, a real pleasure to be around and work together. I still haven't discovered how recruiting selects for this, but everybody constantly passes the airport test my in book.

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

#703

Post by jdally987 » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 1:48 AM UTC

rorykoehler wrote: post #377

anon9001 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, and as a result I try to work no more than 4 hours a day, preferably less. I take every possible opportunity to extend timelines, create buffer, and reduce scope. I'm highly incentivized to farm as much time as possible, so that's what I do. I try to target obscure projects that I already know how to do, where there's an assumption that nobody really knows how to do it because it's obscure. Complexity a…

This sums up perfectly why I’m pro universal basic income. How many people do this? Think of all the collective brain cycles wasted. We’re stealing from our future. You’re clearly smart and capable. Work you don’t find rewarding stole your motivation. If you could work on projects that reflect the world you want to live in you would create something much more valuable top society than whatever it is you’re half assin…

I'm not for UBI but I totally get & agree with the reasoning behind it; including yours here which I think is pretty dead on as to why it would be beneficial (in theory). In fact the "stealing from our future" part jumped out at me as similar to the way I think of societal debt cycles (the kind Ray Dalio talks about in his books - short-and long-term [~10yr; ~100yr] cyclical sine waves of waxing & waning [in/de]flation). You probably would avoid taking on a ton of debt during the peak of a given credit cycle (when rates are at their highest %), especially if you know you're simply fking yourself that much harder than if you were to take on the debt at some point in the future, when rates are much more likely to be low, and thus save you a ton of money in the long run.

Same thing with putting in extra effort at work. No reason to actually take on the extra hustle if it pays off minimally when all is said & done anyway. Better to say no thank you, I'd rather not take on a burden of effort-debt yet and wait till it makes significantly more sense to do so

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

#704

Post by bananaface » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 4:03 AM UTC

disambiguation wrote: post #644

randomNumber7 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine just doubled his salary. He wanted to resign and look for an other job, but his company offered him double salary. If your work makes you an important person in the company, you have a strong basis for negotiation. Most people just don't use it...

kudos to your friend, but signalling your intent to leave is red flag for management often times companies will opt to pay more as a stop-gap until they find a cheaper replacement

I honestly think this is a myth propogated by managers to discourage negotiation

They know the game, no employee ever is going to stay if they're being paid half their market value. "Commitment" my ass lol. But more to the point in order to replace you they have to pay market value for your job. They can only find someone cheaper if your job is beneath you.

Parlaying offers is fine as long as the work they need doing is worth that money. Who are they going to replace you with? Hiring is expensive even if they find a sucker. The only risk is if your market value is higher than they need to pay to get your job done.

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

#705

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 4:18 AM UTC

_qulr wrote: post #690

bananaface wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP said the objective was to create a critical mass of people refusing so companies would have to adapt. That's what wouldn't work. If it's just a niche job board then that's not an issue, but it also seems like one of those things that should have been done already, probably has been, and isn't popular for a reason.

There is already a large number of people who hate audition-style interviews. They don't want to defect. A public group actually makes it easier for people to avoid defecting. It's very difficult for a job candidate to talk to employers about this when you're just some lone weirdo with idiosyncratic principles. It's much easier to have that discussion when there's a public group of people you can point to with the sa…

[deleted]

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

#706

Post by chillacy » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 5:47 AM UTC

goldenManatee wrote: post #571

shaftway wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the interviewer pool at Google. Other FAANGs might be different. I've had candidates ask me why we do this, and my answer is that once you're in the company, transferring to another job on the same ladder is fairly trivial and requires no technical re-interviews. I go on to describe how I've been around for 10 years and am on my 5th team. None of those transfers required any sort of technical re-check. Teams t…

I’m not sure how unique that is, though. Most companies once you’re in doing technical, your peers will trust you to switch teams or broaden out a little. Re-testing a coworker would come off anywhere between amusing and insulting.

At larger companies I've worked at without central hiring committees it was common to get re-interviewed unless you were vouched for by someone pretty senior.

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

#707

Post by chillacy » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 5:57 AM 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?

Good architects know a thing or two about material science, good electricians know a thing or two about physics, why programmers programmers be averse to understanding algorithms (i.e. the nature of computation)?

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

#708

Post by chillacy » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 6:08 AM UTC

landtuna wrote: post #145

solipsism wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some other problem. None of us can say what it is unless you share your resume, what companies you've applied to, etc. But if you get "no hits" with 20 years of experience in Python and C++, the problem is 100% not "missing machine learning and cloud experience".

Is that an offer? :) https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimhunziker/ One hit was for making machine guns target humans better. (I rejected the in-person interview.) Another dropped me because they wanted cloud experience. A YC company changed the job from remote to SF only before we talked.

I suspect that even though you have a lot of experience programming, recruiters aren't counting it as applicable experience to the jobs you want. You essentially have even less experience with cloud/ML than most college grads who at least took classes where they have applicable project experience.

Changing job areas is hard, the best way imo is to find a company that does both what you currently excel at and what you want to do, then do an internal transfer to build experience. I've seen it done before where a friend of mine joined one team building internal support tools, switched to a different team doing data science, and now gets job offers for data science.

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

#709

Post by chillacy » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 6:20 AM UTC

andybak wrote: post #589

We've been trying to hire a part-time contract dev recently and we hate the process so we've been a little half-assed about it. As a result I think we've stumbled across a fairly effective approach. We ask them to do a half day to day coding task based on a real requirement. We pay them for this as we have few enough applicants that we want to test that we can afford to. We give them the requirement as if it came dir…

I once had an interview like this from a very large e-commerce company in Seattle (though I did not get paid, at least they paid for my flight and hotel and food. A good deal for a college kid). Though the coding problem was less "poorly worded requirements and bad docs" and more "this is actually an NP hard optimization problem".

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

#710

Post by kyting » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 6:36 PM UTC

didibus wrote: post #77

zug_zug wrote: post #8

A rather tired conversation in my opinion. Everybody likes to complain about interviews, but every single alternative I've heard is even worse: Take-homes are biased toward those willing to work hours for free, a "track record" is biased toward those who inflate their resume, a casual conversation is biased toward the likable and native english speakers, high-level whiteboarding is biased towards people who are good…

I've found asking people to write a small program works pretty well. Like ask someone to build a command line app that arranges your mp3 files in folders of their artist's name. You can even ask it to be whiteboarded, or coded in a notepad, no code execution or IDE. I found that to quickly tell you if someone can write programs. Surprisingly (and maybe not surprisingly), a lot of people can do difficult leetcode ques…

That kind of UX experience, OSish or design small app whatever can be learned very quick on job. However Leetcode skill is not -- you have to devote 2~3 hours per day to grind and practice.