241–250 of 447 posts
That is the saddest self-realization post I have ever read. Boils down to accepting being a tool and proceeds with optimizing ROI on said tool.
Reminds me about the Gervais model.
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What are you planning to do with all that financial independence? This question is a pet pieve of mine. The number of good answers is endless, and its sad that you would even ask it. Working is slavery, however you want to slice it.
> The number of good answers is endless. So why wait until retirement to start seeking them? > Working is slavery, however you want to slice it. This is a thought-terminating cliche. Slavery is slavery. Working is an arrangement you enter into voluntarily with a series of pros and cons for all participants. Is the CEO if a company a slave? The researcher who finds a cure for a disease a family member died from? A mus…
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That sounds like a terrible idea?
interviewer: we're going to do a small coding exercise. you can use ANY programming language you would like. ANY PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE!
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Reading these responses is pretty upsetting. No wonder big tech is so evil. So many talented developers willing to sell their soul for more money. No thought to whether what they’re doing is causing harm to the world.
Can you blame them. A lot of the work is very unexciting and you're doing maintence on a business layer or some kind of framework crud work. Who's writing network drivers these days? Who's pushing streaming technologies to the max? Who's designing a cool iot framework/automated driving? Some people are...but most are write a microservice type tasks.
Yes.
I don't quite get the study plan, as it sounds more like cramming. Nothing wrong with cramming per se except that what you learn does not stick, and you will have to repeat the process when you need to switch jobs again. I think a better system is to regularly study fundamentals and always deep dive in your work. Case in point, I've never had problems passing interviews by FAANG or other hot startups, I always got ti…
It's a great approach as long as you remember that you're reading for the benefit of your own knowledge rather than the benefit of an interviewer. One of the supposed benefits of a degree (leave aside grade inflation etc. that undermine the benefit in the real world) is that you can put a degree on your resume but not all the books you've read for personal and professional enrichment.
Is something wrong with software engineering interviews that one could reasonably need to spend months prepping for interviews? Leetcode problems can be fun and interesting, but seldom represent problems and skills I employ daily as a more senior software engineer. Studying these problems won’t help me much at my current employer and likely wouldn’t after I passed the interview gauntlet at another firm.
Maybe it's because i know a lot of doctor friends, but months of prepping to then get paid more than they do seems way unfair in my favor.
This whole process seems a bit psychotic. Is it really necessary to cram like you're taking the SATs again to get a good job as a software engineer? Is "has memorized some number of coding problems" really a test of engineering knowledge? I suppose it's appropriate that after all that work, the author wound up at Facebook, the most soulless company on the list.
> Is it really necessary to cram like you're taking the SATs again to get a good job as a software engineer? Frankly, yes. Just as the SATs and ACTs are IQ tests with a shitty veil on top, FAANG interviews are meant to be the same. Everyone knows interview prep has basically zero correlation to job duties in software engineering, but you have to play the game. > the author wound up at Facebook, the most soulless comp…
>Frankly, yes. Just as the SATs and ACTs are IQ tests with a shitty veil on top
If you can prep for them they aren't really IQ tests.
This sounds like a game for younger people. But then again, do FAANGs even hire middle aged developers? I ask because of genuine curiosity -- I have a decent network and could probably land another job pretty easily, but only one of my closer contacts works for a FAANG. So the only way I could even try would be through the front door, as it were.
Yea, they all do. That’s who mentors all the juniors they hire. It can be harder coming from non-FAANG, but plenty of people do it every year, esp as all those companies are expanding. Gotta put in the LeetCode grind though, bc other than Netflix, they all do those interviews. I’m at about 15 yoe, got interviews at 3/5 of the FAANGs with only startup experience on my resume. As others said in thread, get those Blind…
It's wild to me that his way of figuring out what companies to apply for was to make a list of the top-paying ones and just pick the top 10 highest-paying. Is that a common strategy? No thought about product, industry, impact on the world, just $$$. It looks like it worked out for them though, since I guess they got like a million dollar offer, so maybe I'm the one approaching this the wrong way?
I think the fact that he's a power lifter is an important factor to consider in your impression. Power lifters are generally obsessed with their physical metrics and numbers, so this just seems like an optimization exercise in a similar vein. Clearly not a "fulfill the purpose of my life" exercise.
Whether this is unhealthy when carried over into other parts of your life is an exercise for the reader to consider.