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Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

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Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#131

Post by jstarfish »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #76
pavel_lishin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The daycare center aesthetic and all this weird pronoun crap achieves the same ends. If everyone around you is an androgynous alien speaking a novel language and communications mishaps will get you fired, you won't feel comfortable working there. I'd argue that if you can remember people's names, you can remember their preferred pronouns - and that if you can't, or refuse to because you think it's "weird crap", the…

To be fair, even remembering the names is really difficult, especially working in a large org, many people I see only once or twice or have just heard about. With pronouns most of the time I can luckily just resort to "them" if I am unsure. I frequently in a meeting am unsure if I have or when I have met the person before, although I do find their face familiar. That is the first level of awkwardness to solve for me.…

Yeah this ends up being exactly what I do, in addition to avoiding high-conflict individuals altogether. I can't handle the actual headache of keeping up with everyone's arbitrary titles. I'm not your Tumblr mutual or a goddamn MUSH engine.

I'll humor transpeople since they offer some visual cue in either direction but enbies are deliberately obtuse and go ballistic when you get it wrong. I have more issue playing ball with them since this cycle amounts to coercive obedience training.

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#132

Post by reactordev »

thdc wrote: post #58
one_buggy_boi wrote: post #33

> When interviewing as a software engineer, for example, you’ll run into places that lean heavily on algorithms interviews. And don’t get me wrong, those interviews can be fun (in the same way that Project Euler can be fun), but it’s not very relevant for most jobs I'm curious what changed around 2015-2016 that led to the current interview process. In the before times the interview was more of a technical conversatio…

I like to think it went like this 1. Interviewer: If you're a good software engineer, you can answer basic algorithmic questions. 2. Interviewees: Practice algorithmic questions so you appear to be a good software engineer. 3. Interviewer: People are just studying leetcode to get jobs, what can we do? Ask harder leetcode questions. 4. Other companies: Let's copy them since they're successful. In short, the questions…

Sadly, we can’t defer to stack overflow for interview success like we can with code. GPT will/may help break it up but until we stop with the sociology questions and get back to technical delivery, we’ll continue to see people try to game a system and then try to game that system they gamed. It’s real life NPM.

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#133

Post by Our_Benefactors »

paulcole wrote: post #123
abathur wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you're apparently here to play semantics games: if you aren't willing to pay your employer for the opportunity to solve their problems, you don't want the job.

Yes! You’re getting it.

“Paying your employer to work for them” is commonly referred to as a “scam”.

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#134

Post by switchbak »

rhymer wrote: post #78
one_buggy_boi wrote: post #33

> When interviewing as a software engineer, for example, you’ll run into places that lean heavily on algorithms interviews. And don’t get me wrong, those interviews can be fun (in the same way that Project Euler can be fun), but it’s not very relevant for most jobs I'm curious what changed around 2015-2016 that led to the current interview process. In the before times the interview was more of a technical conversatio…

I'm grateful for leetcode. Despite my background in electrical engineering, where I specialize in statistical signal processing, I never had the opportunity to delve into algorithm or data structure courses during my college years. In my field, understanding signals and systems, probability, optimization, and numerical computing is very important. Leetcode, in comparison, offers a more confined scope, making preparat…

If you don't have the background, to me you would be a risky bet since you may be missing some fundamentals. But I'm not sure what niche you're specializing in, or if you could provide some social proof that you've otherwise picked up the requisite software engineering skills.

If sounds like gatekeeping, it kind of is.

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#135

Post by joshspankit »

thdc wrote: post #58
one_buggy_boi wrote: post #33

> When interviewing as a software engineer, for example, you’ll run into places that lean heavily on algorithms interviews. And don’t get me wrong, those interviews can be fun (in the same way that Project Euler can be fun), but it’s not very relevant for most jobs I'm curious what changed around 2015-2016 that led to the current interview process. In the before times the interview was more of a technical conversatio…

I like to think it went like this 1. Interviewer: If you're a good software engineer, you can answer basic algorithmic questions. 2. Interviewees: Practice algorithmic questions so you appear to be a good software engineer. 3. Interviewer: People are just studying leetcode to get jobs, what can we do? Ask harder leetcode questions. 4. Other companies: Let's copy them since they're successful. In short, the questions…

“if a flag of truth were raised we could watch every liar rise to wave it”

I heard this lyric at a formative time, and I’ve seen it be proven true many times. Including tech interviews. People continually seek out those signals that imply knowledge and experience and even shared culture, but those signals inevitably become too small (smaller = quicker and easier to weed people out) and then they become the very things that people practice in order to look like they have the knowledge, experience, or shared culture they need in order to get through the doors and secure the opportunities.

Then those signals get burned and the cycle starts again (in fact, in my experience the cycles concurrently overlap).

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#136

Post by joshspankit »

midasuni wrote: post #91
ascar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So what scale are we talking about? A few million monthly users? So like hackernews? I would use a single server... "

You really need two in physically different locations (ideally ASes) with some form of failover, assuming you want a reasonable guaranteed uptime

Add a static caching layer and you’re ready for traffic spikes.

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#137

Post by plagiarist »

jstarfish wrote: post #129
plagiarist wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny to whine that, "redefining the reality of others is literal brainwashing," but you obviously feel quite comfortable redefining the reality of the people you misgender for them.

Nice try. "Misgendering" happens to be my favorite example of modern sophistry. When you're afflicted with gender dysphoria, technically it's you who's engaging in misgendering since you refuse to recognize your own gender (or its pronouns). It starts with you . But self-loathing doesn't make for a compelling persecution story, so you project it onto me. It's my fault. I'm hurting you, by not validating your beliefs.…

("These days?" When were "we" not about consent?)

Maybe you're having trouble finding companies that won't fire you because companies are selecting for employees who recognize peers as actual humans. You won't take my advice, but I think you should consider that other perspectives exist and try to grow.

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#138

Post by dallbee »

dmurray wrote: post #83
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I explicitly do the opposite and have the most pragmatic exercises, questions. Another thing is an exercise for system design where hyperscaling is not required and the thing is actually quite simple. Many who have specifically prepared by leetcoding and reading "cracking the coding interview" 10 times over will naturally overengineer everything trying to fit this exercise to those book patterns dropping all com…

When I get a system design question I always tell the interviewer "I'd just run it on a single server with an SQLite backend, that will be plenty for the median software service and you haven't told me any numbers that suggests this needs more" and then it turns out they wanted it to run at the scale of WhatsApp.

For what it's worth if I ever had a candidate give me this answer on a systems design problem I'd probably immediately stop evaluating them and start selling them on the role.

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#139

Post by kens »

ascar wrote: post #97
midasuni wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really need two in physically different locations (ideally ASes) with some form of failover, assuming you want a reasonable guaranteed uptime

Does 99.995% [1] of hackernews sound reasonable enough to you? The reality is a lot of systems (especially simple ones) run perfectly fine on a single server with next to no downtime and all the additional redundancies we introduce also add additional points of failures and without the scale that makes these necessary you might actually end up reducing your availability. [1] https://hn.hund.io/

> Does 99.995% [1] of hackernews sound reasonable enough to you?

How did you come up with that number? I looked at the link and just one of the outages listed on January 10 was 59 minutes. That alone makes the uptime worse than 99.99% for the entire year before it was halfway through January.

(99.995% means at most 26.3 minutes of downtime per year. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_c...)

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#140

Post by dmoy »

trashface wrote: post #121
rhymer wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm grateful for leetcode. Despite my background in electrical engineering, where I specialize in statistical signal processing, I never had the opportunity to delve into algorithm or data structure courses during my college years. In my field, understanding signals and systems, probability, optimization, and numerical computing is very important. Leetcode, in comparison, offers a more confined scope, making preparat…

We might also ask why EE specialists (and indeed half of STEM) needs to fall back to software engineering to get meaningful and stable employment, but capitalism probably does not like us asking these pesky questions.

It's not that EE *needs" to fall back on software for stable employment, it's that software pays more, and ridiculously more at big tech companies.

I have both EE and CS degrees, but I make literally more than double in CS-type jobs than I would back in EE. Even though back in the day, I was definitely better at EE stuff than CS stuff.

This was true very early career, and for now at least continues to be true.

---

I'm still of the opinion that software will eventually revert to the mean, comparable to other engineering compensation... some year. It probably won't happen until there's significant regulatory and liability burden that doesn't really exist in software yet. Like some in software complain about GDPR or DMA or whatever, but crank that up orders of magnitude and then add career-and-company-ending lawsuit threats on top, and then you have real engineering. Then it becomes much more expensive to do things, profit margins go way down, and pay does as well.

Who knows when that'll actually happen. For now, software is bonkers profitable.

(When software engineering becomes real engineering, I posit that it will also cease to be as highly paid)

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