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It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

simonwillison.net

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Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#171

Post by thewarrior »

kebman wrote: post #154
RandallBrown wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a pure engineering role things like credits at large companies, online talks, side projects, etc. are all really great ways to get an interview. I can't really remember the last time I was turned down for an interview. You're totally right about the other part though. I've lost a lot of jobs I think I could have been great at because I'm really bad at whiteboard coding interviews.

Does this mean that the whiteboard coding interviews are flawed, or that guys like us, who has made a ton of more or less great projects are flawed? Why would a company rather have a guy that can solve binary search in five seconds, than one that has showed continuous progress with several finished projects over the years? Do they think accomplished guys somehow are a liability? Or is it that they want a blank sheet…

The book Disciplined Minds goes into some of this. It helps one understand the answers to questions like why companies prize things like performance on coding tests that don’t correlate very well to the job. Even FANGs are not looking for truly innovative engineers. Most of the innovation comes via acquisitions or when they hire some industry luminaries to lead projects. The rest are only there to fill in the lines and be highly productive coding machines that will learn the “syllabus” just like they learn to leet code.

These deep technical skills don’t matter as much because a lot these highly paying companies don’t have work that is deeply technical. Their challenges are primarily around management and scaling the number of engineers.

This requires reducing people down to something very simple and being able to treat engineers as fungible resources. Hiring and evaluating each person as a special snow flake is not the most profitable thing to do at large scales.

This is exactly the thesis behind Paul Graham’s ideas on startups and innovation. The scaling of a large corporation inevitably jams up the gears of the system and a small team can completely outflank a large company with employees keeping more of the returns and the work being more fulfilling.

Unfortunately the incumbents have sucked in most of the revenue so even though you regularly have small teams of people knocking out work that puts the biggies to shame making money is hard to impossible. So everyone on “Hacker news” is now left reverse engineering every detail of how big co works to get ahead .

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#172

Post by kebman »

thewarrior wrote: post #171
kebman wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this mean that the whiteboard coding interviews are flawed, or that guys like us, who has made a ton of more or less great projects are flawed? Why would a company rather have a guy that can solve binary search in five seconds, than one that has showed continuous progress with several finished projects over the years? Do they think accomplished guys somehow are a liability? Or is it that they want a blank sheet…

The book Disciplined Minds goes into some of this. It helps one understand the answers to questions like why companies prize things like performance on coding tests that don’t correlate very well to the job. Even FANGs are not looking for truly innovative engineers. Most of the innovation comes via acquisitions or when they hire some industry luminaries to lead projects. The rest are only there to fill in the lines a…

Thank you for your insight! Hm so perhaps statistics and probability are actually more valuable for companies like that?

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#173

Post by golergka »

cableshaft wrote: post #86
jameshush wrote: post #27

In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I had credits at large companies, posted talks online (interviewers rarely looked at them), but if I forgot how to write binary search in 10 minutes in an interview it didn’t matter. This actually made me realize being just an IC wasn’t actually my goal though. Once I started interviewing for management and sales, all of those things _really_ matter…

Yep. I've had a portfolio of full video games I've coded and released on my own, as the sole programmer, that could be played on the web, had my name credited on the title screen, and you could even see the code on some of them, and I proudly included the link on my resume. Never brought up during the interview process, I was still expected to take the coding tests, and if I did a little poorly on one question I almo…

I've worked in gamedeve since 2007 and interviewed a lot of people. Small games portfolio doesn't matter, because small games, just like beginner tutorials from Unity, don't teach you skills necessary to work on a large-scale project with multiple developers. When you're working on small-scale projects, you can follow bad practices and don't hit their limitations.

However, if I would be interviewing a game designer and not an engineer, this portfolio would have been incredibly relevant.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#174

Post by sedeki »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #170
jameshush wrote: post #27

In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I had credits at large companies, posted talks online (interviewers rarely looked at them), but if I forgot how to write binary search in 10 minutes in an interview it didn’t matter. This actually made me realize being just an IC wasn’t actually my goal though. Once I started interviewing for management and sales, all of those things _really_ matter…

> if I forgot how to write binary search The binary search algorithm isn't something you can "forget". For a literate programmer it's like forgetting how to write the letter 'A' or forgetting which pedal is the gas and which is the brakes.

I think the overall point is the risk of forgetting something judged as "fundamental."

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#175

Post by teknofobi »

lmilcin wrote: post #164
jameshush wrote: post #27

In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I had credits at large companies, posted talks online (interviewers rarely looked at them), but if I forgot how to write binary search in 10 minutes in an interview it didn’t matter. This actually made me realize being just an IC wasn’t actually my goal though. Once I started interviewing for management and sales, all of those things _really_ matter…

> In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I am interviewing a lot of people. I look very suspicious at these kinds of moves to try to impress me. I don't necessarily ignore, but I try to figure out if this is some kind of shallow engagement. It impresses me if you can stick to something meaningful and do it regularly for years but you can just as well hurt your chances if you propose 5 si…

> I always remind people to learn something first before you try to teach other people.

Teaching is one the greatest ways to learn and develop your relation and vocabulary for what you are currently learning. It’s one of the greatest tricks a good college class will pull, having students continually drag each other a step further as they learn something new and then have to explain it to their peers. Most blogging is this kind of “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”, so it’s seems to me you might be dismissing some eager learners if you think the act of blogging is self-important.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#176

Post by carnitine »

kebman wrote: post #154
RandallBrown wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a pure engineering role things like credits at large companies, online talks, side projects, etc. are all really great ways to get an interview. I can't really remember the last time I was turned down for an interview. You're totally right about the other part though. I've lost a lot of jobs I think I could have been great at because I'm really bad at whiteboard coding interviews.

Does this mean that the whiteboard coding interviews are flawed, or that guys like us, who has made a ton of more or less great projects are flawed? Why would a company rather have a guy that can solve binary search in five seconds, than one that has showed continuous progress with several finished projects over the years? Do they think accomplished guys somehow are a liability? Or is it that they want a blank sheet…

Binary search? I would never hire anyone who couldn’t implement it from scratch. There’s no complex idea or trick to remember, it’s the most basic algorithmic around.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#177

Post by cassonmars »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #170
jameshush wrote: post #27

In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I had credits at large companies, posted talks online (interviewers rarely looked at them), but if I forgot how to write binary search in 10 minutes in an interview it didn’t matter. This actually made me realize being just an IC wasn’t actually my goal though. Once I started interviewing for management and sales, all of those things _really_ matter…

> if I forgot how to write binary search The binary search algorithm isn't something you can "forget". For a literate programmer it's like forgetting how to write the letter 'A' or forgetting which pedal is the gas and which is the brakes.

I think you’re overestimating most people’s ability to withstand the stress that quiz show style Leetcode interviews can put on people. I’ve literally blanked on an interview before when I was tasked with writing a simple parser and I’ve written entire compilers. The interview processes are broken in most companies. Pair programming sessions with debugging and incremental graduation of the problem scope are way better at assessing programming competency, because you also get a sense for how well the candidate can collaborate and communicate.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#178

Post by carnitine »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #121
eru wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No worries. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27927159 for some more. > May be he meant to use "invert binary tree" as a representative example of questions that typically asked. Yes, that's a charitable and believable interpretation of his tweet. (Though I don't know where he got that 90% figure from. Probably made up, like 85.12% of statistics.)

It’s a charitable interpretation, but seems super reasonable. Around that time, I think “inverting a binary tree” was a bit of a meme/shorthand about software interviewing.

Was it? I thought that meme began from his post. To be totally blunt if you get asked to invert a binary tree in a FAANG interview, that’s very easy compared to most questions.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#179

Post by bob1029 »

epicureanideal wrote: post #158
Hermel wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you should have applied with smaller companies that don’t have bureaucratic hiring processes yet?

Most small companies copy the bureaucratic hiring processes of the larger ones at this point.

I'll never understand why business owners want to fail so badly. The principal advantage of small business is that you can happily ignore bureaucracy when it makes sense to.

Some of our best employees are the ones who came in with the fewest credentials and the most to prove. There is no candidate I would refuse purely on the grounds of credentials.

We are much more interested in side projects and work ethic than formal certifications or other pieces of expensive paper.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#180

Post by lmilcin »

teknofobi wrote: post #175
lmilcin wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I am interviewing a lot of people. I look very suspicious at these kinds of moves to try to impress me. I don't necessarily ignore, but I try to figure out if this is some kind of shallow engagement. It impresses me if you can stick to something meaningful and do it regularly for years but you can just as well hurt your chances if you propose 5 si…

> I always remind people to learn something first before you try to teach other people. Teaching is one the greatest ways to learn and develop your relation and vocabulary for what you are currently learning. It’s one of the greatest tricks a good college class will pull, having students continually drag each other a step further as they learn something new and then have to explain it to their peers. Most blogging is…

> Teaching is one the greatest ways to learn and develop your relation and vocabulary for what you are currently learning

Oh sure it is.

I studied theoretical math and I found teaching other students math was great way to get it organized in my head. But we also had professor and I wasn't teaching anybody original ideas, just the material that was already written and defined.

Now I have decades of development experience I still find explaining things to other people a very useful and efficient way to get my thoughts organized.

I kinda exclude blogs with posts of the form "see, I have found something interesting today!" or "I just spent 5 hours solving this problem, writing down solution here so you don't have to waste time". This is fine.

But if you have 3 years of experience in development and start writing blog posts criticizing OOP, that is definitely not going to help your case.

I mean, it is highly unlikely you got enough experience and thinking done to even understand OOP, let alone start criticizing it.

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