171–180 of 336 posts
This is absolutely embarrassing for the industry.
Why is it not embarrassing for Caltech’s admission department and algorithms courses?
My career path in tech so far has been junior engineer -> mid level -> senior -> tech lead. As I've progressed through that path, I have had literally no opportunities of applying the stuff I've learnt on HackerRank, save for a couple of interviews. At this point I'm convinced that the focus of those interviews was entirely wrong. Once you pass those tests and get hired, you will be dealing with tons of legacy code r…
I'd be OK with modern interviews if they reflected the job you will be doing to a reasonable degree. But knowing the state of the industry I feel that they fall somewhere between gatekeeping and a bait & switch scheme. Yep, Back in the 90s and early 2000s, the interview problems I got were often the actual problem I was meant to solve on the job. Which is to say that I don't think there's any barrier to coming up wit…
Really? In the early 2000s, half the questions I got for dev jobs were completely irrelevant riddles and nonsense like "which US state would you remove?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why should I trust the university selection process more than those corporate hiring ones? I don't know the US education system enough, but there are some schools out there which are much more selective than any SWE interview process. You can be guaranteed that the worst student from these top schools could nail any algorithm interview with minimal preparation. But these big companies hire many more people than the…
Needing to hire more than just the top schools graduate is certainly a reason companies can't limit themselves to university selection processes. But that's not all that's going on here! CalTech is pretty selective as far as US schools go (6% acceptance rate). Slightly more than MIT, slightly less than Stanford. SAT score stats all in the same 1500+ range. But they're offering this course, and that makes me think tha…
My take on this is that the problem is misaligned expectations. I failed Google's algorithmic interview round twice under the assumption that when the interviewer asked me a question, the point was to see if I could come up with the answer.
But that isn't true. The interview questions are chosen with the expectation that candidates cannot come up with the answer themselves. Instead, the point is for the candidate to cold-read the answer from the interviewer.
When a test -- or a computer -- asks you how to do something, it won't care or even realize that you spent ten minutes thinking about the problem before starting to write a solution down. But an interviewer will fail you for doing that.
That insight was enough to pass the interview round. And it also suggests that a course in "how to pass an interview" should boost CalTech grads' passing rates to nearly 100%, because all they need is to be informed of the "proper" technique.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the opportunities are possible, but exceptional. For the most part, you will be wiring crud APIs or trying to figure out why your button is misaligned by 12 pixels. Those problems also pay better too, bc those are business problems. The hackerrank problems have mostly been solved. Think about that - you think Ed Dijkstra or Tony Hoare ever made more than a facebook swe?
Tony Hoare works at Microsoft as a Principal Researcher, as well as having won over 5 million dollars just in awards. I'm quite sure he makes more than a Facebook SWE. Dijkstra won a similar amount of money in prizes and worked at UT Austin which according to their 1985 docket paid 110k a year ($287,418.96 adjusted for inflation) and also worked in private industry in a research role, so once again... likely made mor…
So wait you are smart enough to get into caltech, smart enough to graduate with a degree in CS. And yet the curriculum on its own does not do a good job enough on its own to prepare you for getting a job? Very hard to graduate with a decent GPA in CS at caltech and not be able to thrive as an entry level engineer. If you got B’s in caltech CS I’d make you an offer for 200k+ without blinking or even asking you anythin…
Computer Science is not Software Engineering. A PhD does not translate to real world engineering skills. If you just go through a bachelors CS curriculum, designed to give a survey of all topics in academic computer science, that wouldn't make you a competent engineer. This is especially true now that through the internet, just about anyone with a laptop can get as good as they want at software engineering without ev…
So wait you are smart enough to get into caltech, smart enough to graduate with a degree in CS. And yet the curriculum on its own does not do a good job enough on its own to prepare you for getting a job? Very hard to graduate with a decent GPA in CS at caltech and not be able to thrive as an entry level engineer. If you got B’s in caltech CS I’d make you an offer for 200k+ without blinking or even asking you anythin…
Computer Science is not Software Engineering. A PhD does not translate to real world engineering skills. If you just go through a bachelors CS curriculum, designed to give a survey of all topics in academic computer science, that wouldn't make you a competent engineer. This is especially true now that through the internet, just about anyone with a laptop can get as good as they want at software engineering without ev…
True, but it's probably not a worse predictor than most interviews.
So wait you are smart enough to get into caltech, smart enough to graduate with a degree in CS. And yet the curriculum on its own does not do a good job enough on its own to prepare you for getting a job? Very hard to graduate with a decent GPA in CS at caltech and not be able to thrive as an entry level engineer. If you got B’s in caltech CS I’d make you an offer for 200k+ without blinking or even asking you anythin…
I went to Caltech and would definitely not do this. The CS faculty was fantastic, but the undergraduate option has some problems:
- a wildly disproportionate share of cheating cases came from CS undergrads
- CS graduation requirements are very flexible, which is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, giving students more freedom is broadly a good thing, and many of them use that freedom to double major or go deep into specialized grad level work. On the other hand, some of them use it to construct schedules much easier than most other options would allow. Not all of them, but enough that "B's in caltech CS" is not as strong a signal as you might think.
Some signals I would consider stronger for Caltech students:
- CS/Math double majors. Or CS/[Any technical subject], for that matter.
- Summer research: someone paying five figures of opportunity cost to do something they think is interesting is probably not a $/effort optimizer.
- Grad-level CS coursework. CS 139 (Design and Analysis of Algorithms) in particular pulls no punches.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tony Hoare works at Microsoft as a Principal Researcher, as well as having won over 5 million dollars just in awards. I'm quite sure he makes more than a Facebook SWE. Dijkstra won a similar amount of money in prizes and worked at UT Austin which according to their 1985 docket paid 110k a year ($287,418.96 adjusted for inflation) and also worked in private industry in a research role, so once again... likely made mor…
Alrigt, alright, I stand corrected. Here's your upvote.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason this complaint never changes anything, despite being very popular, is that these interviews serve two purposes that it doesn’t address: 1) they’re an intelligence test; 2) they’re a perseverance/conscientiousness test. Will you take the time and put in the work to pass one of these interviews? That measures perseverance and conscientiousness. Having put in the time, can you recall and adapt what you learne…
> The reason this complaint never changes anything, despite being very popular, is that these interviews serve two purposes that it doesn’t address: 1) they’re an intelligence test; 2) they’re a perseverance/conscientiousness test. No argument on perseverance, but I don't think it measures conscientiousness. At least, not how I understand the term, which has connotations of intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic.…
Interviewing is broken. When I was at Amazon, it became impossible to hire candidates, and generally the engineers we brought on board were non-US citizens. Typically they're Indians without U.S. residency status, often times U.S. college grads or often even transfers from Amazon's Indian offices. Not only did we pay below other FAANGs, but with these hires, we'd pay them at the low end of our own scale. What are the…
Unless your an L1 transfer, you can still change jobs fairly easily on an H1B, because everyone else in tech is also willing to do H1B transfer paperwork. So you can quit, it just takes longer... And even as an L1, you can still apply at other jobs, because they will apply for the H1B for you and if successful, hire you then. So yes between the waiting periods you do have to keep it up, but the barriers are not that…