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Ask HN: Been writing code for 40 years and can't get hired

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Re: Ask HN: Been writing code for 40 years and can't get hired

#181

Post by therealdavesky »

kjksf wrote: post #49
bradlys wrote: post #20

You’ll need to get up to speed with modern interviewing practices. Unless you know someone - people don’t care what you’ve done. They care about how you perform in the interview. True with most of the top paying companies. I’d suggest doing a 100 problems on LC (try the subject study guides first) before interviewing again. Doesn’t sound fun but that’s how it is now. The bar is high for all candidates - at least for…

I second that. LC is https://leetcode.com/ There are other similar websites for practicing interview questions. The important thing is to use at least one of them.

I spent 6 weeks doing Leetcode problems, mostly medium-level ones. However when the take-home project was assigned, my submittal crashed on their end, even though it ran on my end on two different simulators and my phone! That pretty much canned my application there and then, even though the engineer agreed with me that the crash was VERY weird... it involved iOS crashing while adding a valid string to a Set, which was non-null! Given the opportunity, I could have quickly changed the Set usage to an Array, but that wasn't put on the table. In other words, a real-world fix didn't make sense to them!

Re: Ask HN: Been writing code for 40 years and can't get hired

#182

Post by therealdavesky »

ratorx wrote: post #135
pfp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been a professional software interviewer (600+ interviews) and have seen most very experienced software developers do quite poorly during interviews. So... you've 1) realized you're dealing with experienced people and 2) yet discarded them based on irrelevant "interview skills"? How does this serve the company trying to hire someone? FWIW, the couple of times I've interviewed someone -- I've always given the g…

Interviews at FAANG don’t really work like that. The typical interviewer has very little say in metrics used to evaluate the candidate. Their job is to evaluate the candidate based only on those metrics, with little room for anything else. Part of the reason is standardisation. There is lots of training given to avoid bias. I think you’ve misunderstood what the parent meant by interview skills. The criteria don’t sel…

Also the 'metrics' being used to make the final decision are secret, most likely not known even by the interviewer. This prevents gaming the system but the lack of transparency makes it easy to imagine that MANGA companies choose new hires the same way that South Park depicted the FED making economic decisions: with a headless chicken running around and finally falling down on a big diagram.

Re: Ask HN: Been writing code for 40 years and can't get hired

#183

Post by markwkw »

therealdavesky wrote: post #180
kamaal wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah, tough luck. There are people out there who keep complaining about talent shortage, and not finding people to do anything at all. But you go through their hiring process and it's all about 10 rounds of questions on OJ sites like LC. Plus they have a bar raiser round which is just basically more of the same. This actually makes the problem much worse because the only people who are acing these tests are peo…

Damn Straight. It amazes me how little interviewers seem to care about how_much_code_you_have_delivered... honestly, what else is there?

How would an interviewer verify how much code you have delivered? And what quality that code was?

I'm not trying to sound like a smartass. This is a real problem. I've been bitten before by candidates with big stories to tell about their past deliverables, but were a fountain of bugs once they were hired. Sometimes it's easy to tell, sometimes candidates background is a bit different than yours so you can't easily judge if them writing three customized discombobulators for flux capacitance use cases is something challenging or not. What is more, barely anyone writes alone. We almost all work in teams, and it's easy to claim N% of contribution to the code the team has written. In many cases you will be able to somewhat confidently speak about other people's code since you've been reading and reviewing it.

Re: Ask HN: Been writing code for 40 years and can't get hired

#184

Post by yesenadam »

mwattsun wrote: post #137
martinbooth wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I conduct interviews for Facebook and we do not discriminate on age. I assume the recruiter just got the impression you really didn’t want to interview with us. I only do the coding interviews but every piece of interview feedback I write is focused on the same criteria and that definitely does not consider age. We don’t even refer to the gender of an applicant in the feedback, and comments on an applicants age would…

I said "You know I'm over 60, right?" in a friendly and informative way in case that could be an issue. The correct response would have been your comment, but instead was a quick exit and putting me on the no call list. You may not age discriminate, but that doesn't mean everyone one at Meta (Facebook at the time) does not. I was aware of Mark Zuckerberg's comment which is why I brought up my age. “I want to stress t…

This may be off topic, but I don't believe "most chess masters" are under 30, whatever MZ meant by that exactly. ("Chess master" is not a term used in chess.) Most top players seem to reach their highest rating between 35 and 45. Looking at ages of the current world top 100[0], about half seem to be over 30, half under. There are not so many players over 40 or 50 at the top these days though. A classical chess game often goes for 5,6,7 hours, and playing a tournament means doing that every day for a week or two. As most players reach 40 or 50, they start to fade after 5 or 6 hours play. It's stressful and tiring - a single mistake often can lose the game, and lose many hours work, sometimes lose weeks/months/years work.

[0] https://www.2700chess.com/?per-page=100

Re: Ask HN: Been writing code for 40 years and can't get hired

#185

Post by therealdavesky »

icsa wrote: post #173
tester756 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see anything special in this list >It provides many built-in data structures and methods that make one's solutions brief and eliminate the need to write a lot of boilerplate code. Could you name some? the most important / handy in your opinion?

Data structures: vector/list dictionary/hashmap/hash table queue priority queue heap Methods/Algorithms: min/max insert/delete contains key list comprehension N.B. I've done most of my interviews in C and watching me code has been referred as "watching paint dry" because of all of the boilerplate code that I have to write.

dont forget graph theory. FB caught me off guard on a takehome project which involved contact tracing (very timely in 2021) Dyjkstra's algorithm (spelling?) and backward tracing through graph nodes

Re: Ask HN: Been writing code for 40 years and can't get hired

#186

Post by skyzyx »

kamaal wrote: post #134
gopher_space wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people don’t care what you’ve done. They care about how you perform in the interview. I think OP is expecting a level of competence from interviewers that simply doesn’t exist anymore. He’s from a time when the initial conversation would be engineers only and absolutely focused on past projects.

Well, yeah, tough luck. There are people out there who keep complaining about talent shortage, and not finding people to do anything at all. But you go through their hiring process and it's all about 10 rounds of questions on OJ sites like LC. Plus they have a bar raiser round which is just basically more of the same. This actually makes the problem much worse because the only people who are acing these tests are peo…

I was at AWS for 4 years and spent A LOT of time interviewing. We couldn’t find and interview qualified candidates fast enough. Lots of engineers doing the interviewing; few charlatans.

At AWS, however, it’s important to look at the well-roundedness of the candidate. It doesn’t matter how much code you’ve delivered if you’re an asshole in meetings.

Being a self-starter, earning the trust of your peers, and being highly-focused on customer experience are all soft skills, but are critical to ensuring success in the role. Hiring the wrong person is costly, and even then, many people at AWS wash-out in the first 2 years.

Soft skills and collaborative working habits are MORE important than writing code. Code can be taught. Being collaborative and thinking-like-an-owner is much harder to teach.

Re: Ask HN: Been writing code for 40 years and can't get hired

#187

Post by icsa »

therealdavesky wrote: post #185
icsa wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data structures: vector/list dictionary/hashmap/hash table queue priority queue heap Methods/Algorithms: min/max insert/delete contains key list comprehension N.B. I've done most of my interviews in C and watching me code has been referred as "watching paint dry" because of all of the boilerplate code that I have to write.

dont forget graph theory. FB caught me off guard on a takehome project which involved contact tracing (very timely in 2021) Dyjkstra's algorithm (spelling?) and backward tracing through graph nodes

Yes, I forgot Depth-First Search/Traversal and Breadth-First Search/Traversal.

Those two algorithms are the workhorses of graph algorithms.

Advanced graph algorithms include Dijkstra's algorithm, Minimum Spanning Tree, Strongly Connected Components, among others.

In addition, dynamic programming (DP) also shows up as a more advanced algorithm/technique in high-level interviews.

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