181–190 of 336 posts
Note how I stressed the word (most).
The interviews mostly serve to keep salaries high.
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 totally agree with you. Some of the content there seems relevant to CS in general, but I hate the fact that you need to study content that you won't use on the job in order to pass an interview. It doesn't make sense to me. I've seen new grads perform as well as senior engineers with these Leetcode-style questions so I've stopped using them to assess engineers. Further, I know we're specifically trying to assess te…
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…
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The industry recreates the problem every so often with different variants. Previously it was the Microsoft/Google “thought problems” such as “Why are manhole covers round?” and “How would you estimate the number of gas stations in a city?”.
Thet change when they realise the current method doesn't actually work. They're not recreating the problem; they're looking for a solution.
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> I've told at least 5 or 6 companies that wanted to white-board me to suck it. It's honestly insulting that I'm forced to white-board when I have two books with my name on them (published by Apress), contributions to Golang (small commits, but they still got me in the AUTHORS file), and OSS projects with hundreds of stars on GitHub That is all commendable but none of that tells me if I can work with you. When I inte…
> a collaborative opportunity to see how the interviewee thinks. In principle, this sounds great. In reality, if the interviewee fails to come up with the correct/optimal solution for the duration of the interview, they are going to be rejected.
I think the thing going on with interviews is that (most) of software engineering is actually pretty easy. Anyone can do the job outside of an interview session with the right experience. Note how I stressed the word (most). The interviews mostly serve to keep salaries high.
I graduated with a physics degree and I still remember how steep the programming learning curve felt when I took my first programming in C course despite having done some python work in the past.
So I don't think the "most" qualifier is necessarily correct either.
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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…
The issue is the Greencard sponsoring through EB-3. You have to wait till the process reaches i-140 or I-485 or otherwise you have to restart the process. This is worse for Indian and Chinese citizens due to their priority date from the 7% rule.
Frankly I think green card golden handcuffs are heavily played up in these discussions to advance a specific narrative
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Here we see what the alternative to whiteboard interviews: credentialism. Get into the right school and muddle through and get a guaranteed 200k! Is there more to you than your high school performance? Push back against this if so! (Calling the interview Leetcode is misleading IME, since I've rarely been asked something that would be near the upper tiers of that site's difficulty). Top-tier tech companies face a LOT…
> 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…
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Perhaps not everyone has to grind it so much. (I would wager they're the same people who do regularly find themselves thinking about computational and space complexity, and about using different datastructures and algorithms for problems, vs the ones who never see reason to!) A take home test requires spending free time for everyone. A whiteboard interview requires variable amounts of free time. I would wager that, o…
I’ve passed almost every interview loop I’ve had without ever studying leetcode. I have a (maybe uncharitable) suspicion that people who find they need to study are spending all their time at work gluing software together without actually writing any from scratch.
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…