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“I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

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Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#21

Post by SECProto »

ravenstine wrote: post #13
Swizec wrote: post #9

> Once in a while, though, I'd find someone exceptional who could approach problems differently, and those people would always turn out to be the best hires. They would have been filtered out by these systems. This is the goal. When you’re a large org, you do not need exceptional people, you need foot soldiers who do what they’re told. Yes even in engineering. Most of the day-to-day work boils down to JSON bureacracy…

> code archaelogy I've never heard this phrase, but it's so apt to most of every dev job I've had. I love it.

Then you should read A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge!

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#22

Post by wolco2 »

decafninja wrote: post #12

Unless you've made it to your "endgame" company that you're happy to stay at for a while, I feel investing anything more than the bare minimum to get your assigned work done is worth less than just grinding leetcode and otherwise studying for interviews. Doing an actual good job, above and beyond, is not going to be worth much when you're looking for your next job. Thus we're now seeing the rise of Professional Inter…

That's interesting and truly insightful. Doing a good job in a previous role doesn't matter anymore because everyone relys on the leetcode score.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#23

Post by nulptr »

dcl wrote: post #17

Hear, hear! I've got a PhD in statistics and consider myself a pretty good data scientist, but I am not a computer scientist. The last job I applied for asked me to perform a coding challenge prior to a possible in-person interview. The challenge was heavily focused on algorithms and data structures, almost nothing about statistical inference, causal inference, experiment design, model fitting, etc. I didn't bother s…

were you applying for a data scientist or software engineer position?

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#24

Post by chii »

mav3rick wrote: post #14
decafninja wrote: post #12

Unless you've made it to your "endgame" company that you're happy to stay at for a while, I feel investing anything more than the bare minimum to get your assigned work done is worth less than just grinding leetcode and otherwise studying for interviews. Doing an actual good job, above and beyond, is not going to be worth much when you're looking for your next job. Thus we're now seeing the rise of Professional Inter…

What's your endgame ?

To me, the "best" endgame is to obtain enough saved capital to found your own (small?) business to which you can generate and capture value directly.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#25

Post by hcs »

ravenstine wrote: post #13
Swizec wrote: post #9

> Once in a while, though, I'd find someone exceptional who could approach problems differently, and those people would always turn out to be the best hires. They would have been filtered out by these systems. This is the goal. When you’re a large org, you do not need exceptional people, you need foot soldiers who do what they’re told. Yes even in engineering. Most of the day-to-day work boils down to JSON bureacracy…

> code archaelogy I've never heard this phrase, but it's so apt to most of every dev job I've had. I love it.

Software archaeology in a mature programming environment http://akkartik.name/post/deepness

(An excerpt from A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge)

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#26

Post by runT1ME »

I'm very sympathetic to the idea that a more objective test like interview format eliminates bias from the interviewer, as well as the idea it allows introverts or those not as well versed in storytelling to be successful opposed to traditional 'sell yourself' interviews.

However, it's a huge waste of time when so many of the questions are the same. I get it, every company wants to know if I can turn a list into a balanced BST, it's not an unfair question, it's not particularly hard, but I really get annoyed I have to keep solving it over and over.

I really wish there was some certifying body that would put me through the whiteboard guantlet once, and then I could just share my score to companies I apply to.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#27

Post by ssutch3 »

zug_zug wrote: post #8

A rather tired conversation in my opinion. Everybody likes to complain about interviews, but every single alternative I've heard is even worse: Take-homes are biased toward those willing to work hours for free, a "track record" is biased toward those who inflate their resume, a casual conversation is biased toward the likable and native english speakers, high-level whiteboarding is biased towards people who are good…

We do “take homes” that are paid at $65/hr. Still, biased toward people who can make the time.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#28

Post by dx87 »

decafninja wrote: post #12

Unless you've made it to your "endgame" company that you're happy to stay at for a while, I feel investing anything more than the bare minimum to get your assigned work done is worth less than just grinding leetcode and otherwise studying for interviews. Doing an actual good job, above and beyond, is not going to be worth much when you're looking for your next job. Thus we're now seeing the rise of Professional Inter…

Yeah, I burned myself out really bad trying to go above and beyond for a few years at various companies. Just ended up frustrated, making no more money than people coasting in the same position, and still got laid off during downsizing instead of the people who spent time playing office politics and going out to happy hour with the supervisor.

I feel kind of guilty now though, because I actually managed to get hired at a really good company a few years ago, but I can't work up the motivation to put in as much effort as I did before. Now I'm the one coasting (still not schmoozing though), and see other new people making the same mistake I did.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#29

Post by gwbas1c »

I'm in the job market and I've hit a lot of these Hackerrank style tests.

They're easy. They (the people writing and administrating) the tests bend over backwards to offer the same test in many different languages. They provide unit tests and examples.

To be quite blunt: These tests just verify very basic programming skills. They're meant to filter out people who just can't code. Someone who's struggling with these kinds of tests probably needs to consider a career change.

Edit: A common gripe early in my career was the amount of incapable programmers we had to put up with. I suspect the author isn't capable of learning how to program well.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#30

Post by mhh__ »

zug_zug wrote: post #8

A rather tired conversation in my opinion. Everybody likes to complain about interviews, but every single alternative I've heard is even worse: Take-homes are biased toward those willing to work hours for free, a "track record" is biased toward those who inflate their resume, a casual conversation is biased toward the likable and native english speakers, high-level whiteboarding is biased towards people who are good…

> high-level whiteboarding is biased towards people who are good at whiteboarding

Shouldn't the process itself be biased towards people who can enunciate their thoughts anyway?

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