231–240 of 336 posts
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…
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…
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…
What’s your suggested alternative? Please remember that while some of us would do well and prefer some live pair programming or debugging sessions, it stresses the hell out of some folks and penalizes them unfairly. Take home tests penalizes people with families and other responsibilities and probably has a racial bias as well in countries where different races have different societal loads. In the end, even if these…
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…
It's Google's interview format after all (actually Microsoft's, but operating systems are hard as well).
The great big sleight of hand trick behind all of this is that the entire industry has copied the interview process of a single, extremely large, company.
And Google makes $$$ writing software for *extremely complex graphing and search algorithms*.
It's a great interview process. For Google.
For everyone else, it's holding up a great big sign that says "I'm a moron and I copied my homework assignment from Wikipedia."
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…
Bingo. It should be telling that there are a number of, usually for-profit, resources for prepping for just the interview process: * leetcode * Cracking the Coding Interview * Elements of Programing Interviews * Interview Kickstart, which costs like $5500, is a bootcamp just for passing interviews * educative.io * algoexpert.io That being said, I might just play along with the DS / Algo interview game. Having an inte…
You’re acknowledging that you have the both the ability and the knowledge to change (your small part of) a shitty system, and instead you’re pulling up the ladder behind you. That sucks.
You should not let yourself feel good about that, even if it’s “economically rational” or whatever.
You’re making things just a little worse for everyone but yourself — actually, even for yourself, too — and trying to excuse it with “well, that’s just the way things work!”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are a memory test not an intelligence test. If you truly wanted to measure intelligence it would have to be based on a priori knowledge and not on the ability to memorize algorithms and their implementation.
The notion that somebody could simply "memorize algorithms" and then apply that information on-the-fly to questions they won't know in advance -- demonstrating adaptiveness, creativity, and the application of general problem-solving knowledge to novel problems -- and that this doesn't measure intelligence is not credible. I'd bet my net worth that the ability to perform well on these interviews positively correlates…
But that's the whole point of LC grinding: to claw your way through enough of these problems until, lo and behold... there ends up being an 80 percent chance that any given "medium" problem thrown at you -- is one that you have in fact seen and worked on, already.
I'm just guessing at the 80 percent figure. But it seems pretty clear from the cult of LC grinding that one of the goals of this strategy is not just to learn general techniques for solving these problems -- but to get a significantly high percentage of these problems under your belt already, or nearly so.
While also learning to deploy the just the right grunts and moans and pauses to make your interviewer think you're seeing the problem for the first time, of course.
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 mean I guess on a surface level this might be true if you only consider like developing small web features, but large and complex code bases and distributed architectures are not easy to work with imho. You can see that its actually pretty difficult because brand new junior devs can take upwards of 6 months to be useful, not to mention to occasional stand-in dev that sub contracts their job out, then when taken int…
Most stuff isn't done in C anymore. C is waay less safe then python and that's despite type checking.
Most jobs don't require C or C++. I would say because of this most programming jobs are easier now.
>You can see that its actually pretty difficult because brand new junior devs can take upwards of 6 months to be useful,
This means it's easy. 6 months is incredibly short. Mastery of anything usually requires a couple years.
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 interview senior SWEs at a big tech company (I've done in the order of a few hundred interviews, which were a mix of coding and system design sessions). I'm always open to hearing about ideas to improve my interviewing, but I find that threads like this are repetitive and not really actionable. One common misconception I keep seeing is the idea that the interview result revolves around solving the question. IMHO, t…
Candidates know this.
The issue is:
Interviewers who do their job, and build a broad based picture of a developer's skills and give fair ratings, are rare.
The perception is 75% interviewers don't even bother. They're tired, they're unmotivated.
Their annual bonus doesn't reflect "conducts fair and balanced job interviews."
They underclock their brain to 10% of its maximum, and at the end of the hour look at how shiny and perfect the piece of code at the end is.
Despite whatever the intentions of the system, I don't think anyone has ever hired a candidate with a messy code who spoke and reasoned well.
My extremely strong perception, having never conducted a big tech company interview, is that a candidate who submitted a shiny piece of clean code at the end of a technical interview will always be first pick. No matter how much they mumbled.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
A shiny perfect coding solution is a perfect image in the mind of the interviewer.
Interviewers are human, fallible people. When they're doing the end of day calibration on interview performance, having a shiny perfect solution changes their perception of a candidate utterly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Symphonic musician. The first stage is nailing a blind audition, perfectly.
Not anymore! Blind auditions are now a thing of the past: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition... However, since you can't choose your parents or where you were born, there's little you can do to prepare for the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity goals. (I could probably get a lift by changing my religion. People with the exact same ethnicity and appearance as me but of a different faith are con…
This is communism for social currency. In fact, I'll wager this will develop and become _the_ modern form of communism in the next decade or two (in the US/West), provided the following remains true:
We (continue to) live in an a world of abundant material resources. And, we (continue to) live in a world of limited social resources (and likely always will).
Anyways, my thoughts on the matter as musician/composer. The people that deserve to be in an orchestra are the ones who work the hardest towards achieving goal, and have the talent to fulfill the requirements of that position. It is an incredibly competitive, limited position and would be massively unfair if people were favored/unfavored for admission because of the color of their skin (hmmm...).
I think that would create a lot inter-orchestra tension (which is already sky high because of how competitive it is[0]). Decades of sweat equity will be thrown out the door (most start playing while still a single digit in age). 45% or more of classical musicians end up leaving the career because they cant earn enough money to survive. [1] It's already an impossible discipline to succeed in, regardless of your background.
It is deplorable to shift and count colored beans on an abacus to keep track of an organizations social currency, particularly when that organization has blind admissions. There is not a non-obsessive, wont-be-abused-by-those-who-count way to implement such a gate keeper. Blind auditions solve all these problems, and bring together the most talented people in the world to work together for the benefit of every member of the audience, without the racist undertones.
[0] I used to play with Juilliard musicians. They have plenty of horror stories to tell, such as the time when the NYC Phil woodwinds tallied mistakes made by other musicians during practice. Or when one of the famous string quartets' members refused to stay in the same hotel together.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/arts/music/the-juilliard-...