His technical skills were not already "very strong" if briefly revisting college mathematics made them "considerably stronger", lol
“I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
281–290 of 731 posts
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#282Tech hiring is severely broken. 22 years in and it's only gotten worse. We still tolerate PhD Comp Sci algorithm questions for frontend developer gigs, endless series of array shuffling and sorting, canned problems intended to "measure your problem solving ability," ridiculous hypotheticals (e.g. whiteboard how you would build Slack), and a litany of other tactics that recruiters or old school management thinks are r…
You can't believe how many people are unable to do the basic things like sort an array. These kind of questions is not to see how smart you are, it is to weed out all the ones who don't event get the most basic parts of programming. And I can assure you as someone doing a shitload of interviews, that a huge part of candidates doesn't understand the basics of programming such as sorting an array. If all candidates had…
Why would any company want me to write an array sort instead of calling the .sort() method on the standard array class? Is that really the sort of thing they want their devs to code and debug and maintain by hand?
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#283Generally, I'm more likely to hire someone with interesting hobbies than someone who has completed HackerRank tests. I don't find it compelling to see that a candidate has accomplished standardized metrics; but I am swayed by non-computing hobbies. Synthesizers, painting, rock climbing, volunteering, and so on are indicators of a curious mind that's happy to apply itself.
So how successful is this hiring strategy? Did you ever hire someone that didn't know how to program at all?
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't believe how many people are unable to do the basic things like sort an array. These kind of questions is not to see how smart you are, it is to weed out all the ones who don't event get the most basic parts of programming. And I can assure you as someone doing a shitload of interviews, that a huge part of candidates doesn't understand the basics of programming such as sorting an array. If all candidates had…
Why would any company want me to write an array sort instead of calling the .sort() method on the standard array class? Is that really the sort of thing they want their devs to code and debug and maintain by hand?
If you can't do a sort, how will be be able to do more high level complex things?
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Our industry feels like it's in the decline of the Roman Empire right now. .... And here I am, writing a desktop native app that targets a small niche of users, with no marketing, no advertising, and we've had our strongest year yet, and overall usage just grows slowly year over year. Maybe it's how you think things ought to be that is misaligned with reality, rather than "the decline of the Roman Empire".
> And here I am, writing a desktop native app that targets a small niche of users What is it?
Looks like it’s Ardour DAW https://ardour.org/
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#286Unless 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…
The problem is that you never know when you make it to the end game company.
I thought about it a couple of times, and then synergies came into play.
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#287A 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…
There was a time where you would just hire someone and fire them if it wasn't working out. Why make the barrier to entry so high and prone to bias when you can always just let people go who aren't doing the work?
Yes, I've worked at places where that was the approach. Problem is if you end up doing it very often it costs you a lot of time and you do have to eat some inital payroll and administrative costs. Plus out of respect for the candidate, they've quit their prior job, maybe moved and signed a new lease, and now they are unemployed 30 or 60 days later.
You really need to have some basis for confidence that the candidate is a good fit before you put yourself and them through that. Even for entry level jobs where what they know coming in isn't too important, you want smart people who can get along with the team and learn.
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would any company want me to write an array sort instead of calling the .sort() method on the standard array class? Is that really the sort of thing they want their devs to code and debug and maintain by hand?
If you can't do a sort, how will be be able to do more high level complex things?
If you reimplement the standard library for basic tasks, when will you ever get the time to build useful things?
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#289Unless 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…
Our industry feels like it's in the decline of the Roman Empire right now. Our craft is becoming arcane: Microsoft is building VSCode for the cloud. Few people own desktop computers anymore. Apple is locking down MacOS to signed binaries. Soon we'll all have thin clients and will write software in the cloud for the cloud. Few will be able to learn how to engineer at home anymore - you'll have to go to a university or…
"Few people own desktop computers anymore."
I will own a desktop computer until the day I die.
Excellent post too.
Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”
#290Unless 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…
There is a point to "staying current" beyond chances in future interviews. Imagine working at a company that has basically found its niche, is doing well, just not growing much so only hiring really slowly. Everybody around you has been there for 20+ years. Everybody working like 20-30 years ago. This kind of bubble is dangerous, not just for the employees' future chances on the job market, but for the company itself…
I don't think it's a strong sign of complacency. I think people just don't do toy problems involve coding breadth first searches or determining bipartite graphs. How often to people really write dynamic programming algos in 45 minutes. They don't - they think and tinker.
Algorithms can be beautiful to code but most of the time is not spent on this sort of thing. It's fixing null pointer exceptions or parsing json requests or whatever javascript front end engineers do.
You definitely have to prepare.