“I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews” • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by robviren » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #55

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…

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…

It's because the business people got interested and are increasingly taking leadership roles. As an engineer who has shifted over to the product management side I can safely say business people suck fun out of stuff for a living. Margins, cost savings, metrics to manage, each and every slow step of creating a new, less fun, normal erodes a culture built on making "Something cool" or "Just for fun".

Worse yet is when the business minded masquerade "Fun" activities as them still being cool such as hackathons. The sad truth of the matter is that this is what happens in a maturing industry. A lot of the green field money that sat around for Facebook and Google to gobble up has been eaten. The remaining scraps are enough to prop up small startups, but really only until they get absorbed into the giants with fat checks for the founders. The regular workers get conformed into the system, with assurances "Everything will totally stay the same" as they slowly change everything.

Businesses exist to make people money. Engineers are great at solving problems and innovating. Business people are great at squeezing every last drop from those solutions till only a husk remains. To be fair to the business people, myself included, if you do anything less than squeeze for money as hard as you can, you get beat out by the competition who copy you, and nothing is as not fun as being jobless. The more and more people who get coding knowledge the more and more being a coder will be just like every other engineering position. Someone who executes. Which is why I bailed and got into PM so I could actually have a strong say to the business in what we execute on.

To end on a happy note I have never seen more people getting into robotics clubs, trying to make small static sites, learning the basics, and I am certain that every day more and more people are running their first hello world programs. So I think there some ups and downs to everyone learning coding.

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

#362

Post by rorykoehler » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:44 PM UTC

noir_lord wrote: post #293

throwitaway1235 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Few people own desktop computers anymore." I will own a desktop computer until the day I die. Excellent post too.

I mean - desktop processor sales an insanely strong, AMD can't make enough. Gamers will buy every RTX3xxx card that hits the shelf and every heavy duty programmer I know has at least a fast desktop and often server racks. I don't think we need to worry about the future of the desktop just yet.

What is a heavy duty programmer?

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

#363

Post by everdrive » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:47 PM UTC

wolco2 wrote: post #184

decafninja wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think FAANG would be considered as "endgame company" for many. Including myself.

Back in the day you wanted in to get shares before they went public. Then the dream was to cashout and using your google money you can create something. Then people stopped getting stocks but used it to get funding. Then there are the people who get in any position for less than 2 years and use that expereince to get a CTO job at a smaller org. Why do you consider it your endgame? Top salary? Interesting problems? Ma…

This is an interesting question. I moved into to IT/Security from another sector, and I'm trying to figure out my endgame. At least at my company, there aren't any jobs I covet. Most of the higher ups don't impress me, and they don't seem to know what's going on in their company very well. It seems like if I moved into leadership, I'd have to spend a lot of time lying-via-powerpoint. (that is, taking a complex problem, and both simplifying and misrepresenting in a powerpoint which shows "progress" happening.)

I wasn't a loser in my old career, and I don't want to be a loser in tech. But, it seems like everyone is a loser here. IT/Security is seen as a well-paid janitor; someone you need, but not someone you really care to learn about. Worse, becoming "important" in a company seems to be useful only in so far as you have sway at that particular company. ie, it's a lot of work for some very local, and very useless prestige. And worse, there's no external meaning other than your own status. Why do I care if I have a little fiefdom within company walls? Nothing worthwhile is being accomplished, it's just more sales.

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

#364

Post by throwaway0a5e » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:48 PM UTC

Rebelgecko wrote: post #215

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re saying that as if social skills were worthless, and likability unimportant for working together. I wonder where that sentiment comes from.

"Culture fit" is one of those things that seems to be used as a proxy for traits that are illegal to take into consideration during the hiring process.

Also a proxy for not wanting to build a team where people don't like each other. Culture fit isn't a bad thing unless you take it too far.

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

#365

Post by kemiller2002 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:48 PM UTC

I hate to tell everyone this, but this isn't new. It's been this way for 25+ years. This is just a new form. There were the "brain teaser" questions in the late 90's (How Would You Move Mount Fuji), and then there was the whiteboard coding (reverse a linked list). It's always been this way, and IMO it's stupid, but there will always be companies that do this. I've been discounted, because even though I did what they asked I didn't go above and beyond on the "test assignment." You know what, I don't want to work for those companies anyway, so I consider it a boon they asked it in the first place. There will always be people are that are gatekeeping and trying to show they are the smartest person in the room. If you and I can't sit down and have a conversation and determine whether or not I can help your team without some silly test about writing a loop, you're wasting my time.

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

#366

Post by ghaff » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #348

echelon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Companies are trying to hire more outside of California in order to lower wages across the board. Lower labor costs mean lower costs passed on to the end users which means more products in the wild which means a bigger industry. It's only a problem if you're worried about being out-competed by "those hicks in the flyover states". Techies complaining about companies moving out sounds a lot like the guy who worked the…

It's hard not to see Bay Area software developer wages, especially at the big "tech" companies, as something of a bubble. They're completely out of line with engineering and science jobs more broadly, including software engineering jobs in much of the US.

Which does suggest that someone going into software just for the money or, as GP or so commented, going through the motions and spending all their time prepping for Google interviews may be chasing a pretty transitory target.

Historically there's very little to suggest that the segment of one profession that's largely in one geographic area can sustainably capture super-premium compensation even though it doesn't really require a higher level of skill than many others have throughout the country (and the world).

And the fact that a lot more flexibility in living location has come in essentially overnight means that a lot of companies are going to start looking more skeptically at some of the premiums they're paying.

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

#367

Post by mtberatwork » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

andrew_ wrote: post #88

Tech 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…

> a national, Austin based real estate firm

I can't help notice the irony that they wanted to put you through a gauntlet of leetcode style interview questions only for you to be working on what are most likely basic CRUD apps.

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

#368

Post by _qulr » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

andrew_ wrote: post #88

Tech 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…

> The interviewers had no idea I would decline the challenge, and I politely ended the call.

This happened to me too, despite assurances from the recruiter beforehand.

Don't believe recruiters. They'll tell you anything to get you in the company's hiring process.

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

#369

Post by thrower123 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:54 PM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #334

llukas wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you assume those jobs will stay in US?

Have you seen the offers for remote work? Almost every one is "remote (us citizen)", "remote (same timezone)", "remote (monthly onsites)". Unless the companies are prepared to open whole divisions with colocated management in other countries, the jobs are staying local.

Anyone who has worked with remote programmers, unless they happen to have hit the jackpot on them, really has no desire to ever do it again. Timezone differences, language differences, cultural differences, communication differences, etc, etc, all combine to chew up so much more time and money than the nominal savings of hiring someone local. And the good remote people don't cost appreciably less anyway.

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

#370

Post by abj » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:55 PM UTC

What if we form a group/site that refuses to do leetcode interviews?

This seems like a classic coordination problem. If enough people refuse, companies will have their talent pool limited.

We could use this group to help match companies and developers who don't want to leetcode.

If it's true that leetcode filters out great developers, than companies who 'can't find talent' should be able to use our group to find some. In fact, it could be a great sign of how willing the company is to think against the current hiring zeitgeist.

Edit: Here's a quickly built site. say-no-to-leetcode.netlify.app