“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”

#381

Post by ghaff » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

thrower123 wrote: post #369

viraptor wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You seem to be agreeing with the parent. Large timezone differences, cultural differences, and language differences can be real remote challenges. (Although, in my experience, US--at least ET--to Europe works pretty well. Takes more to coordinate Asia in general and probably want to minimize the amount of synchronous communications.)

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

#382

Post by goutsuffer » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

Its not able hiring the best but filtering out the bad. Its very hard/expensive to fire someone.

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

#383

Post by decafninja » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:07 PM UTC

meheleventyone wrote: post #271

an_opabinia wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No dude, I’ve been burned by exactly what that poster described. Being well networked just gets your application opened. The leetcode is what gets you hired. The people who would hire me without leetcode were either trying to take advantage of me or have never been my coworkers. As another commenter said: Leetcode, leetcode, leetcode.

I think it really depends on how and where you get referred. Bigger companies are likely to be process heavy and inflexible. My last three interviews and job moves have all been from referrals or old colleagues. None had coding challenges and all resulted in job offers. But that was a small satellite team for a big org and two early stage startups. It’s also a consequence of timing and luck though. I’d definitely be…

I've gotten lots of referrals from old colleagues and bosses, but as the previous poster has said, all that has resulted in is opening the door to an leetcode interview.

Also timeframe is significant too. I'd say 5-10 years ago, fewer companies (especially outside the tech industry) were leetcoding candidates. Now, many of those same companies (including my current) are all leetcoding candidates.

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

#384

Post by randomtree » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:07 PM UTC

As an Engineering Manager, I find that solving this kind of problems really helps in my work, and it also helped to make our interview process more objective.

When working with high-load systems, it kinda doesn't help that a person knows what "DRY"/"SOLID"/refactoring etc is.

What helps is the ability to write code that handles corner cases and does it efficiently.

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

#385

Post by workthistime » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:10 PM UTC

Shared404 wrote: post #78

eyelidlessness wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so sad to read. I made my way into a tech career in what would properly be described as “hacker” in the traditional sense, though I never applied the term to myself. I came into a ton of formal knowledge and became quite talented through paths that opened with recognition of my experience and skills. I’m going into the job market for the first time in a few years and this is exactly what I feared. That said,…

Hoping the best for you. I'm hoping to either follow a similar path, or dodge computing entirely as a career path, find an interesting job, and keep it as a hobby where I have the chance to work on interesting problems. Don't know that I would describe myself as talented though, but definitely driven.

> Hoping the best for you. I'm hoping to either follow a similar path, or dodge computing entirely as a career path, find an interesting job, and keep it as a hobby where I have the chance to work on interesting problems.

I’m at the point I’m seriously considering this, and I’m just not sure I can do it. Everytime I run through the possibilities in my head nothing adds up. The only viable careers for me to switch into are a) not interesting or b) pay depressingly little and would require me to obtain expensive credentials.

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

#386

Post by abj » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:10 PM UTC

bananaface wrote: post #375

abj wrote: post #370

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…

Won't work because there's a giant incentive to defect and no way to effectively police it.

Great point - there will be a giant incentive to defect. I'm not interested in policing it.

I'm interested in raising the incentive for people to say no.

I'd do this by offering another job board for people who aren't likely to leetcode anyway. I would tailor it to people with great open source projects/ experience that might get looked over in a more traditional interview.

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

#387

Post by yodsanklai » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:10 PM UTC

okareaman wrote: post #376

yodsanklai wrote: post #359

I've just landed a job at a FAANG company. Some random subjective comments based on my experience: - it was hard work - there was no way I could have passed these interviews without all the work. - my past experience and education barely helped me for the interview - it's not enough to be able to solve the problems, you need to be able to solve them on the spot, without much thinking, in an interview context - I pass…

> - it's not enough to be able to solve the problems, you need to be able to solve them on the spot, without much thinking, in an interview context Sounds like they're looking for assembly line programmers - crank out the code, pass it off, then on to the next piece of code without pause. This would be a nightmare for me. The high salaries and prestige of these companies definitely would not be worth it. I'm not neur…

I think what is required for the interviews is very different than the actual work you do once you are hired. It 's also very team dependent.

The reason why you're expected to be fast during the interviews is that you're competing with people who are fast (either because they are smart, or because they've practiced a lot).

That being said, this type of interviews is clearly not for everyone. There are tons of skilled people who (for good reasons) don't want to play that game, and there'll always be a market for them.

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

#388

Post by decafninja » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:13 PM UTC

trimbo wrote: post #213

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…

This is a truly remarkable take I've never heard before. I honestly wonder if it's true. If it's actually true--and if poor quality of work and reputation mean nothing, just leetcode--it seems like that is just a side effect of extremely rapid expansion and/or churn. Because no employer would willingly hire people like that. That'd be absurd. So the only reason that would be possible if the hiring manager never got w…

I currently produce average to slightly above average quality work while being a "Professional Leetcoder". All my performance reviews have been positive. I could produce significantly better and/or faster work by going "above and beyond", but other than a sentimental feeling of self satisfaction, why bother?

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

#389

Post by dbspin » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:14 PM UTC

jarl-ragnar wrote: post #285

warpech wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

Yikes, tried to use Ardour multiple times back in the day (I used to work as an independent radio producer and sound engineer). Classic open source desktop software in that it promised the world, but in practice was extremely difficult to even get to install, and reliant on external packages that were themselves glitchy and baroque (I believe Jack was the common issue in this case).

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

#390

Post by srj » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 2:14 PM UTC

throwaway201103 wrote: post #282

koonsolo wrote: post #272

Earlier 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?

Having a deeper understanding of how things work is important in knowing how to use even the high level constructs well. How do you choose between an ordered and unordered map? If you've implemented them even one time I bet you'll have a clearer understanding of where each one excels.

If you couldn't remember how to implement quick sort or merge sort that would be one thing, but if you had no idea or never considered how a fast sort could operate that's another problem. I would never ask this in an interview but to use it as an example, it wouldn't be recall of an implementation that I'd be looking for but seeing if the candidate can identify a divide and conquer approach to the problem.