471–480 of 524 posts
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If you pulled someone off the street, odds are that that person would also be able to successfully deliver your daughter. How much did the anesthesiologist help, above that baseline?
He made an incision that was needed for a successful delivery. I don't want a random person off the street doing that, no.
The question for those of us that aren't leetcode fans - what are we going to do about it? We should make it easier for people to get a job without leetcode. Here's a job board I made for jobs without leetcode. https://say-no-to-leetcode.netlify.app/
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It really is about interviewing skills. I noticed a strong trend over time that the people I interviewed kept doing better. You need to engage with people without letting things get confrontational. The best advice I can give is look at how entertainers get random audience members to relax and engage in front of huge audiences. Many people lock up in such situations and can barely say their own name, yet with the rig…
> and have been repeatedly complimented on my ability to put people at ease You calling them a liar eh?
Conducting a full interview “without letting things get confrontational” is difficult. However, unless the job actually requires intense face to face confrontation you want to know how well they can do the job, not how well they can interview for it.
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I can't speak for Harvard, but in the vast majority of the world, going to college is strictly on the basis of entrance exams, with some countries also using high school grades, nothing more. This is done to avoid bias and/or favoritism. I am not an expert in U.S. admissions but my understanding is that they give points for things like whether your parents are alumni or have donated, whether you play sports, whether…
High stakes entry-exams have their own problems. Among many other issues, they measure peak performance, rather than sustained performance. US college admissions have many problems, so don't hear me say they don't need reform, but you are also assuming that academics are the sole thing that college is about. It isn't, at least not in the US. US schools value many things beyond pure academics. Among them being leaders…
I never saw it expressed so succinctly. Excellent!
It captures well the frustration around tech interviews. You might be a very competent worker (sustained performance), but fail miserably during interviews (peak performance). Ideally, you could show a body of work during your interview, but this isn't possible with most commercial software companies. If you are lucky to work on open source for your job, it is easy to show your work.
To manufacture a public body of work for myself, I built two open source projects and published them on GitHub. (Please do not read that as advice!) I can share and discuss them during interviews.
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First of all, I'm not sure where this "10 years" is coming from. I know many/most "senior" developers who reached that level long before 10 years out of university. Secondly, programming doesn't have a standard licensure process like medicine. If it did, I think a lot of these kinds of interviews that companies do would not be necessary. But as it stands I've interviewed many engineers with years of experience who co…
> First of all, I'm not sure where this "10 years" is coming from. I know many/most "senior" developers who reached that level long before 10 years out of university. That's because it's a near-meaningless title that has been watered down. Everyone is a "senior" now by their second year working.
Most of these companies have solid internship programs, and almost all E3 (entry-level) positions are offered to returning interns.
What this means is that there's no track into a junior position where you can gain experience and work your way up to senior within a FAANG if you're older than a recent college grad. That's unfortunate, because as someone working for a mid-tier company I'd like to work hard and land a senior role at a FAANG but I often wonder if these companies would look down on candidates who have spent years at lesser companies.
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Law might be different. An anecdote my Dad (Lawyer) used to tell me. > I went to school to learn the law. After school I had to teach myself how to be a lawyer.
Yes, the bar exam requires you to learn much law you'll never use. They are a general test that covers all areas of the law. Boards are for specific specialties. You don't take a board to be a doctor, you take a board to be a podiatrist, etc. Personally, I think both exams are about protectionism more than anything else. Source: have taken a bar exam, have a wife that's a doctor.
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I know you’d like to believe this. But I see a constant stream of challenging software problems at FAANG
Yeah, but basically anyone at a FAANG company who landed in any other non-FAANG company would be able to singlehandedly revolutionize the tech at that company. Those same skills that let you plug Machine Learning Library A into Tracking Database B could make things that vastly increase productivity for a bunch of regular people, and if you're doing it for yourself or a small enough shop, it could actually pay off.
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> and have been repeatedly complimented on my ability to put people at ease You calling them a liar eh?
No, I am saying putting someone at ease is only half of it you need to keep them at ease. The standard script I see people use is basically some warmup conversation where everything seems fine, followed by a grilling. Conducting a full interview “without letting things get confrontational” is difficult. However, unless the job actually requires intense face to face confrontation you want to know how well they can do…
I don't think a candidate who I put at ease then absolutely hammered would compliment me on putting them at ease would they? Or does your theory stretch to them somehow having short-term memory loss?
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I am not sure whether you have an incredibly good filtering system or have got incredibly lucky. I have interviewed similar numbers and have been repeatedly complimented on my ability to put people at ease, but have encountered exactly what the grandparent comment says. It really opened my eyes seeing so many with many years on their CV but struggling with (literal) fizzbuzz. This experience accords with most I have…
It really is about interviewing skills. I noticed a strong trend over time that the people I interviewed kept doing better. You need to engage with people without letting things get confrontational. The best advice I can give is look at how entertainers get random audience members to relax and engage in front of huge audiences. Many people lock up in such situations and can barely say their own name, yet with the rig…
I have witnessed a huge range of anxiety levels from candidates and when you get used to interviewing it is pretty clear what comes down to anxiety and what comes down to simply not being able to program.
When a candidate struggles, I gently lead them and help move things along in a very collaborative way - I am also very tolerant of mistakes or poor starts and proactively give every opportunity for those to be discounted.
If somebody, after 10 hints as to the ordering of the if/else if/else of fizzbuzz, still cannot figure it out when you have held their hand for 30 minutes that's not because you lack interview skill.
Interviewing is inevitably vastly imperfect and many aspects that are not relevant to the job will play a role (for example - time constraints dictate that you must ask small questions that are sufficiently challenging that might not always be entirely representative of the job) - nobody who is honest could claim otherwise, but that is the nature of the task - it has to be an approximation - and you have to asssess actual ability to code and do the job.