“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”

#481

Post by marcosdumay » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 3:54 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…

And yet, there are still so much value one can create with software... A lot of it is even outside of the reach of the spy and divisiveness as a service companies, it's the kind of thing that if they touch it, they destroy it.

The late years of Rome is actually a great metaphor. We are suffering from human capital loss, and have signs of institutional collapse. A shock can destroy our institutions and throw us into something like the early Medieval period: much less wealthy at the beginning, and messy too, but fast growing and with a much higher ceiling than the previous age.

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

#482

Post by cratermoon » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 3:56 PM UTC

jdreaver wrote: post #54

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 inconsistent with my experience in my most recent round of interviews. I interviewed at a few places at a senior/staff level, and most of my interviews were behavioral, architectural, or discussions about past work. The few leetcode-style or coding questions I had were easily prepared for from my ~40 hours of interview-specific coding prep. There is zero chance I would have gotten those interviews or passed t…

> my ~40 hours of interview-specific coding prep.

Where did you find time to do 40 hours of prep, and how many weeks did it take?

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

#483

Post by decafninja » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 3:58 PM UTC

neverminder wrote: post #477

vsareto wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NGL, I'd jump through hoops for 250k + other compensation Part of why this has stuck around for so long is that so many people are willing to do that because it's a life-altering amount of money

Well, there are also counter-examples to your thinking. Brian Acton was rejected by Facebook, then went on founding WhatsApp and eventually selling it to the same Facebook for $19B. "Life altering amount of money", wouldn't you agree? Probably one of the most expensive rejections in history.

That's an extremely, extremely, extremely, unlikely edge case though. You're more likely to get simultaneous offers from all the letters in FAANG while also simultaneously becoming a 1MM+ subscriber Youtube star than you are of repeating Brian's story (or even a fraction of it).

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

#484

Post by abj » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 3:58 PM UTC

llbeansandrice wrote: post #479

abj wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I avoided using the word union. In an ideal world, this would be a union. In (what I worry might be) the real world, the word union conjures unhelpful barriers to action. I'm less interested in fighting idealogical battles. I'm more interested in achieving a practical goal - getting a large group of people to say no to leetcode. My guess is more people will say no to leetcode if they think of it as a general…

> getting a large group of people to say no to leetcode. I assume you mean LC to be a stand-in for the types of interviews that focus on LC-style questions? LC didn't invent these and they're certainly not to blame when companies ask senior SWE candidates to invert binary trees.

That's a great point - LC didn't invent binary tree questions. Leetcode might be the wrong term to use.

Is there another, more general term I could use? I'm looking for a term that would be as clear to as most people as possible.

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

#485

Post by lentil_soup » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

koonsolo wrote: post #275

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way you size up anyone else's aptitude, really: by making them feel comfortable, speaking with them honestly, trying to quickly figure out what excites them and asking lots of follow-up questions. When someone is eager and bright, and they've been made to feel relaxed, it's usually obvious. Conducting a great interview is hard. It requires some mentorship and a ton of practice. Not everyone's cut out for it.…

Again an answer with a lot of fluff but no real content. So what do you ask then? How do you assess the skills of the candidate?

You ask them about a previous project they've worked on, or a problem you currently have and take it from there. You are bound to hit interesting problems where you can ask them what they would do, if they've had similar issues, how they solved it, what tech they used and why, would you do it differently now, etc.

If you care about performance and data structures you can dig in, you can ask what bottlenecks they had, what structures they used. I've had a lot of success just asking in the middle something like "why not use a list or vector?" (in C++), the discussion that follows tells me already if this person knows how memory works, how algorithms scale, etc and this are things I really care about in my industry, not just random trivia.

All of this is done as a conversation, I want to minimize their nerves as that just obfuscates the real person I'd be working with.

I get none of that info asking someone to invert a binary tree on a whiteboard.

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

#486

Post by marcosdumay » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

alltakendamned wrote: post #109

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…

Unfortunately I feel it is hard for me to disagree with the overall sentiment of what you are describing. But I'd like to offer a little glimmer of hope from someone with too many gray hairs to count. Computers are still machines, and we still tell them what to do by programming them. It is still possible to stay out of what you describe above, it is still possible to work on low-level code, on real products, on thin…

> Hackaday might be a more interesting hangout than Hacker News for you?

The Hackaday focus on the dumbed-down format of video presentation is infuriating. It would be very nice to fund something community-driven, focused on actual content, with the same subject.

Until then, I think the few articles on the Hackaday subject that appear here on HN are worth more than the entire Hackaday site.

(I still visit both, of course, but tend to only look at the headlines there.)

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

#487

Post by lokar » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

One thing I've seen some companies do for Sr hires is give a tech talk. Present some past work, take questions, etc. Seems like a better way to evaluate what you actually end up doing.

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

#488

Post by jandrewrogers » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

I've hired a lot of people out of FAANG. In recent years, there are developers there who are extremely polished at these style of interviews, which makes them seem very impressive, but don't know anything else. The minute you step outside what they've been practicing for, the façade of ability crumbles. Increasingly, I suspect these interviews are overfitting for people whose only skill is that they spend all their time practicing for these interviews. In my current hiring process, we've needed to do things to weed these people out because quite a few have been getting through the FAANG filter.

I've worked at FAANG and gotten offers from the rest, but I can't view leetcode as anything but a hazing ritual at this point.

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

#489

Post by AlwaysRock » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

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…

I used to be a recruiter. Roughly 1 in every 25 developer I worked with told me they wouldn't do silly arbitrary technical interviews and that if the company wanted them to they would decline the interview.

I respected that decision but it none of those engineers every got hired by companies I was working with. They all had jobs already so clearly that was fine with them but it seems like there needs to be a better alternative.

One developer would ask what the role entailed, then find a relevant job/project that showed he had done similar work. That was helpful but obviously only works if you have a longer career with many projects to pull from.

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

#490

Post by _benj » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #50

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…

When I was a hiring manager at the previous company I was at, I gave an interview where I gave an exact description of what I wanted coded. No algorithm tricks (you could solve it faster with a paradigm, but it wasn't necessary) actually this is a problem I remember having to solve for homework in intro HS CS class 25 years ago. I was checking to see if the candidate could 1. read documents. 2. ask questions. 3 ident…

This is really interesting. On a previous company my coding test was "build a contact manager application with python and Vue.js" and I really loved that! It was something I could do in less than 10 hours or so. The role was full-stack web dev and I got it.

I've been considering screening companies based on what their hiring process is. How do you think that could be assessed, say, companies that eveluate real-life experience vs. leetcoder skills?