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

This seems like a pretty good idea on the surface. I'm curious how the SAT and ACT standardized testing in the US came into the position of almost de-facto standardized college entrance exam. On the other hand, I've wondered why a similar thing doesn't exist in the real estate industry for home inspections. A good inspection costs a lot of money, and it seems basically every serious buyer needs to pay for it themselves. Why doesn't the seller pay for one up front and share the results with interested buyers? Certainly there's room for corruption / cheating, so maybe that's why? The same concerns would apply for a standardized whiteboarding. Not to mention that some kind of interview would have to happen anyway just as a context for getting to know a candidate. Personally, I think it's actually good that this happens in a technical context and, as others have said, is not completely based on a verbal conversation.

I was just griping about this earlier today. I'm in the interview process with a company, who has talked to me before, after being referred internally to do so. I've talked to them about technical problems I've solved in the past, discussed problem solving and approaches to optimization and architecture. Interview process has gone really well.

They said the last thing is a code test, that they do through Hackerrank. I figured ok, I'll go through some on Hackerrank and get the hang of them, since I've never really done much on these types of things. I did bomb out of an interview process last year that was strikingly similar, with a final step of random algorithmic code test that was timed/monitored and I struggled on.

I spent 2 hours working on Hackerrank stuff just to realize:

1. It's virtually all either 1+1 intro or comp sci stuff. There's nothing there remotely applicable to any work I've done in my career, which has included numerous positions of architecture/scalability/emergency fixing.

2. A lot of the problems are very poorly described. After an hour of failing to solve one, with no feedback on what strange inputs were failing (because the ones it would tell me all passed), I finally clicked the editorial part. And it began with "here's the obvious solution, but that won't work because it's O(n^3). Well no sh*t, I'm aware, but this is a stupid brute force exercise and there was no notice of "be efficient, must solve using linear algebra."

In the past, a couple places have done a code test that is basically "sit down with Jim for an hour, he's working on XYZ problem, and see how you would approach it." Those have been the absolute best code tests, both for me to show talent and for companies to judge me.

Anyways, time to go bomb out of another candidacy at the last stage.

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 trade school. Building a simple website will require JS package management, kubernetes, and AWS. The "free tier" will fall away.

Employees aren't excited by what they do: People job hop for promos, raises, and resume fodder, not because there's an actual interest in the product. The majority of software projects are mundane glue, pipes, optimization tweaks, or migrations.

Companies don't care about employees: Wages are adjusted for cost of living. Companies are trying to hire more outside of California in order to lower wages across the board. Employees at "passion project" companies (gaming, SpaceX, Tesla) are overworked and underpaid.

Incentives are wrong: Google bestows promos on launches, not KTLO. Google kills products that make customers and engineers happy and doesn't spend enough effort to make them better.

The industry is eating the commons: The web is turning into shit. Devices are being locked down. Ads and tracking are everywhere. Open source is being co-opted, but the benefits are not returned. The cool things to hack on and integrate with (remember "mashups"?) are all siloed up, full of ads, and dumbed down to the most basic products.

The Internet now treats everyone using it like we're all brainless idiots to be injected with dopamine. Like we're not smart enough to choose how to consume it. And working for companies in this field now feels like working for the insurance industry. Optimize for the average.

The author has been working as a developer for 15 years, and claims very strong technical skills. Why are they learning/re-learning Python, C++, SQL, C#, college math? Nobody will be fooled by that; at 15 YoE they will be evaluated on what they have done over a career, not over the last month.

> it's all about how much time you can spend on Leetcode.

The author is playing a game built for new grads. Here's a secret, speaking as an (ex) Facebook interviewer:

Facebook's hiring pipeline is optimized for new grads, but its hiring needs are senior engineers. They know this, but you can't build a high-volume interview pipeline for senior engineers: there's not enough of them, their skill set is too varied. So Facebook is kind of at a loss, but in general if you have 15 YoE and can show you're good, they want to hire you. In particular they'll try to find deep domain experts ("pirates", their term) to evaluate you.

So be prepared to demonstrate basic competence in coding, and also some deep expertise. T-shaped engineers, as they say.

Working hard for a raise/promotion is a losing strategy. Working hard so you can change jobs every 18-24 months with big salary jumps is rather easy to do consistently.

Trying to get a promotion is deciding to compete for one position in one company with essentially every qualified candidate in the world. It’s easy to see how looking for a better job every so often has better odds for success.