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Code Interviews

alaiacano.github.io

51–60 of 98 posts

Re: Code Interviews

#51

It's also frustrating for job mobility, as you need to move jobs (or at least have offers) to get employers to pay your market rate. But in order to get offers you need to basically start a part time job studying and interviewing. If you just interview with a company you want to work for with no competing offers you will get lowballed - you might also just get rejected because companies prefer high-false positive rat…

why spend 3 months full time studying when you can spend one month full time writing code for a product you can talk about in the interview?

Re: Code Interviews

#52
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People making non-trivial contributions to open source projects or coding in their free time are an exception. Most candidates (>99%) have no work you could actually look at.

> Most candidates (>99%) have no work you could actually look at. Most inexperienced candidates... One of my favorite pastimes, is following up on GitHub, with people from this joint, or others, that pique my interest. There's a lot of really awesome stuff out there! You guys rock ! Of course, many of these folks, are... chronologically challenged , let's say. If you've already decided that you will only be hiring fo…

why is this voted down?

Re: Code Interviews

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, from a hiring perspective, it's not scalable going through a candidates repos and verifying their worthiness. However, it is fun to talk about them during interviews. I was a hiring manager for 25 years. I would have killed for this kind of information. The people I hired were no slouches. It was a big deal, and not to be taken lightly. I loved multi-page résumés.

For a long time when looking for work I got absolutely no callbacks. A friend looked at my Resume and said "You have this huge block of skills you say you have but you have no explanation for how you have them." I explained it was because I got most of my experience from working on OSS software or software for myself and if I listed everything my resume would be ~2 pages & ~4 sides. He said to go for it despite every…

so this basically means people assume you are lying and a fraud, which is another problem that is not talked about enough - it should not be assumed that you are like that, until proven otherwise.

Re: Code Interviews

#54
post #43
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People making non-trivial contributions to open source projects or coding in their free time are an exception. Most candidates (>99%) have no work you could actually look at.

that’s too bad then. anyone can work on a simple project. how about a simple CRUD app for kitchen recipes?

It is like a cover letter, if you will do half-arsed one it will work against you.

It has to be a good CRUD kitchen recipe app if you want to show it off.

Re: Code Interviews

#55

I won't bother with coding interviews. I consider them to be "hazing rituals"; not actual qualification assessment. I am very, very fortunate, in that I don't have to deal with them. I am not looking for work, and plan to never look for work, ever again. I have a giant portfolio[0]. It has links to 40 or so repos, with tens of thousands of lines of code, spanning decades. Just about every project can be cloned, built…

GREAT work! I can understand why big companies use LC type of questions to assess coding skills of those who graduated recently or didn't enough experience to show their work, but I struggle to understand why many Startups adopted such way of evaluating engineers. I see many startups nowadays asking to candidates to reverse a tree, a task that doesn't reflect the daily work in a startup (where people change gears fre…

reversing a tree does not mean you are capable of getting anything done, it just means you bought that shitty book called "cracking the coding interview" and grinded enough of the sort of questions the book covers. besides, you have grinded enough of that stuff in college, if you went to any reasonable quality college anywhere in the world with a CS program.

Re: Code Interviews

#56
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tweet comes up every so often, but it has two problems: (1) Most of Google's engineers didn't even know Homebrew - it just wasn't something Google used on its notebooks. (2) There's no such thing as "inverting a binary tree." At least I haven't heard about it anywhere else. Maybe Google's interview process is broken, but the tweet isn't really explaining much. It's just a nice soundbite.

Knowing Homebrew could have given them reasons not to hire him. He made bad engineering decisions and brushed off feedback. And even he said he's a dick.

sounds like what google does with their analytics and google drive products

Re: Code Interviews

#57
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a long time when looking for work I got absolutely no callbacks. A friend looked at my Resume and said "You have this huge block of skills you say you have but you have no explanation for how you have them." I explained it was because I got most of my experience from working on OSS software or software for myself and if I listed everything my resume would be ~2 pages & ~4 sides. He said to go for it despite every…

so this basically means people assume you are lying and a fraud, which is another problem that is not talked about enough - it should not be assumed that you are like that, until proven otherwise.

Why? People lie a lot about their skills. The fizzbuzz test was invented a first to filter candidates that said they knew how to code but didn't, and it was very effective at it.

Re: Code Interviews

#58
post #45

The problem is that however distasteful or lacking the current situation is, it’s been adopted by most large companies and is seen as standard now so nobody has any incentive to improve it and it self perpetuates akin to hazing rituals at fraternities . Google got us into the current mess with their claim to have found the only difference between good performance and bad performance at Google was the ability to do al…

it's just a matter of time before the workforce will be replaced by shitty engineers who all grinded leetcode and are good at that but are not capable of actually creating anything good on the job. eventually, FAANG will realize they have a problem on their hands and fire everyone and hire experienced people who have no interest in leetcode, and the cycle starts over.

Re: Code Interviews

#59
That may be because I'm young, but the idea of studying for a few months and get a salary that's triple of what I currently make, or double of what starts to be the high barrier in my country (France) is extremely appealing to me. I understand that I may not feel the same way in 10, 20, 30 years but until then it's a golden opportunity.

Re: Code Interviews

#60
post #45

The problem is that however distasteful or lacking the current situation is, it’s been adopted by most large companies and is seen as standard now so nobody has any incentive to improve it and it self perpetuates akin to hazing rituals at fraternities . Google got us into the current mess with their claim to have found the only difference between good performance and bad performance at Google was the ability to do al…

they don't need research, they had that person who became part of the hiring committee overnight and who sold them all on the magic leetcode formula and they bought it.
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