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

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

#511

Post by SQueeeeeL »

mywittyname wrote: post #466
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

Plus the prestige of being able to walk into your next job and captain the ship. I've been at a few places that hired former Googlers, and they were all treated like gods.

Yeah, the ex-Googler's I've met have always been average; but I guess if no one will say the emperor has no clothes it doesn't matter

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

#512

Post by dnautics »

_benj wrote: post #490
dnautics wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

one of the companies I interviewed at had a question where they showed me a bug in what looked to be an old version of their UI and I had to debug it as a pair with them piloting. I didn't get the job (probably in part because as an "almost totally backend" it took me a bit of time to decide to look at the web console), but it was literally the best interview I'd been on. It really exercised everything you could possibly want to know about a full stack dev, and was done in 25 minutes.

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

#513

Post by mtnGoat »

llukas wrote: post #175
ip26 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are trying to hire more outside of California in order to lower wages across the board This could turn out to be a very good thing for the country. It's a social & economic problem if all the money & opportunity are squeezed into just one metro.

Why did you assume those jobs will stay in US?

Hiring foreigners is a pain. Companies did it because the headache offset the savings, without the savings the headache may no longer be worth it.

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

#514

Post by decafninja »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #401
gumby wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I feel precisely the opposite: if you work somewhere with people you like working with (and who like working with you) then you will start t…

I have a (metaphorical) rolodex filled with contractors who I've enjoyed working with, which I will always check first before even thinking about ringing an agency.

I have a friend/ex-colleague who I would describe as a master networker. He has connections all over the NYC investment bank and hedge fund IT department world, and can literally call a few people up and get "a" well paying job at a hedge fund in a matter of hours. Some of these connections are billionaire CEOs/fund managers.

The caveat to this is that he has to be extremely unpicky. Said job can be very undesirable other than the compensation - stuff like feeding XML feed files or working with VB, etc. But because they are at hedge funds, they all still pay well.

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

#515

Post by davidjnelson »

drchopchop wrote: post #414
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…

One big problem is that companies (especially FAANG) are wasting time having very senior devs do Leetcode-style shit, which is a false negative for people that don't balance binary trees and manually regex strings all day. This especially penalizes more experienced / older devs who don't have time to LC grind (of which I'm also one), and introduces unconscious selection bias. Certainly there are other ways to verify…

Sounds reasonable. Thing is, these companies pay, and this is what they do. So if you want to play there, you have to play the game their way.

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

#516

Post by dnautics »

decafninja wrote: post #483
neverminder wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

well there is the story of when Google acquired youtube at the all-hands meeting the CTO addressed the engineering department and asked them how many of them had been rejected by google, and half of the people there shot their hands up. Probably they had a better windfall, and "Google could have saved more than a few billion"

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

#517

Post by decafninja »

_9omd wrote: post #73
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…

Yup, I jumped into the if you can't beat em, join em camp with leetcode. I Did 160 problems (likely low for many people) before my last job search, and I now make 3x what I used to. I gotta admit it's a hell of an ego boost to crush coding questions in interviews; being completely in the flow and cranking out flawless code. It makes me wonder how much money I left on the table the last 10 years, because I went the ro…

The ironic thing is I too, have come to enjoy leetcode problems. I just hate the pressure of doing them in an interview setting.

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

#518

Post by davidjnelson »

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…

> So let's not lose our excitement and sense of wonder

Exactly. It’s wild the potential that many of us hold.

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

#519

Post by _benj »

dnautics wrote: post #512
_benj wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

one of the companies I interviewed at had a question where they showed me a bug in what looked to be an old version of their UI and I had to debug it as a pair with them piloting. I didn't get the job (probably in part because as an "almost totally backend" it took me a bit of time to decide to look at the web console), but it was literally the best interview I'd been on. It really exercised everything you could poss…

I wish companies like that would be easier to find!

From the feel of this thread it seems to me that a company that explicitly states on "Who's Hiring" that they don't do leetcode, but do actual pair programming for evaluating candidates would have an advantage above the rest!

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

#520

Post by _9omd »

polishdude20 wrote: post #155
_9omd wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I jumped into the if you can't beat em, join em camp with leetcode. I Did 160 problems (likely low for many people) before my last job search, and I now make 3x what I used to. I gotta admit it's a hell of an ego boost to crush coding questions in interviews; being completely in the flow and cranking out flawless code. It makes me wonder how much money I left on the table the last 10 years, because I went the ro…

Did you just start off doing leetcode questions online and learned from the solutions? I'd study leetcode stuff if I could even start getting interviews to show my skills :/

Yes, and I went against the standard advice to not look at the solution until you solve it yourself. I think for the first 50-100 problems it's best to not think too hard about it before looking at the solution, gaining a full understanding, and writing an implementation or three (building that muscle memory so to speak).

At this point, you'll have many more tools in your kit (graph traversal, search, dynamic programming, queues, heaps, stacks, etc.) and you can work on coming up with your own solutions to new problems. But I found it to be a waste of time staring at a problem for hours when I didn't already have the fundamentals in place to tackle it.

The other thing I did was watch youtube videos to get a better grounding in some of the data structures that I struggled with. I mostly did this wish graphs, as I was always terrible at graph problems and never had to apply them in my career. I found this series of videos to be extremely good.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDV1Zeh2NRsDGO4--qE8y...

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