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The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

jarednelsen.dev

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Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#541

Post by peferron »

fsniper wrote: post #421

Not exactly a comment for the piece, but for overall comments going around. I am really shocked with people's understanding of situations. Like one great example of a different interview process which totally seems like working for the interviewer and his/her interviewees is bashed for not being good for their tastes without even getting the rationale. Or expecting people to spend 6 months on preparation for intervie…

> expecting people to spend 6 months on preparation for interviews considered normal or totally acceptable

You're expected to be able to solve a certain set of problems. Whether you don't prepare at all, spend 6 months, or spend 6 years is up to you. Oh, and everything you need to prep is available in cheap books and websites.

That's immensely superior to being required to spend 5 years and thousands of dollars in college to get the degree that nobody will hire you without, like some industries do.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#543

Post by speedgoose »

ummonk wrote: post #144
throwlaplace wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having just recently (in the last 2 weeks) completed >100 problems on leetcode i can affirmatively tell you that it's not actually that difficult to game this system. i read elements of programming interviews (took about a month of a couple of hours a day) and then just blitzgrieged leetcode. this was all in prep for a FAANG internship tech screen i had yesterday. it went well (not perfect but well). but it is true t…

The people complaining are usually the ones who can't just prep for algorithmic interviews with a couple hours a day of effort for a month. Which makes the algorithmic interview a relatively good filter - ability to learn something difficult quickly is a very important skill at high performance software companies.

It's a good filter, you only get the people who spent too much time on bullshit for free. They can make very good workers.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#544

Post by petagonoral »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #291
petagonoral wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're speaking as if you have experience with this but looking at your LinkedIn and previous comments, you have zero years professional software dev experience? Yet, you speak so authoritatively and decisively in this comment and your parent comment. The other people responding (including me) all have multiple years experience in actual software companies of all sizes.

I never claimed to work at a FAANG company, but I must have hit a nerve if people are going through the effort of looking at my LinkedIn profile and looking at more than the first page of my comments. Believe it or not, you don't need to have passed the tests or have software development experience to make the observation that people complaining about a process are the ones that don't perform well. I've written and g…

[flagged]

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#545

Post by Cu3PO42 »

heartbeats wrote: post #249
Cu3PO42 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARM, for example? But let's assume for a second that the only relevant companies are US-based. A lot of them also hire in other countries and it is my understanding that compensation isn't what it is in the US either.

ARM have offices all over the world and are owned by the Japanese. The European "tech industry" is and remains a joke. American companies also have offices all over the world. For example, Google have several offices in Africa. This does however not mean that Ghana has a booming tech industry, it just means that sometimes you need domestic offices for minor regulatory reasons.

SoftBank only bought ARM in 2016, they are by origin very much from the UK and I don't think anyone is going to argue that ARM wasn't relevant before 2016.

DeepMind was also founded in the UK and later bought by Google. Their HQ remains in London.

DeepL, who are providing a much better translation product than Google or Microsoft by many accounts, are a German company.

Spotify, which I'm sure needs no explanation, is a Swedish company.

While it is certainly true that the US pays better, I think you need to re-evaluate your position that noone else is creating good or valuable products.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#546

Post by scarmig »

peferron wrote: post #530
scarmig wrote: post #441

This will probably be lost in the pile of comments, and I'm sure some people will interpret it as humble bragging. But I genuinely do not get the angst and anger over the tech screen, from the perspective of an applicant. So I want to explain why I like them. My background: I've never taken any kind of CS or programming class in my life. Mediocre grades in college. My first exposure to programming was at age 24, as I…

Your experience is incredibly close to my own. I'd love to know if you also feel the same about a few other issues: - I used to have a massive impostor syndrome due to not having a CS degree. Joining FAANG alleviated perhaps 80% of it. (Just to be clear, that's not the reason why I joined FAANG; I just wanted to try a large corp after years in tiny startups.) It feels good, but I'm mourning it a little, because I bel…

> imposter syndrome

Absolutely. And that imposter syndrome played a substantial part in motivating me to apply to FAANG :) I found myself in the doldroms for years afterward after starting at G, but I recently quit to do my own thing for awhile and have been so happy to find that I still have the capacity for joy and drive.

And, yes, it was incredibly fun to study and solve these problems. Sometimes I'd end up going on unrelated tangents--cache-oblivious algorithms, a full history of quicksort and all its variations and partitions, how all the concurrent data structures in the Java standard library are implemented--and just spend all day reading about them and/or re-implementing them on paper on a sunny day in Golden Gate Park (and one of my Google interview questions was with a gruff Ukrainian guy who wanted me to implement a concurrent LRU cache, so that went swimmingly!). And so when people talk about how hellishly oppressive and difficult having to learn about binary search trees is, it just doesn't resonate with me. Even if not for the jump in comp, it was just genuinely fun.

My background is math/physics, so perhaps that's part of it? Maybe many applicants just want to build something and just care about the final product, while the part of programming that I enjoy most is the brain teasers and making things work in the most efficient and elegant way possible.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#547

Post by redis_mlc »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #423
scottlocklin wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, do you even data science? Not knowing Unix tools like cut and sort is a hard fail on a senior individual contributor in data science role, as is using sqlite which totally doesn't scale the way sort and cut does. Separates sheep from goats in data science land. You should really learn them if you're in the field and work with reasonably big data sets. Frankly you should learn them if you work with data at all,…

Hmm, tell us more? Databases are generally known for their good performance (under locking conditions - this is the relevant factor I guess?), after all...

> Databases are generally known for their good performance

If the data is on a filesystem, then sed, grep and cut pipelines will likely be your fastest option (Yahoo! processed petabytes of logfiles for decades that way.)

If the data is already inside a database table and indexed well, that could be fast enough. But generally speaking, the ETL is often a bottleneck. And DBAs are $$$$ compared to "the UNIX way."

Source: DBA

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#548

Post by peferron »

defen wrote: post #510
ummonk wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people complaining are usually the ones who can't just prep for algorithmic interviews with a couple hours a day of effort for a month. Which makes the algorithmic interview a relatively good filter - ability to learn something difficult quickly is a very important skill at high performance software companies.

Speaking as a parent, the idea of having “a couple hours of free time per day for a month” to learn difficult new material is laughable, and it has nothing to do with intellectual ability.

Then try 1 hour every day for 3 months, or 1 hour every 2 days for 6 months, or whatever you can fit into your schedule. Do you really have no time at all after your kid(s) go to sleep? I prepared and interviewed with a 1 year old at home, it was challenging but doable. Your situation might be more complex than mine though, I wouldn't know.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#549

Post by peferron »

scarmig wrote: post #546
peferron wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your experience is incredibly close to my own. I'd love to know if you also feel the same about a few other issues: - I used to have a massive impostor syndrome due to not having a CS degree. Joining FAANG alleviated perhaps 80% of it. (Just to be clear, that's not the reason why I joined FAANG; I just wanted to try a large corp after years in tiny startups.) It feels good, but I'm mourning it a little, because I bel…

> imposter syndrome Absolutely. And that imposter syndrome played a substantial part in motivating me to apply to FAANG :) I found myself in the doldroms for years afterward after starting at G, but I recently quit to do my own thing for awhile and have been so happy to find that I still have the capacity for joy and drive. And, yes, it was incredibly fun to study and solve these problems. Sometimes I'd end up going…

Thanks for answering. If you're still in the Bay, and feel like drinking a beer to our dear departed friend the impostor syndrome, feel free to email me :) it's in my profile.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#550

Post by Aeolun »

alexpetralia wrote: post #310
DoreenMichele wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hilarious, but I think you dodged a bullet. Imagine for a minute actually working there.

To be honest I never understood this logic. Clearly a firm's skill at interviewing might diverge from their ability to mentor, innovate, have a great engineering culture and so on? Sure - perhaps it's slightly less likely, but it's not at all obvious that interviewing skill and company excellence are 100% convergent.

If someone giving you an interview problem isn’t mortified that the entire premise of their result is invalid because they didn’t even bother testing the code, I would not want to work with them.
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