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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”

#571

Post by goldenManatee »

shaftway wrote: post #554
okareaman wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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 Sounds like they're looking for assembly line programmers - crank out the code, pass it off, then on to the next piece of code without pause. This would be a nightmare for me. The high salaries and prestige of these companies definitely would not be worth it. I'm not neur…

I'm in the interviewer pool at Google. Other FAANGs might be different. I've had candidates ask me why we do this, and my answer is that once you're in the company, transferring to another job on the same ladder is fairly trivial and requires no technical re-interviews. I go on to describe how I've been around for 10 years and am on my 5th team. None of those transfers required any sort of technical re-check. Teams t…

I’m not sure how unique that is, though. Most companies once you’re in doing technical, your peers will trust you to switch teams or broaden out a little. Re-testing a coworker would come off anywhere between amusing and insulting.

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

#572

Post by potta_coffee »

py_or_dy wrote: post #183
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…

Goodness, you and the OP have really hit the nail on the head. I spent the last 5 years quite happy at a simple dev shop. Then they hired a bunch of people, paid them more than me, and allowed them complete free reign to write what ever kind of code on some brand new projects. After a year of this, one person quit mid-project, another died mysteriously (covid?), and then another just recently quit. My boss expected m…

This sounds exactly like a job I interviewed for a couple of years ago, a Django shop. I'm skilled at Python but the questions were ridiculous. I feel like you probably dodged a bullet and don't want to work there anyway.

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

#573

Post by newbie578 »

dnautics wrote: post #516
decafninja wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Source please? I would love to read more about this. Couldn't find anything on Google.

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

#574

Post by baq »

decafninja wrote: post #383
meheleventyone wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it really depends on how and where you get referred. Bigger companies are likely to be process heavy and inflexible. My last three interviews and job moves have all been from referrals or old colleagues. None had coding challenges and all resulted in job offers. But that was a small satellite team for a big org and two early stage startups. It’s also a consequence of timing and luck though. I’d definitely be…

I've gotten lots of referrals from old colleagues and bosses, but as the previous poster has said, all that has resulted in is opening the door to an leetcode interview. Also timeframe is significant too. I'd say 5-10 years ago, fewer companies (especially outside the tech industry) were leetcoding candidates. Now, many of those same companies (including my current) are all leetcoding candidates.

FAANG are doing it, what more proof do they want...

i used to like computers. not so much anymore.

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

#575

Post by Apocryphon »

FlaSheridn wrote: post #527
snarf21 wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This process is all theater. We really need some kind of certification process instead. I'm a while out of school and one interview I went on had a requirement for a live coding session. The ask was to implement red/black trees from scratch despite the fact that they have an Angular app with MySQL on the backend. I took this as a blessing. I don't want to work at a place where they think this is a good way to hire pe…

A certification exam wouldn’t survive a disparate impact challenge. Google stopped asking for SAT/ACT scores long before universities did. And long before that (according to my father, who actually used them), telegram companies had to stop giving spelling tests to telegraph operator applicants. Add to that difficulties with preventing cheating during a pandemic, and I see no alternative to rolling your own live exam…

Just have the certification system be leetcoding on a whiteboard so the interviees need only pass it once rather than all the times for each FAANG, unicorn, and wannabe unicorn-FAANG startup that mandate such questions.

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

#576

Post by goldenManatee »

emddudley wrote: post #452
astrea wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment inspired me to ask a question I've had for a while. My background is not CS, it's computer engineering. So I didn't have any education in the fancy algorithms that you'll find in these interviews. Is that expected or did I miss something?

I also went to school for CE and although we did have some algorithmic and data structures classes, I don't think they were as in-depth as the CS curriculum. For example, the only time I ever encountered red-black trees was in the context of prepping for software interviews.

And then how often over one’s day-to-day career? It’s farcical.

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

#577

Post by mettamage »

pickledcods wrote: post #346
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…

And then age... I'm an eighties whizz-kid, educated hardware and software background with borderline epiphanic understanding of computer technology. From firmware to systems where peoples lives literally depend on. In 2000 jumped on a plane to Taiwan to develop the first Arduino/RaspberryPi class devices. Still up to date and currently busy polishing a ShowHN which will blow you off your socks. Everything nowadays is…

> Finding a job position is impossible. The excuses for rejection range from unbelief to insulting. It is so bad that I have now seriously considered leaving the field, taking 40+ years experience with me.

Before you do, are you up for a Zoom call or something? Talk about anything you're passionate about, and perhaps we'll post it as a show HN.

I'm 31 myself and at the beginning of my career (I've been longer in the education system than most).

My email is in my profile.

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

#578

Post by monknomo »

_bj1k wrote: post #309
anon9001 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, and as a result I try to work no more than 4 hours a day, preferably less. I take every possible opportunity to extend timelines, create buffer, and reduce scope. I'm highly incentivized to farm as much time as possible, so that's what I do. I try to target obscure projects that I already know how to do, where there's an assumption that nobody really knows how to do it because it's obscure. Complexity a…

I've started my first dev job earlier this year at a small company, around 10 people. And it scares me that I already do this. I used to deliver as quick as possible and working my ass off and finding that the only thing it got me was a little praise and that more was expected from me the next time. Now I'm browsing HN during work time still delivering within deadlines, just not a week ahead, and most importantly, I…

think this way - you have 40-50 years of work in front of you. Can you sprint the whole time?

Work your ass off when it's important, and just work otherwise. A valuable skill is distinguishing important from urgent

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

#579

Post by LolWolf »

pb7 wrote: post #567
rhombocombus wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not my thing personally (at least not today). I could buy a lot more toys and BS and retire earlier if I took one of those jobs, but my already generous (not by FAANG standards) programmer salary is enough and it comes along with a sane schedule and reasonable work expectations. The value in this is I get more time outside of work to enjoy my life, which is worth more than an extra pile of lucre when I already get by…

I don't know where this misguided implication comes from that FAANG doesn't have a sane schedule or reasonable work expectations. The people that work a lot do so because they're some of the most passionate in the industry and enjoy working a lot as a result. On average, I would speculate FAANG is less stressful and more reasonable than other companies. The reason you may think that is not the case is that negative s…

I would describe FAANG (in my and many friends' experiences) as "adult daycare." Not in a bad way, mind you, but very much "get your homework done and go have your free time after." (This excludes higher management and architects, etc., of course. I mean this as a middle-of-the-road SWE on a decent team.)

I'm not quite sure where the GP got stressful, but it is soul-sucking if you expect your work to be interesting, impactful, and creative, which doesn't really happen apart from a few core or research teams. There is a ton of piping and rewriting of frameworks going on all the time, even when it need not be extremely useful. This is the main reason I found it thoroughly drab—even though it is likely that the lines of code I wrote there are likely to touch many orders of magnitude more people than anything else I ever work on for the rest of my life.

I guess that's just how it goes, though.

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

#580

Post by dilyevsky »

jjav wrote: post #324
dilyevsky wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven’t worked at fb but same experience at other big co. Also I question authors experience interviewing people - I’ve done literally hundreds coding sessions and there’re surprisingly large number of folks who claim 5-10 years of experience and several companies under their belt but aren’t able to code a simple for-loop in their language of choice

> there’re surprisingly large number of folks who claim 5-10 years of experience and several companies under their belt but aren’t able to code a simple for-loop in their language of choice No. This indicates a failure in the interview technique.

Not really - these companies try to cast a very wide net deliberately so it’s natural there will be large number of rejections. Smaller companies do a lot more prescreening so it’s less common there
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