“I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews” • Hacker News Board

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

#591

Post by pseudalopex » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

ganafagol wrote: post #313

blobbers wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a strong sign of complacency. I think people just don't do toy problems involve coding breadth first searches or determining bipartite graphs. How often to people really write dynamic programming algos in 45 minutes. They don't - they think and tinker. Algorithms can be beautiful to code but most of the time is not spent on this sort of thing. It's fixing null pointer exceptions or parsing json req…

Please. Neither the original article nor my comment where about interviews asking to implement a breadth first search. That's a different topic. This was about him having to learn C# since it wasn't really around 20 years ago. And having to polish up Python cause it was very different 20 years ago. And other programming practices. You definitely need to stay up to date on the stuff that's relevant to your job. Not be…

The article had 2 short sentences about C# and Python and several paragraphs about HackerRank and LeetCode.

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

#592

Post by ldng » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

randomNumber7 wrote: post #332

AmericanChopper wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A friend of mine just doubled his salary. He wanted to resign and look for an other job, but his company offered him double salary. If your work makes you an important person in the company, you have a strong basis for negotiation. Most people just don't use it...

Only if the company realize your important.

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

#593

Post by gknoy » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:51 PM UTC

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #561

okareaman wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you imagine how many times Google was burned by junior devs writing C++ no matter how smart they were? Memory bugs at Google scale must be expensive. They had to come up with Go.

How about hiring better engineers instead?

At scale, it might be hard to do that, however this doesn't address the key problem. One of the hallmarks of good engineering is to add technical safeguards, rather than relying solely on Smart People.

It would be comical to hear, "Hire better pilots" as an alternative to building parachutes, or fly-by-wire systems.

Every one makes mistakes. This is why we have tests, linting, code review. Our choice of tools that we use (or, in this case, create) reflect our engineering needs as well. The goal is not just to hire Smart People, but to make it _hard for people to make critical errors_. At Google's scale, I can completely understand why they might feel that developing a new tool was the best way to prevent a core set of problems.

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

#594

Post by okareaman » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

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 don't doubt that you're required to maintain your own code after you've checked it in for others to use ("pass it off") but have you always designed your own solution or have you had to implement designs by higher ups for some not insignificant percentage of the time?

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

#595

Post by anon9001 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:57 PM UTC

scott_meyer wrote: post #587

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 can't wait until I have enough money to be financially independent and never have to do this nonsense again. There are a lot of people operating on that plan. Mostly it doesn't work out for them. Play this forward ten years with a family to support and a mortgage which committed you to personal inflation and a track record of ...? You can absolutely fool people for a week or a year, but a decade of non-experience…

> Play this forward ten years with a family to support and a mortgage which committed you to personal inflation and a track record of ...?

Being an excellent employee?

I understand your point, but I actually have been doing this for about 10 years now, and I consistently have improved my "career trajectory" by switching jobs when I start to feel that my coworkers are overachieving and throwing me under the bus. I look at it like a forcing function to switch jobs and get a raise.

I already had a decade of pre-work experience just from being a lifelong hacker, so it's not like I'm relying on my job to learn new technology. I don't have a fear of falling behind. If anything, I've noticed a huge decrease in SWE competence over my time in industry.

Some of my most "successful" friends at FAANGs are bad developers that just devote more time to playing the system than I am willing to do. I find the social con-man stuff to be really draining and I hate doing it. I also hate interviewing, which limited my career more than I'd care to admit.

Also, I've opted to not support a family or carry a mortgage. I'm doing something similar to FIRE. I'm hoping to be FI with a total of 15 years as a tech employee.

"But do you really hate working so much that you would sacrifice having children!?". Yes. Very yes.

It's also likely that tech workers are "overpaid" right now, as we're compartmentalizing more work, lowering the skills required to join tech companies, and remote work is now the norm. It's a race to the bottom, and I want out as soon as possible.

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

#596

Post by mdpopescu » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

andybak wrote: post #589

We've been trying to hire a part-time contract dev recently and we hate the process so we've been a little half-assed about it. As a result I think we've stumbled across a fairly effective approach. We ask them to do a half day to day coding task based on a real requirement. We pay them for this as we have few enough applicants that we want to test that we can afford to. We give them the requirement as if it came dir…

Huh. On three separate jobs (small tasks, few hours to couple of days) I was told, after asking some questions, "stop bugging me and just write the damn thing".

I would probably not ask any questions on any new task of that sort and just randomly pick something. To be honest, that might not even be intrinsically bad - the client can always change their mind even if I write exactly what they wanted, so "write something and show it to me" is probably a good idea.

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

#597

Post by 8note » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #561

okareaman wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you imagine how many times Google was burned by junior devs writing C++ no matter how smart they were? Memory bugs at Google scale must be expensive. They had to come up with Go.

How about hiring better engineers instead?

That's hard to scale up.

Making them learn go is basically training for then to be better engineers though, so that's kinda better

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

#598

Post by eeZah7Ux » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

gknoy wrote: post #593

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about hiring better engineers instead?

At scale, it might be hard to do that, however this doesn't address the key problem. One of the hallmarks of good engineering is to add technical safeguards, rather than relying solely on Smart People. It would be comical to hear, "Hire better pilots" as an alternative to building parachutes, or fly-by-wire systems. Every one makes mistakes. This is why we have tests, linting, code review. Our choice of tools that we…

> This is why we have tests, linting, code review.

None of which is related to using a dumbed-down language.

> At Google's scale, I can completely understand why they might feel that developing a new tool was the best way to prevent a core set of problems.

There's plenty of research around software reliability and on the sources of bugs across different languages.

Research shows that verbose languages e.g. Java don't have lower bug rates or better maintainability than expressive languages like Python.

Dumbing down a language, reducing expressiveness and introducing boilerplate does not help. If anything, it removes the attention of the developers from the core aspects of an application.

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

#599

Post by dnautics » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

newbie578 wrote: post #573

dnautics wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Private communication, sorry. Source considered 95% reliable.

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

#600

Post by jmchuster » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:06 PM UTC

How much would people prefer a more practical 1-hour exam? My company has a takehome to build a basic CRUD api app. But my impression is that most people aren't even comfortable enough with their tools to whip up a simple webapp from scratch. Given the choice, they'd actually prefer to implement a hackerrank function.

https://github.com/FarmWise/takehome-backend