Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Quitting a New Job

yolken.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 246 posts

Re: Quitting a New Job

#61

Post by toomuchtodo »

xapata wrote: post #47
0x445442 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but I'm getting the feeling a developer's best option these days for maximizing pay increases is to spend their free time on Leetcode. Which in my opinion is a problem from an industry perspective.

Leetcode, Project Euler, etc. may not feel like a programmer's daily tasks, but they may yet be a good proxy for many behaviors that large employers desire. For example, a large employer may want a willingness to do arbitrary, difficult tasks that appear meaningless. These same employers may have a variety of software maintenance tasks that require recognizing a pattern of problem, knowing the appropriate algorithm f…

> These same employers may have a variety of software maintenance tasks that require recognizing a pattern of problem, knowing the appropriate algorithm from Ye Olde Textbook, and quickly applying it.

These edge cases might exist, although I argue the more likely problem is that hiring is hard, expectations can be unrealistic, and so it’s easier to fall back on puzzles and call them an objective measure of technical competency and soft skills. Project Euler is fun, but Stack Overflow is likely more relevant for your day to day for solving business problems with software.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#62

Post by jdmichal »

whitepaint wrote: post #13
0x445442 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but I'm getting the feeling a developer's best option these days for maximizing pay increases is to spend their free time on Leetcode. Which in my opinion is a problem from an industry perspective.

> Which in my opinion is a problem from an industry perspective. Why? If a person can learn bunch of algorithms and apply them to custom problems they probably can do quite a bit with computers. And it shows that they probably can learn new stuff rapidly as well. I don't get why so many developers hate Leetcode. I love it personally, I think it's great. And also, I think people are just lazy and don't want to learn n…

I did ACM programming competitions at both high school and collegiate level. So I'd like to think I have a pretty favorable opinion the types of things leetcode tests -- algorithms, data structures, big-O and big-theta, etc. They are incredibly important.

But these topics are very, very far from being everything important. I would put them under soft skills, especially in cross-collaboration and working with non-engineering groups. And I would put them under having the type of knowledge and experience in approach that, especially combined with the above soft skills, allow us to push the direction of the company forward.

As a dumb example off the top of my head: It's great if you know how to average a batch of numbers efficiently. It's better if you know how to do such in a streaming fashion, and recognize that we can use that within our architecture to materialize savings. And, it's best if you can convince the business that there's no need to calculate the average because we can do streaming estimates for any quartile.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#63

Post by filoleg »

whitepaint wrote: post #30
spectramax wrote: post #14

This statement is just sad "After a few weekends of furiously-paced Leetcoding".

Reply that I posted to another comment: Why? If a person can learn bunch of algorithms and apply them to custom problems they probably can do quite a bit with computers. And it shows that they probably can learn new stuff rapidly as well. I don't get why so many developers hate Leetcode. I love it personally, I think it's great. And also, I think people are just lazy and don't want to learn new stuff so they whine in…

>I don't get why so many developers hate Leetcode.

Because they think that the employer should recognize their greatness by just looking at their resume and having a simple conversation with them, instead of assessing them on some skill that they have to brush up on.

After being on the interviewer side myself recently, I think those people just don't realize how hiring actually works. I've seen some people with impressive resumes and who could bullshit their way around a conversation greatly, to the point where they make you believe they are one of those magic 10x-ers. And when you get to algorithmic problems, they struggle to figure out when or how to use a hashmap and cannot even do some super basic bruteforce parsing of binary trees or even know what they are used for.

Of course there are some edge cases where a great developer would fail a leetcode-style interview, but those exceptions are very rare and only seem to affirm the rule. I know that leetcode style interviewing is far from perfect, but I struggle to think of anything that would work better. A take-home coding project sounds like a great option, until you realize that each one of them takes about a week of working on it a couple of hours a day, which is an unacceptable time sink for any adult with responsibilities and who interviews at more than one place at a time.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#64

Post by ashtonkem »

whitepaint wrote: post #45
ashtonkem wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because learning a bunch of algorithms doesn’t translate well into day to day programming capability. This is exactly why those dumb whiteboard problems aren’t good for interviews; you’re not measuring what makes someone successful on a day to day basis.

> This is exactly why those dumb whiteboard problems aren’t good for interviews; you’re not measuring what makes someone successful on a day to day basis. If that was the case, you think all of the biggest tech companies that have billions of dollars would continue using it? Did you ever consider that you might be wrong?

I mean, for a while there Google thought that asking how many basketballs could fit into a school bus was a good way to find good coders. Just because Google does it doesn’t mean it’s smart.

And when is the last time you had to balance a binary tree or write Djikstra’s algorithm from memory anyways?

Re: Quitting a New Job

#65

Post by xapata »

whitepaint wrote: post #30
spectramax wrote: post #14

This statement is just sad "After a few weekends of furiously-paced Leetcoding".

Reply that I posted to another comment: Why? If a person can learn bunch of algorithms and apply them to custom problems they probably can do quite a bit with computers. And it shows that they probably can learn new stuff rapidly as well. I don't get why so many developers hate Leetcode. I love it personally, I think it's great. And also, I think people are just lazy and don't want to learn new stuff so they whine in…

> I think people are just lazy

Yep, that's me.

> don't want to learn new stuff

No, I like learning some kinds of new things. I read non-fiction regularly. I just don't want to practice algorithms.

Yes, this means I probably would be a failure as a BigCo employee.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#66

Post by Dig1t »

I also did this, worked at a startup for 3 months and left for FAANG. Everyone was surprised, and my manager wasn’t super happy, but on the whole my coworkers understood and tbh it was the best decision of my life. Definitely do not regret it in any way.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#67

Post by deeteecee »

whitepaint wrote: post #30
spectramax wrote: post #14

This statement is just sad "After a few weekends of furiously-paced Leetcoding".

Reply that I posted to another comment: Why? If a person can learn bunch of algorithms and apply them to custom problems they probably can do quite a bit with computers. And it shows that they probably can learn new stuff rapidly as well. I don't get why so many developers hate Leetcode. I love it personally, I think it's great. And also, I think people are just lazy and don't want to learn new stuff so they whine in…

I get what you're saying but in my view, it's more of a massive time sink. I think of it as having to spend many hours preparing for an exam. And I have to do this every time I switch jobs.

The algorithms and ideas do sort of stick to me somehow but I still have to repeat this silly exam prep over and over again. And it's sad because the truth is this part of the interview process has almost no relation to your actual job.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#68

Post by st1x7 »

tayo42 wrote: post #22

I haven't had success switching teams at all. I had a few that wanted to still interview me. I had a vp say he won't let me switch. The only time I ever switched teams, I had that decision made for me, worked out fortunately. Having another internal team still want to do a technical interview was ridiculous to hear though.

A lot of this comes down to company culture and size. In some companies it's completely expected and even encouraged to switch teams. In others you're treated basically like an external hire.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#69

Post by mistersquid »

spectramax wrote: post #38
janosett wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the risk with at-will employment in CA. The employer could very well decide after two days of you working there that they wanted to let you go -- there's no part of the contract keeping either side from ending things early. I don't think it's unethical to leave after a short amount of time given the employer has no equivalent expectation.

Nailed it. At-will employment in CA, so the employee can be fired or laid off instantly in an afternoon - happens all the time. But, they're generally expected (not required) to give 2-3 weeks notice. I always found this a bit asymmetric.

> But, they're generally expected (not required) to give 2-3 weeks notice.

California at-will employment cuts both ways and requires neither employer nor employee to give notice.

Many employers will typically notify employees 30 days in advance of layoffs and provide severance on top of that.

Many employees give employers two weeks’ notice before quitting.

Some employers and some employees do neither, which is fully within the bounds of at-will employment in California.

Re: Quitting a New Job

#70

Post by lhorie »

jnwatson wrote: post #39
pavel_lishin wrote: post #3

> As I noted in a previous post, switching teams is a lot easier than switching jobs. I didn’t do this before I left Stripe because there weren’t any other teams that I was super enthusiastic about at the time. But, in retrospect, I probably should have given this a try before quitting. A few years ago, I was looking for a new job after being laid off. I had two competing companies to choose from, and chose the one t…

This strongly depends on the company structure and the political structure. There are many managers that would rather have an employee leave than go to a rival team.

If there are rival teams, then doesn't that mean that by definition resources are allocated less efficiently? (and by extension that competitors will be able to outbid for talent)

Some recent Apple threads seem to support the idea that there was intense internal competition and lower overall compensation at Apple, compared to other tech companies of similar caliber.

Post reply on HN