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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”

#661
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rarity of this scenario is not remotely close to once every 3 years, and not everyone is interviewing to work on something so obscenely performance dependent. Probably >99% of developers will never encounter something like this in their career.

It's an improbable scenario for most developers in the world but it's normal day to day work for quite a few developers working at large companies. There's no surprise that people are screening for the roles they are trying to fill.

Absolutely, but that screening is reasonable. The same screening at run of the mill companies isn't.

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

#662

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…

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…

At the very least, it would be nice if all the companies that want to use this standard could get together and design a certification that they all accept. If we could cut the length of interviews down by removing the leetcode portion it would save countless hours of both candidate and interviewer time.

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

#663
post #430

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…

Well, now that you've started working. Have you actually applied any of it ? To make an analogy, I'm always perplexed at how you're asked to build an EPR on the spot and then all you do is general electricity mundane work. I've seen a lot of EPR builder beeing incapable of simple wiring ...

Why do people use weird acronyms that no one uses.

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

#664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finding a job position is impossible. What's your email? I'd love to reach out to you and discuss some openings that we have on our team.

Thank you. It's mailto:xyzzy%40rockingship.org

I love the %40, that's a great way of obfuscating an email address that I've never seen before.

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

#665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some other problem. None of us can say what it is unless you share your resume, what companies you've applied to, etc. But if you get "no hits" with 20 years of experience in Python and C++, the problem is 100% not "missing machine learning and cloud experience".

Is that an offer? :) https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimhunziker/ One hit was for making machine guns target humans better. (I rejected the in-person interview.) Another dropped me because they wanted cloud experience. A YC company changed the job from remote to SF only before we talked.

Would you consider moving away from the north east? Because you would probably be able to at least get interviewed at a national lab. But only Brookhaven is in NY and that is one that I have very little experience with.

If you were willing to entertain the idea of New Mexico then the labs might be an option for you.

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

#666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The situation in America is that no name startups are doing the same type of interviews.

It's the same in UK Went over interview process this year. A complete joke with no name startups asking the most absurd things for middle level positions

What’s absolutely hilarious about it is if I did sit down and study Leetcode every day, why the fuck would I settle for your startup?

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

#667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally a scan of string with some basic logic and three cases inside. People would take 30 mins+ and create a giant mess. This was easily 50%+ cases during phone screen and resumes all looked good so not recruiters fault (most of the time).

So basically a FizzBuzz, Jeff Attwood discusses it here. This article was really eye-opening to me. Problem: Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz". https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

A bit harder than fizzbuzz but along the same lines. No textbook algo bs or anything like that...

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

#668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is inconsistent with my experience in my most recent round of interviews. I interviewed at a few places at a senior/staff level, and most of my interviews were behavioral, architectural, or discussions about past work. The few leetcode-style or coding questions I had were easily prepared for from my ~40 hours of interview-specific coding prep. There is zero chance I would have gotten those interviews or passed t…

> my ~40 hours of interview-specific coding prep. Where did you find time to do 40 hours of prep, and how many weeks did it take?

I did it over 4 weeks. I have two kids, so I spent about 1-2 hours per day. I usually did some reading or a couple leetcode problems in the morning before starting work, and a couple in the evening. Honestly, once you do about 20-30 problems, they start to feel the same. I found that if I treated each problem like an interview and slowly walked through a solution (versus just diving into code and mashing Compile over and over until I get it), the problem ends up being easier.

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

#669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is inconsistent with my experience in my most recent round of interviews. I interviewed at a few places at a senior/staff level, and most of my interviews were behavioral, architectural, or discussions about past work. The few leetcode-style or coding questions I had were easily prepared for from my ~40 hours of interview-specific coding prep. There is zero chance I would have gotten those interviews or passed t…

Is this faang / levels.fyi pay range?

Absolutely. I work at Stripe now. In fact, I wish I only interviewed at Stripe (hindsight is 20/20), because I would have done zero leetcode prep. It is well known that Stripe interviews are much more practical than FAANG interviews. The leetcode prep was definitely necessary for some of the FAANG interviews I did.

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

#670
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't work because there's a giant incentive to defect and no way to effectively police it.

Does individual defection even matter? The purpose of this isn't to put pressure on job seekers, it's to put pressure on employers. The whole idea of "policing" the members seems strange to me. If you're the type of job seeker who has no objection to leetcode, you wouldn't join. And if you're the type of employer who refuses to do anything else, this would be the last place you'd look for hiring. The goal is to publi…

OP said the objective was to create a critical mass of people refusing so companies would have to adapt. That's what wouldn't work.

If it's just a niche job board then that's not an issue, but it also seems like one of those things that should have been done already, probably has been, and isn't popular for a reason.

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