“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”

#71

Post by XorNot » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:23 AM UTC

alpha_squared wrote: post #35

zug_zug wrote: post #8

A rather tired conversation in my opinion. Everybody likes to complain about interviews, but every single alternative I've heard is even worse: Take-homes are biased toward those willing to work hours for free, a "track record" is biased toward those who inflate their resume, a casual conversation is biased toward the likable and native english speakers, high-level whiteboarding is biased towards people who are good…

What if there were a certification authority that could claim that professionals are, indeed, competent in X, Y, Z within software? And, of course, that authority would need to be recognized by A, B, C companies. That'd certainly skip the endless, often mind-numbing, repetitiveness of technical interviews (especially for those with many years of experience) and can jump straight to culture/team/behavior fit. This is…

The entire area of "information technology" throwing the term "engineer" around has always made me uncomfortable for this exact reason.

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

#72

Post by tomcat27 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:24 AM UTC

dcl wrote: post #41

nulptr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

were you applying for a data scientist or software engineer position?

Senior Data Scientist. I've got a feeling that these large corporations have started to realise that the 'data scientists' (commerce and engineering grads that know some python) they are hiring are all pretty useless because they don't have the engineering skills to actually get anything done. A lot of the job advertisments for 'data scientists' I see these days focus WAY more on things like 'AWS, Spark, building pip…

Yeah, tooling is the heavy work. Most of the times a simple KNN model baseline is good enough starting point.

People are impatient to do math, they'd rather want to try 100 things at once, see what works. So I am not surprised they don't care in the interviews.

Only when someone writes a fancy engineering blog post or paper, weird equations appear out of nowhere..

This is so much visible in deep learning papers. The equations are there just to impress.

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

#73

Post by _9omd » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:24 AM UTC

decafninja wrote: post #12

Unless you've made it to your "endgame" company that you're happy to stay at for a while, I feel investing anything more than the bare minimum to get your assigned work done is worth less than just grinding leetcode and otherwise studying for interviews. Doing an actual good job, above and beyond, is not going to be worth much when you're looking for your next job. Thus we're now seeing the rise of Professional Inter…

Yup, I jumped into the if you can't beat em, join em camp with leetcode. I Did 160 problems (likely low for many people) before my last job search, and I now make 3x what I used to. I gotta admit it's a hell of an ego boost to crush coding questions in interviews; being completely in the flow and cranking out flawless code.

It makes me wonder how much money I left on the table the last 10 years, because I went the route of great software engineer -> great interviewer, instead of great interviewer -> great software engineer.

Also, I have to say I really came to enjoy doing leetcode, and learned (really re-learned) a lot of interesting things.

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

#74

Post by pcmoney » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:27 AM UTC

Big Tech Cos have a lot of candidates. A false negative is a lot harder to deal with than a false positive.

Sure there are good engineers that are bad at hacker rank questions. But there are fewer bad engineers who are good at hacker rank questions.

Its just a numbers game with a filter

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

#75

Post by cambalache » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:27 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #55

decafninja wrote: post #12

Unless you've made it to your "endgame" company that you're happy to stay at for a while, I feel investing anything more than the bare minimum to get your assigned work done is worth less than just grinding leetcode and otherwise studying for interviews. Doing an actual good job, above and beyond, is not going to be worth much when you're looking for your next job. Thus we're now seeing the rise of Professional Inter…

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…

The moment the MBA types discovered there were plenty of VC money to get if you exploit the socially inept nerds it was game over.

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

#76

Post by tinkertamper » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:27 AM UTC

zug_zug wrote: post #8

A rather tired conversation in my opinion. Everybody likes to complain about interviews, but every single alternative I've heard is even worse: Take-homes are biased toward those willing to work hours for free, a "track record" is biased toward those who inflate their resume, a casual conversation is biased toward the likable and native english speakers, high-level whiteboarding is biased towards people who are good…

Recently I started trying something new for our interviews. I start with a phone interview that is more about discussing their background, expertise, what they need to feel productive, and explain the role. If I think they’d be a good culture and expertise fit, I send them something like this (I’ve made a few): https://gist.github.com/tywalch/cf60e4c942ab6a80e481f4ba6754....

It’s a small “api service” that represents a POC with some bugs and bad practices. I tell them to look over it, write down notes on how to make it production ready, setup a time to discuss their thoughts in a second call. No code writing necessary.

It ends up being an excellent Rorschach test where folks can really show/express their unique skill sets and experience. I ultimately let them drive the conversation and it gives me great insights into what experiences have shaped their career and what it might be like to collaborate with them. Best of all it does resemble what some of their day to day might look like better than hand crafting some tree algorithm.

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

#77

Post by didibus » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:28 AM UTC

zug_zug wrote: post #8

A rather tired conversation in my opinion. Everybody likes to complain about interviews, but every single alternative I've heard is even worse: Take-homes are biased toward those willing to work hours for free, a "track record" is biased toward those who inflate their resume, a casual conversation is biased toward the likable and native english speakers, high-level whiteboarding is biased towards people who are good…

I've found asking people to write a small program works pretty well. Like ask someone to build a command line app that arranges your mp3 files in folders of their artist's name. You can even ask it to be whiteboarded, or coded in a notepad, no code execution or IDE.

I found that to quickly tell you if someone can write programs. Surprisingly (and maybe not surprisingly), a lot of people can do difficult leetcode questions, but can't write a small app, or can't do it well.

It'll quickly show you about how the candidate can come up with some level of UX, handle OSish level stuff, how they structure and think about their code and readability, how they model data, and depending on the app you ask them to write, it could include a little algorithm in it as well.

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

#78

Post by Shared404 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:28 AM UTC

eyelidlessness wrote: post #45

decafninja wrote: post #12

Unless you've made it to your "endgame" company that you're happy to stay at for a while, I feel investing anything more than the bare minimum to get your assigned work done is worth less than just grinding leetcode and otherwise studying for interviews. Doing an actual good job, above and beyond, is not going to be worth much when you're looking for your next job. Thus we're now seeing the rise of Professional Inter…

This is so sad to read. I made my way into a tech career in what would properly be described as “hacker” in the traditional sense, though I never applied the term to myself. I came into a ton of formal knowledge and became quite talented through paths that opened with recognition of my experience and skills. I’m going into the job market for the first time in a few years and this is exactly what I feared. That said,…

Hoping the best for you. I'm hoping to either follow a similar path, or dodge computing entirely as a career path, find an interesting job, and keep it as a hobby where I have the chance to work on interesting problems. Don't know that I would describe myself as talented though, but definitely driven.

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

#79

Post by martamorena9182 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:28 AM UTC

alpha_squared wrote: post #35

zug_zug wrote: post #8

A rather tired conversation in my opinion. Everybody likes to complain about interviews, but every single alternative I've heard is even worse: Take-homes are biased toward those willing to work hours for free, a "track record" is biased toward those who inflate their resume, a casual conversation is biased toward the likable and native english speakers, high-level whiteboarding is biased towards people who are good…

What if there were a certification authority that could claim that professionals are, indeed, competent in X, Y, Z within software? And, of course, that authority would need to be recognized by A, B, C companies. That'd certainly skip the endless, often mind-numbing, repetitiveness of technical interviews (especially for those with many years of experience) and can jump straight to culture/team/behavior fit. This is…

Maybe because building a bridge is a very standardized process that lives through regulation. Maybe software will end up there some day, hopefully a day by which I am retired.

It may make sense to do this for certain disciplines, like software tailored for other engineering disciplines (think medical grade software, airplane/car control software, etc.).

However for the broad mass of software projects, certification makes no sense and is in fact much worse than what we have now. Do you think certification can't be gamed? It will usually be much easier to game that one since certification by definition is meant to be achievable by a broad mass of people. You don't build a certification program for elites.

Professional leetcode programmer? Sure. So let's count the facts we have at the end of the interview:

* You can code yourself through a number of problems, answer follow-up questions that dig into random specifics of your problem, slightly modify the problem, etc. You can demonstrate structured problem solving, ad-hoc clean code and you make an overall good impression in that performance.

* You are able to demonstrate the necessary experience through targeted behavioural questions that probe deeply into specific aspects of your job history and alignment with the company values

* You are able to design a complex software system and are able to answer unknown follow ups and able to follow drill-downs into random aspects of your design.

Congrats, you are a professional software developer. Can you game the leetcode part? Potentially, however I met several "leetcoders", some of which were even kind enough to put that on their CV... They usually fail quite spectacularly at random follow ups and modification to the problem statement. But even if you are able to somehow "wing it" convincingly, you need to succeed several times and you need to still demonstrate the adequate proficiency in the other two pillars (behaviour and software design).

What we might need is an "interviewer" certification.

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

#80

Post by crb002 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 4:28 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #55

decafninja wrote: post #12

Unless you've made it to your "endgame" company that you're happy to stay at for a while, I feel investing anything more than the bare minimum to get your assigned work done is worth less than just grinding leetcode and otherwise studying for interviews. Doing an actual good job, above and beyond, is not going to be worth much when you're looking for your next job. Thus we're now seeing the rise of Professional Inter…

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…

You can arbitrage AWS with your own servers as long as network costs don't eat you. Run say a TravisCI type service on your own hardware?

The big lockin is network pricing. No egress fees when their data is already in S3. You have to run where the consumer has their data or you eat that network transfer as overhead for your SAAS.

I see GitHub slowly charging for egress downloads as the next lockin. You "save" by paying for builds on Azure.