Please stop the coding challenges

A partner of a friend quit their job earlier this year. They then took 4-6 weeks to prepare for each interview with Big Tech companies (4-6 weeks for Meta, 4-6 weeks for Stripe, etc.). Along the way, they also took random interviews just to practice and build muscle memory. They would grind leetcode several hours a day after researching which questions were likely to be encountered at each Big Tech.

This paid off and they accepted an offer for L6/staff at a MAANG.

Talked to them this week (haven't even started the new role) and they've already forgotten the details of most of what was practiced. They said that the hardest part was studying for the system design portion because they did not have experience with system design...but now made staff eng. at a MAANG. IRL, this individual is a good but not exceptional engineer having worked with them on a small project.

Wild; absolutely wild and I feel like explains a lot of the boom and bust hiring cycles. When I watch some of the system design interview prep videos, it's just a script. You'll go into the call and all you need to do is largely follow the script. It doesn't matter if you've actually designed similar or more complex systems; the point of the system design interview is apparently "do you know the script"?

Watch these two back to back at 2x speed and marvel at how much of this is executed like a script:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_qu1F9BXow

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K-eupuDVEc

Literally every day this week.

Documentation? The code was last updated in June, the documentation was last updated in January - of 2022.

The team? The half that didn't get laid off two years ago all quit for greener pastures. Sure, there's a team that owns this project - along with three others, all of which they've contributed maybe a dozen lines to over the past year, and 11 of those were dependency updates.

What are references for anyway...

For example, it's not uncommon for a challenge in finance to be "build an exchange matching engine that takes orders, modifications and cancels from different threads in two hours." That's totally doable if you just fly through whatever comes to the top of your head, and maybe have an hour left over to test, debug and modify it. But that project (an exchange matching engine) is something that the CME has 10 full time programmers working all the time on. A more realistic 2 hour task is something like "look at edge cases for the order cancel type, and figure out a way to handle malformed inputs." Then you can actually write production quality code for them to judge.