“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”

#711

Post by kyting » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

_9omd wrote: post #93

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…

Yes, it's extremely tired. FAANG companies are not dumb, they hire at scale and know how to find talented engineers using a rigorous/repeatable interview process. I think most of the complaints come from people who fail these interviews (I used to be one), and don't want to admit that maybe they're not good enough.

I completely agreed with you. People who hate Leetcode, I am wondering, are those who refuse or lazy to devote hours per day to practice.

Because of covid-19 there are overwhelmed programmers, newbie and veteran on the job market to compete with fewer programming openings. Companies have reasons to be extremely picky, and job seekers either to comply with the game rule (Leetcode) or consider to change career.

And those who have job also need to consider to regularly practice Leetcode (one or two questions per day or every other day) to stay employable.

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

#712

Post by HenryKissinger » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

burntoutfire wrote: post #636

snarf21 wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't a CS degree (from a non-degree-mill school) such certification process?

No, because computer science programs are not managed by a central authority, like the CPA or the CFA are, for example.

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

#713

Post by disambiguation » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 6:48 PM UTC

bananaface wrote: post #704

disambiguation wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

kudos to your friend, but signalling your intent to leave is red flag for management often times companies will opt to pay more as a stop-gap until they find a cheaper replacement

I honestly think this is a myth propogated by managers to discourage negotiation They know the game, no employee ever is going to stay if they're being paid half their market value. "Commitment" my ass lol. But more to the point in order to replace you they have to pay market value for your job. They can only find someone cheaper if your job is beneath you. Parlaying offers is fine as long as the work they need doing…

maybe, i'm not saying employees shouldn't negotiate but there's a lot of ways it can backfire so you might be better of hopping to another company at that point, rather than waiting around to have the rug pulled out from underneath you

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

#714

Post by kyting » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

landtuna wrote: post #107

millstone wrote: post #57

The author has been working as a developer for 15 years, and claims very strong technical skills. Why are they learning/re-learning Python, C++, SQL, C#, college math? Nobody will be fooled by that; at 15 YoE they will be evaluated on what they have done over a career, not over the last month. > it's all about how much time you can spend on Leetcode. The author is playing a game built for new grads. Here's a secret,…

That's nonsense. I've got 20 YoE, an elite college degree, tons of experience in Python and C++, have single-handedly put together mission critical software systems, and I can't get my foot in the door outside my small area of expertise. The teams I've worked on are tiny, so I have no career network to draw from. I'm missing machine learning and cloud experience, and my resume gets no hits because of it. Age 44, and…

Can you do Leetcode medium level problems bug-free in 30 minutes? If yes you can try FAANG. I knew some people of your age (one is 59) were hired by Google -- they are all good in Leetcode.

Companies nowadays want you to be good in domain knowledge but also good to solve Leetcode problems during the interview. Time has changed.

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

#715

Post by gwbas1c » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 1:35 AM UTC

Ragib_Zaman wrote: post #432

gwbas1c wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I had to quit coffee earlier this year because a single cup in the morning was keeping me up at night. But, let's be honest: One of the questions that I solved was basically "detect if a string is an anagram of another string." So cat -> act: true, cat -> dog: false. This was just a matter of treating the string as a series of characters, sorting them, and putting them back into a string. Then, if it's an anagram…

Ok sure. This explains a lot. If that's the problem you're getting, then it is indeed testing basic programming skills. But the general landscape has gone far beyond this. Nowadays this solution would probably not get you the job. Instead of sorting, you should create hashmaps storing counts of each character and checking equality of the hashmaps. And if you didn't produce the hashmaps solution within 10 minutes, you…

A Hashmap isn't "better." For example, if you need to optimize for memory, running a bubble sort on a character array will be the most compact solution.

Likewise, if you profile, there's no guarantee that a hashmap is faster or slower, or even more readable. It gets into the nitty-gritty of how memory allocation works and the overhead of maintaining a hashmap versus whatever optimized character sorting algorithms are part of your runtime.

Anyway, I've found that companies that want to ding me for those kinds of things aren't worth working for. IMO, we're better off having an industry-standard licensing board. Plenty of other industries do the same thing.

Edit: I've also spent an afternoon with a FAANG's set of practice programming challenges. I won't go into details out of respect for confidentiality, but they weren't unreasonably difficult. I only want to work with people who can solve "most" of them. (No one's perfect.)

The best analogy is like being a musician or an athlete. Anyone can learn to play an instrument or play a sport, but to be a professional musician or athlete requires something that takes more than practice. No one's excluded from those industries due to lack of talent, but the people without the talent have to take the jobs that support the musicians and athletes.

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

#716

Post by asdff » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 7:02 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #266

asdff wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried out Google's beta with assasin's creed, and the results weren't promising. I had gigabit fiber and while it worked pretty well for the most part, I still got quite a few gamebreaking lag spikes and fps slowdowns. It stuttered like a youtube video: freezing, then resuming in 144p quality which made the in game text completely unreadable on my screen. And that's on a beefy internet connection, imagine the si…

People can scarcely tolerate playing a game with high ping as it is. People who classify themselves as "hardcore gamers" perhaps, but those people will also drop upwards of $1000 on a graphics card. They're not the majority in gaming. Most people will happily play a game even if there are a few problems if it's cheap and entertaining.

Anyone will throw a controller across the room after putting a whole clip into someone taking no damage, watching them rubber band across the map, and pistol whip you in the head. That's your life on a crappy connection in most FPS games which are some of the best sellers every year.

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

#717

Post by randomswede » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 8:47 AM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #428

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…

That's not it - it's that interviewers set problems that they already know how to solve . They forget how hard it is to solve new problems on the spot in an interview setting. In my experience technical interview questions are usually way harder than they need to be. I don't agree with getting rid of HackerRank style filters entirely because they save you a ton of time with candidates who just can't code at all (or c…

As an ex-Googler who's done a fair bit of interviewing, my bar for "will I use this coding question" is to look at the problem statement, do a from-fresh implementation in a suitable language, and if it took me more than 7 minutes, it is not suitable for a 45-minute interview slot (I would expect the candidate to have a solution in ~20 minutes, then maybe 10 minutes of follow-up questions, then flip to "do you have any questions for me").

I thus gave the candidates roughly three times longer than I needed to solve the problem myself, which should pretty much account for the interview situation.

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

#718

Post by bananaface » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 1:04 PM UTC

disambiguation wrote: post #713

bananaface wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly think this is a myth propogated by managers to discourage negotiation They know the game, no employee ever is going to stay if they're being paid half their market value. "Commitment" my ass lol. But more to the point in order to replace you they have to pay market value for your job. They can only find someone cheaper if your job is beneath you. Parlaying offers is fine as long as the work they need doing…

maybe, i'm not saying employees shouldn't negotiate but there's a lot of ways it can backfire so you might be better of hopping to another company at that point, rather than waiting around to have the rug pulled out from underneath you

I agree, but it's still cheaper to counteroffer than to hire someone new if the demand is market price for that job. There's big overhead in replacing you.

Fundamentally the operative variable is: "can they get your job done for less than you're demanding." That's what matters, more than the impression of commitment.

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

#719

Post by bananaface » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 2:16 PM 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…

a "track record" is biased toward those who inflate their resume

Could you explain this a bit? I'd have thought this is the only real way to judge someone. People will lie but figuring that out is part of the process.

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

#720

Post by bananaface » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

_9omd wrote: post #93

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…

Yes, it's extremely tired. FAANG companies are not dumb, they hire at scale and know how to find talented engineers using a rigorous/repeatable interview process. I think most of the complaints come from people who fail these interviews (I used to be one), and don't want to admit that maybe they're not good enough.

The FAANG interview process is designed to allow people who are bad at interviewing to assess candidates in a way that's replicable. It's designed to be a flowchart that you can't screw up.

The point is to remove wiggle room. It's a domain-specific solution. Note e.g. DeepMind don't hire the same way.

Their number one problem is automating the beurocracy at scale with people who are fundamentally not that good at evaluating other candidates, or more likely don't care if they make a mistake. Everything else is downstream from that. Copying them without understanding their objectives is a mistake.