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The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

jarednelsen.dev

741–750 of 851 posts

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#741
post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One needs a little domain knowledge for "inverse square" to be informative. It is a simple-minded interviewer that wouldn't just explain the concept. Unless you are hiring someone that is supposed to understand some maths, that is.

What does it mean to implement it in code though? What kind of data should it consume - n-dimensional coordinates, distance matrices, some sort of power level to calculate falloff? If it’s as described, it’s way too vague. Inverse square laws show up all over.

Well, yes - I agree.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the problem was oversupply, we wouldn't be getting the cushy salaries and benefits we do. I think the issue is more that it's pretty easy for people with no programming ability to appear competent on a resume, especially to a clueless HR rep or headhunter. There are a lot of people out there whose backgrounds look good on paper who can't solve FizzBuzz...

For most programming jobs wages are lower now than in 1995. Back then, I had many friends who were charging $100 an hour just to build VisualBasic apps and they had more work than they could handle. And Phillip Greenspan has written that his company, from 1996 onwards, offered $100,000 to recent college grads. That was really good money back then, especially if you wanted to buy a house. Wages right now only look goo…

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Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#743
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most programming jobs wages are lower now than in 1995. Back then, I had many friends who were charging $100 an hour just to build VisualBasic apps and they had more work than they could handle. And Phillip Greenspan has written that his company, from 1996 onwards, offered $100,000 to recent college grads. That was really good money back then, especially if you wanted to buy a house. Wages right now only look goo…

100k then would be 170k today, in line with (if not slightly lower than) entry level comp at FANG companies.

That’s my point. Ars Digita (Greenspan’s startup) was a small startup. You don’t see small startups paying 170k as a base salary nowadays. All available evidence shows that wages have fallen for software developers. If the market for software developers was tight, then we would see very different behavior from companies.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#744
post #510
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people complaining are usually the ones who can't just prep for algorithmic interviews with a couple hours a day of effort for a month. Which makes the algorithmic interview a relatively good filter - ability to learn something difficult quickly is a very important skill at high performance software companies.

Speaking as a parent, the idea of having “a couple hours of free time per day for a month” to learn difficult new material is laughable, and it has nothing to do with intellectual ability.

How about taking a few days off to prepare for interviews?

I mean, you're going to spend 4-5 hours per day for each of your onsite interviews (plus an hour or two each for recruiter calls, phone screens, etc.), so if you have zero free time, interview prep is probably the least of your problems...

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#745

When my classmates were preparing interview coding questions, I was working on a mini TCP implementation and a toy kernel. AWS rejected me since I failed to write prefect code to traverse a tree in level order. Google did not even give me an interview since I told the campus recruiter I have not prepared for the coding questions. Then I ended up with an internship at CoreOS and created etcd. I am glad that they did n…

Getting good signal-to-noise ratio from ANY interview, forget the big cos, is really difficult. I've seen great programmers passed over because they were _not_ given a chance to whiteboard and show their technical skill. At the end of the day, there is a bit of randomness to the process of sizing anyone up in an hour, and people will make bad calls.

That said, I'm skeptical about your particular story. As a process rule, AWS doesn't provide interview feedback, so I'm pretty sure you don't _actually_ know why you were rejected, you can only guess. Perhaps if you were rejected in phone screen(s) it can be obvious, but if you made it to an on-site, I can guarantee (based on experience being in the room during hiring decisions at AWS) that they don't almost someone because of one bad whiteboarding result; there are multiple people collecting and reporting on results and only one person, the bar raiser, has veto power, and I've never seen it used for something as banal as not writing perfect code.

I also don't know what happened in your interview, but consider it's also possible that you completely bombed it: failed to ask questions, failed to communicate properly, or made more mistakes than you even realize.

It's certainly great that you went on to do great things, but maybe at the time you interviewed you weren't yet doing those great things...

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also other trends that, thankfully in my experience, have not yet made their way to tech. I suspect it is only a matter of time, though... A lot of non-technical positions I have seen and heard about (including non entry-level positions) require a video of the candidate to describe themselves and why they would be a good fit for the position. That just sounds awful to me.

One company said I had to make a video of myself..and then the final interview would be singing a song of my choice in front of the entire company through video conferencing. This was for a software engineer position. I didn't even bother going on the interview. I feel like the purpose was to see what they could get you to do.

You should have gone to the interview and chosen this as your song to sing (the company song from the Postal movie): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnb7WdHEPao

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#747

This will probably be lost in the pile of comments, and I'm sure some people will interpret it as humble bragging. But I genuinely do not get the angst and anger over the tech screen, from the perspective of an applicant. So I want to explain why I like them. My background: I've never taken any kind of CS or programming class in my life. Mediocre grades in college. My first exposure to programming was at age 24, as I…

What's LH?

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#748
post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just described me haha. In my Google phone screen, I fumbled around on solving an easy-moderate problem - so much so that when it ended, I felt that there was no way even I would hire me. And once it ended, I wrote the code for it in probably 10 minutes. Also, arranging it so that it was the first in the loop did not help either. The only good thing about the process was that the recruiter was nice about the whol…

Do you think that there's something an interviewer could have done to help you get the solution written within the interview instead of after?

Reducing the emphasis on thinking out-loud every single one of your thoughts might have helped. I'm not the type of person who can verbalize everything and moreover, it's too slow and prone to errors. Perhaps I should have fought back and asked for the interviewer to be quiet and also let me be quiet for a while.

Also, the absolute requirement that any of your workings should be done only on the shared Google doc seems like an overkill. There are a lot of times when I wanted to quickly note down / draw something on the notebook I had but couldn't.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#749
> companies are more afraid of hiring bad candidates than they are excited about the opportunity to hire a great candidate

Pretty much - they're willing to reject 100 good candidates in order to avoid hiring one bad one by mistake.

It's also a feedback system/arms race (like college admissions, conference paper submissions, etc..) The lower the acceptance rate, the more places you have to apply. This raises the number of applicants for each position, which in turn lowers the acceptance rate even further. This continues until you reach the maximum number of applications that each candidate can produce. Needless to say, the quality of evaluation is inversely proportional to the number of candidates, so acceptance becomes arbitrary and random.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so you know, salaries in Bangalore are comparable to that of SF if adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity. If you don't believe me, feel free to look up levels.fyi for both and match the conversions through: http://salaryconverter.nigelb.me/

That's because SV outsources their development work there, artificially inflating prices. In reality, India has a 'tech industry' in the same sense that Africa has an 'AI industry' - there is industry and it is vaguely related to AI, but tagging images does not an 'AI industry' make.

If there is development work happening, then there is a tech industry. Perhaps you may consider a tech industry to only exist if it is spawning a million startups a day but that is not a view shared by the rest of the world. See: http://elitebusinessmagazine.co.uk/global/item/how-the-tech-...
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