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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”

#81

Post by liquidify »

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…

There are so many pieces of software that are latency dependent. Aspects of them can be in the cloud, but I doubt we will ever truly lose track of bare metal. Right now I'm hoping for a real time OS that has enough of the common apps that most people are happy, but that satisfies the speed requirements necessary for digital audio, lighting controls, and other tangible and interactive behaviors. Hopefully the natural world's fundamental interactivity and tactility in real time is something that we all consider going forward enough that the cloud / thin client model becomes only a part of our human system.

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

#82

Post by ra7 »

jdreaver wrote: post #54
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 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…

I completely agree with his, as someone who has recently completed several interviews for senior level. I used to think everything depended on Leetcode questions, but I was surprised to find out how much of the focus was on design, past experience and leadership.

Leetcode is "easy" to crack with some (considerable) amount of hard work and they know that. But you can't make up past experience in behavioral interviews as you get found out very quickly.

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

#83

Post by gentleman11 »

mberning wrote: post #5

I do sympathize, but there is a flip side to this. I have worked in large orgs with many developer and engineer titled employees that can’t code at all. Zero coding skills. And their title would be things like “Senior Enterprise Application Engineer”. Unfortunately their resume doesn’t read that differently than a similarly experienced engineer that actually writes code.

I’ve worked with people who led competitive programming competitions and they couldn’t produce working code in a real project. The entire project was held up by them over and over because they couldn’t figure out APIs or write anything maintainable. They were wizards at leetcode but I’d prefer having somebody who could code. Managers are just lazy and imagine these people to be magical because of how intense their brains can work at niche problems, but it’s not magic at all and isn’t even on topic. Ask some design questions

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

#84

Post by prh8 »

xiphias2 wrote: post #39
dleslie wrote: post #4

Generally, I'm more likely to hire someone with interesting hobbies than someone who has completed HackerRank tests. I don't find it compelling to see that a candidate has accomplished standardized metrics; but I am swayed by non-computing hobbies. Synthesizers, painting, rock climbing, volunteering, and so on are indicators of a curious mind that's happy to apply itself.

How many Petabytes of data are you working with? Maybe your company is too small for data structures and cutting every 0.1ms latency count. As an example at Google I needed director level exception to introduce 0.1ms latency to the ads server (which wasn't needed at the end, but the monetary damage for timeouts is real). Understanding basic data structures and how the computer works is important in these cases, even…

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.

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

#85

Post by tomcat27 »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #49
tomcat27 wrote: post #7

> It's also an opportunity to excuse ageism. Yep!

That unintended benefit seems to be found in most every hiring process.

I guess companies do very tough interview to justify high salary. Let's say Google and some-small-shop have same interview for exactly same job position and responsibilities, and only one of them pays really well.. I am quite curious how the economics of market will shape out

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

#87

Post by dleslie »

xiphias2 wrote: post #39
dleslie wrote: post #4

Generally, I'm more likely to hire someone with interesting hobbies than someone who has completed HackerRank tests. I don't find it compelling to see that a candidate has accomplished standardized metrics; but I am swayed by non-computing hobbies. Synthesizers, painting, rock climbing, volunteering, and so on are indicators of a curious mind that's happy to apply itself.

How many Petabytes of data are you working with? Maybe your company is too small for data structures and cutting every 0.1ms latency count. As an example at Google I needed director level exception to introduce 0.1ms latency to the ads server (which wasn't needed at the end, but the monetary damage for timeouts is real). Understanding basic data structures and how the computer works is important in these cases, even…

Ha, 0.1ms of latency is a heavy cost for what I do these days. I've spent most of the last two weeks clawing back 0.05ms from here and there.

Algorithms absolutely matter, and that will be evident from work experience and education.

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

#88

Post by andrew_ »

Tech hiring is severely broken. 22 years in and it's only gotten worse. We still tolerate PhD Comp Sci algorithm questions for frontend developer gigs, endless series of array shuffling and sorting, canned problems intended to "measure your problem solving ability," ridiculous hypotheticals (e.g. whiteboard how you would build Slack), and a litany of other tactics that recruiters or old school management thinks are reasonable hoops to jump through.

Yes, I'm a bit salty.

The best advice I received recently came from someone 10 years my junior in the industry: politely refuse hackerrank, algorithmic code challenges, array shuffling, or anything unrelated to the work you've done or the work the interviewers are doing on a daily basis. Instead, offer to pair/group program or troubleshoot on a problem they're currently trying to solve, offer to walk through an open source project you've worked on or authored and speak to the problems you encountered. Let the gatekeeper/recruiter know you decline the kinds of interviews I mentioned above, and let them know you're looking for an org that thinks outside of that box, that values a person beyond their ability to regurgitate for-sale interview prep.

That approach has an effect of weeding out companies mired in corporate lockstep. I had told a recruiter at a national, Austin based real estate firm that I decline those types of questions and interviews. Was assured that they would not happen, and in the first round of the process was asked to sort an array of phone numbers. The interviewers had no idea I would decline the challenge, and I politely ended the call.

I recently adopted this approach with great success, speaking with a number of high quality orgs and all around great people who were truly interested in what I could bring to their effort. Granted, not everyone is in a position to take a bold stance, but I found that it made me more interesting to companies who were doing more than going through the motions.

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

#89

Post by kmonsen »

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…

I mean why not both? I worked hard and do my best in my job, but I also do leetcode and others a few times a month just to make sure I can still get another job if I need to.

I am not professional leetcoder, but good enough if I need to in addition to my experience that has been good enough so far.

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

#90

Post by sudeepj »

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…

> Our craft is becoming arcane

I would say is that a lot of hard problems (of last 20-30 yrs) are getting commoditised (e.g. S3, DynamoDB, Redis) and barrier to entry reduced. This would mean increasing the work is "glue & pipes".

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