[HN Gopher] My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable
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My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable
Author : dave_sullivan
Score : 393 points
Date : 2021-04-13 14:45 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (davesullivan.is)
(TXT) w3m dump (davesullivan.is)
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Change the strategy. These days, HR people are hunting for
| deveopers of any kind. Make yourself a nice LinkedIn profile, put
| all the correct words there, DO NOT emphasise that you are
| currently unemployed...
|
| ... and when the inquiries will inevitably come, just politely
| reject doing interviews with code questions, etc., and turn on
| the offence! Ask them yourself about the task and if it might
| interest you enough, so you will be motivated to work on it. Your
| ideal interview should be more about THEM, not about YOU. It
| might take a while to master this skill, but used right you can
| totally dominate the interview process and hire yourself into
| almost any company which is desperate for developers.
| m0llusk wrote:
| No, they are not. The whole reason there is a perception of a
| lack of developers is the screwy criteria and process applied
| to applicants.
|
| I'm a developer with more than 30 years experience including
| some well known products from big companies. The same is true
| of my circle of friends but only two still have traditional
| tech jobs. The rest have gone independent out of necessity.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| The biggest mistake people make when I give a coding question
| is not asking for help, even though I always tell them to treat
| the question as collaborative and use me as a resource. While
| I've been on interviews where the company expected me to code
| with no help, usually the culture at those places wasn't a good
| fit anyway.
|
| All that to say I'd suggest candidates be more willing to ask
| for help. Interviewers are people too and if you can code a
| solution easily after getting unblocked they might forget you
| ever asked for help, or respect you more for it.
| kwo wrote:
| > Being a self taught software developer who has been programming
| since I was 12, I had no idea how to reverse a binary tree.
|
| I'm also an autodidact having taught myself how to program at 15
| but never pursued a bachelor in CS. I've failed coding interviews
| before when asked to diagram a sort function. So I upped my game,
| took an algorithm course on coursera, coded up some binary tree
| examples, learned about algorithm complexity. Then I got through
| the interview process at a FAANG.
|
| Algorithms are not a part of my daily job but perhaps they are
| like an honor code for software developers as much as a martial
| artist will never use violence in real life.
| dkarl wrote:
| > Not only were these programming word problems ridiculous, but
| it seemed like everyone I interviewed with was a caricature of
| narcissism and delusions of grandeur.
|
| Everyone? Really? That's a red flag. I would believe "a lot," and
| I would accept "half" as hyperbole, but if it feels like every
| single one, then you either have an uncanny knack for picking bad
| places to interview, or you're taking the process way too
| personally. Sometimes a job isn't a good fit because of a skill
| it requires that you don't have. Maybe they need someone who can
| sling complex SQL from day one. Maybe the ridiculous word
| problems are real problems they've had to solve, which they have
| to frame in silly-sounding ways because the real-world context
| would reveal sensitive information or take an hour to explain.
|
| Sure, there are interviewers who waste everybody's time by asking
| questions that don't select for good candidates, but even if you
| write off all those interviews, that just adds a certain
| percentage of overhead to the process.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I imagine I'd end up with the same result if I applied for
| programming jobs - get interviews because of the range of
| programming experience I have and tools I'm comfortable with,
| then summarily fail every interview question about linked lists
| etc.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| I sympathize quite a bit as a fellow engineer from a non-trad
| background -- I solved this problem for myself by just biting the
| bullet and obsessing over getting good at the rote questions
| we're forced to answer. A nice side effect is that it has made me
| a better software engineer in some ways. I'm still working on it
| however, can't seem to shake the intra-interview jitters. I'd be
| interested in reading more about your swap to digital nomadism.
| yodelshady wrote:
| Side note, I know its a meme for other reasons, but "invert a
| binary tree" should be the poster child for "communicating badly
| then acting smug when you're misunderstood".
|
| It's a horrible, flat-out _wrong_ use of terminology,
| inconsistent with the use of the term "invert" in just about any
| other technical context. Using it should be grounds for shaming.
| xondono wrote:
| I sincerely don't understand this. According to the title he was
| "uneployable", but he managed not only to be perfectly
| employable, he was able to be selective about which companies he
| wanted to work for. What am I missing here?
| cinbun8 wrote:
| A failed self funded video game project is a microcosm of the
| pain felt by bootstrapped founders that don't make it against
| their competition (VC funded or otherwise).
|
| Reminds me of this thread -
| https://twitter.com/awilkinson/status/1376985854229504007
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Or certain questions about complicated SQL queries (I use an
| ORM, rarely do I need to write a query by hand).
|
| This doesn't really seem unfair as ORMs stop working at a certain
| level. He seemed to have been targeting companies doing more
| complex things than he was previously doing.
| NAK21 wrote:
| Agreed - anyone applying for a job as a data scientist should
| at least be able to work with SQL.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| That's really part of the problem of doing a bootstrapped or
| early angel type startup, and I definitely feel this guys pain.
| You spend years doing very shallow work because you simply do
| not have the time or money to dig deep into any given issue
| until it actually crops up, at which point you do the bare
| minimum to fix it and move on. Repeat this process until you
| fail to find a viable business model, or find a viable business
| model at which point if you're really lucky you can start
| slowly rewriting your app piece by piece, but more
| realistically you just accept that it was good enough and keep
| doing more new things.
|
| This skillset just isn't that useful to a large software shop.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I started software development in startups/innovation teams
| and this is the reason I am telling younger friends who have
| yet to graduate to go for the big companies.
|
| Startups are fun. I work at one now. 3/4 software engineering
| roles I have had have been startups. But all the work I am
| doing is also very shallow because everything is a fail fast
| timeboxed sort of thing where you work across a large
| spectrum of stuff and I will eventually need to change that.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| One of the non-obvious challenges with doing a startup is that
| the majority of your work is spent slogging through boring,
| non-complicated tasks.
|
| You're simultaneously doing some of the hardest work of your
| life but also watching some of your skills atrophy simply
| because you're spread so thing across so many different
| problems.
|
| Startup founders tend to make good product managers or cross-
| discipline engineering managers for this reason, but it can
| take some time to slide back into the groove of deep technical
| work in specific domains.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| yeah agree. you want to know what kind of query that ORM
| generated some might be unsafe.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Or debugging. Or performance.
|
| Basically this guy discovered he is not actually very deep
| but has not actually concluded that from the evidence before
| him.
| NationalPark wrote:
| That struck me as a red flag too, I wonder if he's really
| getting passed because his experience is all on stuff thats too
| small scale. Regardless, it doesn't sound like he actually did
| any interview prep, so it's not surprising he's getting
| negative responses. Even people who love this stuff have to
| brush up on the areas they don't frequently use (for work or
| fun).
| tzs wrote:
| I'm somewhat baffled by the reversing a binary tree thing in the
| article and in the comments here.
|
| Unless you don't know what a binary tree is, or are forbidden to
| use recursion, you should be able to figure it out even if you
| have never studied algorithms. This is FizzBuzz level stuff.
|
| The only difficulty should be if representing a binary tree in
| the language you are using involves pointers/references or
| nesting that you do not understand. In that case, the question
| has exposed a serious gap in your knowledge of that language
| which you really should fix. It's OK to not know the more
| esoteric features of a language, but you should know how it
| handles pointers/references or nested data structures.
| jdeaton wrote:
| To spell it out... "reversing a binary tree" here is just being
| used as a stand-in reference for any CS-y interview question
| that is neither relevant to the job, nor particularly difficult
| to solve but would be much more familiar territory for anyone
| who has taken traditional CS courses.
|
| The fact that reversing a binary tree is in fact trivial is to
| help make the point that these kinds of questions are not that
| useful.
| reedf1 wrote:
| Exactly this - as someone with a non-traditional background
| (physics) "reversing a binary tree" is as you say completely
| trivial and I could have "discovered" the answer to the
| question in slightly slower than real-time in an interview.
| But people with CS backgrounds don't need to discover it,
| they have it memorised. These questions aren't testing for
| original thought or problem-solving ability, they are testing
| for your skill at memorisation or, to put it more cheekily,
| regurgitation.
|
| I've worked in the industry for years now and I've probably
| used more maths from my physics degree than I have of the
| algorithms that I learn for interview.
| geebee wrote:
| I enjoyed the blog post. It didn't break new ground, but it is
| still useful and a little therapeutic for me to read these posts.
|
| I have made it a personal goal to have a career in the tech
| industry that doesn't require taking technical exam interviews.
| It's something I understand I need to work on - to _earn_ ,
| really, it's not something that just happens. My approach is to
| do this by consulting, speaking, teaching workshops, doing
| projects, and eventually building a network, mainly through
| contacts with non-technical people who value my assistance. It
| actually has been working.
|
| This approach has, however, required taking a hard pass on what
| have turned out to be very good career opportunities. But since I
| very rarely pass a technical exam interview, I'm not really sure
| what I've lost.
|
| Another factor - I was a math major and did a grad degree in
| operations research, so while I've written lots and lots of code
| and wouldn't really call myself "self-taught", I'm not really a
| great match for SE roles. Yes, I did code for graphs and trees,
| factoring primes, solving diff eq's and optimization problems,
| and so forth, but this was within the context of math classes,
| not CS. So I never took any formal CS beyond the intro in
| college. Over time, I realized that's not a coincidence, I
| actually was't really interested in code per so, I was interested
| in what questions I can answer with code.
|
| One thing I mention here on HN - I can absolutely create and
| search a binary tree, DFS and BFS. I've been able to implement
| merge sort and recursively print all permutations of a string or
| set. I believe the claim that a tech interviews are used to
| filter out those who "just can't code" is a myth. The questions I
| get in later rounds of tech interviews are far more elaborate
| than this (for example: find all matching subtrees in a binary
| tree at the whiteboard, in 45 minutes). Here's the thing - I
| actually _have_ used trees extensively in my work (I needed to
| find the shortest path to passing a series of interrelated tests
| where various groupings were adequate). I looked it up, learned
| it, coded in it... but eventually it left short term memory. Had
| I taken a tech interview test on exactly the same topic aa year
| later, I would surely have failed. I just don 't walk around with
| this all loaded up in my head, and I feel that I've re-loaded it
| for an interview for the last time (I would happily reload it for
| a real project).
|
| And I'll sign off with my usual: companies are free to filter out
| candidates based on very intricate technical tests, but I have
| zero sympathy when they complain about a shortage of good
| candidates. And this becomes sinister when they claim that this
| shortage means that they should be empowered to bestow limited
| residency rights on someone where they control how the person
| interviews, what the person works on, where the person lives and
| works, and when the person shows up at the office.
| mustafa_pasi wrote:
| What I got out of this is that some guy got a startup in ML going
| and even got funding without having a degree. That's insane to
| me. On the other side of the Atlantic, if you look at founders
| most of them are Phds, some even professors, and some "merely"
| MScs.
| fairity wrote:
| Many people seem to think there must be something wrong with OP's
| skills or interview style.
|
| I'd just like to point out that it's possible they're a perfectly
| competent hire and just got unlucky.
|
| If a competent engineer has a 20% chance of passing an interview,
| the probability that they fail 10 interviews in a row due to pure
| bad luck is 10.7% (.8^10).
|
| The chance that the same competent engineer gets an offer in 3 or
| less interviews is 50% (.2+.8.2+.8^2.2).
|
| So, it makes sense that most competent engineers will believe
| it's easy to get a job offer (after all, most will get an offer
| after 3 or fewer tries). However, a small but significant portion
| of competent engineers will believe it's exceedingly difficult
| and become disillusioned. The truth is somewhere in between.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Conventional wisdom tells potential founders not to worry about
| failure because they can "fail up" when things go wrong. In my
| experience, this was not the case.
|
| The part that's not usually said out loud is that you need to be
| rich and/or well-connected to "fail up" when your startup fails.
| Running a startup _may_ help you get connections, especially if
| your angel /VC network has a good reputation, and you happen to
| remind them of their younger selves.
| avelis wrote:
| I think he was applying for the wrong roles. He needed to move to
| some form of management it looked like.
| slibhb wrote:
| As someone who has a humanities degree and had zero trouble
| finding a job as a programmer (3 interviews required to get a
| job), color me skeptical.
|
| You might have a hard time getting a job at
| Netflix/Google/Facebook/etc. But there are plenty of companies
| out there that absolutely do not care if you can write algorithms
| on a whiteboard and they aren't bad places to work.
|
| Are those companies missing out on good programmers because of
| these requirements? Of course, but it's hard to say if they're
| making a mistake. They're also filtering out some bad programmers
| or at least bad students.
| [deleted]
| icu wrote:
| I don't accept that someone is unemployable unless they have
| extreme physical or mental handicaps. I think what the article
| reveals is that this person's ego is heavily invested in the idea
| that they are competent in areas they are not. If your mental
| schema is wrong, you cannot take life's feedback that you need to
| put in the work in areas you aren't getting your desired results.
| If you're not careful your ego will prevent your growth.
|
| Overcoming ego is hard... but not impossible. It's like telling
| someone they are parenting their children incorrectly, but you're
| the one telling this to yourself. Often it takes an emotionally
| difficult situation that triggers deep self reflection or
| incredible friends whom you trust, and who are willing to speak
| the truth.
|
| I'm happy that the blogger has seemingly found a way to be happy,
| but I can't help but wonder if they've just optimised for a local
| maximum, and not their full potential.
| edwnjos wrote:
| I can relate so much to this! I was only 18 when I became a
| technical co-founder and when the burnout and the subsequent
| crash kicked in, my entire world turned upside down.
|
| It took quite some time to recover, now that I'm up and running I
| only see a few options outside of starting one. I'm currently
| pursuing the digital nomad route with contracting.
|
| There is something so addictive about being able to zoom between
| high and low level tasks with very high responsibility .
| Hewlberno wrote:
| Just putting it out there. Windows is a bad dev environment.
| Learning basic sql and basic coding tests is sort of expected.
| Honestly I'm not sure if it was the interviewers that were being
| narcissistic given the broad brush strokes you paint with. What
| do you think they're perspective actually was?
| DangerousPie wrote:
| Windows + WSL is a great dev environment.
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| Yeah, 90% of the time I'm in a linux VM.
|
| I don't buy apple products anymore because of the walled garden
| bullshit that permeates apple's vision of the world.
|
| Linux is a fine dev environment. That interviewer was an idiot.
| pyb wrote:
| If this guy cannot easily get a job, the developer shortage in
| the Bay Area is wildly overstated.
| Keverw wrote:
| Have you thought about doing some open source contributing? Like
| publish some mini projects or modules, submit pull requests, etc?
| I think some recruiters scrape GitHub. I know some people get
| tired of the unsolicited emails from recruiters but in a way it's
| kinda nice too sometimes.
| nabla9 wrote:
| SW industry lacks clear terms for proficiency levels and
| different skills. Programmer, developer, SW engineer, etc. are
| all interchangeable.
|
| In other professions, you can distinguish between, say
| mechanic/technician and mechanical engineer.
|
| The author of this piece seems like a very experienced good
| "software mechanic". He can work independently and build stuff,
| but he is not a "software engineer". "always used ORM", not
| skilled in SQL is an indicator of narrow knowledge based on just
| completing tasks and learning by doing. That's fine but it also
| sets some limits.
|
| He could find a well-paying job and interesting work if he would
| not have to apply for every vaguely defined SW job there is.
| swordsmith wrote:
| I am a research scientist at a FAANG. The interview process we
| went through is much less demanding in the CS part, as the domain
| knowledge is the focus (yet we still struggle to find good
| candidates that pass). But I've noticed that those who passed the
| coding interviews (easy to medium leetcode style) write much more
| efficient, maintainable, and concise code for the algorithms,
| experiments and analysis they implement. This results in much
| higher productivity, even if they have to do more catch up on
| domain-specific knowledge.
|
| The blog post mentions he works on "machine learning" projects,
| which in my experience benefits significantly from having
| leetcode-style algorithmic knowledge (assuming you are not just
| calling blackbox.infer() all day).
| throwbernanke wrote:
| > about complicated SQL queries (I use an ORM, rarely do I need
| to write a query by hand)
|
| There's "reverse tree" and then there's that...
| gambler wrote:
| _> I went on HN Who's Hiring_
|
| And that's exactly why your experience was the way it was. HN is
| a self-selected crowd with a very specific mentality. Unsolicited
| advice: try a traditional job search website and look for
| companies outside of California and NYC. Your experience will be
| drastically different. I'm not saying it will be awesome every
| single time, but there will be more diversity in approaches to
| interviewing and in personalities.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| Yeah I agree. You'll have better luck if you just go to indeed
| and apply for something that interests you. My most awful
| interview experiences have been from the jobs I've applied to
| on HN Who's Hiring or Stack Overflow's jobs board. It's clear
| the kind of people they're looking for are the hardcore CS
| types and not the casual (but highly experienced) business
| application developers.
|
| Also - sometimes you just need to get your foot in the door
| somewhere that's not too picky and caters to what you're
| looking for but pays slightly lower than what you want. Then
| prove that you're actually as good as you say, so you can ask
| for a raise. I did exactly that with my current employer. After
| 4 months of being there and proving myself, I asked for a 35K
| pay raise (about 27%!) and got it almost instantaneously.
| johnx123-up wrote:
| Apart from Indeed, are there any better job sites?
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| Honestly I've had such good luck with indeed that I haven't
| bothered to look elsewhere. I think there are some
| competitors like Monster and Glassdoor. I've heard good
| things about LinkedIn, but I find their platform to be
| extremely intrusive so I personally avoid LinkedIn
| altogether.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _it seemed like everyone I interviewed with was a caricature of
| narcissism and delusions of grandeur_
|
| I don't know what it is, but something about the position of
| authority and power of being an interviewer really does change
| people. It's a modern-day Stanford Prisoner Experiment[1]. I've
| been on both sides quite a bit, and it's remarkable how people
| flip like a light-switch when you enter that room. There are
| exceptions of course. Those people who it doesn't affect are the
| ones I like to work with. Although, it seems those most
| interested in being on the interviews also seem most affected.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
| bartread wrote:
| I picked up on that phrase too, and it made me laugh.
|
| I've worked in places where often interviewers seemed more
| interested in proving how smart they were - and particularly
| how much smarter than the candidate they were - than in
| assessing whether or not the candidate is suitable for the job.
| It smacks of insecurity.
|
| My current company, regardless of how good or bad a candidate
| is, everyone knows that they are to be treated with respect and
| kindness, and they also know that if they don't treat the
| candidates well they're going to get a bollocking for it.
|
| First impressions definitely cut both ways, and word travels.
| If you treat candidates like crap don't be surprised if your
| stream of applicants dries up. Unless you're a FAANG you really
| can't get away with that sort of behaviour.
| ertian wrote:
| There may be something to what you say. But on the other hand,
| there's that old adage: if you meet an asshole one day, you met
| an asshole. If _everybody_ you meet during the day is an
| asshole, then _you're_ the asshole.
| dkarl wrote:
| To add some opposite perspective to this, jobs interviews are
| extremely stressful, and it's really, really, really hard not
| to psychologically trigger people. Even if you tell people
| ahead of time that you're going to ask a lot of questions about
| a variety of topics to get a well-rounded picture of their
| skills, including a lot of things that aren't strict
| requirements for the position, even if you tell them it's a
| conversation more than a test, even if you tell them that
| virtually all successful candidates have gaps in their
| knowledge that will come up in the interview, even if you
| explain all that and do your best to come off as easy-going and
| approachable, still.
|
| Still.
|
| A lot of people will panic and freak out the instant they hear
| something they're not prepared for.
|
| In an ideal world you would only ask questions that no
| qualified candidate could possibly have difficulty with, even
| under severe stress, but there's no way to do that.
|
| An additional complication is that interviewers can't just walk
| away knowing whether the candidate can do the job. They need to
| give a more complete evaluation of the candidate so the hiring
| manager knows what to do if the candidate negotiates for a
| higher salary or asks the company to match another offer
| they've had. This often depends on "nice to haves" such as
| advanced SQL skills or the ability to quickly assess the big-O
| complexity of an algorithm and figure out how to improve it.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Hmmmm. The article drips with anger and cynicism, and hints at a
| few bitter opinions like "...companies I had ideological issues
| around..." It's hard to judge someone from an article, but if 5%
| of this sentiment bled through in an interview, I'd take a hard
| pass too. I just don't want to work with difficult, unhappy
| people.
|
| It's a strange tone to take? The buried lede is: "[I] travel
| around and work as a digital nomad. I've been doing that for a
| couple of years now and I work an average of 2.5 days per week on
| machine learning or web projects and have rebuilt my savings and
| my whole life."
|
| That sounds incredible! Like, the article should be titled "I'm
| winning at life".
| everdrive wrote:
| >Hmmmm. The article drips with anger and cynicism, and hints at
| a few bitter opinions like "...companies I had ideological
| issues around..." It's hard to judge someone from an article,
| but if 5% of this sentiment bled through in an interview, I'd
| take a hard pass too. I just don't want to work with difficult,
| unhappy people.
|
| I find a sentiment like this pretty scary. Being competent at a
| job is not relevant, but just whether or not the interviewer
| subjectively likes you.
| freedomben wrote:
| I don't disagree, but have you never worked with a person
| whose personality was a clash? It's a nightmare. I've quit
| jobs just to get away from people before.
|
| One of my top criteria for accepting a job is whether I like
| the interviewers.
|
| I'm not hardcore in the "asshole geniuses should die" crowd,
| but if you are a miserable person to be around, go find a job
| where you work solo. Don't drag your whole team down.
| everdrive wrote:
| This topic has come up a few times on hn, and I always find
| myself in the minority. At my previous job, I never
| considered likability, and ALWAYS considered what
| contributions someone had to offer. Whenever I bring that
| frame of mind here, I always get a lot of push back.
| "People just want to work with people they like." It's
| clear I'm the outlier in this opinion, but if you're just
| working with people you like, you're not really a business,
| at least not fully. You're at a social club, too.
| RussianCow wrote:
| > You're a social club, too.
|
| I get what you're saying, but you spend 40+ hours a week
| with the people you work with, so the social stuff
| matters. If someone is really good at their job but a
| complete asshole to their coworkers, nobody is going to
| want to work with them, which will likely end up being a
| net negative for the company's productivity.
| matwood wrote:
| I tend to fall closer to your view, but there is a
| difference between professional and asshole. I don't need
| to or even want to be best friends with my colleagues,
| but at this point in my life I also refuse to deal with
| assholes no matter how smart they (think) they are.
|
| So when I say likability matters, what I'm saying is I
| need this person to be professional enough that we can
| work together day in and day out, _and_ I don 't want to
| routinely punch them in the face.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| What if your colleagues are condescending, rude and
| actively trying to sabotage you?
|
| Cooperative work needs some form of positive bond, trust
| and feeling of being part of a team that looks out for
| each other. It doesn't need to reach 'social club'
| levels.
|
| Truth is, you either have a cooperative unit or have
| smaller cooperative factions within the team that are
| competing or adversarial.
|
| You don't want the second type of nonsense at your
| workplace.
|
| Maybe you've not seen it in practice and that's why it
| doesn't make sense to you.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Both technical contributions and a positive social
| environment are necessary components for a business.
| ip26 wrote:
| Likability doesn't have to mean they will be your best
| friend. It can just mean they aren't a colossal jerk. I
| would probably call anyone who is considerate &
| constructive "likeable".
| bckr wrote:
| Do you tend to have emotional responses to the behaviors
| of others, or do negative behaviors roll off your back
| (like so much water off a duck's feathers)?
|
| Most people feel bad when people act like assholes.
| Feeling bad enough, frequently enough, is cause for
| changing jobs for most people.
|
| I'm confused by "you're not really a business". Are you
| the business owner at most of your jobs? Or do you tend
| to identify with the business you work for, sort of
| letting your ego merge with that of the organization
| during working hours?
|
| I think saying "you're at a social club, too", is not a
| right way to frame it. A place of business is by
| definition a place where people are doing things
| together: business is social. Most people want to do
| social activities with people they can at least tolerate
| if not enjoy being around.
|
| Now, if you are not of such a psychological make up that
| it really matters to you who you spend the majority of
| your waking time around, and you're able to
| compartmentalize strongly, then, it makes sense why you
| would be in the minority on this subject.
|
| I think it could be important for you to realize that
| this is not really a matter of opinion in the sense of "a
| perspective on things that can be changed by experience
| or new information". This is really about folks'
| fundamental psychological make up.
| everdrive wrote:
| Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
|
| >Do you tend to have emotional responses to the behaviors
| of others, or do negative behaviors roll off your back
| (like so much water off a duck's feathers)?
|
| >Most people feel bad when people act like assholes.
| Feeling bad enough, frequently enough, is cause for
| changing jobs for most people.
|
| So, I definitely get a bit ruffled when people are
| assholes, but I've also never found myself in a job where
| I can't at least push back on rude people and stake out
| some boundaries. In other words, I may not like
| interacting with some of the mean people, but I can find
| a way to work successfully with them, and ideally, even
| get past initial difficulties. When someone is
| dysfunctional enough, I frankly try to find ways to avoid
| that individual. Usually, if someone is that
| dysfunctional, everyone in the business knows it, and are
| trying to avoid them all the same.
|
| A big fear I have is the distinction between a "truly
| dysfunctional person" and "someone who the interviewer
| didn't like during the interview." At least in my
| experience, first impressions aren't worth very much. And
| despite the fact that they aren't worth much, I've seen a
| number of people act as if their first impressions
| contain accurate and valuable information.
|
| And, I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that I'm
| very afraid that someone will not like a good candidate
| during an interview, but would actually like them quite a
| bit once they actually got to work with them. I've
| actually just watched this scenario play out at my most
| recent job. Me and my team members interviewed a
| candidate who was very quiet and very shy. Those team
| members did not want to hire him because they were afraid
| he'd be a "poor fit." From talking to him, I felt that he
| seemed to be very intelligent, and so I vouched for him
| heavily. In hindsight, this has gone very well: he's one
| of the most productive members of the team, and is
| generally well liked. At worst, he hasn't had _any_
| conflicts with anyone. If I had not stepped it, it is
| unlikely he would have been hired, simply because people
| did not like his personality.
|
| >I'm confused by "you're not really a business". Are you
| the business owner at most of your jobs? Or do you tend
| to identify with the business you work for, sort of
| letting your ego merge with that of the organization
| during working hours?
|
| This is something I've struggled to articulate well, but
| I suppose I'm drawing a hard distinction between
| "accomplishing a specific work function," and "really
| liking a person I work with." Now, I'm not blind. I
| understand that there is some correlation here: a team of
| people who hate each other will generally be less
| effective than a team of people who all get along really
| well. I guess what I mean is that it feels to me that
| people are heavily prioritizing friends over function.
| Or, that people believe (incorrectly in my view) that if
| they find somebody disagreeable, it will be _impossible_
| to resolve differences and develop a good working
| relationship. In other words, the whole point of a
| business it to successfully complete some set of tasks.
| (build a thing, provide a service, etc.) I feel that if
| you too heavily prioritize working with people you like,
| eventually you 're putting your social preferences ahead
| of actually running the business. In other words, we can
| all agree that all things being equal, a team of people
| that works well together will be more successful than one
| that does not. But what about a team of below average
| people who like each other a lot, vs. a team of brilliant
| geniuses who aren't much fun to be around? Clearly the
| choices between these two options will not always be that
| cut and dry. (and I've only provided a cut and dry
| example for the ease of explanation, not because I feel
| it is the most common scenario.) But, I feel that
| sociability is overemphasized because it preferred, not
| necessarily because it is successful. Does that help
| clear up what I was trying to communicate?
|
| > I think saying "you're at a social club, too", is not a
| right way to frame it. A place of business is by
| definition a place where people are doing things
| together: business is social. Most people want to do
| social activities with people they can at least tolerate
| if not enjoy being around.
|
| > Now, if you are not of such a psychological make up
| that it really matters to you who you spend the majority
| of your waking time around, and you're able to
| compartmentalize strongly, then, it makes sense why you
| would be in the minority on this subject.
|
| Hmm. I this is a good insight, and I'm struggling with
| how to reply. I guess if I were being completely honest I
| might say ... I don't need to compartmentalize when it
| comes to getting along with a rough personality. I'm a
| bit weird socially, but despite this, have not really had
| trouble working with a wide variety of personalities.
| Where I _do_ often have to compartmentalize is when
| thinking about the business itself. For example, if a
| powerpoint presentation is completely meaningless, but
| nonetheless gets a good reception, I will
| "compartmentalize" in the sense that I know better than
| the waste time critiquing it. Or, I might
| "compartmentalize" in the sense that if someone says "I
| love working for this company!" I would politely offer
| some affirmation, rather than saying something negative.
| In truth, I think most companies aren't really something
| to be proud of in the moral sense. They offer services,
| and either have successful business models, or else do
| not. It might be possible to be proud of the intellectual
| achievements of a company, but often then, the
| intellectual achievements are in service of something
| which is a waste of time. (ie, there's no way I'm
| anywhere near as talented as a Facebook engineer, but I
| think they can only be proud of their work in the strict
| intellectual sense. The problem was very hard, and
| perhaps few people could solve it. But the actual outcome
| of their work is meaningless.)
|
| Now, I recognize that this doesn't actually do much to
| support my original argument, but I definitely wanted to
| answer you honestly since you wrote such a thoughtful
| reply. I suppose what I'm struggling with here is: are
| other people compartmentalizing too? Or do they really
| believe that their work is meaningful? If other people
| are compartmentalizing, then it feels very arbitrary to
| me to gleefully accept some corporate myth, but then to
| draw a line in the sand regarding having a teammate you
| like. I suspect people would call this a false dichotomy.
| But to me, it feels like an oddity.
|
| > I think it could be important for you to realize that
| this is not really a matter of opinion in the sense of "a
| perspective on things that can be changed by experience
| or new information". This is really about folks'
| fundamental psychological make up.
|
| I think you're probably right here, which is why I
| appreciate your response, and why I've tried to write so
| thoroughly and candidly. Even if this perspective always
| feels alien to me, I'd still like to understand it
| better. So, thanks again.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Working well with others is a big part of competency.
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| Both are important. I don't want to be saddled with someone
| who's incompetent _or_ someone who 's an asshole. I spend
| more time with my colleagues than I do with my family, and I
| want to enjoy that time.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > whether or not the interviewer subjectively likes you
|
| Yes, because we've been burned by this in the past: firing
| somebody who's impossible to work with is WAY more difficult
| than just not hiring them in the first place.
| striking wrote:
| What, so we should all tolerate disagreeable people just
| because they can lay down a few lines of code?
|
| It's not "whether the interviewer likes you", it's whether
| you can work with other people without taking an emotional
| toll on them. And it is as important, if not more so, than
| their ability to program. It's certainly a harder thing to
| teach.
|
| (as for this specific quote, I think it's fine to have issues
| with what companies are working on... But the rest of the
| article really does just come off as bitter and angry, and
| for what?)
| sushid wrote:
| If you had technically brilliant but difficult to work with
| coworkers at your job you'd understand where the parent
| commenter is coming from.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Are you suggesting a person's attitude doesn't matter at all
| for how they perform at work? Very few employees are hired
| and then don't have to interact with anyone. If a person is a
| brilliant programmer, but pisses off everyone they work with
| and drives other employees to quit, they are going to be a
| net negative.
| [deleted]
| pc86 wrote:
| Feel free to quote the area where the GP said competency is
| irrelevant.
|
| There are tens or hundreds of thousands of skilled developers
| in the world, there's no reason to work with bitter, angry
| people.
| idrios wrote:
| I don't place any judgement on the author at all. Programming
| since he was 12, started a company, self taught developer &
| data scientist. He's been extremely busy, is clearly motivated,
| and on paper should be extremely hireable. But he's getting
| dozens of rejections over whiteboard interviews, so he's
| probably wondering "am I actually just getting rejected for not
| having a CS degree", which is an extremely frustrating thought
| when you have the experiences he has.
|
| The digital nomad life is probably somewhat relaxing, but he's
| clearly someone who values his accomplishments over his
| experiences, so I'm guessing that's why it wasn't the focus of
| this article.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| > The digital nomad life is probably somewhat relaxing, but
| he's clearly someone who values his accomplishments over his
| experiences, so I'm guessing that's why it wasn't the focus
| of this article.
|
| Ooh, that hits in a soft place for me.
|
| Therein lies all of the angst, unsettledness, and general
| escapisms of this post, and more probably the world. I've
| seen the happiest people on earth do so very little compared
| to traditional 'success,' because they mastered what they
| 'valued' first... then pursued it relentlessly.
|
| Here's piece from Hunter S. Thompson (don't know if you
| really want to emulate all of his teachings), that gets at
| the heart of this values orientation:
|
| "The answer--and, in a sense, the tragedy of life--is that we
| seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal
| which demands of us certain things: and we do these things.
| We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid.
| When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a
| fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer
| want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has
| changed. It's not the fireman who has changed, but you."
|
| https://lettersofnote.com/2016/07/18/a-man-has-to-be-
| somethi...
| okamiueru wrote:
| Thank you for that. The full letter was a pleasure to read.
| temac wrote:
| If a CS degree just let you invert a binary tree and do
| convoluted SQL queries, then arguably it is a quite poor CS
| degree. Maybe some interview questions/exercises are, as
| often, let's say not perfect. Or maybe they are good enough
| for most candidates but the people asking them are failing to
| see other competencies when somebody fails at boring /
| specialized tasks but could bring value in other ways.
| sirmoveon wrote:
| Exposing yourself to what you consider your community of peers
| and being considered inferior is demoralizing. Even if he is
| winning, or you imply sarcasm, he felt minimized by a system
| that doesn't make sense to him (and many other software
| developers).
| coldcode wrote:
| A friend of mine dropped out of college 1 semester short of a
| CS degree, wrote some iOS apps, sold them for a lot of money,
| started several software companies, wrote a book on how to do
| this, invested in several more startups and lost most of what
| he had made - and now runs a land clearing company and is
| having loads of fun and success doing it. Sometimes you don't
| realize what you really want to do until something bad happens.
| Winterflow3r wrote:
| How did he lose what he had, if I may ask? Was it the startup
| investments? What is a land clearing company?
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| > The article drips with anger and cynicism, and hints at a few
| bitter opinions like "...companies I had ideological issues
| around..."
|
| To be fair, I did literally have ideological issues with them
| -- such as the amount they track their users, their stance
| towards China, their use of patents, or just generally bad
| reputation in the industry -- there's a bunch of issues I feel
| strongly about and that prevents me from working with a lot of
| different companies. I guess that's a bit of a luxury, isn't
| it? But that's also my choice. I'm not exactly homeless these
| days, so I still manage to find great people to work with.
|
| I am pretty cynical and stubborn... not sure about angry, as
| you say, "I'm winning at life".
|
| > I just don't want to work with difficult, unhappy people.
|
| Me neither!
| ysavir wrote:
| Are you really unemployable if you aren't fitting in with
| companies with which you would be a bad fit? Sounds more like
| an issue with your application choices than your
| employability.
| gpvos wrote:
| They were invitations he received, not applications that he
| initiated himself.
| ysavir wrote:
| That invites even more inquiry. So the author waited for
| people to come to them, and when nothing worked out,
| declared themself "unemployable" (despite not proactively
| looking for work).
|
| I get that people can hit hard places, and that the
| author was in such a place. But I don't think the
| perspective given is an objective one, especially
| considering the author has had time for hindsight to
| settle in.
|
| According to the blog post, they didn't proactively apply
| at companies they were interested in. They didn't bother
| catching up on new technologies or other skills sought
| after in the current market, spending their time on
| building a computer game instead. Interviewers are being
| vilified for acting in their own best interests rather
| than the author's conveniences.
|
| They then finish up by becoming a digital nomad working
| 20 hour weeks and building up their savings and loving
| life. Where are the details that went into making that
| lifestyle work? Was it not due to being employable?
|
| It's hard to sympathize with the author when the
| narrative is essentially "I put very little effort into
| getting hired and so had to work a little harder to get a
| job".
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| Hello, I am the author.
|
| > So the author waited for people to come to them, and
| when nothing worked out, declared themself "unemployable"
| (despite not proactively looking for work).
|
| There are two sections. There is the part where people
| reached out to me. Then there is the part where I went
| out and interviewed more proactively. And there is a lot
| of stuff in between that doesn't really fit into this
| blog post. So consider my version a simpler, abbreviated
| version than real life.
|
| > According to the blog post, they didn't proactively
| apply at companies they were interested in.
|
| I did apply at companies I was interested in. Why
| wouldn't I?
|
| > They didn't bother catching up on new technologies or
| other skills sought after in the current market, spending
| their time on building a computer game instead.
|
| So, I had just come off 5 years deeply immersed in the
| bleeding edge of deep learning and the beginnings of the
| wider application of this technology at various
| companies. Excuse me for wanting to try something
| different. Have you ever made a game before? Do you have
| any idea how technically involved it is? How does this
| not count as catching up on new technologies or other
| skills? I should have studied leet code interviews
| instead? I think I'd rather enjoy life and pursue things
| I find interesting.
|
| > Interviewers are being vilified for acting in their own
| best interests rather than the author's conveniences.
|
| No, they are being vilified for focusing on arbitrary
| things rather than focusing on things that are important
| to the actual job.
|
| > It's hard to sympathize with the author when the
| narrative is essentially "I put very little effort into
| getting hired and so had to work a little harder to get a
| job".
|
| I'm not looking for your sympathy and I don't know what
| part of my life story seems low effort to you.
| [deleted]
| andi999 wrote:
| Yes. When I read 'I was unemployeable' I thought it meant:
| companies wont hire me. But actually it meant: I cannot stand
| working for companies (anymore?).
| username_my1 wrote:
| yeah it's much much less about being an entrepreneur and much
| much more about not having professional software engineering
| experience / work etiquette.
|
| Most scale up / startups would love ex founders to help them.
| efsavage wrote:
| > Being a self taught software developer who has been programming
| since I was 12, I had no idea how to reverse a binary tree.
|
| It can be done. As a self-taught developer, and after years of
| startups and consulting, I got my first FAANG job at age 40. I
| hadn't done any real kind of interview in 15 years. I spent 90%
| of my time preparing for CS questions, and struggled at the first
| one, but ended up at FB, and Google a few years later.
|
| My mindset wasn't that they really cared that I could do these
| obscure programming exercises that I hadn't used once in 20+
| years of real-world programming, but rather that I could prove
| that I could learn and adapt.
| falcolas wrote:
| > I spent 90% of my time preparing for CS questions
|
| As always, to me this sounds like a real waste of time. I'd
| rather be working on a real project (working for people who
| value work on real projects), not practicing for an interview.
|
| But that's me.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I have a dilemma related to this. I know what I like to work
| on (domain / industry, etc.). There are companies hiring for
| this sort of thing. I don't have any professional experience
| there though. So do I spend my time working on cool projects
| to build up the necessary domain problems so I can even get
| my resume looked at or do I spend my time leetcoding so I can
| pass the interviews.
|
| I can do both, perhaps even concurrently, but clocks are
| ticking and I'm worried I only have so many years before I'm
| pigeonholed where I am now.
| decafninja wrote:
| I too, would like to be working on a real project. But most
| if not all companies that I'd be thrilled to work for are
| gatekeeped by these leetcode style interviews.
|
| I don't like that that's how it is, but that's what the game
| is, and most people are in no position to change the rules of
| the game.
|
| I also acknowledge that despite all its flaws, the SWE
| interview landscape is still better than say, that for
| lawyers, where if you didn't graduate from a top law school
| some doors are immediately and permanently shut for you.
|
| You can still get into a top tech company without an
| outstanding pedigree. The closest analogue to the lawyer
| situation is that if you have a top tech company on your
| resume, I'd say many doors are _opened_ (or opened much more
| easily) to you than someone without such name brand companies
| on their resume.
| falcolas wrote:
| > I'd be thrilled to work for
|
| There's the key. Their marketing has convinced millions of
| current and future devs that they are the best places to
| work for; that they are worth doing silly things for just
| to work there.
|
| The problem is that many of their "wins" are from decades
| ago (or more). Today, for Google at least, you can't even
| choose what you'll be working on. You'll be tossed wherever
| they think they need you. Even the best new hires won't
| make it to the largest salaries (dominated by veterans) and
| won't get to spend their 20% time (if they even get it) on
| the next gmail.
|
| The best advice I can offer, about two decades into my
| career, is to stop chasing the shiny marketing material.
| They'll burn you out and replace you without blinking.
|
| Almost every non-family owned business now hires developers
| (and data scientists), some for very good salaries in
| places where you're not paying thousands of dollars monthly
| to be someone's roommate.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > Today, for Google at least, you can't even choose what
| you'll be working on. You'll be tossed wherever they
| think they need you.
|
| I am not sure what you mean by this, but at least a
| couple of years ago you did have the opportunity to talk
| to several different teams and decide which one you're
| joining before signing the offer. Is that not the case
| anymore?
| bmn__ wrote:
| Has this ever been the case? I've read stories of new
| doctorate hires being assigned to maintain Orkut a decade
| ago.
| dilpreet_singh wrote:
| >The best advice I can offer, about two decades into my
| career, is to stop chasing the shiny marketing material.
| They'll burn you out and replace you without blinking.
|
| That hit hard! Thanks for putting that in words!
| decafninja wrote:
| I admit grass is greener on the other side. However every
| company (even Google) has it's downsides.
|
| But it's all relative. At least from this side of the
| fence, I see FAANG (and other top tech companies) have
| _less_ downsides and _more_ upsides, relatively speaking,
| compared to your typical non-tech companies.
|
| The point is emphasized by friends and ex-coworkers
| who've jumped ship to FAANG and other top tech companies
| after working at non-tech companies like where I am. All
| of them seem to love it.
| sanderjd wrote:
| It is totally a waste of time. But one with extremely good
| ROI.
| falcolas wrote:
| > But one with extremely good ROI.
|
| If, and only if, you're hired. Putting all of that time
| into studying for the interview is no guarantee of being
| hired.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Fair enough, but I think it is good ROI even risk
| adjusted.
| scsilver wrote:
| So knowing a professionally comprehensive set of tricks and
| approaches for commonly used algorithms has just straight up
| made me a better coder.I know when its wise to wield bfs,
| dfs, sliding window, et al, and have the capability to knock
| out and efficient function, when needed. Its rare, but its
| helpful to master some of these tools. There is a certain
| power in being able to reason a correct algorithmic approach,
| modularize it in your head, and then use it to tackle a real
| life problem, without having to resort to hashing it out in
| an ide.
|
| The hard part is distilling the most commonly used and most
| helpful of these tools. But after doing so, I can now
| approach side projects where I got stuck on not having an
| efficient way to store and access data.
|
| Knowing the start and limits of those algorithms gives me
| that confidence that what I build is close to as efficient as
| possible, and allows me then focus on pulling those efficient
| modules together.
|
| As a self taught dev, its given me confidence in my
| expertise, and that pays off in job opportunity, self
| respect, confidence to mentor others, and actually completing
| hard projects that I could not complete before.
| caconym_ wrote:
| If somebody told me to complete five pages of trivial
| arithmetic problems, I'd probably regard it as a waste of
| time. If they said I'd get a million dollars for doing it
| (and I believed them) then it would cease to be a waste of
| time and become, in fact, an extraordinarily efficient use of
| my time.
|
| The FAANMG+ life probably isn't for everyone, but it has
| definite upsides, and I imagine that's why most people jump
| through the interview hoops. It's not because they generally
| value toy programs over real projects.
| pc86 wrote:
| So needlessly passive aggressive. FAANG jobs, right or wrong,
| are _super_ competitive and extremely well compensated at
| senior levels. You just won 't make the same amount of money
| writing BI software or CRUD line-of-business apps for an
| insurance company, it's not possible. When you've got that
| many resumes to go through you need to add whatever filtering
| mechanisms you can. Nobody does any BST stuff at work. But
| it's a filter. Reasonable people can disagree about how
| effective of one but it's at least no worse than just
| arbitrarily throwing half the resumes out, because the people
| who know it have _some_ CS background, or they want the job
| bad enough they were willing to spend a couple hours to learn
| it. It 's not like it's a high bar to meet.
| heelix wrote:
| >just arbitrarily throwing half the resumes out
|
| how else to you filter out the unlucky candidates :)
| joelbluminator wrote:
| Every startup that raised money can choose from dozens of
| candidates. I'm not really buying the "Software developer
| shortage" theory. If there was a real shortage we all
| wouldn't be jumping hoops learning bachelor degree material
| or doing home assignments for some startup interview when
| we have 15 years experience. But this isn't what shortage
| looks like, to me this feels saturated.
| danjac wrote:
| FAANG jobs are one thing: they are so big they have to have
| filters, even if those filters lose good people.
|
| Small companies cargo-culting FAANG interview processes on
| the other hand...
| wernercd wrote:
| Soft skills aren't a waste of time... and being good at
| interviews is a soft skill that lead to job offers - so far
| from useless if you can pull a six figure job.
|
| This seems like a "why go to college" type of response where
| there is some truth to the fact that so much of college is a
| waste (I've never used statistics or economics in jobs)...
| yet it's more than just college or CS questions.
| falcolas wrote:
| Spending time working on "how to reverse a binary tree" and
| "how to find the shortest path in a multi-dimensional
| array" are not soft skills. It's learning how to handle
| highly specific theoretical CS questions.
| creata wrote:
| "Theoretical computer science" has a fairly well-accepted
| meaning, and these basic puzzles don't fall under that.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theoretical_computer_scie
| nce
| wernercd wrote:
| and those skills lead to job offers. As proven by the
| thousands of CS devs that "jump through the useless
| hoops" and end up with jobs.
|
| I agree that a lot of story around interviewing is broken
| and that many of the questions don't relate to day to day
| jobs... like creating a binary tree or "how do you move a
| mountain" (IE: https://www.amazon.com/How-Would-Move-
| Mount-Fuji/dp/03167784...) - but they do show that you
| know CS basics, know how to learn them or have basic
| problem solving skills.
|
| As much as people bemoan CS interviews... currently? They
| are a necessary evil to certain segments of the job
| market. Can you get jobs without them? Sure... just like
| you can get jobs without degrees - but your resume will
| get round-filed for a large number of jobs without a
| degree and you'll not make it past initial filters
| without knowing "basic" CS trivia like binary trees.
|
| Whether you're okay with a limited job pool or not is on
| you... I don't have a 4 year... but I have a 2 year with
| many years of experience and I'm okay with some of the
| limits until I eventually get a BA. I still make six
| figures and know I can find a new job if it comes to it -
| as I've done repeatedly with limits. I've never balanced
| a binary tree for a job interview but I have "failed"
| online tests because I wasn't "fast enough" on code
| tests. I'm still employable and successful.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > but they do show that you know CS basics
|
| Ok. So not soft skills then.
|
| Instead, it is very specific skills. It is not soft
| skills.
| wernercd wrote:
| Slight review shows I may be off on my terminology...
| Interviewing isn't a soft skill per-se but it is still an
| important one for those who wish to interview as it
| stands currently.
|
| https://www.wikijob.co.uk/content/interview-
| advice/competenc...
|
| > Soft skills are the more intangible and non-technical
| abilities that are sought from candidates. For example:
|
| * Communication * Teamwork * Problem-solving * Leadership
| * Responsibility
|
| So "interviewing" isn't a soft skill as I've always
| though it to be but I didn't call CS basics a soft skill
| - I called interviewing one. I was thinking more "a skill
| not work related per-se" - ie interviewing - while the
| expected definition is more... personality and
| interpersonal skills.
|
| I'd consider interviewing "personality and interpersonal"
| but I can adjust my terminology.
|
| Interviewing is an important skill for most people and
| interviewing in the programming realm, unfortunately,
| relies on CS basics. Generally you don't get one without
| the other.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Unpopular opinion, but the skills learned in these exercises
| really can translate to improvements in real world projects.
| We can get very far with most modern programming projects
| through brute force alone or by using standard library
| containers and algorithms, but past a certain scale it really
| does pay off to have an intuitive understanding of how data
| structures and algorithms work from first-hand implementation
| experience.
|
| Of course, if a company is just building the stereotypical
| basic CRUD app to serve a maximum of 10K users total and
| maybe 10 per minute at peak, this probably doesn't matter
| much.
|
| However, companies that pay top dollar expect candidates with
| top knowledge, and that's fair IMO.
| the_local_host wrote:
| I'll second this opinion. I drilled on Leetcode medium
| problems to address some deficiencies in a recent job
| search (whilst in my late 40s age-wise). It made a huge
| difference in the interview outcomes, and I've found that
| I'm actually using this stuff designing solutions in my new
| job.
|
| Having a bunch of basic, generally useful algorithms in
| recent memory does save a lot of time on the "general
| solution" side when you're working in a new milieu. (That
| saved time then gets consumed trying to find, configure,
| and tune anything in an unfamiliar cloud environment, but
| that's another kettle of fish).
| falcolas wrote:
| > pay top dollar expect candidates with top knowledge
|
| Knowing how to solve the ten or twenty most common CS
| interview questions is not an indicator of possessing "top
| knowledge". It's an indicator that someone studied the
| cheat sheet to big tech interviews, and that's all.
| golergka wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious, what are you all guys doing? Why are you
| not using CS in your jobs?
|
| I've never worked in a large company, never had a salary that
| is even close to US engineer level, and yet I regularly write
| code that traverses complex graph structures (often with
| recursive CTEs in SQL), just because that's how a lot of real-
| life data is structured. I spent this weekend debugging this
| traversal, in fact. And that's only the 'trees and graphs'
| example from the top of my head, as I've found myself
| constantly using all the different CS stuff throughout my
| career.
|
| This is not an attempt to attack anyone or an attempt to appear
| superior. If anything, I'm constantly reminded by how stupid
| and uneducated I am when I'm reading HN comments. I'm just
| trying to understand: are you guys really spending your whole
| days changing button colours?
| deanak wrote:
| This is why software is terrible. Would you test Frank Gehry on
| the basics of architecture? Or have Frida Kahlo count her
| brushstrokes or plan her day hour by hour?
|
| I test all developers by paying them to make the equivalent of
| a bird box. If it comes back relatively well designed, cool,
| I've got a developer. If they come back with three designs for
| different environments and species, I know I have an engineer.
|
| As it stands, we have kids who have zero real world experience
| at the helm of corporations and the results are easy to see.
| They rarely produce anything of value for the general
| population. So rare we have to call them unicorns.
| slumpt_ wrote:
| Yep. Software and products at these companies are often a
| horrific mess. Leaving one and taking a big pay cut just so I
| can go work with a small team of people who give a shit about
| software and products again.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Specifically, I wouldn't hire Frank Gehry because his
| buildings leak.
|
| The subfield of software development where artistry outweighs
| cleverness and productivity is game design -- and not all
| game studios exist to do things that way, just particular
| boutiques centered around one storyteller's vision.
| deanak wrote:
| Why would you think Frank Gehry built his designs?
| yongjik wrote:
| > Would you test Frank Gehry on the basics of architecture?
| Or have Frida Kahlo count her brushstrokes or plan her day
| hour by hour?
|
| Not sure if it's relevant? Google has hired Guido van Rossum
| and James Gosling. I'd imagine Google didn't ask them to
| "reverse a binary tree", whatever that means.
|
| I.e., if you are Frank Gehry or Frida Kahlo, you don't need
| to go through hoops. (If you're reading this, you are
| probably not Frida Kahlo.)
| deanak wrote:
| > If you're reading this, you are probably not Frida Kahlo.
|
| If someone is aspiring to be her, you just helped crush
| that dream a little bit more. And for what?
| Centigonal wrote:
| "you are probably not Frida Kahlo" is not the same as
| "you will never be Frida Kahlo."
|
| It's just a fact that most people are not one of the very
| best in their field: 50% of people can't be in the top
| 1%. That's not to say people shouldn't try - after all,
| many of the "very best" tried very hard to get where they
| are.
| deanak wrote:
| Why are you assuming that everyone has the same metric
| for being the "top"? There are millions of artists out
| there, creating from the world around them something
| unique to their time and place. Your base assumption
| appears to be that a bell curve can be applied to human
| creativity. Ask yourself who told you this and why.
| colllectorof wrote:
| _> My mindset wasn't that they really cared that I could do
| these obscure programming exercises that I hadn't used once in
| 20+ years of real-world programming, but rather that I could
| prove that I could learn and adapt._
|
| This is how bad interviewers always justify asking nonsensical
| questions.
|
| It's like that old joke:
|
| _An interviewer picks up a stack of 50 resumes, takes a glance
| at them and drops the bottom half into a wastebasket. A
| coworker asks:
|
| 'Why did you discard those candidates?'
|
| The interviewer replies:
|
| 'Because I hate losers.'_
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| The punchline I know to that is "Because we don't want to
| employ unlucky people."!
| giantg2 wrote:
| So that's where my resumes end up...
| varispeed wrote:
| Even if you are self-taught, you should know what is a binary
| tree and how idea of reversing it applies. From there you
| should be able to easily come up with a makeshift algorithm or
| ask if you can google a solution (as this is what you would be
| doing at the job anyway), find best answer and then apply it to
| the problem. I think most important part in this job is being
| able to find a good solution quickly if you cannot code it
| straight from your head. Being offended by any question and the
| attitude "I did X therefore I cannot Y" is what disqualifies
| you. There is nothing worse than an employee who thinks they
| know everything or that they don't need to know something and
| feel too superior to ask how or to find an answer from someone
| else. I would suggest at least trying a therapy to get to the
| bottom of why you behave in such a way. Sometimes a simple
| change in thinking can lead to a dramatic transformation.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yeah it sucks to have to study stuff that's mostly irrelevant
| to your job in order to get that job - it truly does, I despise
| the system! - but it is worthwhile to shift your perspective to
| considering the ROI of doing that study. The dirty secret is
| that CS-y interview questions are _easy_ compared to the job.
| It 's just much much harder to debug some novel bug that crops
| up in the cracks between the myriad components that uniquely
| make up the system you work on, or to figure out what your
| users want and how to build that, or to respond to having the
| good problem of scaling more quickly than expected, or tons of
| other things successful professionals in the field regularly do
| as part of their day to day work. It's deeply lame that
| experience with these much more difficult things is not
| expressed through the typical CS-y interview process, but if
| you can do those things, you can definitely learn to do the
| CS-y stuff. Reversing a binary tree is _easy_ ; look it up.
| Yes, you have to learn how to traverse a tree, and no, that's
| not likely to be very useful knowledge in your work, but it's
| not very hard to learn. You can spend 100 hours studying and
| nail pretty much all the CS-y questions, and that could
| literally have a return of a million dollars over five years; I
| don't know of many opportunities that offer such a good
| possibility of returning 100k per hour. It sucks, I hated
| studying elementary stuff after I was already a successful
| professional, and I was a nervous wreck during the interviews,
| but it is very hard to argue with it from a purely ROI
| standpoint.
| nunez wrote:
| Honestly I'm okay with a super-tough theoretical interview
| when a very high and very comfortable compensation and
| benefits package is at stake. Every other job I can think of
| that pays nearly as much as tech requires years of
| education/apprenticeship, brutal exams, and less flexibility
| around things like location, work/life balance, and dress
| code.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Right. I despise the interview process we've landed on in
| the industry, but have slowly and painfully come to terms
| with it as a decent bad way of doing it to balance between
| having some competency bar and the usual heavy gatekeeping
| solution.
| notacoward wrote:
| > You can spend 100 hours studying
|
| Is that an equal burden for every candidate, in every life
| circumstance? Or does it privilege certain groups over
| others? The ROI isn't the point. Requiring preparation
| _unrelated to the job_ is highly suspect, regardless of the
| return.
| sanderjd wrote:
| It privileges younger less attached people with more free
| time over more experienced people who are more likely to
| have families. Note that I was the latter kind of person
| when I did this, and trust me, a credentialing solution
| like the one in essentially every other professional field
| would have been way better for me, but there are also
| advantages to having a lower barrier to entry than those
| fields.
| decafninja wrote:
| A lot of FAANG engineers seem to report that the interview
| was the hardest thing that they've done, harder than anything
| they do as part of their actual job.
|
| It's probably not that the leetcode problems are ultra hard
| to solve (though they can be). It's also the combination of
| the artificial time constraint and the high pressure
| interview setting - which is a very different kind of
| pressure than you typically experience on the job.
| goostavos wrote:
| FAANG guy here, interviews are hard in that they have
| absolutely nothing to do with your day-to-day job. If I
| were to go through the interviews again right now I'd make
| a massive fool of myself. I'd say it's basically common
| knowledge that prior to making any hops, you've got to take
| at least a month or two to grind leetcode problems so that
| you're back in that head space where you can solve
| pointless problems with high efficiency.
|
| Interviews are also hard (as I frequently comment around
| here) because, once you've seen how the sausage gets made,
| you realize it's basically still a crap shoot which comes
| down to the loop you get. If you get an unlucky roll and
| end up with the personality type which views interviews as
| a chance to show how much more clever they are than
| everyone, then you've already failed. Their ego is tied to
| their "high bar" and impossible question set, and you're
| just fodder for them to show off that "high personal bar"
| during the de-brief.
| xenocratus wrote:
| When I'll be preparing for the next interview rounds in
| my career, I'll make note of some problems that are both
| short/easy to explain, and have really interesting
| optimisations that are almost impossible to come up with
| on the spot (unless you've done a lot of similar stuff or
| that exact problem before). Then, when the interview is
| (nearly) over and it's my time to ask the interviewers
| something, I'll drop one of those in their lap to see how
| they react, and if they can come up with something that's
| not laughably stupid/inefficient. My point being that, if
| they're not capable of solving problems like that under
| intense time pressure, they're not up to the task of
| interviewing someone else on them. If they do give a good
| response, kudos to them, I'll be impressed.
|
| Though I think my expectation is that they'll get annoyed
| and stop the "interview".
| khalilravanna wrote:
| Good call on the dice roll. Spent months prepping for the
| FB interview and got an engineer who seemed to be having
| a bad day or was just bored. I knew both problems but
| they derailed me on whether you can uniquely identify
| objects in JS with no additional id assigned. I told them
| you can't as there's no pointers or memory addresses in
| JS. They didn't believe me and literally spent multiple
| minutes googling things to prove me wrong. And then
| rejected me after I still finished the second problem in
| the 7 minutes remaining. Nevermind they were looking at
| their phone multiple times during the interview lol
|
| Demoralizing as all hell. Thankfully I had multiple mocks
| with FB engineers who told me I did great so I know it
| really was just bad luck that the real phone screen was a
| dud.
| laichzeit0 wrote:
| Sometimes interviews are just part of "following the
| process" when someone who knows someone is going to get
| the job anyway, but still they have to follow the process
| so everything looks normal. These things are not so cut
| and dry and objective as you would like to believe. I
| wouldn't sweat it.
| sanderjd wrote:
| People who interview like that should be fired. The
| damage to the company in missing a good hire and
| blighting the company's reputation is cause.
| brightball wrote:
| As a younger developer I was part of a 3 person team that
| was interviewing people at a telecom. I mostly kept quiet
| and observed since it was the first time I'd done this
| but we had one member of the team who was bent on trying
| to show how smart he was.
|
| My absolute favorite interview of the group, a guy who
| ended up getting hired elsewhere, was the most calm and
| professional developer I'd ever been around. Sitting in
| the room, I felt like he was interviewing us rather than
| the other way around. It was just in the way that he
| carried himself, answered questions.
|
| And then the guy on our team started asking questions.
| The gentleman we were interviewing, rather than answer,
| kept calmly asking more questions of him instead.
|
| - Can you describe the situation where this would be
| used?
|
| No
|
| - Have you ever run into an issue like this before that
| could be an example?
|
| No
|
| - How do I know that by solving this problem we would be
| addressing the business or customer problem?
|
| We don't
|
| - Then shouldn't I be solving questions related to the
| work?
|
| ...
|
| I loved that guy. Wish we could have hired him because I
| really wanted to work with him.
| omoikane wrote:
| I try to use problems that I encountered and solved
| during my daily work in my interviews, and generally the
| experience is better for both me and the candidate when
| the problem is more relevant.
|
| Many interviewers don't do this because it's often
| difficult to distill the most interesting problems down
| to something that would fit within the time allotted for
| the interview, and also there are candidates who prefer
| abstract textbook-style problems.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Amazon calls that the STAR method, Situation, Task,
| Action, Result. Combined with real world experience /
| examples can be powerful during interviews. Especially
| during interviews with people not knowing this method.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yeah all my most interesting problems are solved by
| carefully reading logs and the code that wrote them,
| stepping through code in a debugger, working on small
| repros, and eventually hitting some eureka, often after a
| couple days of dedicated effort. This would be a poor
| interview technique, though it would have great signal.
| derivagral wrote:
| A web startup I joined years ago hired this way. The
| "main" technical interview was pairing with one of the
| devs to fix a toy broken service. In my case, this went
| fullstack from client bugs to backend bugs to sql/orm
| bugs as well as "make a page to show a list of things".
| They weren't so formal as to have a coded up modular
| interview system or anything, but I always enjoyed that
| one the most because it was closest to the job.
| [deleted]
| icedchai wrote:
| So he was a no hire? "Poor cultural fit", I'm guessing?
|
| I stopped an interview once. I told the guy I didn't
| think I'd be a good fit for the organization, and maybe
| we should save ourselves some time.
| brightball wrote:
| Oh no, he was our top choice by the end of it but already
| had something else by the time we got the offer out.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| > I stopped an interview once. I told the guy I didn't
| think I'd be a good fit for the organization, and maybe
| we should save ourselves some time.
|
| I've done this a few times, each time from a startup that
| reached out to me asking me if I'd come in to talk to
| them, and then would throw me into their coding
| challenges immediately. Like whoa hold on there, I don't
| even know what you do, why are you asking me to do a
| coding challenge before we've even figured out if there
| is a fit for me technically and I figure out what it is
| you're trying to solve.
| danjac wrote:
| I once passed some take-home test from a small startup.
| They then requested a further take-home which a) would be
| monitored (it was a remote position) and b) would require
| some six to eight hours and c) would have to be done over
| the weekend. There had been no contact with anyone at
| that point other than passing the initial test, and no
| discussion of salary, benefits, etc.
|
| I've rarely used unprofessional language in job
| application emails, but on that occasion I pretty much
| told them to take their no-name little company and shove
| it.
| svaha1728 wrote:
| Yup... it's like asking your doctor to draw the Krebs
| cycle from memory.
| nwienert wrote:
| Ha! My hobby is pharmacology and I'm always having to
| refresh myself on various steps of Krebs. We need a Ninja
| Nerd[0] for CS I guess, I've found it incredible.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/rr7IRYLqleg
| sanderjd wrote:
| Right, but you can't become a doctor without spending
| many thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of
| dollars gaining credentials. But you can become a highly
| compensated software engineer by spending a miserable day
| answering pointless questions on a whiteboard. I would
| personally prefer the credentialing approach because at
| this point it would be easy for me to get the
| credentials. But the low barrier to entry also has
| advantages.
| mynameisash wrote:
| My beef with the leetcode interviews is that, IMO,
| they're in no way reflective of what you're actually
| going to do, and yet the interviewer often acts like it's
| a perfect barometer. One misstep or quibble and you're
| out.
|
| I remember when a former colleague wanted my input on his
| interview question which was basically, "Write the
| algorithm for product recommendations." (eg, like
| Netflix's movie recommender.) Despite repeated warnings,
| he went ahead with that question only to come back and
| admit, "Yeah, that wasn't at all good." Imagine what the
| poor guy or gal on the other side of the table had to go
| through.
|
| I don't know what the right answer is to interviewing,
| but my take is that I would prefer to work with someone
| who I can get along with, have real human conversations,
| and become good collaborators -- even if they're not ace
| coders. That measurement seems glaringly missing from too
| many interviews.
| enjo wrote:
| I've consulted with quite a few companies on their
| interview process. Almost all of them had adopted
| Leetcode style interviews. My first question to the team
| always is: what exactly are you evaluating when you
| interview someone?
|
| And I rarely get an answer that makes sense. Instead I
| get mostly rationalizations for Leetcode. The thing is I
| recognize those rationalizations because I was certainly
| guilty of it in the past ("We're evaluating intellectual
| curiosity" is one I cringe at now).
|
| The real problem from my perspective is that most teams
| have never taken the time to really think about and
| identify the underlying principles about how they want to
| work. We go through a process of defining those
| principles and all of a sudden the interview gets a lot
| clearer. Do you value the highest quality code? Do you
| value getting things into the world quickly and then
| iterate towards the final solution? Is security always at
| the front of your mind?
|
| Getting really specific about what exactly being
| "excellent" means to a team is really critical.
|
| Because then you can design an interview process that
| actually selects for those things. I've never had a team
| define "the ability to solve leetcode problems under
| pressure quickly" as an endpoint they actually care
| about. Some teams continue to use leetcode, but only as a
| small part of the process with problems that ARE actually
| directed at what they care about. Having been through a
| bunch of interviews in my 25 year career I instantly know
| when a team has actually done the work to design a good
| interview process (which has been far too rare in my
| experience).
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| It's hard to admit that they don't actually know how to
| evaluate people well and instead implement an absurd
| level of inefficient gatekeeping. The same reason some
| jobs only hire people with degrees even if it's not
| necessary or the degree is irrelevant.
| sanderjd wrote:
| My company has an incredibly detailed rubric for what is
| meant to be evaluated. It still sucks.
| jrnichols wrote:
| Wasn't there also an issue with companies trying to
| interview people and asking them questions like that, not
| as a way to hire anyone but as a free way to get smart
| people to solve some of their software problems?
|
| or trying to glean proprietary information out of others?
| chrononaut wrote:
| > Wasn't there also an issue with companies trying to
| interview people and asking them questions like that, not
| as a way to hire anyone but as a free way to get smart
| people to solve some of their software problems?
|
| It's a struggle between fitting the interview to real-
| world situations vs making it seem like the candidate is
| doing work for the company.
|
| I feel like a good situation might be actual problems
| previously encountered with the technology being assessed
| during the interview that would've required you to have
| collaborated with someone who is also experienced in that
| technology to help you solve them.
|
| Maybe the best way to do this is when the situation is
| proposed to the candidate, make it clear that the answer
| is already known and put it in an envelope (physical or
| digital), which will be referred to when it's solved or
| the candidate hits a dead-end.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Leetcode interviews don't test if you're a good software
| developer, they test whether you're capable of becoming a
| good developer. The skills required to succeed at
| leetcode basically come down to 1. willing to spend 100
| hours studying/practicing 2. Baseline critical thinking
| skills. Throw in some behavioral to make sure they can
| communicate and those are basically the skills needed to
| become a decent developer.
| jleahy wrote:
| That actually sounds like quite an interesting and fun
| interview question, why did it go so badly?
| irrational wrote:
| I don't think anyone cares if you can actually solve the
| problem. They are looking to see how you perform under
| pressure (not because the job is necessarily stressful,
| but because we can learn a lot about a person's true
| personality when they are under pressure), how good you
| are at problem solving, whether you actually know
| anything about coding or are just BSing, etc.
| enjo wrote:
| "but because we can learn a lot about a person's true
| personality when they are under pressure"
|
| Do you have a source for this? I can't help but think
| about the person in this clip:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlCEmPF4-V0. You think
| you can learn much about her from that interaction?
| sanderjd wrote:
| This is such a perfect distillation of the problem.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Different people will experience different levels of
| pressure. Interview pressure is not the same as deadline
| or project pressure
| TrevorJ wrote:
| Just being IN the interview to begin with is likely to be
| higher pressure than any sane or sustainable working
| environment would be.
|
| I've interviewed people who didn't know the answer to
| some of these tech questions, and honestly, I was more
| impressed by them calming saying "I'm not sure on this
| one, I would probably need to go look it up".
| ericbarrett wrote:
| This is the ideal, and the original point of such
| questions (I was at a FAANG and interviewing candidates
| when they started becoming popular), but the inevitable
| result is that the test becomes interpreted more
| literally as it becomes more common.
| decafninja wrote:
| While what you say is the ideal situation, I think being
| able to get the optimal solution and giving at least a
| halfway decent explanation about why it works is the #1
| most important thing (along with just plain old not being
| a jerk).
|
| I acknowledge there are some situations where you might
| pass the interview even without arriving at the optimal
| solution, but those are probably the exceptions.
| defen wrote:
| > interviews are hard in that they have absolutely
| nothing to do with your day-to-day job
|
| I often wonder why this is legal, especially given the
| legal concept of disparate impact. It's basically just a
| disguised test of some combo of IQ + free time +
| willingness to grind dubiously useful information
| hannofcart wrote:
| TBH, pointless questions in interviews is not exclusive
| to programmer interviews.
|
| Pretty much any white collar job interview is an
| intellectual joust at best, and a mild hazing ritual at
| worst.
|
| We actually have it good: you at least know what the
| broad contours of what we'll be subjected to.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I often wonder why this is legal, especially given the
| legal concept of disparate impact
|
| "Not yet challenged" and "legal" aren't exactly the same
| thing. Straight up IQ tests are probably _more_
| defensoble than leetcode for lots of positions for which
| leetcode interviews are used. But people have heard the
| popular misrepresentation of Duke Energy ("it's illegal
| to use IQ tests") more than they've heard the actual
| disparate impact rule, and that seems to be true on both
| sides of thr interview table.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| I think it's only a matter of time until the extreme
| disparity between the candidates that pass this filter
| (mostly white and asian men below age 35) vs the
| applicant pool is used in a legal challenge about whether
| these tests are really looking for bona fide occupational
| requirements.
|
| Because any software person will tell you these tests are
| extremely detached from the requirements of the job.
|
| It seems like it would be an open and shut case if not
| for the army of lawyers employed by the likes of Google.
| mgarfias wrote:
| Yup. I failed the last one I had (I'm an SRE/ops guy). I
| realized the proper solution the next morning after
| sleeping on it.
|
| I just couldn't pull it out of my butt in the 30 mins I
| had. Sux. I'll get there one of these days.
| wdb wrote:
| Google projects on Github are a good reflection of it. The
| code quality of these projects sometimes. You wouldn't be
| able to get away with that in smaller companies.
| cloverich wrote:
| Its also a different kind of problem. Its not really
| problem solving, though it masquerades as such. Its
| memorization. Plain and simple, you know the techniques or
| you don't. Studying at length for those kinds of problems
| is extremely unfulfilling, especially for curious minds who
| have long realized there are far more actually interesting
| and useful problems to solve out there than there is time
| left to live. And yet, here we all are jumping through
| hoops because nobody has figured out how to test for real
| job skills.
| sanderjd wrote:
| It isn't pure problem solving but it also isn't
| memorization "plain and simple". It's a mix. It's
| unlikely you'll see exactly the same question as one you
| studied. The problem solving portion is figuring out how
| to apply one of the techniques you've learned to a novel
| problem.
| [deleted]
| cloverich wrote:
| I say "plain and simple" because IME people tend to
| overestimate the novelty of problems and underestimate
| the impact of "memorized" problems for solving new ones.
| 3 months of studying for an interview, while extremely
| annoying, is generally speaking a pretty small amount of
| time needed to cover a field as vast and complex as DS&A.
| And yet it is more than sufficient for most because
| there's extremely little novelty in the problems being
| asked. They want you to solve classic algorithms, but
| either dont' want to tell you so or (more commonly, IME)
| don't realize they are asking classic algorithm problems
| and only think they are asking some novel problem. Even
| "simple" techniques will be impossible for a person to
| solve in an interview setting, and yet if they've seen it
| before the interviewer will think they are a brilliant
| programmer. Its a memorization game even though it
| doesn't directly look like one. IMHO.
| withinboredom wrote:
| There are only so many algorithms and so many patterns.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yes but there is an infinite number of ways to ask the
| questions.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Recognizing the pattern is the problem solving part of
| the problem.
| cloverich wrote:
| I think the argument is that recognizing the algorithm
| part through the (usually thin) facade is very easy, once
| you know the (common) DS&A questions well. I.e. there is
| a lot of challenge in learning the algorithms, and little
| to no challenge in recognizing it through the problem.
| Examples where a person knows the underlying DS&A very
| well but is unable to recognize the nature of the problem
| would be a great counter argument.
| dominotw wrote:
| > It's unlikely you'll see exactly the same question as
| one you studied.
|
| FB _only_ asks leetcode questions tagged with
| 'Facebook'. 100%. I know ppl who memorized these
| questions and got in.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Well that's even stupider than what most companies do,
| which is already stupid.
| ijidak wrote:
| That's software in general.
|
| The core money-making algorithms don't take many human
| bodies to develop. At Google, 500-600 researchers and core
| algo developers likely do most of the heavy lifting.
|
| Otherwise, 90%+ of their developers are likely solving
| routine problems.
|
| Although, most of them likely convince themselves that only
| the "chosen ones" among mankind can do what they do.
|
| The reality is that most of software, even at the FAANGs,
| does not require the type of interview questions these
| teams enjoy asking.
| sanderjd wrote:
| FWIW, I don't think most people at big companies are at
| all convinced that they are the "chosen ones". I think
| they are glad to have good jobs that have a higher than
| average potential to contribute to projects that are
| useful to people.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not just FAANG jobs. In almost every job I've ever had, the
| interview was by far the hardest part. There's such an
| enormous stream of candidates, and no baseline "bar exam"
| to qualify people, so companies have to make the interview
| bar extremely high in order to be able to manage the
| candidate flow and sufficiently minimize false positives.
|
| I'd guess 99% of engineers never have to do CS trivia as
| part of their day-to-day job.
| toyg wrote:
| _> There 's such an enormous stream of candidates, and no
| baseline "bar exam" to qualify people_
|
| That could be trivially fixed tomorrow, either by
| universities or (better) by an accredited certification
| body.
|
| I mean, I'm sure there weren't bar exams for lawyers and
| professionals either, at some point in history. What
| prevents us from creating one for sw developers? As long
| as it didn't require additional attainments just to sit
| for it (i.e. you should not need a university degree), it
| would make the whole process more efficient for literally
| thousands of companies.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| There's a significant number of employed, productive
| engineers that are apprehensive about passing such a
| test. They will fight tooth-and-nail to prevent any
| gatekeeping to the field. Personally, I would be happy to
| have my salary double overnight.
| decafninja wrote:
| I've been on interviews at some companies that have no
| brand name recognition/prestige, and probably do not have
| legions of candidates trying to get in. But they've
| thrown me harder leetcode questions than FAANG.
| sanderjd wrote:
| It's a bit perverse but the problem is that hiring people
| who can't do the job well is much worse for a company
| like that than it is for a big company with lots of slack
| in the system. Not only do they have to pay a person that
| isn't contributing enough, but the more senior folks on
| the team have to spend more time mentoring, so it's a
| double drain. This drives the process toward a higher bar
| after getting burned a few times.
| decafninja wrote:
| I can understand that - but if I (or my company) were in
| that situation, I would not even use leetcode interviews.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I have been in that situation and I still have no idea
| what I'd do.
| wdb wrote:
| I like to ask simple questions, and then dig further into
| once they answered it correctly. You would be surprised
| how many ex-employees from FAANG like companies fail it.
| sempron64 wrote:
| Anecdotal counterpoint: Passing FAANG-style technical
| interviews are the easiest thing I've done.
|
| Learning new frameworks and coding standards, surviving
| code review, dealing with difficult team members, dealing
| with ever-moving business goals, and just about every other
| aspect of work, including the coding, has been harder.
|
| I admit that I have never had to invert a link list as part
| of my work (Graph traversals I definitely had to do,
| actually). But I have had to submit to arbitrary technical
| demands and to learn and use technical materials I did not
| enjoy or agree with architecturally in order to
| successfully complete projects. So in that, studying and
| practicing to pass the technical screen is similar to the
| job. Employers want someone who is able to (sometimes!)
| bite their tongue and just do the work assigned.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Oh I agree, but yes, I think it's the giant amount of
| pressure and negligible room for error that makes it so
| hard, rather than the difficulty of the material.
| msoad wrote:
| FAANG has a system for firing people who can't cope with
| the complexity of the job. There is a huge survivors bios.
| To be a FAANG engineer you need to be able to pass the
| interview and have the skills (mostly people skills) to
| navigate a large system.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Surely companies account for this in their interview
| teams? Or are they just haplessly floating on the
| narrowly applied intelligence of their workers? (Or
| something else, not suggesting a divalency).
| gregors wrote:
| I don't know if it's true but during a video talk there
| was a story that a team of googlers were secretly given
| their own feedback ratings and they didn't hire
| themselves.
|
| https://youtu.be/r8RxkpUvxK0?t=534
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| Amazon introduced the notion of a "bar raiser" who
| expects a candidate to be stronger than 50% of the staff.
| It's sort of appealing, but if your attrition is unbiased
| (you lose equal numbers of strong and weak staff) the
| right edge of the bell curve seems too small to keep up
| with it.
| okprod wrote:
| I like Automattic's process where you work/contract on the
| job first before a hiring/acceptance decision.
| tanjtanjtanj wrote:
| So they aren't hiring people ho currently have a job? Every
| job I've had since starting my career explicitly would not
| allow this.
| dfsegoat wrote:
| If I may ask, what resource(s) did you study from / use to help
| prepare you?
| sanderjd wrote:
| The Algorithm Design Manual (just the first few chapters of
| refresher on data structures and stuff) and Cracking the
| Coding Interview.
| the_jeremy wrote:
| My girlfriend knows multiple SWEs at Google who recommended
| reading the Algorithm Design Manual as a top tier study
| guide for Google's interview questions, to add another
| point of anecdata.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yep. Again, this advice can be overwhelming: it's not the
| entire book that is the most useful part, it's the
| refresher material at the beginning that does a great job
| of covering the kind of stuff that shows up constantly in
| interview questions.
| wdb wrote:
| I still enjoy reading The Tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and
| Data Structures. It's an old book but it's so readable.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > It can be done.
|
| Definitely. I'll add that it doesn't take as much time and
| effort as commonly portrayed online, especially if you have
| many years of development experience already.
|
| Keep in mind that many of the online FAANG cram-style study
| guides and anecdotes about grinding LeetCode are largely
| targeted at college grads who don't have many years of
| experience, and who also likely have a surplus of free time.
|
| For developers with years of actual programming experience,
| it's not as difficult to study interview problems as it sounds.
| Even more so if you spread your practice over a long period of
| time. Doing one problem per weekday over the course of a year
| will get you quite far in LeetCode without much time
| investment.
|
| I grab a random LeetCode problem on my lunch break if I'm
| eating alone (aka every day during COVID). I pick a different
| language that I'm familiar with to rotate my skills. I'm not
| even interviewing, but it's actually kind of fun to do the
| harder problems and play with all of the little optimizations.
| And I get to keep my skills fresh in programming languages I'm
| not currently using in any projects.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Doing one problem per weekday over the course of a year
| will get you quite far in LeetCode without much time
| investment.
|
| The problem with this approach is that you won't be able to
| remember the details of problems older than X months ago, at
| least not to the level that will reliably help when in a
| stressful whiteboarding interview.
|
| There might be entertainment/knowledge benefits, but it
| doesn't replace cramming for a known upcoming interview-
| event.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Having done it myself, I don't find that I lose the
| knowledge or experience as you described.
|
| I approach it more as learning different techniques to
| solve different problems, rather than learning how to
| identify the trick and recall the solution to specific
| cues.
|
| Trying to memorize solutions isn't really effective for
| interview problems, in my experience, unless you really can
| dedicate time to cramming as many solutions as possible
| right before an interview and hoping that they ask you one
| you've seen before.
| random_moonwalk wrote:
| I agree - I feel like I'm collecting 'aha!' moments and
| they tend to stick if you've been banging your head
| against a wall a bit.
| dvirsky wrote:
| You don't need to remember the details of a specific
| problem. Almost all the problems I've encountered
| interviewing for FAANGs were not found on such sites. You
| do need to remember classes of problems - graph traversal,
| tree traversal, dynamic programming, etc etc. But you
| should expect problems you've never seen before.
| ska wrote:
| I think you are thinking about this the wrong way around.
| You don't need to "cram" for something if you understand it
| well. It's a matter of techniques, not answers.
|
| I did one of these interviews on short enough notice no
| review was possible. The process was a little jarring but
| on these type questions I could just talk through the
| problem space and come up with something reasonable and
| explain it; although I doubt I answered anything precisely
| as expected in the half dozen interviews I had. Apparently
| it went well.
|
| To be fair, I wasn't a fresh college grad, and I had been
| recently working as a full time researcher. But they sent
| me through the SE interview process and none of the
| specific questions were close to anything I had thought
| about in years.
| mettamage wrote:
| For people stating the knowledge is useless, here is how it has
| been useful for me.
|
| Graphs: HTML is a tree, it's easier to think about performance.
| Also, I once made a simple DSL like HTML and had to implement
| quite a few graphs traversal algo's.
|
| Heap overflows: I did one on htb. Being able to algorithmically
| think about pointers being overwritten and memory layout feels
| a lot like interviewing.
|
| Trading: one algo trader I made needed speed. I had to go much
| further than most things I see on Leetcode.
|
| In general: algorithms is the ability to think step by step in
| your mind without a debugger. That skill is quite important
| when the going gets tough.
|
| Note: I am not for this interview style. AllI am saying is, it
| is not without merit. Or would you rather do a 40h take home
| assignment? (Same thing, not without merit but 40h?)
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > I spent 90% of my time preparing for CS questions,
|
| For me this is the main problem with companies that hire like
| FANG do. It is fully expected you have to study. Like I have to
| study to basically do the job I am currently doing but at FANG?
| Then there are the fact so many people say the hardest thing
| about Google is the interview. And for me that is kinda
| pointless then, like if I've just done the most challenging
| thing, why would I want to hang around?
| kungfuscious wrote:
| Finally, thanks to your comment, I understand the whiteboard
| interview. I couldn't for the life of me understand how hiring
| for software engineers was conducted in such a ridiculous
| manner (i.e. not anything like the job you are going to do),
| but like someone else said on here, it's a dance that proves
| your proficiency to learn technical concepts.
| beforeolives wrote:
| Yeah, I don't like the attitude of "I'm self taught so I don't
| know about data structures and algorithms". The first part of
| the sentence doesn't logically lead to the second. It's not
| even anything that advanced or difficult either. We're talking
| about easily and freely available information with plenty of
| ways to practice.
|
| If you have a big knowledge gap in something that's
|
| - easy
|
| - freely available
|
| - relevent to your job
|
| then that's pretty much entirely your fault and it has nothing
| to do with your educational background.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _If you have a big knowledge gap in something that 's_
|
| > _- easy_
|
| > _- freely available_
|
| > _- relevent to your job_
|
| > _then that 's pretty much entirely your fault and it has
| nothing to do with your educational background._
|
| Sure. But reversing a binary tree isn't relevant to most
| modern software engineers. And when it does become relevant
| then, like you said, it's easy to learn (on the job).
|
| > _It 's not even anything that advanced or difficult
| either._
|
| No but it _is_ something that gets "memorized" for a test
| (and therefore immediately forgotten afterward).
| mcguire wrote:
| The vast majority of people don't use algebra, yet it
| remains (was?) a requirement to graduate high school.
| letitbeirie wrote:
| Don't disagree, but
|
| > - relevent to your job
|
| isn't necessarily met here.
|
| I'm also self-taught. I couldn't reverse a binary tree in a
| tech interview (without looking up how to do it first)
| because it's never been relevant to my job. I could, however,
| stand up an API and deploy it to AWS in a similar period of
| time, because it _is_ relevant to my job.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _I went on HN Who 's Hiring, looked for people hiring_ data
| scientists _or python web developers (pretty much everyone)
| and sent out resumes. [...] I had no idea [...] whatever I
| was supposed to do with some of the probability related word
| problems I got._ "
|
| What do data scientists do?
|
| " _...I use an ORM, rarely do I need to write a query by
| hand...._ "
|
| " _I had been working as a consultant and /or starting
| companies for almost 10 years and found the b2b sales process
| is literally nothing like the hiring process for SV
| companies. In one we talked about project goals and
| solutions, in the other we talked about hypothetical word
| problems that I have no doubt are popular in CS programs._"
|
| And yet, one of the two failed while the other has job
| openings.
| beforeolives wrote:
| > What do data scientists do?
|
| The title is very broad and it could mean a bunch of
| different things at different companies. But it almost
| always involves a solid understanding of statistics, hence
| the probability questions in the interviews.
| microtherion wrote:
| GP might have been asking a rhetorical question. A data
| scientist's job is _literally_ figuring out what they are
| "supposed to do with [...] probability related word
| problems".
|
| So from the article, it seemed that the interviews were
| quite relevant to the jobs advertised, and that the
| applicant truly was not a good fit for them.
| gher-shyu3i wrote:
| Did or have you experienced any ageism?
| dilly_li wrote:
| This. If you are not willing to learn the basic BST to prep for
| an interview, what's to say about you on your new job?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Agreed, lapdogs should do as they are told and not question
| the leadership, for their ways are mysterious and wisdom
| divine
| acheron wrote:
| The Stockholm syndrome among the leetcode crowd is
| astonishing.
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| It says that I spend my time learning things that are
| actually useful, rather than trivia.
|
| The best screening I ever went through was for a job where
| I'd be working on a Spring Boot app with a React frontend.
| For that screening, I was asked to add a simple feature to an
| example app.
|
| It was clearly toy code, so I knew they weren't trying to get
| free work out of me. It was also representative of the kinds
| of tasks I would be doing, which let me know that I would
| enjoy the job, and let them know I would be good at it. I was
| hired on the spot.
|
| I've written algorithms to reverse b-trees, and I could
| figure it out again if I had to. But I don't have to, because
| the standard library is a thing, and that task tells a
| potential employer nothing about my skill set.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Here's the thing I think you're missing when it comes to
| the employer's POV during these types of interviews: they
| don't care so much about your skillset. At the point where
| you're doing an in-person interview and being asked these
| pointless puzzle questions, they are reasonably sure you
| have the required skillset to do the job.
|
| What they're actually testing for during the in-person
| interview is your ability to be a good worker bee. They're
| filtering out people like you who would question the point
| of doing task X. They want people who will do task X
| without question. They don't want workers who will ask "Why
| are we doing task X? Shouldn't we do task Y instead?" For
| most positions at these large companies, the person who
| questions the efficacy of task X is a different role -- the
| role that is instructing you to do task X.
|
| With these trivia questions, they _are_ in fact telling you
| as a prospective employee the kinds of tasks you will be
| doing. They are letting you know that you will be doing a
| lot of pointless work, you won 't have any say in the work
| you will be doing, the work you will be doing will seem
| trivial to you, and you have to be okay with that. If
| you're not okay with that, it's not the job for you.
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| This might be true at places that are hiring out of a
| boot camp or something, but as a hiring manager myself, I
| can say that this is 100% not true at any company I've
| worked for.
| sanderjd wrote:
| For what it's worth, I don't like the CS-y interview
| process, but I also struggle with that very technology
| specific process. I don't want a job that hired me just to
| be a Spring Boot + React monkey. I want a job that hired me
| because they think I'm smart and adaptable and can tackle
| any problem with any technology.
| alexc05 wrote:
| I don't mean to sound rude, but I feel like your response
| seriously lacks empathy.
|
| I am a father to a 2 year old, I have a mortgage and an
| existing full time job.
|
| The time investment required to go through a bunch of
| algorithms that are almost exclusively used in passing coding
| interviews does not offer the same ROI as, for example,
| streamlining a process that you are currently facing on a day
| to day basis.
|
| On top of that, something that I've learned recently about
| myself is that I have a tremendous _fear_ of failing coding
| interviews.
|
| You see there is an emotional component to the effort you put
| in to doing one of those things. You go through the work to
| get accepted into the interview process then you find
| yourself face to face with "one shot" to impress.
|
| Maybe they've even flown you out to their location so you can
| go through this whole experience on site. At that point the
| optimistic among us might start thinking about things like
| what our lives would look like if we worked at "technological
| mecca" doing really cool shit for silicon valley dollars.
|
| So you start allowing yourself to think about watching the
| ocean on a sunny day eating avacado toast while you watch
| your now bleach blonde son playing in the surf. Your wife is
| happy too. You have this beautiful life that you're providing
| for those that you love.
|
| (in your fantasies you don't worry about the cascadia fault-
| line, the dystopian nature of US healthcare, or the fact that
| california seems to catch fire for a month every year
| nowadays)
|
| ANYWAYS, you go in, you give it your all. Maybe you think you
| nailed it, or maybe you can clearly come up with 20 better
| solutions in the 20 seconds after you leave. Maybe you
| studied 50 concepts intensely, but missed the one they picked
| to ask you about. You didn't get the questions in advance or
| anything.
|
| It doesn't matter though, you missed a semicolon on the
| whiteboard and your code doesn't compile when they type it
| in.
|
| You get a terse reply from your original recruiter "not a
| good fit at this time" ... there's no insight into what you
| did wrong or where you could get better. That opens the
| company up to legal liability. Anything more than "thanks"
| risks exposure.
|
| So you're left with days and weeks of effort for nothing. On
| top of that you have a real long flight home where you get to
| grieve the loss of that beautiful life you imagined.
|
| Do you work in a place where you can tell your colleagues at
| work that you were interviewing? If not, you can't even talk
| to the people in your life who are most likely to understand
| the pain you're going through.
|
| So you get to suffer alone.
|
| So. What does it say about someone?
|
| Absolutely nothing.
| sanderjd wrote:
| For me the ROI was about 40 hours of studying for
| (estimating) about a million dollars delta over my next
| best job offer over the first five years. That week I spent
| studying is the most return I've ever achieved per hour. I
| don't love it and I deeply hated it at the time and still
| feel dirty to think about it, but from a financial ROI
| perspective it is unassailable. Honestly I think the
| opposite of your family-man argument is the case: I
| couldn't afford to allow my pride to keep me from doing
| that, for the sake of my family's finances. When I was
| young and unattached I could (and did) afford to be more
| idealistic about not doing that kind of gross thing, just
| for the financial reward.
| travisporter wrote:
| I think you should acknowledge that some people fail
| despite studying about 40 hours, and failing an interview
| takes a significant emotional toll that needs to be dealt
| with.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Good point, it is definitely not risk-free ROI at all,
| and the emotional toll can have outsized impacts. But I
| still think people with the skill set to succeed at other
| companies can learn enough in a relatively small period
| of time (I said 100 hours in a different comment to make
| the numbers round, maybe even double that is worthwhile)
| for it to be a worthwhile risk. I mean, the exact
| calculation depends on a bunch of details, like what the
| best alternative is in comparison. But I think for lots
| of people, it is worth the risk.
|
| One thing I'd say is that essentially none of the people
| I know in other fields have a similar opportunity for a
| relatively small amount of dedicated study to pay off so
| well.
| croutonwagon wrote:
| I have always felt the desire to work at FAANG was
| diametrically opposed to having a family life.
|
| Its seems to be an extremely competitive, eat or die type
| lifestyle that would require many more hours than a normal
| job. In essence its its own marriage of sorts, or at least
| in competition for non-work relationships/marriages.
|
| And there's nothing wrong with the people that choose to do
| that. But it seems obvious even in the success stories.
|
| I'm extremely competitive, however I also value family over
| all else. I would much rather spends dinners with my kids,
| and weekends with my family enjoying the fruits of my labor
| over having a line on my resume. I know that if i ever went
| that route, it would absolutely come at a cost, most likely
| my marriage at least, and probably some level of
| relationship with my children. Its frankly not worth it for
| me.
| UK-Al05 wrote:
| I feel like FAANG jobs are the most conducive to family
| life compared to small companies or startups.
|
| They have maternity leave, and they have resources so you
| don't have to be on call constantly as it is with smaller
| companies.
| croutonwagon wrote:
| Generally, amongst my peers over time I've found that to
| not be as true. Though of course it depends on a number
| of factors, including leadership and company culture.
|
| I could easily take some time if needed. My senior admin
| is taking a month of paternity here in a few weeks, as he
| did with his first. I have a first line guy that has been
| in and out for months for various reasons. It is a strain
| on others in small places but like any place if you
| document and cross train a bit it's not terrible.frankly
| it's a stated goal for my teams and something I have
| implemented across several roles and sectors in my career
| (even if I didn't get to reap the benefits)
|
| Colleagues of mine that went FAANG stated similar. Amazon
| notoriously has an unlimited time off policy. That buddy
| hasn't made the family vacation tradition since he
| started. The first year he tried it he basically worked
| in the condo.
|
| So from what I've seen, at least with Amazon, it's de
| facto cutthroat and not so much a benefit.
|
| Though I understand I'm possibly attributing that same
| experience, which may even be localized to his team, to a
| much broader set, based on the similarities of their
| culture/workplace.
|
| Many of these places have showers and lounges and free
| food etc. and frankly I don't want to work at a place
| that there's a culture that encourages eating and
| sleeping there. Again I prefer to do those things at home
| or break from work during breaks.
| aeoleonn wrote:
| By the same token, I think your post lacks empathy for OP.
|
| OP perhaps doesn't have the constraints you have.
|
| As an aside--
|
| Do you really expect A. someone who has never met you and
| who has B. written a comment online before you arrived to
| reply... to know your life conditions or to tailor it to
| every possible human life outcome?
|
| That is, because you've had children, does every comment
| online now need to ensure its content is in alignment with
| your perspective? That sounds like a failure to empathize,
| on your part.
|
| For example, if I write something... do I need to make sure
| it's prepared in a way that 100% of people can relate to
| it, throughout time & space? Such as fathers of children,
| amputees, astronauts, etc?
| alexc05 wrote:
| I don't know that you and I should get into a discussion
| here.
|
| It sounds like we're so diametrically opposed that it
| could get pretty heated. At least from my end. You do
| have a right to your opinion, but I don't want to play in
| the space where I could get emotionally dysregulated by
| some dude on the internet.
|
| I'd rather not bring a flame war to the HN community.
|
| I'm also not entirely sure that your argument is in good
| faith and i'm really not in the sort of place where I
| want to tease out the things you say which are hyperbole
| versus the things you really believe.
|
| Do you really think that I said all interviews should be
| tailored to all people throughout all time and space? I
| can't believe that you really think that, so you can't be
| arguing in good faith.
|
| Are you really saying that you think it is unreasonable
| that we expect accommodations be made "for amputees"?
| Like their role or position in society is somehow a
| burden on you, or god forbid employers?
|
| Honestly, maybe you do. Maybe you're super into eugenics.
| I don't want to find out really. It is best that we go
| our separate ways.
|
| I hope you have a very peaceful day.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| I think couple things about interviews I've come to realise
| is this.
|
| 1. DO NOT get emotionally involved or excited about an
| opportunity till the time you see an offer letter - those
| reeeallly sweet people that are so happy and courteous and
| smiley will switch in an instant, snap! throw you out
| faster than a used disposable cup and will not so much as
| give you the courtesy of a reply. They don't give flying f
| about you no matter how many hours they themselves invested
| in the process. See for them, this is paid work to talk to
| you, so they don't give a shit they do it for 10 hours and
| still drop you without even sending you an email. You are
| working for free during the interview process and have much
| more at stake in this process than the person you are
| talking to. You feel you're having a genuine human
| interaction with them? no. You think it went well because
| objectively it went really well? Don't worry you'll get a 2
| line generic rejection email.
|
| 2. DO NOT ever gauge your self worth as a developer to
| passing or failing an interview - you will destroy your own
| morale. Take hints and learn to be better, no doubt, but
| the decisions people make about you sometimes don't have
| anything to do with you specifically so don't take it to
| heart too much.
| cryptoboy2283 wrote:
| The problem is if you don't get emotionally involved
| you'll definitely lose at least some level of emotional
| boost & interest. That also could be noticed & mentioned
| in one of the reviews.
|
| There is no ultimate solution, it always depends on
| specific person you're talking to
| sidlls wrote:
| There's no real correlation here.
| pc86 wrote:
| The BST doesn't correlate to doing well at the job. Being
| willing to teach yourself the BST because you want the job
| _does_ correlate to doing well at it.
| sidlls wrote:
| No, not really.
| noarchy wrote:
| I have never prepped for an interview in my life. If they're
| asking me questions or to solve problems related to my field,
| I don't really need to study. If they ask me things that are
| irrelevant, then that's another thing entirely.
|
| In short, I am a specialist, and am hired accordingly.
| darig wrote:
| That you don't focus on things unrelated to the job at hand?
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| That you don't want to learn worthless stuff that is solely
| for interview theatre?
| blacktriangle wrote:
| If you can't handle the level of theater that is reviewing
| basic CS concepts that we all could afford to be more aware
| of even if we don't need to remember them day to day,
| you're really not going to survive the level of theater
| that dealing with a large organization requires.
| alexc05 wrote:
| There is a better way. We're (mostly) hackers for _bleep
| 's_ sake. You don't think that this is something that we
| can disrupt?
|
| The only reason we accept it as the status quo is that
| people accept it and say "this is the way it is"
|
| If you look at Goldman Sachs or Microsoft, _BOTH_ are
| investing heavily in tuning their recruitment process to
| identify and hire neuro-atypical people.
|
| It is a business strategy that is paying off.
|
| Who's to day the kinder & gentler process they design
| couldn't be just as easily be applied to hiring in neuro-
| typicals.
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/inside-
| microsoft/c...
|
| https://fortune.com/2019/12/07/autism-aspergers-adhd-
| dyslexi...
|
| It doesn't change because it hasn't changed. Not because
| it can't.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _We 're (mostly) hackers for bleep's sake._"
|
| Ironically, the old-school hackers who made the word
| "hacker" famous, like the ones who built the UNIX
| ecosystem before Linux was even a thing, knew their CS
| fundamentals like the back of their hand. They'd have
| zero trouble with the coding aspect of these interviews.
|
| Very few people on HN are hackers.
|
| > " _If you look at Goldman Sachs or Microsoft, BOTH are
| investing heavily in tuning their recruitment process to
| identify and hire neuro-atypical people_ "
|
| That's just a publicity stunt. I'd bet money that few of
| the neuro-atypical they hire last long in those places.
| joelbluminator wrote:
| > knew their CS fundamentals like the back of their hand.
|
| Even if they did, that doesn't necessarily mean they can
| shuffle an array or flip a BST under pressure on a
| whiteboard
| foobiekr wrote:
| Honest to God, I think current interview practices suck
| and single out leetcode as particularly corrosive and
| demonstrating nothing about competence.
|
| But I honestly can't believe people are acting like
| reversing a binary tree is hard. This is like something
| you'd expect high school students with the most basic you
| data structures knowledge to be able to do.
| pantulis wrote:
| So this would be the equivalent to the "how many pianists
| tuners live in New York?"
| clpm4j wrote:
| Absolutely. There is so much pointless bureaucratic BS
| that has to be done and dealt with at large corps that
| studying CS concepts seems like a genuinely pleasant
| experience in comparison.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Absolute load of shit. What does memorizing data
| structure algorithms you'll never practically use have to
| do with navigating company politics?
| blacktriangle wrote:
| It signals your willingness to jump through arbitrary
| hoops.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| When Google had gone down a while back, someone had
| commented:
|
| "Have they tried try to invert a binary tree and see if
| it solves the problem?"
| bmitc wrote:
| There should be a reason for it. I learn things because I
| need them for my job or I find them interesting, hopefully
| with some overlap. There's a lot of things to learn in life,
| and it's rather pointless to learn things for an interview
| process if it doesn't reflect upon the actual job
| requirements.
|
| Also, it's not like people know nothing. A good interview
| process learns both what the candidate does and does not
| know, how what they know could be useful, and how capable the
| candidate is in filling a knowledge gap if there actually is
| one between what they know and what is actually needed for
| the job. That is of course in addition to learning whether
| they're nice to be around or not.
| sanderjd wrote:
| It's like learning a gate code; you don't need it once
| you're in the house, it's pointless to learn it, except
| that you have to in order to get through the gate.
| keb_ wrote:
| I just keep it on a flashcard in my glove compartment,
| and look it up when I need to.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Ok it's like a verbal code where the guard won't let you
| in if you don't do it from memory. It's an analogy
| damnit! :)
| keb_ wrote:
| Haha fair enough. :)
| gigatexal wrote:
| The needless gatekeeping that is "create a linked list" or
| "reverse a binary tree" or my favorite: sort these arbitrary
| list of items are stupid. The thing is they're used as a proxy
| for intelligence and I think they don't work. Think of all the
| countless folks who cram for these interviews and then can't
| actually write code in a real setting, use git, or manage
| expectations. This guy could do all of those things as shown by
| his successful consulting work.
| m463 wrote:
| Thing's I haven't done since college:
|
| - partial differential equations
|
| - reverse a binary tree
|
| - (sadly) made quite so many long-term friends
| novok wrote:
| I agree, the guy should of noticed a pattern after the first
| few, and being unemployed and thus didn't have a job taking up
| his time actually systematically go through cracking the coding
| interview or other similar resources full time for a few
| months. Then he'd be basically be set for life.
|
| Lots of missed income there.
| SeyelentEco wrote:
| Same I was 32 self-taught with 14 years of experience. After a
| few failures at these types of interviews I just studied and
| spent some time learning how to solve the problems companies
| were asking. I did better and got offers at 2 of the FAANGs and
| I've been at one for almost 8 years. So it's possible to be a
| self taught or have spent your entire life at small companies
| before that but studying is required for the coding part. I
| think behavioral and architecture are easier for those that
| have built a lot of things before, but they won't make up for a
| couple bad coding interviews.
| serial_dev wrote:
| And how do you like FAANG? I'm in a similar situation, I'm
| 30, worked for different kinds of companies and now I'm
| thinking I'd like to try applying to FAANG companies (mainly
| because I hope it would be more interesting, challenging for
| at least a couple of years, and maybe even get to know some
| people that operate at a different level).
| sanderjd wrote:
| From my experience, lots of great things: stability, great
| compensation, a never ending supply of technical
| challenges, products to work on that huge numbers of people
| use ("oh you work on that? I use that every day!"), a well
| defined _technical_ career progression path, plenty of
| personnel depth and financial cushion to do things slowly
| (so you aren 't ever up all night live coding against prod
| to keep the systems up and the business from going under),
| a strong engineering culture with more focus on code
| quality / maintainability (related to the financial cushion
| and also the default assumption that code will live for a
| long time), easy to hire good engineers so you aren't
| constantly strapped for talent, ... probably some more
| things that I'm missing.
|
| And lots of bad stuff: the communication burden of
| wrangling huge numbers of people, bad decisions by
| leadership that you're helpless to impact, just the general
| difficulty of having one's values align perfectly with
| those of a big shareholder controlled faceless blob,
| figuring out what to work on that will be both satisfying
| and aligned with the right peoples' goals (that is, fun
| coding projects are often not impactful while thankless
| slogs are, at least for more senior folks), etc.;
| essentially, the politics are harder to navigate and feel
| satisfied with.
|
| To highlight my first two positive points: the stability
| and compensation has allowed me to pay down all our debt,
| buy a house (recently refinanced to a 15 year mortgage),
| save up a year of expenses, allow my wife to go back to
| school, and pay for a couple kids to be in a lovely
| daycare. Most of that would have been much more difficult
| in my previous life in the startup world.
|
| I'm very happy I got the job (when I was about your age),
| but I also think often about leaving it.
|
| Hope that helps!
| SeyelentEco wrote:
| Similar to sanderj reply. It's the longest I've been
| anywhere. I got to work on a team that traveled the world,
| got to work on features used by billions of people, work on
| advanced hardware products, on advanced software products
| that use ML for Speech and Natural Language. It's not
| possible to work on some of these problems at other
| companies. So you deal with the operational overhead,
| sometimes long hours, the uncomfortableness when a mistake
| from your company causes real harm, etc.
|
| The compensation is also something that is not as clear to
| someone who had a career arc like me. I've always been able
| to make money to take care of myself and immediate family,
| but making consistent FAANG money changes the way you plan
| and help people. I've been able to help one family member
| go to school, another go to med school, multiple members to
| move closer, allowed my parents to retire early so they
| didn't have to work customer facing jobs during the
| pandemic, donated tens of thousands of dollars to local
| organizations, etc
|
| If I was single I might've left and worked at startups or
| smaller companies, but I wouldn't now that I see how much
| impact I can have on those around me by just going to work
| and working hard.
| jnsie wrote:
| Yup, it's a sad truth (not limited to tech companies) that
| you've got to play the game. The blogger wasn't unemployable,
| just unwilling to do what was necessary for these particular
| companies (his prerogative; not judging in any way...).
| potta_coffee wrote:
| If you don't mind my asking, what was your study plan like? I'm
| self-taught and I'm in a similar position, I really need to
| study but I'm lacking an effective plan of attack.
| efsavage wrote:
| I did the green book (McDowell) cover to cover, with a few
| dedicated hours of study each day, and random
| googling/tinkering where I wanted to explore more. I won't
| say it was the most fun I've ever had, or as self-motivating
| as a nice side project, but it was a good change of pace over
| gluing APIs together, so the novelty effect kept me going for
| a while. I probably put 150 hours of prep in over 6-8 weeks.
| The ROI on that time (relative to competing startup offers)
| was very far north of $1k/hour.
| rhines wrote:
| Never heard it called the green book, usually just called
| by the acronym CTCI (Cracking The Coding Interview). Just
| commenting in case anyone else was confused.
|
| Congrats on getting a good payoff on your work, and thanks
| for sharing the info about your process.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| Thanks
| hacliff wrote:
| +1 on this, CTCI is worth its weight in gold
| bbulkow wrote:
| Yet, if you want to pass a technical interview, that's the
| game. If you would like to introspect, having a large number of
| passes before you changed course was unnecessary.
|
| I also interviewed and received job offers after burning out at
| startups, i listened to the advice to spend 6 weeks on hacker
| rank and top coder. I passed all my technical interviews. I was
| also coding on two personal open source projects, but practical
| cussing and interview coding are 90 pct different as you say.
|
| I don't know if i will succeed at having impact at a large
| company. Tell you in 6 months. But i am iterating fast and
| following advice of the people around me.
|
| You didn't mention the effect of being unemployable because
| your standards are going up. This is an occupational hazard of
| having more experience. Sorry about that, there are things you
| can't unsee . It happens to everyone, and an underdiscussed
| reason there are more young coders. Good luck.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > but practical cussing and interview coding are 90 pct
| different
|
| Freudian slip?
| davidhyde wrote:
| Agreed. Employers usually want to understand your capacity to
| learn (as well as many other things). Going to university
| formally demonstrates this but obscure interview questions
| attempt to test for this too. You can learn them all, just try.
| aeoleonn wrote:
| Thanks a ton for sharing this! Super inspirational.
|
| I'm a self-taught developer, 34. My first programming job was
| only at about age 30.
|
| About 2 years later, I was consulting for Amazon, as a full
| stack engineer building a digital marketing project, which was
| pretty cool-- plus great for the resume.
|
| After that, Amazon contacted me for an interview with them,
| which I failed (lack of data structures & algorithm
| knowledge/experience).
|
| I still have the hopes of working directly for a FAANG company.
| So, just wanted to say thanks.
|
| Currently I am unemployed, but I am about to start studying
| DS&A again & building some small projects. Fortunately, given
| the industry & skillset, I have recruiters contacting me
| frequently, which is a positive, uplifting signal.
| JediPig wrote:
| Once i was given what I call a "brogrammer" code test. I looked
| at it, said not interested in brogrammer env. Fast forward 4
| years, person I knew became VP. He asked what I thought.
|
| I laid it out to him, that brogrammers are collective tards
| that cant think on their own, BUT they are good at things like
| code interviews. I was hired as director. The 2 people who said
| no cause I said no to their brogramming crap. I personally let
| go in 4 weeks. 2 years later, things were fixed, I got a fat
| check, and moved on.
|
| Lesson? Uncle Bob and his elk are creating problems that you
| can be paid to solve. However Uncle bob and crew are great at
| brainwashing.
| ignoramous wrote:
| If you're in the US, you're in luck and could take this course:
| https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/lambda-school-launches-...
|
| If you're interviewing for a slightly senior role, then this
| self-help guide is a good start:
| https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/preparing-for-the-systems...
|
| The job interview process can be gamed and there's no reason to
| not game it now that it can be; if FAANGs is where you see
| yourself.
| asimjalis wrote:
| Inverting linked lists is not a hard problem. The key is to think
| of the problem visually.
| CTmystery wrote:
| I have some experience with this. My advice: pick the skill that
| you are absolutely strongest at from a specialist's viewpoint and
| interview for that role. Once you are in, you will find your
| generalist skills help you excel quickly. It is annoying that
| interviews can't capture broad skill sets, but it is also widely
| known. It means you have to prep! Dive deep and practice the well
| known interview questions for the specialty you pick.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I'm not going to defend asking algorithmic questions in a
| whiteboard coding interview - there are lots of issues with this,
| but...
|
| If you don't know how to reverse a binary tree, it's likely you
| won't ever think of it as a solution to a problem, so you won't
| encounter cases where you put these skills into action.
|
| Either through self-selection or through lack of ability to
| identify opportunities, if you don't have certain skills you'll
| be unlikely to need them!
|
| Web development or similar disciplines do sometimes manage to
| avoid these sorts of things, but debugging database index
| performance/size can lead down this path, processing data for
| complex business logic, data analysis, there are lots of cases in
| "web development" where these things can be applied, if you know
| where to look.
| LordHumungous wrote:
| Yes this guy comes off as a bit entitled, but hey, the industry
| grind is not for everyone. I applaud him for making his own path.
| shams93 wrote:
| If you burn out 45 its not so sweet after working 140 hours a
| week for 40 hours pay im homeless and keep being denied help.
| self_buddliea wrote:
| I googled "binary tree reversal".
|
| Google requested clarification: "Did you mean: binary tree
| traversal". Google also mentioned "inversion" of a binary tree.
|
| Google seems more confused than I am.
| awb wrote:
| I'm a reasonably successful entrepreneur, but I've been fired or
| quit every FT position I've had. FTE is just a total different
| experience from running a company and being good at one is
| different from being good at the other. The only middle ground
| I've found that has worked for me has been consulting where I'm
| still my own boss and can pick up small projects here and there.
|
| Being an entrepreneur is a high risk / high reward venture though
| and we're not entitled to an easy, well paid salary if we fail.
|
| Great read though and glad the author found their groove
| eventually. A salaried position doesn't have to be the default
| fall back.
| gtardini wrote:
| How old are you and do you plan to have kids? If yes, when? I am
| always very curious about how indiehackers/digital nomads think
| about having a family (or not)
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| ..or whether they can even pull a full career out of it.
|
| To be fair, practically all people in their 20's go through a
| pachinko machine of decisions leading God-knows-where.
| SubuSS wrote:
| I have the reverse question: if you have bandwidth to be able to
| do 20 interviews and you already know they do ask these inane
| leetcode questions, why wasn't it possible to sink a month into
| solving a few of those and then interviewing?
|
| It is hard to take folks for their resume or at their word alone.
| The inane questions just provide a common framework for
| evaluation. It is definitely not indicative of actual work to be
| done. It is totally an indicator for someone willing to pick up a
| new skill and learn in a short window. We in fact get the other
| kind of candidates as well: who can solve these problems very
| well but can't do good work. So the interviews at snap at least
| try to go for a combination of informational and design/technical
| questions.
|
| Ignore the feedback - we are not really allowed to give exact
| feedback because of liability issues :/. So it is going to be
| some super high level things you can't sue us for.
| LordHumungous wrote:
| Yeah I'm not surprised he's burned out after doing 20
| interviews lol. You have to pace yourself. This guy sounds like
| the kind of person who bull rushes into things and burns
| himself out.
| vidarh wrote:
| I agree - you really should sink time into preparing if you
| can. We prepare for all kinds of other things, but a surprising
| number of people won't prepare for interviews that are
| massively affecting the trajectory of their lives.
|
| Leil Lowndes writes books on improving as a communicator, not
| about tech, but one of her pieces of advice for interviews is
| to interview at places you don't want to work first, and treat
| it as practice. In her case the recommendation is meant for
| people who struggle with being comfortable presenting
| themselves and talking, but it applies just as well in other
| contexts.
|
| E.g. find some jobs you're clearly qualified for where you're
| likely to get an interview relatively easily. Drop your
| standards - your goal is not to get hired. See what questions
| you're asked. Use the experience to improve. Amp up the
| "difficulty" if you get offers.
|
| See how the questions differ, and how the process differs if
| you try for more challenging positions.
|
| _Then_ go for the job you want.
|
| Figuring out how to pass the interviews in "low risk"
| situations (because you don't really want the job) is both good
| practice, good calibration of expectations of what kind of job
| you can get, and a good way to relax more when you apply for
| the dream job.
| iandanforth wrote:
| Let's say a company would pay you $250k base with an additional
| $100k in stock and bonuses. This comp puts you in the top 5% of
| earners in the world. The catch is that you need to learn to do a
| stupid dance where you wear huge feathers and do this dance in
| front of a panel of reviewers. Not only that they will insist the
| dance correlates with productivity and you have to nod and agree
| with them. The question is, do you spend the time to learn the
| dance?
|
| That's pretty much it, it's just a stupid dance. You can get
| angry and say "No no no, this dance is stupid!" Or you can learn
| the dance, do the dance, then be richer than 95% of people in the
| world.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| I think this hits the nail on the head. For some people the
| safety and income that these companies provide make it worth
| doing the dance. For many others, we just think "Meh, there is
| more to life than money, I am not doing that dance I am going
| to do this other dance that I think is more fun." Like
| honestly, what I am going to do with that extra money? For me
| just now, the answer is waste it. 100% even if I invest it and
| make more money with it. Eventually I have to spend it and buy
| pointless stuff. An super duper exercise bike that has a built
| in screen and looks cool. A cool car. A big house that is too
| big for my needs. All while being annoyed about a stupid dance.
| While I can get by working on other things and be less annoyed.
| And get to do more of what I actually want to do.
| gryn wrote:
| if you hold the view that all jobs are more or less useless
| in the grand scheme of things, learning that dance is not
| even something to think about.
|
| for most people not getting a job is not an option, because
| they need food and probably a roof to sleep in.
|
| if you take these two things into account, the name of the
| game then is how fast can you get away from needing a job.
|
| the higher you earn the more of your expected lifetime you
| can get to be your fully.
|
| that free time you bought for yourself and the money you can
| spend doing research, sitting in a sunny beach, on non
| profits, on a giant room full of candy or whatever you deem
| to be worth it for you.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| Or give it to causes that, in your own estimation, make the
| world a better place.
|
| There are lots of problems out there that need money to be
| solved.
| tolbish wrote:
| To be fair, a lot of these problems are caused by the
| pursuit of wealth in the first place.
| imtringued wrote:
| I pursue wealth to undo the problems caused by the
| pursuit of wealth.
| wideareanetwork wrote:
| Love this take.
|
| You've changed my thinking.
| tootie wrote:
| He also says he's been working consistently as a freelancer so
| he's obviously hirable. That song and dance is only required by
| the Ivory Tower of Silicon Valley. I've never gone through an
| interview like and I'm earning a very comfortable living for
| the past 20 years.
| draw_down wrote:
| The dance is stupid, leaving hundreds of K (or even millions)
| on the table is stupider.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| The catch is that the dance is so technically complicated and
| physically demanding that you need to take years of very
| expensive dance lessons and be exceptionally fit in order to be
| able to pull off some of the moves, and even then nobody will
| tell you what order to do the steps in, where to acquire the
| huge feathers, or the specific song you need to dance to. Also
| even if you execute the dance perfectly you may get told you
| "aren't a good cultural fit", if they even bother to call you.
| porb121 wrote:
| I'm sorry, what? You need to take _years_ to practice for
| algorithm interviews? You think that it's physically
| demanding to do BFS?
|
| Nobody will tell you what to do? What about, say, the entire
| interviewing ecosystem that's sprouted up?
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| I was alluding to the near-universal requirement of a
| college degree, and to the importance of social skills that
| most engineers frankly lack. Maybe not exactly what the
| parent comment was referring to.
| sushid wrote:
| You can literally spend a few months (even just weeks you
| grind hard with no job/family obligations). You don't have to
| even spend a penny. Just go to leetcode.com and start doing
| problems.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| This may be true for some, but is absolutely not true for
| everyone. Some people pick up leetcode easily, but for some
| it requires much more practice.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| It's actually more like they will ask you to one of several
| stupid dances and you have to know how to do them all well.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I've also made the metaphor of having to learn a silly dance.
| I'd argue the dance might be superior as dance practice every
| day will get people physically fit fairly quickly. Healthier
| employees tend to perform better.
| worker767424 wrote:
| I think half the anger over the silly dance is people who are
| angry they can't do the dance or never put in the time to
| learn.
|
| It's also not quite as silly as you'd think. I've programmed a
| lot and for a long time. Some for personal enjoyment, some for
| school, some professionally. That covered 80% of the dance and
| landed me good tech jobs. Working on my weaknesses in
| algorithms and doing leetcode for a month got me a very good
| tech job. Whiteboard coding will identify strong programmers
| who can perform under pressure and people who are practiced a
| lot of whiteboard coding.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| This is exactly right, and I agree.
|
| But instead of dancing stupidly, could we demonstrate real-
| world skills with real-world code and real-world experience?
|
| And there's a flip side to that coin (from the perspective of
| hiring managers):
|
| You want me to dance for a $300K comp package? OK, I'll dance,
| but don't be upset when you can't find qualified employees when
| you are selecting dancers.
|
| You wonder why candidates are complaining about not getting
| interviews (let alone offers) and employers are complaining
| about not finding candidates. _This is why, my guy._
| Kranar wrote:
| This is an excellent way of putting it.
|
| Also please understand that as employers we make people do this
| silly dance because it's the best way we, and frankly anyone,
| knows to reduce the risk of hiring high quality candidates.
|
| I can understand the frustration of doing the silly dance for
| companies that don't pay competitively and think they are at
| the same level as Google minus the pay... but for companies
| paying among the top 5%, we get flooded and flooded with
| resumes and while you may be a good person, present yourself
| nicely (and those are all good things to do), and even impress
| with a resume, it's simply too risky to hire you on that basis
| without seeing a demonstration of your technical abilities.
|
| When I started out I really was dead-set against hiring people
| based on the silly dance... after making a lot of bad hires and
| seeing people who looked impressive on paper but couldn't apply
| some basic algorithmic knowledge to solve some problems I
| succumbed to using the silly dance and honestly the quality of
| candidates I hired improved substantially.
| worker767424 wrote:
| Learning and reciting the silly dance is at least plausibly
| correlated with job performance, hence fizzbuzz.
| jjk166 wrote:
| I'll do you one better: I can get you a job that will pay you
| $5/minute and all you have to do is lie in bed and move your
| hips in a particular way.
|
| If you'll suck it up and do anything if the price is right,
| you're a prostitute. Professionals have standards.
| plutonorm wrote:
| No one wants this booty.
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| Tangent: Your 5% guesstimation is wildly off. In the USA alone,
| assuming 50% of your bonuses go to taxation, your 300k income
| is going to put you in the top 2% of earners.
|
| Globally, 300k USD income would put you in the top .2%, so
| you're richer than 998 out of every 1000 other people in the
| globe.
| thebean11 wrote:
| > In the USA alone, assuming 50% of your bonuses go to
| taxation
|
| 50% of bonuses? That seems low, it's closer to 50% of total
| comp (maybe 40-45) in the places where these salaries are
| common.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Since silicon valley is in california, yeah you're probably
| paying about 39% to taxes, leaving you $212k of your $350k.
|
| (using this tax calculator
| https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-
| calculator#zj8lo...)
| whack wrote:
| The federal tax brackets are the same everywhere you go. If
| you're married and making 350k, most of your income will
| fall in the ~23% tax bracket. And a small portion will be
| taxed at 32%.
|
| The main variable is state taxes. If you're living in
| California, most of your income will be taxed at ~9.3%.
| With a small portion taxed at 10.3%.
|
| So your marginal tax rate will be 43%, and your overall tax
| rate will be closer to ~33%.
|
| Nit: USA does not tax bonuses any differently from salary.
| They are both interchangeable, when computing taxes. Also,
| all income-percentile metrics in USA are based on pre-tax
| income, not post-tax.
|
| https://taxfoundation.org/publications/federal-tax-rates-
| and...
|
| https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/california-state-
| ta...
| thebean11 wrote:
| I'm seeing 38% effective tax rate with 300k in CA all
| things considered. But anyway I agree, 50% of bonus
| doesn't reflect the total amount or the way things are
| taxed.
| scsilver wrote:
| Dont for one second think that if you only have a large
| income, you are rich. Earning potential is not earnings, and
| wealth/richness is accrued earnings. You'd be amazed at how
| much wealth that some people have isn't being produced by
| production, its their assets going up in value. They don't
| realize that value yearly.
|
| Look at wealth in global real estate for a touchstone.
|
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-
| and...
| soneca wrote:
| There is another option that is not being angry nor doing the
| dance. Learning the dance takes time, a lot of time. And there
| is no guarantee of success. It is a risky time investiment.
|
| I went with the third path of ignoring all that and applying to
| jobs that don't require the dance and pay half of that. I am
| pretty rich with that money (specifically since I don't even
| live in the US).
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| > That's pretty much it, it's just a stupid dance. You can get
| angry and say "No no no, this dance is stupid!" Or you can
| learn the dance, do the dance, then be richer than 95% of
| people in the world.
|
| I mean, yeah, that's what I'm saying: It's stupid and I don't
| want to be part of it. I'm taking it a step further and saying
| that the people who help propagate it aren't doing themselves
| or anyone else any favors.
|
| There's more important shit than money, and it's lame that we
| have an economic system that rewards people so massively for
| doing stupid dances.
| dnautics wrote:
| > There's more important shit than money,
|
| For someone who doesn't want to spend their lives doing
| stupid shit like cocaine fueled parties and megayachts, at
| 100k USD (currently) buys you one life-changing event - basic
| lifelong security, you probably won't have to worry in the
| long run. At about 300k (currently) you can buy into a level
| of security that is probably resistant to major worldwide
| economic or political catastrophe.
|
| If you want to change the world, say by doing an ethical
| capitalistic startup or meaningful nonprofit, you probably
| want to start with $5M all-in assets, it's unlikely to be
| easy to get there quickly on a 300k salary at a FAANG. You
| will want to roll the dice at startups paying you back in the
| 100k-150k range.
| iandanforth wrote:
| I fully agree with this.
| Kranar wrote:
| >There's more important shit than money
|
| Sure but for people who have the opportunity, it's perfectly
| rational to invest a significant part of your 20s to
| accumulate enough wealth by doing the "silly dance" and then
| spend the remainder of your life financially free.
|
| I'm not saying your path is wrong or you shouldn't pursue it,
| but it is risky for a lot of people to take a massive pay cut
| and only work a few days a week in their youth and expect
| that doing so is sustainable or that it can be done for the
| bulk of their life.
|
| The less risky approach for many who have the opportunity to
| do so is to actually invest the time to understand the
| fundamentals of computer science. Really get to know data
| structures and algorithms like the back of their hand, spend
| an hour after dinner every night for a couple of months
| practicing how to apply that knowledge to solve leetcode
| problems, and then do the interview circuit to negotiate a
| high salary so that by the time you're in your mid 30s you're
| a millionaire and can effectively spend the rest of your life
| working on your own terms.
| watwut wrote:
| You don't become millionaire by knowing data structures and
| algorithms.
| hollasch wrote:
| I became a multi-millionaire by knowing data structures
| and algorithms.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I've been in the same boat for over a decade. I was a "top of the
| game" game developer (multiple console OS teams, multiple AAA
| titles as lead), when into VFX and was doing well, got an MBA and
| was doing better... then I pursued an ambitious startup (what are
| called deep fakes now, but applied to video advertising), got
| global patents in '08, and ended up bankrupt by '13 because
| nobody believed what I was demonstrating in front of their eyes
| was possible at scale, or they wanted to do porn (which I
| refused.)
|
| Now I'm working in an industry I don't like, facial recognition,
| because 99.99% of the potential employers I've contacted either
| can't figure out what I could do for them, think I'd be bored
| with whatever they do, or think I'd be too expensive. I even had
| one interview recently when after an hour the interviewer says
| "sounds like you're tech light, so..." WHAAT? They had no idea
| creating media production systems or working in VFX is all
| digital technologies.
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| I hear you, that's really rough. It's a very strange industry
| where things are so feast and famine, and there seem to be a
| lot of people who haven't seen both sides of that. These are
| the people who always say, "Why don't you just X?"
|
| I certainly don't have a solution, but I do get the impression
| that there are more developers than there are jobs and this is
| why many companies can afford to be more arbitrary in their
| selection process. Mostly I just wish I bought more bitcoin.
| Kidding but not kidding.
| akeck wrote:
| I feel like "keep my cost of living low" is one of the more
| important parts of this post. Low personal burn rate makes all
| sorts of things possible.
| pc86 wrote:
| If you have trouble with a "probability word problem" how much
| success are you going to have in _any_ data science role?
| larrik wrote:
| > One company said "uses Windows so we don't think he'll be able
| to integrate into our OSX based workflow". Ha!
|
| As someone involved in hiring, Windows IS a red flag (unless you
| are a .NET developer). Any sort of open source stack is either a
| nightmare to get going on windows, or impossible to get going on
| windows. I also have no idea why you would do that to yourself,
| Windows as a dev environment is terrible, definitely the worst of
| the three options.
| azangru wrote:
| > unemployable
|
| Skimming through the article, this seems to be an exaggeration.
| He may be unemployable at some companies; maybe even at most
| companies that advertise on HN; but I am sure there are companies
| that don't ask for inversions of binary trees, theory of
| probability, etc. during interviews. They may not pay as much as
| the ones that do; but surely he is far from unemployable.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Unemployable does not mean "can't get the job I want", it means
| "can't get a job". It's when your useless ten year old degree in
| education stops you from getting a job as a waitress so once
| again you're having sleep for dinner.
| padseeker wrote:
| "In any case, after about 20 of these in-person interviews going
| poorly, I really disconnected from the whole process and found
| myself deeply frustrated. Not only were these programming word
| problems ridiculous, but it seemed like everyone I interviewed
| with was a caricature of narcissism and delusions of grandeur."
|
| The people who are conducting interviews are all that and more.
| Tech people lord over the commoners by focusing on obscure syntax
| and the latest buzz words as opposed to the basics of building an
| application. The smartest thing to do when building something is
| to Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS). The guy whose interviewing will
| write clever but unmaintainable code and then will leave in 2
| years to follow the next trend.
| lxe wrote:
| This is an all-too-common tale on HN: a debrief on a job
| interview failure in which the author blames the system ("Why
| would I need to reverse a binary tree in the real world?) or
| their own circumstances ("I'm a self-taught founder with 10+
| years of experience, and never had to reverse a binary tree").
|
| The better take away from these essays is that one should just
| study for these tech interviews before starting the rounds and
| learn how to reverse a binary tree.
| offtop5 wrote:
| >A job at a typical startup has no boundaries and feels like a
| cult.
|
| At the same time , they'll often take a chance on someone who on
| paper isn't qualified. That's how I got into this industry.
|
| Has anyone been able to hire a general businesses person to
| manage the day to day boring parts. I'd like to keep working full
| time while paying someone to run my startup
| arbitrary_name wrote:
| You could message me or put a contact on your profile! I'm an
| strategy and ops guy (consulting, now FAANG) interested in
| helping startups grow. Would be interesting to explore this
| problem further.
| offtop5 wrote:
| I honestly wouldn't have the money to pay someone at your
| level. At best I can pay a college kid $30 an hour to maybe
| work on the business 10 hours a week.
|
| Which if you remember being in college, is a decent amount
| lmilcin wrote:
| On the other side of the story, I interview senior
| developers/tech leads for a large bank and it is difficult to
| find people who can code their way out of a paper bag. Lots of
| candidates can sweet-talk their way but then show complete lack
| of problem solving abilities, disorganized approach, inability to
| predict if their code is doing what it is supposed to do, etc.
|
| Realize, when you go for FAANG job you are competing with a lot
| of younger people, frequently just out of school with fresh
| memory of CS topics.
|
| There is a lot of other companies with just as good compensation
| where your other qualities (like maturity) might be more
| advantageous than in lowest echelons of FAANG.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| "Realize, when you go for FAANG job you are competing with a
| lot of younger people, "
|
| You know, I think I can understand that simply due to the
| gigantic amount of in-house legacy code, toolkits, etc. It
| could be simply that younger people are more likely to take
| that Sisyphean task on, especially those on their first job.
| Schools aren't bad at numbing people to be part of a
| collective.
|
| Maybe it's same to assume that a FAANG is simply the modern
| equivalent of a defense contractor.
| adontz wrote:
| This is a paradox which I can easily relate to.
|
| A lot of students start internship where I work and quite often I
| am their mentor officially or not so. Recently their dean called
| me and offered to lecture at the university. I am an engineer
| with 20 years of experience, I can teach a lot of useful
| practical things, but when I looked into syllabus it was a list
| of mostly useless theoretical knowledge I am no expert in.
| Honestly, it was not a pleasant moment, I felt like a successful
| plumber.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| C'est la vie. The disconnect between college and industry has
| always existed I think.
|
| My guess is that what students really want is a lecture in how
| to get a job, not how to be useful in a job. OJT and
| fakeittillyoumakeit would then become the order of the day.
|
| I wonder sometimes why I don't hear more about apprenticeships
| by the nation-state sized companies. Bring in likely 17 year
| olds and train them in whatever specialized way you like.
|
| Perhaps some of all this interview nonsense could be avoided by
| commonly recognized software equivalents of a PE cert, but I
| suppose you'd simply slide into subtle quizzes about
| programming languages and the like.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Product managers, tech managers, people in marketing and finance
| are not being evaluated anywhere near as ridiculously as software
| engineers are. Let every applicant work through problems that
| require them to train several hundred hours prior to interviewing
| and never use again on the job. What's that - - you already did
| them twenty years ago to get into b-school and therefore should
| be exempt? You don't say..
| kodah wrote:
| > But then I went to the in-person interviews. Being a self
| taught software developer who has been programming since I was
| 12, I had no idea how to reverse a binary tree. Or whatever I was
| supposed to do with some of the probability related word problems
| I got. Or certain questions about complicated SQL queries (I use
| an ORM, rarely do I need to write a query by hand). I had been
| working as a consultant and/or starting companies for almost 10
| years and found the b2b sales process is literally nothing like
| the hiring process for SV companies. In one we talked about
| project goals and solutions, in the other we talked about
| hypothetical word problems that I have no doubt are popular in CS
| programs.
|
| Some of the views you will find below are conflicting. No need to
| call me a hypocrite, I am familiar with my dissonance on this
| matter.
|
| I'm a self-taught engineer and I work in the SV and SV-adjacent
| scenes. People who are self-taught genuinely have a hard time at
| the beginning and middle stages of their careers, to the extent
| that it can break you. If you try to explain this to any CE or CS
| graduate it's like they lift their magical empathy goggles and
| provide a full stream of excuses for the current paradigm that
| excludes both good and bad talent.
|
| Where I'm about to be a hypocrite is now. My unpopular opinion is
| that gatekeeping is just fine, but it's all in the details. If
| you are gatekeeping based on knowledge that is commonly acquired
| in college, then you are gatekeeping for education and by proxy
| gatekeeping for status. If your interview process involves binary
| search but you don't do binary search by hand during your day to
| day, you are gatekeeping for education and by proxy status. That
| said, I'm a curious person and I know how to implement some
| recursive binary search because fiddling with sorted numbers can
| be fun when I'm inebriated and bored. It also shows some uncommon
| competency, so it _is_ a great gatekeeping tool for curiosity and
| quality. The question I began asking myself is how I balance the
| equation. If a non-college /CS/CE educated person struggles with
| more fundamental math, then the trick is to introduce tasks which
| also disqualify them in higher numbers. For this, I found systems
| design to be an incredible tool, and one that non-college/CS/CE
| people tend to excel at. I'm sure there's more. At the end of the
| day, my team has a high bar for quality needs, but balancing the
| equation was important so that people like me would still get
| through the pipeline.
| omega3 wrote:
| It's hard for me to understand how someone that portrays
| themselves as intelligent, successful and on top of that mentions
| HN didn't understand how the tech recruitment works.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| I always get a vicarious scare from that kind of doom porn post.
| After nearly 40 years of the thrill of the keyboard and
| accumulating a studio/lab tan, I never had one of those
| 20-questions interviews. In days of yore, tool kits barely
| mattered beyond good knowledge of a language, some sort of
| platform-specific API or the other, and (rarely) deep knowledge
| of an esoteric processor.
|
| Truth is, of course, that the work has changed in fundamental
| ways. Established companies moved from the cowboy approach
| (buncha people, money, a trade show in a year, here's a product
| definition, GO!!) to what smells a lot more like an assembly line
| gig. Finally hitting a modern shop is what made me finally
| retire. Modern practices, while perhaps efficient in some way,
| are no fun.
|
| Give me a 20 year old body, and I'd go into the trades or some
| sort of purposeful anachronism (blacksmithing?) at this point.
| personjerry wrote:
| > A failed startup is a common enough story. Conventional wisdom
| tells potential founders not to worry about failure because they
| can "fail up" when things go wrong. In my experience, this was
| not the case.
|
| How do you "fail up"? Asking for a friend :)
| secretsatan wrote:
| This resonates with me, I lost my job just before my forties. It
| was in a pretty specialized field using a proprietary language
| not known outside of it. I was also in a non native country.
| While I could have probably found another job in the same field
| using the same skills, it would most definitely involve moving to
| another country and I was really settled where I was. I was also
| having visions of slowly becoming too specialized and ending up
| in a basement somewhere looking after a legacy system.
|
| I'd been working on an OSX app as a side project for fun and
| decided to develop that, if only to add an other skill while I
| still looked for another job. After a little interest this
| developed into an iOS app and that started selling a few units a
| week, but nowhere near enough to pay the bills. (It still brings
| me in beer money every month)
|
| All the time I was looking for another job, slowly running out of
| money, this was for 4 years. I'm not university trained, had
| worked with this language no knew about for near twenty years,
| now over 40, in a country where I wasn't completely fluent in the
| language and getting interviews was hard, really hard. Of the
| interviews I did get, one interviewer told me the app I had
| written wasn't technically possible, another told me I'd never
| keep up with younger kids.
|
| I had just about run out of money when I finally landed an
| interview at a company looking to develop an iOS app and also in
| a similar field to what I worked in before, luckily they needed
| someone right away and I aced the interview. I've been there 3
| years now maing a great impact on their existing app, and now
| after developing and proposing a new app to the company, I now
| work on that. I feel my employment prospects are in a much better
| place for the future, with a successful app under my belt in an
| environment people actually know about.
|
| It was tough though, just sorting out the mess I had got into
| with surviving on my last pennies and getting into a pretty bad
| state psychologically is something I'm still dealing with.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Your story is yours to tell. The way it sounds to me, you started
| a startup in 2013, you had great success initially, you worked
| day and night on the MVP, but then something went wrong with the
| business plan (not your coding skills) and the startup failed.
| You made it 3 years though! You had happy customers who were sad
| to see the product go.
|
| And then you took 5 years off to pursue other things. Yes, you
| made a "computer game" (no one calls them that), but I don't
| think that's worth mentioning.
| nassycheezy wrote:
| Your lesson should also include preparing interviews just like
| you prepare an exam. It sucks but it's a standardized process to
| evaluate some capabilities that decrease the risk of losing $$$
| for the company that hires you.
| pirate787 wrote:
| I am familiar with this trap. Self-taught programmers from the
| first wave of the web are now middle-aged and are competing for
| jobs with younger programmers who have STEM degrees. This
| situation is especially complicated by a period of time of self-
| employment -- another job hunting hurdle.
| zerkten wrote:
| Isn't a better approach here to start taking some contract jobs
| to move away from the self-employment status? That way they can
| start getting closer to normal employment, build a more
| relevant network, get some money flowing in, possibly build
| some more relevant skills, etc.
| _0o6v wrote:
| This was a good read. Many tech companies (and some non-tech
| companies) talk the talk about hiring from a diverse crowd, then
| interview them as if they're all CS bros (reverse a tree,
| "justify the text" bullshit leetcode nonsense, 8 hours of
| interviews), the exact kind of stuff that people from diverse and
| non-traditional backgrounds don't know and don't care about.
| bajsejohannes wrote:
| Unpopular opinion, maybe, but:
|
| I don't really get why "reversing a binary tree" seem to be
| used as an example of what's wrong with hiring. I will say,
| though, that if someone said "how do you reverse a binary
| tree?" I would have asked the follow up question: "what do you
| mean by that?". If asking that would be used against me, sure,
| that's bad hiring.
|
| But if the answer is: "swap all the left and right nodes in a
| binary tree", then... isn't that pretty basic programming?
| tfehring wrote:
| It's funny, I've heard "reverse a binary tree" as the
| canonical coding interview algorithm question for over a
| decade and I've never stopped to think about what it actually
| involves. But I just Googled it and it seems like you're
| right...and yeah I feel like if you know how recursion works
| and you know what a decision tree is, it seems like a pretty
| trivial question.
| pokler wrote:
| For me, the 'reverse a binary tree' question goes back to
| the creator of Homebrew being rejected from Google for not
| being able to answer that question:
| https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
| UK-Al05 wrote:
| It's a common joke interview question. I don't think anyone
| has acutally asked it?
|
| I find high end jobs tend to ask some form of problem that
| can be tackled using dynamic programming techniques. Maybe
| couple of easier ones in the first interview.
|
| I agree with most people. I never use these skills in the
| job. I think they're a intelligence test in disguise.
| tfehring wrote:
| Oh, if it's just a joke that went over my head then that
| totally makes sense! Though in fairness there are
| apparently-serious interview questions that are even
| easier (e.g. FizzBuzz, though I don't think anyone asks
| that anymore either) and I've been asked interview
| questions that aren't much harder.
|
| I mostly agree with your impression, though even after
| adjusting for intelligence I bet there's a positive
| correlation between knowing how B-trees work and, say,
| having a good intuition for how to index a database.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Why would you even want to reverse a binary tree in the first
| place? Simply traverse it backwards, it's just as fast.
| CheezeIt wrote:
| Maybe you're passing it to some other function that doesn't
| do that, or you don't want to add some ordering flag to the
| datatype because that complicates things.
|
| But the purpose of the question of course is to be an easy
| question showing basic competency in recursion and pointer
| usage.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| I disagree completely. As someone from a non-traditional
| background, I think CS interviews dramatically increases the
| opportunities for me. I can't change my background, but I can
| prepare for coding interviews.
|
| I can't help but feel that people who think otherwise have
| never worked in literally any other field for any amount of
| time. Like it or not, you have to narrow down any candidate
| pool to like 1% of applicants before doing any sort of in
| person interviewing. Most places do this by only hiring people
| with degrees. If you're talking about a job that's going to pay
| as much as a software engineer, you can probably get away with
| only hiring people from elite universities, or who have
| connections within the company.
|
| Frankly to me the author comes off as arrogant and entitled. He
| feels he _shouldn't have_ to prove his worth because... he ran
| a failed startup? Then when his friends give him a job,
| literally the definition of nepotism, that _still_ isn't good
| enough? What does OP want? A system where only the best jobs
| are gained by nepotism?
| andreilys wrote:
| Nothing is stopping people from diverse and non-traditional
| backgrounds from learning DS&A, and spending a few weeks
| practicing Leetcode.
|
| It's not some arcade high art, it's quite accessible with lots
| of great learning guides.
|
| If you choose not to play the game, your pool of potential
| companies will be quite limited.
| slumpt_ wrote:
| On the contrary, tons of companies don't do this shit. FAANGs
| do without fail, but the world is not all FAANGs.
| andreilys wrote:
| Sure maybe at banks or companies where IT isn't a core
| focus but most tech startups and medium sized companies
| have taken the Leetcode cargo culting to heart
| freyir wrote:
| Leetcode interviews are exactly how I, as someone from a non-
| traditional background, got a job at a tech company.
|
| I didn't need to know 4+ years of CS curriculum, which I never
| would have learned on my own. I just needed to spend some time
| learning algorithms and data structures, and practice using
| free resources on the Internet.
|
| A pretty good deal for non-people who didn't study CS in
| college.
|
| In fact, someone who studied CS in college might be slightly
| miffed that they offered a job to an outsider like me just
| because I practiced data structures problems in my free time.
| criddell wrote:
| I've always wondered if these companies have data to support
| their hiring routine or if it's just a filter to convert an
| overwhelming number of applicants into a pool that's
| manageable?
|
| On the other hand, reversing a tree and problems like fizz buzz
| are pretty low bars...
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Of course they have data, but there are an infinite number of
| possible interview strategies and the current approach is at
| best a local maximum.
| dcow wrote:
| I honestly didn't really think it was all that interesting a
| read. Author burned out developing new products after an angel
| round "ruined" their company. Author wouldn't work at FAANG for
| "idealogical" reasons. Author doesn't know basic data
| structures and algorithms and applied to companies that index
| on that type of skillset. Author's tool belt is Windows and
| they're looking to join macOS shops.
|
| It's a string of poor decisions/planning followed by an
| unproductive rant. I don't particularly like leet code style
| interview questions either, Author could take a few months and
| brush up if they're a proficient engineer or if they're really
| opposed then pre-filter companies based on their interview
| style. Author could find a corporation outside of FAANG that
| isn't idealogically abhorrent. Author could look for windows
| shops. Author could consult (sounds like they've been
| successful with this approach).
|
| I suspect the author just isn't that great of an entrepreneur
| and tried to pivot into a high paying engineering role they
| just aren't really qualified for either.
|
| I agree about the SF observation at the end. If SF culture
| isn't working for you then explore elsewhere. I wish more
| people realized this before assuming they need to be in the bay
| area to be successful. It's a pretty limiting and potentially
| damaging assumption and I've seen people get super distraught
| about the idea of being anywhere else because they drank all
| the VC urban tech hub cool-aid and are just starting to come
| down.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I couldn't help being struck by "I needed to take a break and
| get over my burnout." Must be nice... I've been continuously
| employed since 1992 because I've had no _choice_ but to be
| continuously employed since 1992. Burned out or not, the
| bills don 't stop coming: if you're in a position to "take
| some time and focus on yourself" in between jobs, you're in a
| very fortunate place.
| lumost wrote:
| I learned CS fundamentals after graduating with a non-CS
| degree. It was hard, but I enrolled in a few classes through
| Harvard Extension School which provides access to Harvard
| classes to anyone and self-study.
|
| CS fundamentals have a big impact on the kinds of programs that
| individuals can write. Asking questions to show that a
| candidate can write a DFS, leverage multiple data-structures,
| or do X helps ensure that the individual is capable in this
| regard. Even for experienced candidates with lengthy portfolios
| you may find that someone drifted into an operational,
| management, or product role and has forgotten how to
| effectively program.
|
| However, the format of the whiteboard interview is awful and if
| one doesn't practice for it it won't turn out well. I'd love
| for there to be an alternative, but the other options all have
| their own cons.
|
| 1. Take home tests/projects - Requires the
| candidate to invest time which they may not have.
| - At scale this process is easily gamed.
|
| 2. Github projects/portfolio review - Many
| candidates don't have time to work on open source -
| The median github project has a low code standard, and is
| usually made for the purpose of learning something new.
|
| 3. Pair coding - Many candidates hate pair
| coding, personally if a company mentions that they do this in
| day to day work I will not work for them. -
| Difficult to calibrate.
|
| The only alternative I've seen is a "functional interview".
| Where the candidate is given sample code reviews for standard
| applications or a broken program to debug.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Also for #2 currently the company I work for is 'everything
| you write is ours'. Now in practice they do not really care
| but I really do not want to go through the _months_ of BS
| paperwork (and yes it is that bad) just so I can put some
| project I have on github. So at this moment my github is
| mostly just 'git' fiddling things. Where I use it to fiddle
| with remote git, or some weird thing I got git into and how
| to fix it. No real code there at all. So everything I have is
| private.
| guitarbill wrote:
| > CS fundamentals have a big impact on the kinds of programs
| that individuals can write
|
| Sadly, there seems to be very little correlation though. I've
| known programmers who graduated from a top CS school with
| extremely strong CS knowledge, who still write barely
| comprehensible code. And vice versa, people who have never
| been taught big-O, but who write the most maintainable, well-
| reasoned code I've seen. Most programmers aren't building
| e.g. databases, but writing software that provides business
| value.
|
| Take home tests can be ok, as long as they are limited in
| time (<2h). I was adverse to pair coding, but found it to be
| not as bad as I thought, unless it's 100% pairing all the
| time. Well, whatever the solution, I think anything that's
| closer to what day-to-day work at a company looks like is
| going to give richer feedback/signals than whiteboarding.
| lumost wrote:
| Fresh graduates from university are a poor sample of top CS
| skills as they often lack practical knowledge of software
| engineering required to be productive. However this doesn't
| show that an individual with a strong knowledge of software
| engineering but mixed CS would be highly productive.
|
| Ideally I'd want to interview for both skills.
| motogpjimbo wrote:
| I'm not necessarily agreeing with FAANG hiring practices here,
| but your comment is a classic example of the "racism of low
| expectations". Arguing that candidates who are "diverse" can't
| pass the same tests as a "CS bro" is no different from arguing
| that voter registration laws are racist because black people
| can't afford the internet, phones or cars to get registered.
| You're revealing quite a lot about what you think about
| "diverse" people without intending to.
| _0o6v wrote:
| Please don't lecture me about what I do and don't think,
| thank you.
| dnissley wrote:
| > _the exact kind of stuff that people from diverse and non-
| traditional backgrounds don 't know and don't care about_
|
| This attitude is condescending towards those that come from
| diverse and non-traditional backgrounds, most of whom are
| perfectly capable of learning and developing an active interest
| in these subjects.
| chrisdinn wrote:
| To piggyback on this solid comment, a lot of times it's us
| engineers who can fix this. I sat on L5 hiring committee at
| Google for a while and I really believe what diverse-background
| candidates need is more support at HC. I could sell these
| candidates to the committee often, with minimal effort all they
| needed was a champion at committee. That can be you, dear
| reader, at many of the big tech companies.
|
| Mostly HC is a ton of work (eg read 8 full interview packets a
| week) so if you express an interest and are a decent
| interviewer you're likely to get shot at it and you can make a
| real difference.
| mylons wrote:
| Leetcode interviews _are_ nonsense, but not even preparing for
| them as they're the predominant format, is just showing a lack
| of preparation.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Exactly. Does anyone think that even "non-self-taught"
| programmers may remember off-hand "how to reverse a binary
| tree" ? Interviews require preparation. They may be terrible
| selecting interview questions, but neither that nor being
| "self-taught" are valid reasons to claim "you can avoid
| preparing this interview".
| unilynx wrote:
| That's what I wondered about too.. OP knew about HN but
| hadn't picked up about how interviews apparently work at a
| lot of companies nowadays - the whole 'leetcode' stuff. Never
| had to deal with that, but heard plenty about it after just
| couple of weeks lurking on HN.
|
| Ah well, probably goes to show that everybody picks different
| threads/posts to read
| mylons wrote:
| It also might show some professionalism and interest if the
| interviewee were to ask "what kind of interview can I
| expect such that I can best prepare?"
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > not even preparing for them as they're the predominant
| format, is just showing a lack of preparation.
|
| Why would you spend six months preparing for them when you
| could build and launch an entirely new product in the same
| amount of time, which has a much higher expected value?
| porb121 wrote:
| You must be some incredible entrepreneur for that EV to be
| much higher. Strong leetcode skills print money with far
| less uncertainty than starting a company.
| mylons wrote:
| I don't disagree. The author's stated objective, though,
| was to find a job and went through this process willingly.
| [deleted]
| compiler-guy wrote:
| The author had failed at launching two different products
| over the past few years, so it isn't a gimme at all.
| bootwoot wrote:
| Does it have a higher expected value?
|
| If you land the job, you have a guaranteed, pre-specified
| income. Probably a high one, depending on the company.
|
| The massive risk of failure with launching a product should
| dramatically lower the expected value. Especially since
| most products, even if successful, won't pay as well as the
| corporate job.
| de_keyboard wrote:
| They are testing your ability to jump through arbitrary (and
| sometimes challenging) hoops.
| msoad wrote:
| which sounds similar to working on a large system, doesn't
| it?
| sidlls wrote:
| Not really, no. At least nowhere I've worked. Currently I
| work at a company that recently went public and operates
| near FAANG scale. There are some interesting technical
| debt issues to overcome and these are challenging. But
| they're not arbitrary or capricious. Most importantly
| they're not correlated at all with our interview
| questions, which are designed to select people with
| recent exposure to mid- and upper-level textbook CS
| problems. That is, they're going to naturally select from
| privileged groups (generally white and wealthy Asians who
| have attended top-tier universities).
| pankajdoharey wrote:
| I dont agree many of the word problems on Leetcode i.e simple
| and medium dont even need you to read a datastructure or
| algorithms book, what is required is some good logic and
| basic knowledge of a language. Then its just the way you
| approach the problems so they are actually very good problems
| and will definitely make you think better, clever and maybe
| just maybe make you a better programmer. It is more like
| solving math puzzles in school, no one can deny the
| usefullness of those math puzzles in making you think hard.
| hiq wrote:
| > as they're the predominant format
|
| Are they? I often read this on HN, but I'm starting to wonder
| if there's not a selection bias that's even bigger than I
| expected. Beyond the usual suspects, I've had more coding
| assignments for instance.
| gedy wrote:
| > "is just showing a lack of preparation."
|
| I think that puts a negative tone on people with other
| degrees than CS, even if they have good software experience,
| or are older with life commitments. Jobs and interviews in
| past did not ask this stuff, yet it's now implicitly
| considered prep. It's biased towards new CS grads and young
| folks.
|
| Many/most? companies needing devs do not use/need these CS
| "fundamentals", which do not automatically correspond with
| tech skills needed to do product development, at least in
| SaaS world.
| sneak wrote:
| This is how you make it worse for the next person.
|
| Life is too short to engage in nonsense unnecessarily.
| mylons wrote:
| I don't disagree. You can choose to interview at places
| that do not perform these types of interviews.
| jabedude wrote:
| I agree, but I don't think this is a place where it is fair
| to expect developers to "vote with their feet" and not
| participate in these interviews. The companies who do data
| structures and algorithms interviews seem to pay the
| highest in the industry
| slumpt_ wrote:
| You have to pay a lot (+ a lot of perks) to get folks to
| tolerate the amount of bullshit you put up with at a
| FAANG.
|
| There is a world of other more enjoyable and educational
| opportunities out there they must compete with. And so
| the cash shovel must be pulled out.
|
| People vote with their feet, and then a new generation of
| fresh grads are lured by the pay to fill their role.
| They'll grow sick of it in a few years, rinse and repeat.
| BiologyBum wrote:
| JN
| hrktb wrote:
| Arguably you have a chance to change things from the inside
| once you're in.
|
| I know it's not a good advice in general, but regarding
| recruiting in particular, it's a more realistic
| proposition.
| lisper wrote:
| Social signaling is too important _not_ to engage in
| "nonsense" on occasion. Geeks resist this, thinking that
| their special flavor of technical knowledge, which they
| alone possess, should transcend a million years of
| evolution that produced monkeysphere dynamics. The
| situation is laden with all manner of irony.
| sneak wrote:
| This is a straw man: choosing not to work for fools is
| not opting out of social signaling.
|
| If you know how to program, you have lots of options.
| lisper wrote:
| > choosing not to work for fools is not opting out of
| social signaling.
|
| That depends entirely on how you choose to define
| "fools".
| filoleg wrote:
| Agreed. I am quite ok with being a "fool", if it means
| working for a FAANG tier company and collecting FAANG
| tier compensation.
|
| I am not going to disadvantage myself by refusing to
| participate in this on some questionable principle. While
| I agree that Leetcode-style interviews are not the
| overall best, I am yet to come up with an alternative
| that addresses all those issues without introducing
| massive new ones. So it is a compromise. And as long as
| this compromise stands, I am fully intending on getting
| the most out of it.
| andreilys wrote:
| Leetcode prep is still better than spending hours on a take
| home assignment where the work often doesn't transfer to
| other interviews.
|
| Personally I think 6 Leetcode interview loops is better
| than 6 take homes, but that's just me.
| kache_ wrote:
| You do not need to be a CS bro to learn the basics of data
| structures & algorithms. If you're a self-proclaimed
| autodidact, couldn't you just learn it yourself?
|
| Of course, hnewslets who get filtered by such interviews will
| come downvote in force.
| everdrive wrote:
| >CS bro >self-proclaimed autodidact >hnewslets
|
| This really isn't a place for lazy, ad hominem attacks.
| kache_ wrote:
| I wouldn't describe "hnewslet" as lazy. Actually, I'm quite
| proud of that one.
| tolbish wrote:
| Doesn't Amazon interview you to make sure you align with
| their principles? Other companies do similar culture fit
| tests.
| notacoward wrote:
| The basics? Yes, certainly. The hyper-specific bits and
| pieces that show up over and over again in interviews? Not so
| much. Those are selected because they can fit into an
| interview time slot and be graded consistently despite widely
| varying skills among the interviewers. A lot of important and
| interesting algorithms are too complicated for that, but
| knowing them is no help in an interview. Mostly those
| interviews test for _recent exposure_ (either from being a
| recent grad or from having the luxury of spare time) which is
| not strongly correlated with ability to perform the job
| itself and can even be considered discriminatory.
| porb121 wrote:
| > The hyper-specific bits and pieces that show up over and
| over again in interviews
|
| One would think the same topic showing up "over and over
| again" would make it easier to study for interviews
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The reoccurring problem set being finite does not prevent
| it from being large, or costly to prepare for in terms of
| time.
| NeutronStar wrote:
| When's the last time you had to reverse a tree without the
| help of the internet at your current job?
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| OTOH this is standard interview-curriculum stuff that people
| can prepare for, which is fair in its own way. Moving away from
| this can also put people at a disadvantage because it makes it
| harder to know how to prepare for interviews.
|
| (I say this as someone with a weird background/employment
| history who'd be at a fair disadvantage in many respects if
| they had to get a normal job - but I know I can get a bit of
| normie cred by brushing up my algorithms at least...)
| k_sze wrote:
| I would argue that "preparing for interview" is exactly
| what's wrong. Nobody should be "preparing for interview",
| especially the really hardcore technical kind of interview,
| unless the _job itself_ really is about hardcore technical
| stuff. Most of the time the job isn't hardcore technical
| stuff, and so the performance during interview has zero
| correlation with performance on the job.
| [deleted]
| MattGaiser wrote:
| To me the really bizarre thing is that I so rarely talk
| about things I have actually done in interviews. Even for
| system design ones, I am often repeating information out of
| a book that I read as that is the correct theoretical
| answer.
|
| I suspect you could teach someone to pass a lot of tech
| interviews without them ever building a production system.
| ertian wrote:
| Talking about past projects selects for people who are
| comfortable talking at length in florid language about
| relatively little substance, and who are maybe
| comfortable exaggerating or stretching the truth.
|
| The most substantial and complex projects I've worked on
| can end up sounding simple and boring when I describe
| them. It's not that I can't discuss the details, it's
| just that I'm not good at _selling_ them. I tend to stick
| to facts and give a simple overview of the project, and
| I'm never sure how to approach the gritty details. And
| honestly, the right choice at the time was likely "Pair a
| MySQL db with a cron job" or something, and that sounds
| really underwhelming in an interview.
|
| On the other hand, I've heard people describe projects
| they worked on, and you'd have thought they were leading
| the charge on the reinvention of Internet. But when you
| do the math on their resume, they were two months out of
| university at the time.
|
| Those types of interviews basically and inevitably end up
| being "tell me a good story". Non-fiction is preferred,
| but interesting fiction will win out over boring reality.
| rescbr wrote:
| It really depends on the interviewer not wasting both our
| times and making it worth for everybody. I had candidates
| that weren't good sellers of their past experience, but I
| made sure to engage with them and they were in fact
| excellent professionals.
|
| When interviewing you can ask the candidate for details
| on their MySQL + cron job and investigate how do they
| think, architect and build a solution and how much
| bullshit they're talking. Were you given a very detailed
| task to perform and you just did it? Or did you reach the
| conclusion that a MySQL DB plus a cron job would achieve
| the results? Why? What if the cron job failed? Draw a
| rough flowchart of your script, etc.
|
| On the other hand, you can smell the bullshit of
| interesting fictions from a long distance when you ask
| those probing questions.
|
| Now, an interview on basic CS algorithms? The only thing
| I would know is that you have a good memory and can
| recall the Cracking the Code Interview book.
| ertian wrote:
| The same thing actually applies to DS&A interviews: a
| person can memorize the solution to a given problem, but
| the interviewer can easily throw some curveballs that
| require deeper knowledge to handle.
|
| It might come down to who is doing the interview: if
| you're a founder, or a team leader, and have done a lot
| of project management, you're likely to ask better
| questions about constraints, considerations, teamwork,
| etc, and get a better read on a candidate from questions
| about past experience. OTOH, a programmer giving an
| interview may not really care that much about those
| aspects or have a realistic idea of what a reasonable
| answer sounds like, and will thus tend to just jump
| through the interview hoops--and be more susceptible to,
| well, nonsense. On the other hand, they may actually be
| interested and invested in low-level technical questions.
|
| I've had really good tech interviews that were
| challenging and even fun, and I don't think I could've
| faked my way through. I've never had a good experiential
| interview. But then, I've only ever interviewed for
| front-line programming jobs at large companies.
| jlangemeier wrote:
| Focusing on the business need filled and results seems to
| be the best tactic here; we all hype ourselves, but if we
| were honest most of our work is boring "plumbing" to
| solve a business need. I mean, that's what we're hired to
| do, that's why we get paid; if we're not producing value
| for who we're working for, that relationship has broken
| down.
|
| Most day-to-day "programming" can be broken down into
| that "Pair a datastore with a processor" idea, or "know
| enough about the problem to google/SO a fix or solution,"
| so I don't think being honest about the mundane is a bad
| quality. Honestly, I think it's important enough, to make
| it at least a few of my questions on any formal
| interview, something akin to "what was a project that you
| thought would be simple but turned into something bigger,
| and how did you handle communication and management of it
| from that point forward?"
| k_sze wrote:
| At my last interview (which happened less than a month
| ago), I said I used to do "stupid stuff with Raspberry
| Pis" (my exact words) and I got hired.
|
| Maybe I was just lucky, but I think you don't have to be
| all "florid", just show enthusiasm when talking about
| what you did, and it doesn't have to come from the
| vocabulary; people can tell whether you're enthusiastic
| from your tone.
| guitarbill wrote:
| You can teach that. You can even pass most tech
| interviews without having ever touched version control or
| knowing how to use it. Maybe that's an easy thing for
| candidates to pick up once hired, but then so are algos
| you never need in day-to-day programming (like sorting),
| because you can simply look them up should you ever need
| to implement that.
|
| It's all a bit broken. Best method I've seen so far is to
| sit down with candidates and pair on some code, and it's
| still got issues.
| ionwake wrote:
| I have nearly 2 decades of experience and when I was
| asked to write a console log hello world app by a
| teenager and the CEO , who stared at me silently - well -
| I just couldnt bring myself to do it, fear of failure at
| such a simple task in such an OTT scenario mean I quit
| the interview on the spot as I did not want to know what
| the judgement could be.
|
| Im not saying its right, just that it didnt come
| naturally to me to be in that situation.
| mixedCase wrote:
| You should not be taking an interview so seriously that
| you freeze under such a situation.
|
| If you feel it's out of your control, it could've just
| been a bad day, but you may be suffering from something
| like generalized anxiety or a similar problem, you might
| want to look into that with a health professional.
| SamBam wrote:
| Exactly. And, just like unpaid internships, being able to
| invest a many hours every day into "preparing for an
| interview" is something that many people can't afford to
| do.
| k_sze wrote:
| The way I do "technical" interviews:
|
| 1. FizzBuzz, always, unironically; this easily weeds out
| 99% of the people who can't program. I don't even ask for
| an elegant solution, just a solution that works, in any
| language they choose.
|
| 2. Open question/toy problem that doesn't involve
| hardcore technical knowledge, just common sense. The
| question is framed in a way that the candidate can grasp
| an actual use case - e.g. "How would you design a
| database for a public library?" I would explain concepts
| like PK and FK on the spot if needed. I even let them use
| the internet to look up whatever they need. The idea is
| not to see how much stuff they have memorized from
| leetcode, but to see their thinking process and whether
| they are resourceful and ask the right questions.
| Seriously, some people don't even know what keywords, not
| even approximate ones, to use to Google stuff.
|
| Resourcefulness and asking the right questions have much
| higher priorities on my list of things to look for in
| candidates.
| ionwake wrote:
| well then Im out, I refuse to do fizzbuzz and I can
| program so already I spot a fallacy in your statements.
| stale2002 wrote:
| How else can I know that you know how to program though?
|
| Fizz buzz is literally a couple IF statements and a loop.
|
| As an interviewer, I need to know that you aren't just
| completely making everything up.
|
| This is an actual problem. There are actually people who,
| for some reason or another, made up a bunch of stuff on
| their resume and literally do not know how to use a loop
| or IF statement, and there is no way to know this, unless
| you ask them to do it.
|
| It is not an insult against you. It is just that an
| interviewer needs some small very easy check, just to
| make sure that you didn't completely make everything up.
| k_sze wrote:
| Heh. I don't claim my method is perfect, but I believe
| it's reasonably better than hardcore leetcode stuff.
| FizzBuzz is the kind of problem that doesn't need any
| preparation to solve for any person who can program. In
| fact, if I sense that the candidate already knows
| FizzBuzz too well, I can skip right over it and head over
| to the open question/toy problem. The candidate could try
| to bluff me about FizzBuzz, but that's not going to help
| them at the open question/toy problem. :P
| mason55 wrote:
| So what's the alternative? You can talk about work history
| but now you're locked out of the FAANG track if you don't
| start with an internship there because very few jobs are
| going to work at the same scale. Of course you could go
| learn about systems design at scale but now you're back to
| preparing for interviews.
|
| You can just sit and chat like you're friends but that's
| going to bias the interview process to "people who I like"
| which is just "people who are like me".
|
| I'm sure there are LeetCode questions that are more & less
| predictive of success but it does have the benefit of
| removing much of the bias in the hiring process, at the
| expense of requiring candidates to do some prep work. If
| you don't want to do the prep work then there are plenty of
| other places you can work.
|
| I think one challenge in these conversations is that people
| talk about what the interview process should or shouldn't
| look like without talking about what the interview process
| is trying to optimize for. And each person is going to have
| different ideas of what they should be optimizing for in an
| interview so they'll have different interview solutions.
| Then you argue about the solutions but the reason you
| disagree is because you're starting with different goals.
| k_sze wrote:
| See this reply I wrote to another branch of the thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26793636
| rektide wrote:
| being able to reason about expense & cost, being able to
| appreciate the path the computer has to take, has real
| value, even if it's not called upon day to day. it's just
| more pleasant working with people who bother to develop
| algorithmic insight.
| k_sze wrote:
| Yes, but you don't need to know how to "reverse a b-tree"
| for that. You just need to be _aware_ of something called
| algorithmic complexity and big-O notation. You don't even
| need to know _how to determine_ the big-O for all the
| known algorithms and data structures: they can be readily
| looked up in reference books.
| cryptoquick wrote:
| Wouldn't that just be interviewing a candidate based on their
| capability to prepare for interviews and not actually
| interviewing for candidates who would be effective at their
| jobs once hired? Could this be a false assumption that these
| are correlated, or a decent indicator of one over the other?
| sanderjd wrote:
| I have come to totally agree with this. The leetcode
| interview process actually _disadvantages_ experienced
| professionals and _advantages_ inexperienced upstarts with
| time to study.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Yeah, it probably is a good proxy for agism, given how well
| it correlates with university material that will very
| naturally rot from disuse (in most programming jobs).
| bmitc wrote:
| As an honest question, why do you want to work for places who
| interview and hire so pedantically?
|
| As a person with a diverse background and even more diverse
| interests, who likes to use jobs to learn things I don't know
| rather than simply apply things I do know, I use interviews
| as a natural filter. It can be rather unpleasant and
| frustrating at times, but in the end, it's better I don't
| work for some place that interviews like they got their
| process out of some Silicon Valley playbook.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Who said I did? I don't particularly; I'm self-employed and
| have been for a long time.
|
| When I see people getting all het up over technical
| interviews on various moral grounds, one notes that they
| often forgo reflecting over the possibility that any
| replacements could be even more
| bullshit/arbitrary/exclusionary.
| bmitc wrote:
| I inferred it but you said:
|
| > but I know I can get a bit of normie cred by brushing
| up my algorithms at least...
|
| So I guess the question would be "why do you want normie
| cred?", and then the rest of my comment remains the same.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Yeah ok, makes sense. (Apologies for making you spell out
| the question again; I could've probably inferred what you
| meant and answered that in my earlier reply).
|
| I have a history of self-employment and little formal
| education in programming per se. It might put potential
| employers at ease to be able to exhibit some conventional
| chops, and that kind of interview segment would give me
| an opportunity to. And algorithm-questions being more or
| less role-agnostic might mean less preparation rather
| than more for interviews when one is doing a bunch. OTOH
| if you want a particular role you should probably better
| brush up on what's needed for that role and show each
| application you make some individual love rather than
| hoping that you can carpet bomb tech company interviews
| in your city with algorithm-knowhow-powered interviews
| and get a job out of it.
|
| Given how theoretical this discussion is for me, I feel
| like I'm slipping into being some kind of devil's
| advocate role now. I would like to apologise to anyone
| (basically everyone else here will have more experience
| with tech interviews than I have) who's reading this
| rolling their eyes.
| bmitc wrote:
| No worries. I was basically just using your comment as a
| jumping point to say what I wanted to say anyway, as one
| does. Haha.
|
| My experience has been rough and painful at times,
| because I tend to be very pragmatically and interest
| driven in terms of what I learn, outside of being
| pragmatic about what might be asked in interviews. I also
| do not have a computer science degree, as I studied
| mathematics, but I self-study on interests of mine and
| take interviews as they come. This has made interviews
| rough at moments, but it's worked out so far, because I
| would likely be very unhappy at a place that quizzes me
| on something I could learn over a weekend or two if
| needed and grades me solely on that. I had one particular
| interview that wasted an hour and a half on tree
| questions, then a few more hours on random discussion
| topics and behavioral questions, and they never once
| asked me about prior work or side projects. It was a
| complete waste of time and energy, for both of us, and I
| have held that interview experience as a prime example of
| what I have read about Silicon Valley and FAANG-style
| interviews.
| onlyfortoday2 wrote:
| [I don't work for some place that interviews like they got
| their process out of some Silicon Valley playbook. ]
|
| This.
| zelon88 wrote:
| > Moving away from this can also put people at a disadvantage
| because it makes it harder to know how to prepare for
| interviews.
|
| This just proves that you can memorize a cheat sheet. What
| good is having interviews if they are so predictable that the
| applicant basically just repeats himself over and over again?
| That isn't an interview. That is gatekeeping. "Do you know
| the secret handshake?"
|
| I don't know the entire multiplication table by heart, but I
| know how to multiply. But that's not what interviewers are
| testing for. They basically want to see you rattle off a
| chart from memory as though that's a non-arbitrary universal
| indicator of capability.
| ertian wrote:
| A skilled interviewer can take the classic CS interview
| questions and combine them or take them in unexpected
| directions. Memorizing the solutions won't help with that,
| and it'll quickly become clear if your understanding is
| shallow.
|
| Of course, that doesn't really change the fact that the
| content of the questions has little to do with the work
| you'll end up doing. But I've done brainstorming with
| coworkers, and none of us had any ideas for interview
| approaches that would work better--except maybe those 2-day
| take-home projects that everybody hates. I think I remember
| a paper claiming that random acceptance would work about as
| well as the current interview process.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > A skilled interviewer can take the classic CS interview
| questions and combine them or take them in unexpected
| directions.
|
| Problem is, the percentage of skilled interviewers is
| likely not much higher than the percentage of skilled
| candidates.
| [deleted]
| happppy wrote:
| I am a CS graduate with around 4 years of exp nd I DO NOT KNOW
| HOW TO REVERSE A BINARY TREE.
| christiansakai wrote:
| On the other hand, plenty of us FAANG/Unicorn engineers would
| love the skillset of creating AND selling our own B2B skillset.
| Reversing binary tree is easy, dynamic programming is hella easy,
| but creating and selling your own B2B project and living as
| digital nomad? That's the real skill right there.
| golergka wrote:
| > it seemed like everyone I interviewed with was a caricature of
| narcissism and delusions of grandeur
|
| If some of the people you encounter are assholes, that's just
| life. But if all of them are -- that's you.
| cmollis wrote:
| I used to rail against this practice of using CS-y questions as
| hiring filters.. but I think now I get it. I just got a take home
| test from a start up where I had to find all bounding boxes in a
| 2d array of chars, filter out the overlapped (or contained
| boxes), and return the largest non-overlapping box.. whew. I
| wrote it with a recursive traversal to find each bounding box
| (something I thought was clever), in scala (their language of
| choice, although I could choose any), within a few hours on a
| weekend, and I still didn't get the job. Evidently, missed some
| edge cases, but in their view generally worked for the most part.
| Obviously, this isn't remotely close to what I'd (ever) possibly
| do there (it's a web portal.. or something), but I can see why it
| was used. It's like the SAT, it's something that can be cheaply
| deployed with immediate feedback. You don't really have to guess
| if this guy/girl is going to hack the basics. Now clearly it
| doesn't really control for any sort of specifics of experience,
| other than how you think, and how you put together a specific
| solution. They need to filter on something, other than a gut
| feel, or a good conversation. They're in the business of software
| development, so I guess this is (at least) some objective measure
| of that. What might be interesting is to know how many FAANG
| wash-outs there are, despite doing really well on these tests. I
| wonder if it's close to what the normal attrition rates would be
| at other companies.. maybe none of that really applies.
| msoad wrote:
| I would be the first to say our interview process is broken but
| frankly, if you don't want to participate you can find jobs that
| don't require CS/Algo. If you want to get those juicy pay checks
| from FANG and top startups, then you have to play the game.
|
| The point of those questions is not that you might need that
| knowledge at work. It is to make sure you can learn something
| difficult to learn. Trust me, once you join those big companies,
| there are a lot of difficult to understand concepts. They are not
| exactly the Leetcode questions but difficultly to understand and
| work on it is similar.
| rronalddas wrote:
| Got rejected from a FAANG job, because the interviewer didn't
| like Inorder recursive approach of tree traversal , he asked me
| to redo the question in O(1) Space. The interviewer specifically
| mentioned that , recursion or a stack can't be used.
| jblow wrote:
| If you can't reverse a binary tree, or don't even know how to
| approach the problem, you can't do most of programming. Fixing
| this should be a high priority, but the author seems to have no
| awareness of this.
|
| Programming is hard. It takes a lot of skill to do it well. If
| the author seemed interested in acknowledging this and developing
| skill, the article would not come off as whiny and pointless. But
| it does, because he's not interested in identifying and fixing
| the problem, which resides in his own house.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| I'd say that reversing a binary tree can be solved in two ways.
|
| 1. Never having thought about it before, generate an acceptable
| whiteboard algorithm from scratch while having a person or
| three bore holes in your back.
|
| 2. Throw a canned answer on the board.
|
| My impression is that large companies prefer Door Number 2.
| lostcolony wrote:
| "Can't reverse a binary tree" is different from "Can't do it
| flawlessly enough in an interview setting". It also isn't
| necessary to provide business value. The things I spend 98% of
| my time on at work are not raw data structures, but leveraging
| those data structures.
|
| The fact many companies interview for something that is mostly
| unpracticed by candidates in the field (only those practicing
| it at home), and won't actually be done on the job if hired, is
| a very strange place our industry finds itself in.
| chowells wrote:
| Reversing a binary tree isn't some crazy algorithmic knowledge.
| I'm concerned that so many people here think it is. What's gone
| wrong that makes people think reversing a binary tree is up
| there with hand-coding machine learning techniques?
|
| Reversing a binary tree is a basic test of whether you can
| implement a trivial requirement given a spec. How is that not
| related to what you do every day on the job? You get a lot of
| requirements, most of which are trivial tasks needed to
| maintain compatibility with some broken external system that
| will never get fixed. The solutions are two to five lines of
| code, once you've taken the time to understand the requirements
| properly - just like reversing a binary tree.
|
| This is neither a task that needs to be studied for nor an
| unfair pop quiz. It's an easier version of fizzbuzz. (You don't
| even need to worry about gotchas like getting case ordering
| wrong the way you do in fizzbuzz.) All it checks is that you
| have the basic skills necessary for reading and comprehending
| requirements and then meeting them with trivial code.
|
| If you can't do that, what _should_ an interviewer conclude
| about your capacity to do the job?
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > up there with hand-coding machine learning techniques
|
| A toy implementation of machine learning algorithms (e.g.
| backprop on an arbitrary neural network) on the CPU, is
| pretty simple as well.
| chowells wrote:
| If you already know the algorithms, sure. The thing about
| reversing a binary tree is that no one already knows the
| algorithm. It's not something you'll find in any textbook.
| It has no intrinsic meaning, so why would it be there?
|
| That makes it far better for an interview question. It's
| just a test of how you handle the sort of nonsense task
| that makes up so much day to day work. "Why do I have to
| frobnicate these doodads?" "Because the doodad processor
| requires it. That's just how it works, so we need to do
| it."
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| If you're doing matrix multiplication from scratch it sure
| isn't!
|
| But I do think that by hand implementations of k means or
| k-nn or cross validation would be appropriate for folks who
| are interviewing for ML positions...
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| For the record, I did look it up (back then) and I know how to
| do it. It's really simple. I still think it's stupid to ask
| about in an interview.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >certain questions about complicated SQL queries (I use an ORM,
| rarely do I need to write a query by hand)
|
| this is a red flag. even if you use ORM, you want to know what
| kind of query that it generated. certain query generated by ORM
| is actually quite dangerous like Entity Framework core.
| codingdave wrote:
| I don't see this as having anything to do with a startup failure.
| It sounds like burnout led to a lack of a desire to really put
| effort into preparing for interviews. If you don't know how to
| work with binary trees, go learn it. Frankly, a self-taught dev
| who then complains that their own self-teaching missed a topic is
| a red flag.
|
| This is a good read... and does show some struggles people can
| have. I just think it misidentified the root cause of the
| problems.
| serial_dev wrote:
| In my opinion his startup career and failures have nothing to do
| with the fact that (he thinks) he is unemployable.
|
| He (like many others) just doesn't want to play the "leet code
| white board" interview game, nor wants to play along and pretend
| to be super excited about some foolish cult-like startup only to
| receive less money.
|
| You can argue that the interview questions don't make sense, but
| in the end, if you decide you don't want to play the game and
| master the tech interview, then you will have less options.
| skizm wrote:
| > So at that point I really did say fuck it and just left the
| country to travel around and work as a digital nomad. I've been
| doing that for a couple of years now and I work an average of 2.5
| days per week on machine learning or web projects and have
| rebuilt my savings and my whole life.
|
| The only interesting part of the article, and the author doesn't
| expand on it. "I was trying to get a desk job, but when that fell
| through I just decided to travel, work remote all the time, and
| work half as much." Um, what? I have so many questions.
| jb775 wrote:
| You aren't unemployable, you just need to study LeetCode
| problems.
| alexc05 wrote:
| Hey Dave!
|
| I've recently started a podcast where I talk to developers about
| their experiences in programming, career advice, their thoughts,
| hopes and visions for the future of technology.
|
| I wonder if you'd be interested in telling your story in a more
| long-form interview format (that gets recorded and posted
| online).
|
| You can get a sense of the format by looking through the work
| I've already done:
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1SKRYr2Emfbas-8ZA9GYng
|
| I think your story is pretty compelling and I'd love to help
| share it with a wider audience.
|
| Though in all fairness, I'm sitting at 41 subscribers as of this
| moment, so reasonably speaking I should say "share with an
| audience which is expected to grow wider in the future"
|
| If you're interested, feel free to reach out on any of the
| contact channels listed here:
| https://github.com/AlexChesser/lgtm-shipit or even just open an
| issue directly in the repo and we can coordinate!
| [deleted]
| Simulacra wrote:
| This has been a huge worry for me if I ever went out on my own,
| failed, and wanted to get back in to the warm blanket of security
| of a corporation, I would need to explain that failure of
| independence. My gut tells me it will not go over well with
| employers, for example, they may think that I'll jump as soon as
| I get a new idea, or maybe I'm not a good success candidate.
| brhsagain wrote:
| As I read through this, I found myself thinking over and over,
| what should have happened instead?
|
| He did a startup, it failed, fine, he got some job offers, he
| turned them down, tried being a starving artist, realized he
| didn't really want to be one after all, hit the job market again,
| and found his market value wasn't what he wanted it to be. Sounds
| normal. It's like dating again after a long relationship.
|
| I don't think the conventional wisdom even says you're guaranteed
| a job after running a failed startup. It just says you won't be
| penalized for it. The last generation freaked out about their
| kids starting companies instead of getting jobs -- "what if it
| fails?!" -- and my generation replied, well, then you just look
| for jobs again. You're not locked out of the market. But you're
| not _automatically_ going to get a job either.
|
| I also don't understand the hand wringing around interviews. So
| you get asked to invert a binary tree, and you realize, shit, I
| don't know this. Might be the Asian in me talking, but what's
| wrong with going home, practicing binary trees, and trying again?
|
| Anyway, as far as a practical suggestion goes, having done a
| failed startup myself, it sounds like this person could try
| applying to other startups.
| defnmacro wrote:
| There's alot to unpack here and I resonate with it to a degree
| since I've also failed with 3 ventures so far, luckily while
| employed so as a result the failure wasn't so life or death,
| simply a learning experience.
|
| 1) Your 100% employable but like others have said you're not
| playing the tech interview gauntlet game.
|
| 2) Recover and reflect: Figure out what worked and what didn't
| work. This is important for your burnout recovery. Part of being
| burnt out means you feel incapable of achieving. This is not the
| case, reflect on what you did right and what went wrong,
| understand what you have to do to get where you want to be by
| taking stock of where you're at now. Then make a plan of where
| you want to be, keep yourself accountable, and every week analyze
| again where you are at and where do you want to be. Only make a
| plan after you have recovered.
|
| 3) De-risk your life, startups are inherently risky 96% of them
| don't make it to a Series B. However, you can build a SaaS
| product that gives you lifestyle money without taking on
| investors. Figure out how to take high impact low risk in
| everything you do in life. This allows you to have outsized
| returns on the things that work out and minimal drawdown for the
| things that don't. Sometimes you have to do risky things but if
| you're going to take risk find the metrics that you seem
| satisfied that make the risk worth it and then have a backup plan
| if it fails. This way you'll never be surprised.
|
| Best of luck!
| ijidak wrote:
| > Not only were these programming word problems ridiculous, but
| it seemed like everyone I interviewed with was a caricature of
| narcissism and delusions of grandeur
|
| Felt the same way during a recent spate of software interviews.
|
| And I have the MIT CS education.
|
| But I don't know all the latest lingo and CQRS or whatever is
| cool this week.
|
| Thankfully, an old employer knew my value and brought me back to
| develop for and manage a large, cutting-edge project.
| mylons wrote:
| I read the blog, and see it as a failure to prepare on the
| author's part. I HATE the software engineering interview process,
| but like any good engineer I do some research and prepare. I have
| to re-learn the graph algo implementations every time I interview
| for a job that has that kind of process. The author seemingly did
| not study for something they could have been prepared for.
| soniman wrote:
| If hiring is so broken, then some company could succeed by hiring
| all the non-traditional applicants. Has nobody tried this? "We
| hire weirdos" might attract a lot of high-quality applicants.
| There is a market failure here or there isn't.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But then I went to the in-person interviews. Being a self
| taught software developer who has been programming since I was
| 12, I had no idea how to reverse a binary tree.
|
| Sure, that's a little bit understandable if the problem came at
| you out of nowhere, but...that basic algorithms questions are
| common technical screens is hardly hidden knowledge. Abd that
| aside, even without having studied it specifically, reversing a
| binary tree isn't, as problem solving challenges a developer
| might face, a particularly challenging one.
|
| > Or whatever I was supposed to do with some of the probability
| related word problems I got.
|
| Examples here would be useful to understand the complaint; I
| mean, since you say you were actively looking for data scientist
| vacancies, I would assume that both understanding and identifying
| needed clarification on statistics word problems ought to be in
| your wheelhouse.
|
| > Or certain questions about complicated SQL queries (I use an
| ORM, rarely do I need to write a query by hand)
|
| While you may not usually write queries by hand, using an ORM
| doesn't prevent you from needing to understand complex SQL for
| complicated queries, and, I mean, I don't known what position
| this was an interview for, but if you aren't the person dictating
| tech stack decisions (as presumably you were as a founder), you
| may not have the luxury of avoiding get your hands dirty with
| SQL, so its not an unreasonable thing to test.
|
| > I had been working as a consultant and/or starting companies
| for almost 10 years
|
| So why weren't you either:
|
| (1) Continuing to work as a consultant, either independently or
| in a consultancy?
|
| (2) Applying for the types of b2b sales, or other business-
| oriented positions for which starting a company or independent
| consultancy experience would be relevant?
| brightball wrote:
| I feel this. I had a hard time getting a job after mine shut down
| a decade ago because after running a startup you're quite
| literally a jack of all trades and many big corp jobs seem to aim
| for more specialization. DevOps seems to be the place to fit at a
| larger org after all that.
|
| I've since learned to just stick with smaller companies and I'm
| much happier.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I have two friends who ran their own small non-tech companies,
| and it's fairly clear companies don't value it when doing hiring.
| People have a fairly rigid idea of the sort of person they want
| to hire. They just see the time as "out of industry for years".
| vmception wrote:
| Wow this could be me!
|
| Almost the same experience, except without the obsessive marriage
| to poor products and I actually did learn how to pass those l33t
| code and behavioral interviews.
|
| Basically I left the software career and did a tech startup that
| essentially failed but made me an okay amount of money (yay no
| dilutive capital), tried to leverage my newly awesome network to
| get a job and also went to through the recruiter path. Once I
| started getting good at the interviews and solving them above the
| average time, I still wasn't getting hired. Like this guy, I did
| this with about 20 different companies, although when I look at
| forums people are doing this with way more companies and way more
| time studying and practicing. So that's kind of a pathetic waste
| of resources happening industry wide.
|
| All the big tech companies interview me for an L5 or equivalent.
| All the non-big tech companies just didn't want to pay me more
| than $180,000. Which eventually turned into a big deal because
| some disgruntled ex-hiring managers would retroactively contact
| me and tell me they got overruled and that my skillset and
| experience should have landed me roles at 180-220k. Improbable
| and a completely separate discussion, (am I getting overriden by
| a particular VC board member? nah it doesn't go that deep), any
| way I honestly just have better things to do. I had begun to be
| willing to take a much lower more relatable salary or
| compensation package, but then I found another lucrative project
| to do (with no dilutive capital yay) and that's been great.
| Crypto market picked up again too, great way to make money. It is
| still strange that the private sector doesn't accurately value
| this skillset yet (employed "blockchain jobs" pay low with
| startups paying the highest and midsize companies that are
| dabbling in blockchain are treating it like an intern play thing.
| all while contract and solo work pays or earns several multiples
| above market.)
|
| Yes, another similarity is our observation about San Francisco
| and the Bay Area being just a working class town with high
| salaries. People there think they are special because the
| salaries are high. But it's really just like factories, like the
| article mentioned. The idea that they're special allows for all
| kinds of cultish abuse.
|
| Use this thread as a collection of anecdotes to get a view of the
| reality, as soon as I was willing to interview for a role that
| would pay between $110,000-$135,000 the entire experience was
| completely different and better. Despite thinking "ah I'm an
| unemployable founder" or "ah maybe I'm older and I hit the wall I
| read about" or "ah my google results must not be good" or
| something, the experience at the lower salary (but high to that
| company in a different city) matched my positive interview and
| onboarding experiences earlier in my career. I did not accept as
| I was on to other things. So really all I have left for
| comparison purposes is the compensation: industry wide, people
| just don't want to pay _me_ above a certain amount. They look at
| me and don 't say yes. So there is a glass ceiling for me in that
| field, not the first person to draw that conclusion. Travel and
| doing my own thing is more fulfilling - I have a lot of lucrative
| software projects to continue rolling out - although the earnings
| are mostly similar to FAANG L5's with vesting stock price
| appreciation, its not as risk free as just showing up to a FAANG
| job as I meet many of them in my travels (over the last 6 months
| any way) and get a feel for their obligations or lack thereof,
| hope the industry gets better!
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| > can't get a job at the kind of SV company that asks you to
| invert binary trees
|
| > calls it being unemployable
|
| What a narrow minded view on the world of professional software
| engineering. There are plenty of ,,pays the bill" jobs that don't
| require grinding leetcode.
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| While the digital nomad lifestyle is attractive, I'm always
| bemused by people on HN who are concerned about burnout, but also
| don't even seem to consider the non-coastal US. It's a less
| drastic option than leaving the country entirely.
|
| A lot of the annoyances with SF companies just go away (of
| course, there are new problems too). Nobody will ask you to
| implement a red-black tree from memory, you can consistently work
| under 40 hours a week, and interviews are more focused on
| behavioral questions and project experience. If you're ok with a
| salary in the low 6 figures, it's really not bad.
| sneak wrote:
| A lot of US coastal people grew up in the non-coastal US. The
| cost savings are there (to some extent) but we left there for a
| reason.
|
| Leaving the country isn't "drastic": 96% of humans live outside
| of America.
| optimiz3 wrote:
| Did those 96% of humans leave their home country or
| previously live inside America?
| viro wrote:
| > 96% of humans live outside of America.
|
| Do 96% of English speakers live outside of America tho?
| sneak wrote:
| About 75% of English speakers live outside of the USA.
| viro wrote:
| My google card shows closers to 62%. but regardless ESL
| technically broke the point I WAS going to make.
| cies wrote:
| Not leaving the country is "less drastic" (OP's words) than
| staying, especially for USers.
|
| > we left there for a reason.
|
| Yups. So did immigrants who came from outside the US now
| living in the big coastals.
| skynet-9000 wrote:
| Or less, but agreed -- the quality of life is so much higher.
| Can you imagine a world where you don't have to fight traffic
| or step around human feces or discarded needles that were
| helpfully provided _by the city_?
|
| Sure, you might end up moving in a year or two when the job
| plays out, but you can just move to another non-coastal town.
| Be flexible and follow the jobs, and you'll see more disparate
| types of environments (and learn more about how different
| people think) than you ever could. You can learn pretty much
| everything there is to learn from a given team in less than six
| months, so looking at it as a consulting or training gig (even
| if it's a full-time job) can give you a much stronger resume.
| (Bonus, you learn people skills from dealing with people from
| many different regions and backgrounds.)
| Fern_Blossom wrote:
| Just want to throw it out there. Sure, you have a sub-six-
| figure salary in different parts of the country, but your
| rent/mortgage for a similar sized home is a third. Compared to
| Cali, your taxes are less too in most states.
|
| While your absolute salary is less, your purchasing power is
| far greater compared to SV, SF and LA. I know someone is going
| to pick some outliers like NYC, Seattle and so forth. There's
| still more places to live than that.
| cma wrote:
| Historically your stock incentives have done a lot worse
| outside of those areas though.
| Fern_Blossom wrote:
| People have also gotten rich off the lottery. Doesn't mean
| that's something you should always bank on. People have
| different lifestyle desires with various degrees of risk
| tolerance. There are different locales that benefit to
| different lifestyles. Understanding that difference allows
| people to live happier lives. Everyone catering to one
| lifestyle because a handful of people like it is not
| exactly ideal for any society.
| lostcolony wrote:
| A lot of the jobs (barring remote) in non-coastal US are for
| non-tech companies. There's a definite cultural difference
| between a company whose product is software, and a company
| whose product is -something else-. The article's comment about
| tech being the new factory workers rings true, but more true
| for that latter case, where devs are a particular kind of cog
| (a notably expensive one to boot), rather than a valuable
| asset.
|
| Though that's probably less of an issue if consulting.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| The title is a bit misleading. It's kind of negative spin for
| click bait value.
|
| In the end he found he was happier as a freelancer, basically.
|
| He has high standards, ethically, and he is competent and knows
| how to get things done and has little tolerance for people's BS.
| And he knows how to make enough money to keep body and soul
| together without having to put up with that shit, so that's what
| he's doing.
|
| I would say he's wildly successful and has found his escape hatch
| from the rat race and we need more such stories in the world, not
| less.
| kaiju0 wrote:
| A guy with a proven track record of delivering on a deadline and
| he is getting passes. The thing that would make the most sense in
| this is they saw he would not be happy in the roles he was
| applying for.
| jgrowl wrote:
| This is what I would assume too. I remember sitting next to a
| manager's cubicle at GE and hearing him discuss candidates. He
| would say things like, "Wow, this guy applying for this entry
| position has a PhD, he definitely would get bored and leave
| quickly." These places just want to fill seats at max capacity
| and turn over just means more work.
| not_kurt_godel wrote:
| Delivering what exactly? Half the article is how he failed to
| deliver on a startup and a game...and then failed in interviews
| too.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Internships are better than an interview.
| newbie578 wrote:
| Unfortunately this is the "dark side" of entrepreneurship, and
| people show be made more aware of it.
|
| We all love to open HN and read the new PG essay and dream "I am
| the one", but the odds are not in our favor.
|
| The extreme survivorship bias also doesn't help. But honestly, I
| don't know what the ideal solution is.
|
| Even though I read stories like these, hear all about how the
| odds are stacked against, how difficult and hard it can be, I
| keep wondering a simple "What if?".
|
| I guess you could say that there can be a 100 reasons not to do
| something, and yet one good reason why is more than enough to
| offset the 100 bad ones.
| officehero wrote:
| I think one also has to be a little bit "crazy"/"idealistic" as
| a person to be a real entrepreneur. As a realist (coder) in a
| tiny startup I know I could never run it like my CEO. He may
| not be the smartest guy but man does he have belief in the
| idea. If I were in his shoes I would have given up 1 year ago
| and bankrupted, but he kept investing his own money and now he
| might actually get it sold for big cash.
| worker767424 wrote:
| > mostly at companies I had ideological issues around
|
| > I should have gone to a small, cheap island nation and swam
| with dolphins
|
| > After some months of that, and with enough runway to go for
| another year, I went back to the game and finished it.
| Unfortunately, it wasn't as finished as it should have been
|
| > questions about complicated SQL queries (I use an ORM
|
| > they fired me after a few months because they found they
| couldn't bully me into working longer hours for lower pay.
|
| > I really did say fuck it and just left the country to travel
| around and work as a digital nomad
|
| I can't believe he'd post this publicly. The reasons he's
| unemployable are he never dug into the technology he's using,
| he's bad at finishing things, and he's a bit of a beautiful and
| unique snowflake.
| fairity wrote:
| What makes you say he's bad at finishing things? He stuck with
| his startup for 5+ years. That shows a good amount of
| perseverance.
|
| What makes you say he never dug into the technology he's using?
| He clearly dug into it enough to release a couple finished
| products - that's more than most engineers can say.
|
| My guess is that your lack of sympathy is an indicator of
| having not faced this degree of failure in your own life, else
| you wouldn't take such a cynical perspective.
| worker767424 wrote:
| > What makes you say he's bad at finishing things?
|
| His game.
|
| > What makes you say he never dug into the technology he's
| using?
|
| The bit about using the ORM. He said he's been a programming
| since 12. Not being OK at SQL by the point he's at is a
| smell.
|
| > My guess is that your lack of sympathy...
|
| I'll halfway grant you that. I've failed more publicly and
| more spectacularly, but I'm a better engineer, so despite
| that, I'm still employable.
| adamrezich wrote:
| finishing solo game projects is harder than most people
| think
| hannofcart wrote:
| @dave_sullivan What's the title of the game you got around to
| finishing? Would love to try it.
| quantumofalpha wrote:
| > Being a self taught software developer who has been programming
| since I was 12, I had no idea how to reverse a binary tree.
|
| I fail to see the link between the premise and conclusion here.
|
| I'm also largely self taught and been programming since
| childhood. And although I also did go to a university to study
| math, most of what know about algorithms is from self-learning to
| satisfy own curiosity, _not_ from attending university courses.
| University gave me a chance to participate in ACM ICPC and paid
| for my flights a few times, for that I 'm grateful - I was able
| to land a FAANG job right out of school thanks to my success at
| it. But they did _not_ teach me algorithms and competitive
| programming, that was all self study.
| danielrhodes wrote:
| This is a common problem among ex-founders. Founders, almost by
| their nature, will take unconventional paths to get where they
| are. Many are highly talented and fast learners and can be great
| employees. But to medium and large companies which have trained
| their processes to find conventional and stable people, these
| founders look like red flags. It's a shame because typically the
| self-starter high ownership type of person that companies love
| and think are hard to find are the exact traits these founders
| have.
|
| For founders, the reality is that part of their skillset is not
| transferrable into a more structured company. Working with
| bureaucracy, interviews, communication, working with large groups
| of people, high amounts of structure, planning, and risk
| mitigation are not skills that overlap with starting a company
| and going from 0 to 1. If you're a founder type who wants to take
| a break and work at a more established company, you should be
| prepared to make this transition. All is not lost though - if you
| plan to start another company someday, be a sponge for how a
| larger company works - it will pay dividends later when you need
| to create this yourself.
| xwdv wrote:
| I didn't see anything saying that the author had a CS degree.
| I'll be frank, we get a lot of applicants with no degree who
| claim to be "self-taught". Because teaching yourself isn't really
| accredited, self taught can mean anything from a genius level
| programmer who was too cool for school and cranks out amazing
| stuff, to some bootcamp grad who read some stuff once and went
| through some tutorials and thinks they're now ready to start
| touching our web scale systems. It takes too much energy to sift
| through the bullshit and in the end the ROI isn't even worth it
| because we don't need a prodigy we just need someone who we can
| trust to do decent work.
|
| A CS degree isn't hard to get in the grand scheme of things, and
| not getting one is basically the equivalent of burning your boat
| and going all in to whatever alternative path you choose, because
| if you fail you'll just end up unemployable later on.
| II2II wrote:
| > A CS degree isn't hard to get in the grand scheme of things,
| and not getting one is basically the equivalent of burning your
| boat and going all in to whatever alternative path you choose,
| because if you fail you'll just end up unemployable later on.
|
| I wouldn't go that far. While the work involved may not be that
| hard, a CS degree may be inaccessible or a poor fit for many
| people.
|
| That said, I agree with the premise that it is hard to evaluate
| self-taught individuals. It is far too easy to have gaps in
| knowledge if one doesn't approach their studies systematically,
| it is difficult for the learner to assess their own learning
| without a realistic baseline to compare against, and too many
| businesses oversell the quality of their programs (e.g.
| bootcamps).
| the_only_law wrote:
| > A CS degree isn't hard to get in the grand scheme of things
|
| I'm not going to call it hard quote yet, but I've been a bit
| shocked at just how much the university process is designed
| specifically for 17/18 years olds prepped and groomed the past
| few years for it. There seems to be little at all in the way go
| good education options for working adults and what little is
| directly targeted at that demographic, even from otherwise
| legitimate schools, feels extremely (I'd be happy to expand in
| this but I want to keep this comment short-ish)
| EMM_386 wrote:
| What about people who went to college for something else but
| have been programming for many years professionally and have
| absorbed vast skill-set?
|
| If the degree on the resume puts those people into the "pass"
| bucket automatically, that is the wrong approach.
| xwdv wrote:
| Think about it. 20 years ago? They were hired in simpler
| times, when people weren't even sure if the internet was
| going to be a big thing yet and if anyone could even make
| money off of it.
|
| That probably wouldn't fly as well today or going forward as
| the field matures. Get your CS degree.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Given that we can expect a rising degree of risk adversity
| and narrowmindedness as the tech industry ages into
| something resembling other major industries, it would
| probably be a good idea for the readers to take xwdv's
| advice even if they disagree with the ethos behind it.
| lostcolony wrote:
| If having an unrelated degree on the resume puts those people
| into the "consider" bucket automatically, that is also the
| wrong approach.
|
| To be honest, I can see requiring a degree for certain
| positions. But given the work most software devs are doing,
| I'd be happy to consider 4 years work experience. The number
| of times I need someone to invert a binary tree so far is 0,
| but the number of times I've needed someone to build some
| basic CRUD functionality following a UX spec is too numerous
| to mention. I don't need my degree to do the latter; I don't
| need to hire a degreed person to do it either. And even
| things that a degree might help with (recognizing an O(n^2)
| implementation when an O(n) is available) are lessons you can
| learn pragmatically by doing (i.e., having senior engineers
| point out issues in code review).
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| As a self-taught dev who has been continually employable for a
| long time, I don't know what you're talking about.
| [deleted]
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| I'm sorry for all the people who downvoted you, but this is
| just a practical fact. You may think the CS degree is utterly
| useless, that they teach you extremely outdated stuff that you
| will never use in practice, that it's just elitism in all but
| name, a way to filter people with economic resources, etc. etc.
|
| And I agree with almost every opinion you may have on this; but
| the thing is, it is just harder to come by a decent opportunity
| without it. Nice that you try to set your foot in the door here
| politically, but the cost for that is being on a crappier job.
|
| I was an idealist too, 20 years ago...
| dcolkitt wrote:
| At the very least if you don't have a CS degree, you should be
| able to demonstrate CS-knowledge by prepping for basic
| whiteboard interviews.
|
| Imagine what this guy looks like from the hiring managers side.
| Would you take the risk of hiring him for a software
| engineering position? Do you have any confirmation whatsoever
| that he can even write a single line of code? Yeah sure, he
| founded a startup, but you literally have no idea who wrote the
| actual code there or even if anything functional was even
| produced. Maybe the reason the startup failed is because the
| software was incompetent.
|
| I get it. We all hate reversing a binary tree, and most likely
| we'll never have to do it in day to day work. But here's the
| thing, almost anyone who can reverse a binary tree on a
| whiteboard has basic competence at writing code. The reverse
| isn't necessarily true. There are lots of great coders who
| aren't good at whiteboard interviews. But hiring managers don't
| care about false negatives. Bad hires cost a truly staggering
| amount of money, overlooked candidates cost virtually nothing.
|
| When I hear or read about people who are failing to get SWE
| jobs, it's usually because they do not have any demonstrable
| credibility of basic competence at writing code. To get a seat
| at the table you must bring at least one of the following: a
| pedigree, a network of credible people who can vouch for you,
| your name publicly attached to a successful project _or_ the
| ability to crush whiteboard interviews. A manager that hires
| somebody who meets none of those criteria is taking an enormous
| risk.
| aulin wrote:
| What about other degrees? physics or math come to mind, they're
| probably self-taught at software engineering but they may have
| a problem solving and abstraction oriented mindset that far
| surpasses any ability to solve leetcode problems. They still
| shouldn't pass your initial screening?
| npsf3000 wrote:
| Getting a CS degree:
|
| Pro - You might get hired by xwdv.
|
| Con - You might get hired by xwdv.
|
| So far the cons seem to outweigh the pro's for me.
| saxonww wrote:
| No, not really. There are plenty of people who did not get a CS
| degree, for a variety of reasons, who can still be competent
| and help your company.
|
| If someone has a legit work history in our industry, but no CS
| degree, and their resume otherwise makes them look like a good
| fit, you should interview them. At worst they are terrible and
| you waste a few hours of your time.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| It is easy to end up in this hole. If you have graduated years
| ago or are approaching 30 and don't have an established brand
| with 9-5 schedule on your CV, you will be approached with
| caution. It's very demotivating to deal with rejection and
| arbitrary and daft questions.
|
| Regardless, I was interested in the Author's switch to digital
| nomad lifestyle - was it easier than interviews? Why? where did
| you go? etc. I'd love to hear more, and whether the author is
| enjoying it more than whatever FAANG job he was applying for.
| tharne wrote:
| When I was younger I commented to another coworker about how I
| didn't understand why employers place such high value on the MBA
| degree when the stuff learned obtaining it isn't all that useful
| in a real business.
|
| My coworker shook his head and laughed at me, saying, "No one
| hires an MBA because of what they know, you hire an MBA because
| you know they'll do whatever dumb thing you ask them to without
| too much complaining or pushback; you're hiring for polished
| compliance."
|
| I think these coding interviewers are more or less the same
| thing. They prove that the applicant is willing to eat a certain
| amount of sh*t without making a fuss about it.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Part of what is not necessarily recognized on HN is that high
| paying software engineering positions really do hire
| competitively. And part of that is often the BS whiteboarding
| stuff which almost everyone will need to prepare for explicitly.
|
| But regardless it is competitive at the well-compensated
| positions and things like "culture fit" etc. are also used. They
| can be very selective and just hire anyone they like. So one may
| be a genius and an experienced developer, but you may also be
| competing with someone who is a much younger genius, charismatic
| and with a well-regarded degree and good at whiteboarding.
|
| For me, being a little bit older and not interested in getting an
| associate's degree in white boarding algorithmic problems or
| dealing with a lot of stress from office politics, I am not
| easily able to obtain or maintain a high paying job. But I am
| able to live somewhere with a low cost of living and work on a
| contract basis that keeps me going.
|
| My goal is to build robots someday so I am taking advantage of a
| light schedule to learn/work on computer vision.
| npsf3000 wrote:
| lolwhat.
|
| Runs startup. It fails.
|
| Makes a game. It fails.
|
| Fair enough, those things are really hard to do.
|
| Gets into tech interview, asked a question he doesn't know the
| answer to and DOES NOT RESEARCH THE ANSWER FOR THE NEXT
| INTERVIEW?
|
| Now I'm starting to understand why the startup and game failed.
| Sure, reversing a tree is arbitrary. However, when there's a 6
| figure job on the other side of that arbitrary line... it's
| probably worth learning.
| pankajdoharey wrote:
| I felt the same for a long time till i started solving leetcode
| problems, what he really needs is to solve a lot of problems on
| leetcode instead of writing this blog.
| ideamotor wrote:
| I'm basically the same demographic, but I really question the
| author's judgment if the things he misses most about San
| Francisco is "In-n-Out and Mexican food."
|
| I travel to SF from Austin every year. What about the comfortable
| weather and giant healthy outdoor playscape, actual history and
| continued diversity and interesting things despite people like
| him, I could go on and on, it's beautiful.
|
| He didn't need to go on a vacation, he needed to look outside his
| damn window. Maybe it was joke and he misses these things as
| well. If not, what a dolt.
| yalogin wrote:
| A founder of a company that did everything they can to make the
| company viable has a lot more skills than programming. I would
| say after that long stint as a founder, programming will be the
| least valuable skill they would bring to the table. In that
| sense, looking for a programming job is the wrong approach. The
| author doesn't mention why they chose that line. If they are
| really only interested in going back to programming it's fine, if
| not it's a wrong decision IMO.
| darepublic wrote:
| I understand the frustration over random interviews. I would say
| tho if you keep getting data alg questions to just bite the
| bullet and practice them. It is the advice I'd give myself
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