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Nearly every bit of advice you read on interviews and how to get a job never happens in the real world. You can imagine how scary it is to read all the super t

Nearly every bit of advice you read on interviews and how to get a job never happens in the real world. You can imagine how scary it is to read all the super tough questions, going to the whiteboard, having to discuss passion projects, needing a solid github profile, knowing algorithms, data structures, strange math, and on and on. You start interviewing and you see that none of the above happens 99% of the time. You wasted 2 years learning a bunch of stuff when you really should have been interviewing six months after writing your first line of code.

icebraining 9y ago
I'd say that's more of a selection bias that bullshit. The only companies blogging about interviewing are the few ones that actually have made a conscious decision to deviate from the norm (regardless of the reasons). It's like if you were trying to evaluate the average math proficiency of the population by only reading blog posts about math. It would seem like everyone really knew math! Except of course, the only people who blog about math are the few that are into it. They're not bullshitting, they're just overrepresented. Not that I disagree with your original point, by the way; BS is rampant.
simonh 9y ago
The fact that so many tech professionals don’t have GitHub and Stack Overflow profiles, personal projects, etc is exactly why having those things helps you stand out. It’s definitely helped me, hugely, aside from just plain increasing my self confidence. I’m no web startup Silicon Valley brogrammer either, 50 something application support specialist in London.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I've never experienced anyone caring even the least bit about my GitHub and StackOverflow profiles.
aidenn0 9y ago
Every single interview I've been to has had at least one of those. None of them has had more than half though.
bcoates 9y ago
With the exception of the github profile, that's not my experience at all -- if anything, lots of hiring managers want to ape that sort of experience even if they can't really assess it because the alternative is something like this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/a-job https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/a-job Spending 2 years learning how to interview when you could have been spending 1.96 years getting passably good at something and 2 weeks on interviewing is madness, though.
rsp1984 9y ago
You start interviewing and you see that none of the above happens 99% of the time. You wasted 2 years learning a bunch of stuff when you really should have been interviewing six months after writing your first line of code. I agree with this. I have interviewed a good amount of engineers, both as a SWE at Google as well as founder of my own company. From that experience I can tell that the only thing that asking mostly hard interview questions does is reducing your candidate pool to 0. Even with mostly moderately hard questions your candidate pool at the end of the funnel is probably going to be around 5% to 10% as compared to the start of the funnel. Plus after a certain level of question difficulty as an employer you're probably optimizing for the wrong skillset. Perhaps for super competitive positions, e.g. for algorithmic trading at reputable Wall Street hedge funds, there's a place for killer interview questions but it's definitely not the bread and butter.

icebraining 9y ago

I'd say that's more of a selection bias that bullshit. The only companies blogging about interviewing are the few ones that actually have made a conscious decision to deviate from the norm (regardless of the reasons). It's like if you were trying to evaluate the average math proficiency of the population by only reading blog posts about math. It would seem like everyone really knew math! Except of course, the only people who blog about math are the few that are into it. They're not bullshitting, they're just overrepresented. Not that I disagree with your original point, by the way; BS is rampant.

simonh 9y ago

The fact that so many tech professionals don’t have GitHub and Stack Overflow profiles, personal projects, etc is exactly why having those things helps you stand out. It’s definitely helped me, hugely, aside from just plain increasing my self confidence. I’m no web startup Silicon Valley brogrammer either, 50 something application support specialist in London.

emodendroket 9y ago
I've never experienced anyone caring even the least bit about my GitHub and StackOverflow profiles.

aidenn0 9y ago

Every single interview I've been to has had at least one of those. None of them has had more than half though.

bcoates 9y ago

With the exception of the github profile, that's not my experience at all -- if anything, lots of hiring managers want to ape that sort of experience even if they can't really assess it because the alternative is something like this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/a-job https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/a-job Spending 2 years learning how to interview when you could have been spending 1.96 years getting passably good at something and 2 weeks on interviewing is madness, though.

rsp1984 9y ago

You start interviewing and you see that none of the above happens 99% of the time. You wasted 2 years learning a bunch of stuff when you really should have been interviewing six months after writing your first line of code. I agree with this. I have interviewed a good amount of engineers, both as a SWE at Google as well as founder of my own company. From that experience I can tell that the only thing that asking mostly hard interview questions does is reducing your candidate pool to 0. Even with mostly moderately hard questions your candidate pool at the end of the funnel is probably going to be around 5% to 10% as compared to the start of the funnel. Plus after a certain level of question difficulty as an employer you're probably optimizing for the wrong skillset. Perhaps for super competitive positions, e.g. for algorithmic trading at reputable Wall Street hedge funds, there's a place for killer interview questions but it's definitely not the bread and butter.