10 ms·

On the flip side. Sometimes you're just not that good at stuff despite your best efforts. In college I really struggled with math. Which was a challenge becaus

On the flip side. Sometimes you're just not that good at stuff despite your best efforts. In college I really struggled with math. Which was a challenge because computer science has you take a lot of math classes. In my calculus class I studied so hard for the final. Did every problem in the book. And I still just got a B in the class. At the same time my programming classes were really easy. I didn't study at all and the homework was trivial. Based on my interviewing history I'm not in the 95th percentile of programmers - I'm routinely outright rejected and don't even land the on-site interview. And this is basically my best skill for which I've invested an enormous amount of time and energy. The movie Amadeus really nails this idea. Salieri has one goal in life: to create beautiful music. And he achieved some success, but then he meets Mozart - " a boastful, lustful, smutty infantile boy..." - yet he creates the most amazing music he's ever heard. > All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing... and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If He didn't want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent? I've experienced that frustration many times in my life. Salieri is a tragic figure though - his response is one of contempt and hostility to the injustice of his life. But he's missed the point. All success and talent in life is a gift. Maybe your frustrations in life are an opportunity to teach you humility and to be gracious to others.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago
I learned this at a young age. Leaving my small community where I was the smartest, most educated person I knew. I went to college where there were easily 1/3 of the class doing as well or better. I came to understand we all stand on a spectrum. For everybody there's someone better, and someone not as good. So what? Do what you can with the skills you have, and you're doing more than 99% of the people who squander what they have.
- aloisdg 7y ago
  I learned this while learning chess. I could win against anyone in elementary school. Some years later, I went to a small tournament. I was wrecked by everyone including children half of my age. Humility lesson right here. I still play though. Playing for fun is fine. It is a game after all.
k__ 7y ago
Comparing you to some geniuses in the field isn't gonna help. Sure Mozart was better that Salieri, but there is just one Mozart. Companies are always talking about how they just take the best, but in the end they have to settle with what the market gives them.
- injb 7y ago
  I don't know why this was downvoted, but you're right. Geniuses of that level are rare and extremely lucky. It's like lamenting that you'll never be financially independent because you didn't win the Megamillions lottery. Only a tiny minority of people have that kind of luck and no one has any control over it.
  - scoutt 7y ago
    I agree there is a degree of luck in some people, but I'll be wary about the term genius. Personally, when someone says Genius, in some contexts, I take it like an excuse to justify the existence of people that excel doing something, just because they are born-geniuses. The fact that some of these geniuses dedicated their entire lives to improve themselves (being it by practicing on an instrument or doing math, for example) is left aside, and the justification for doing practically nothing to achieve excellence is because "that guy/girl is a genius and I am not". PS: In the office that justification comes as being an expert: when someone doesn't know how about something, it's because some other person is an expert. When the boss asks the lab manager "how does that WiFi module work?" the answer is "let's call X because she is an expert", when the manager should already know how that works.
    - EpicEng 7y ago
      Genius is, in my experience and from what I know of history, is something people are born with though. I've met (and worked with) exactly one person I would place near the designation of "genius". I wasn't under the impression that he didn't work hard to gain knowledge, but he just had a different way of approaching problems. I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do, but I could be struggling with something for hours that he could break down in a way that just never occurred to me. So yes, he put in the time, but it was his thought process that made him great, and I'm not convinced that's something that can be taught to great effect.
euix 7y ago
This is true but there is also a time dimension to it. I was similar in undergrad, no matter how hard I tried I never really got passed A- while the class genius would ace everything. But as a I got older and I kept studying I began to close the gap with the "market leader". The star burns twice as bright burns half as long. Sometimes it's not about how well you do at the current point in time, but how you navigate changes in the external environment. Skills and people are always in flux.
blattimwind 7y ago
> Salieri is a tragic figure though - his response is one of contempt and hostility to the injustice of his life. But he's missed the point. This is a gross falsehood spread after Salieri's death.
- afthonos 7y ago
  GP is describing Salieri in Amadeus. It is an absolutely correct description of the character.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  So what is the non-tragic response? Leaving music and working in some other craft, say, a carpenter or a doctor? This means a lot of sunk cost and further sunk cost of retraining. Ignoring the injustice? Then it will be perpetuated. Or attempting to correct it, then hope you're able to? Hope runs out. (Actually movie Salieri did some messing with Mozart to correct the injustice in a destructive way. It didn't make him happy.)
janpot 7y ago
In what sense would your interviewing history reflect your programming skills?
- Madmallard 7y ago
  Probably modest correlation between acceptance rate and skill
lordleft 7y ago
> Based on my interviewing history I'm not in the 95th percentile of programmers - I'm routinely outright rejected and don't even land the on-site interview. And this is basically my best skill for which I've invested an enormous amount of time and energy. You mentioned faring well in programming classes. Interview performance aside, do you feel that you're a good and perhaps exceptional programmer?
- cdoxsey 7y ago
  I can be very quick and can work diligently (grit my way through a problem) but I struggle with design and some high level concepts. Interviews ask abstract and theoretical computer sciency type questions and in real life I would usually google my way to a solution on those types of questions, so I do very poorly on the spot. (forget everything or say something dumb) But in practice I can usually deliver quicker than my teammates on real world problems.
  - Swizec 7y ago
    > Interviews ask abstract and theoretical computer sciency type questions and in real life I would usually google my way to a solution on those types of questions, so I do very poorly on the spot. Fwiw some of us ask abstract questions with the sole purpose of breaking you out of coding mode and into thinking mode. I wanna see how you break down a problem you haven’t encountered before. Not how you google a solution to a known problem. If you’re talkinng to me, I already trust that you can write code and google solutions. One of my fav questions to ask is “Design a system to protect a skyscraper from flooding in a scifi Manhattan of 2140”
    - cdoxsey 7y ago
      Right. I'm not good at those kinds of questions. I can code quickly but rigorous thought takes time for me. I need to ponder a design question for a while or work on two or three prototypes before I feel like I know what to do. FWIW I've also seen the opposite. A developer who was a very good thinker and talker, but got stuck for two weeks on an issue with a Google API. It took me five minutes to figure out what was wrong. Not cause I'm smart, actually the opposite, I have to break problems down to things I can understand and it's that process which lends itself well to fixing bugs. But I'm sure he would've run circles around me when designing an API or architecting out multiple systems.
tyingq 7y ago
Personally have experienced the "star in a small pool" vs "anonymous in a big pool" thing many times. I was surprised that the "star" experience wasn't always as personally ego-rewarding. Occasionally surprising people was often superior to the expectation that you always would.
- sjtindell 7y ago
  Agreed. What got to me was that no matter how hard you kill it, there’s no one to share it with if you’re the “best” on the team. They’re always looking up to you. Also you need to feel like you have some backup.
yomly 7y ago
I don't know anything about you so I suppose take this with a pinch of salt as I'm probably not best placed to tell you about yourself. That said, I hold a general belief that attainment in something is not dependent on your "talent" for that thing. Your "talent" determines your ability to progress in that thing without direction and/or poorly specified direction. Genius allows you to push past everything that has come before and effectively discover new things. Yes I'm sure there are edge-cases it's a loose mental model or rule of thumb. So I'm sorry that despite your admirable persistence to work through all those problems you didn't achieve the grade you wanted, but if you haven't given up on calculus I would encourage you to seek alternative teachers / materials that will work for you, as it is fundamentally a thing that can be learned just like anything else. And not in a cruel way, but undergrad level calculus should be achievable for anyone given enough effort and good teaching (assuming you actually want to invest this energy and effort in the subject). Work smart and hard, but working hard in absence can at best be inefficient grind and at worst can crystallise bad habits...
- bradknowles 7y ago
  Agreed. The teacher you have is vitally important. I also had to take a lot of math classes, on my way to a BSCS. The first time I took Calc I, I got a D. The teacher was the Director of the Math department, and by all reports, he was actually a good teacher. Probably a good teacher for grad students, but his style didn't work well for me. The second time I took Calc I, I had a grad student as a teacher, and his style and method worked much better, because I really understood the material, and as a result I got an A. Same thing happened for me with Calc III. Ironically, I got the same grad student as my Calc III teacher as I had for Calc I. And with the same result -- his style and method really worked well for me. Now, if you really want to have your butt kicked across the room, torn to shreds, and then handed back to you, try Engineering Math, a.k.a, Differential Equations. I only barely escaped that one with my life -- and a very hard fought for C.
SkyBelow 7y ago
>Based on my interviewing history I'm not in the 95th percentile of programmers - I'm routinely outright rejected and don't even land the on-site interview. And this is basically my best skill for which I've invested an enormous amount of time and energy. This means you aren't high in the 'programming interview' skill set. While related, I consider it distinctly different than the 'programming' skill set. I think it shares more in common with other interview skill sets than it does with programming. I suggest not using this to judge your proficiency in programming, and if you want to improve this (say you plan to be job hunting soon), I would focus more on interviewing skills than programming skills. Especially if you aren't landing on-site interviews. For starters, improving your resume to have a good UX and working on how to answer interview questions, especially the non-technical ones, would likely help. Things like how to 'correctly' answer "What is your biggest weakness?" or "Why are you looking for a job?". A lot of it comes down to learning how to lie without appearing dishonest (personally I hate how much honesty during interviews is treated as a bad thing, but I have to play the game by the rules that already exist).
- eshyong 7y ago
  Agreed with your points, although I wouldn't use the word "lie". "Marketing yourself" would be a better way to put it. It's not about falsely representing your experience; it's about knowing and emphasizing your strengths, and aligning that with the needs of the team.
  - SkyBelow 7y ago
    I'm talking things like "what is your biggest weakness". You don't answer that honestly, you come up with a 'nice to have' weakness but that still seems enough of a weakness to not appear to be holding the question in contempt. If it comes to why you are leaving your current job, depending upon why you actually left you could be able to give honest answers, half truths than hide the major reason, and twist the facts enough that it would be best described as a lie. When asked what you are looking for in a new company, rarely will it be perceived positive to give any importance to money at that stage of the interview. Benefits can be mentioned, but you will have a better interview if you can give an answer closer aligned to the business you are interviewing at. A major one is when you are asked what your current salary is, lying can be more beneficial than either not answering or telling the truth. You can stretch the truth a bit, say "A little under $130,000" when it is actually "101,000 plus a bonus that the company didn't give out last year". Is 101 a little under 130? It is subjective, and in some cases that wouldn't be a lie, but in this case it definitely stretches the truth. Now, I'm not advocating lying about stuff on the technical side. Well, not by much. If someone in HR is asking if you have 15+ years experience in Rust (to those not familiar, it has only been about about 10 years), responding with an affirmative style answer is probably reasonable if you are experienced in the language. Don't do something like saying "Yes". More "I am very experienced in Rust and have had 3 large scale Rust products deployed with numerous smaller ones." This ends up being much better than trying to correct the HR rep that the language hasn't been out long enough for someone to have 15 years experience and better than answering no.
eshyong 7y ago
I hope you've found success and happiness in life nowadays! Honestly interviewing is in some ways closer to dating than contests of skill. Sometimes your area of expertise is just not what the team is looking for. Sometimes that company just wouldn't be a good culture fit for you. I've had similar experiences with rejection and I've since learned that interviews are really bad at sorting out good engineers from bad engineers, and that networking goes a lot further than raw coding skill (although you still have to know some leetcode, unfortunately).
- clarry 7y ago
  The last two interviews I had involved no coding at all. I got an offer from both companies..
vibrolax 7y ago
Having attended a high school with a poor math program, I had a similar struggle with math in university. My understanding would catch up maybe too late for a grade, but I kept progressing. Seven years into my career I got a job working for an extremely gifted scientist/manager who gave me several projects that required me to learn math a couple levels above my education. Because the problems were interesting and the results really mattered, I had sufficient motivation to overcome the frustration of learning things that didn't come naturally. I found a way into a company that needed good programmers that grew more mathematical over time, and I was lucky enough to have a highly motivating and supported learning environment.
gowld 7y ago
Have you interviewed as places like Epic (Health Care) or Accenture or Knoxville Microsoft Certified Solution Providers, or only at Bay Area webtech?
- cdoxsey 7y ago
  I've interviewed mostly at startups. I've worked in Boulder, Menlo Park, Austin and NYC. Once I spent quite a while in NYC trying to get a job only to give up, move back to Boulder and reach out to a friend to get a job. I'm so grateful for what he did for me. If not for him I may not be in this industry anymore. My first job was for a non-startup web development shop. That interview was entirely non technical, but I fear it was the last of a dying breed. I did come very close to taking an offer at an insurance company once.
brtkdotse 7y ago
Hah! I often reflect on (the purely fictional Characterization of) Salieri in that movie. Especially when he talks about mediocrity - I am 100% a mediocre developer. And you know what? It’s perfectly fine. Most of the development work out there is LOB apps that don’t require programming Mozart’s.
gumby 7y ago
(This is a side point to your excellent comment) The movie really distorted what we know about Salieri and Mozart. That doesn’t matter in that Amadeus is just a fun story and doesn’t claim to be any sort of documentary, and such a story made a good case study for your comment. But Salieri was a very good composer and I personally like more of his work than Mozart’s (though Mozart at his best blew away most of his contemporaries, including Salieri). Mozart appears to have lived a more conventional middle class life and Salieri a more contemporaneously successful one which is kind of henopposite if he film.
ken 7y ago
"Amadeus" is famously fictitious. In real life Salieri and Mozart were friends. It's good dramatic writing but that's all. I'm somewhat disappointed that, of all the possible stories and lessons one could tell about Mozart's life, the one that Hollywood chose to immortalize on the silver screen is simultaneously depressing, disparaging, and false.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  More recently the movie "Sully" portrayed the NTSB as being some conniving government organization that is out to get airline pilots for some reason. The real world Captain Sullenberger had to release a statement to correct this false injected dramatization of the investigation. There was no reason to do this other than to spice up the story, which is unfortunate especially given most of the people depicted in the movie are alive.
gauravjain13 7y ago
Amadeus is a movie that really resonated for the reasons you mention. However, another movie that really resonated, and offers a counterpoint to you’re-either-born-with-it-or-not fatalism is Gattaca. (Of course, one could argue that Amadeus is a “true story”, whereas Gattaca is science fiction.)
- autokad 7y ago
  I think the OP's 'problem' is that they do not sit down and have focused practice properly. They are not good at coding interviews, they were not good at math, and freely admits they "didn't study at all". You get really good at things by practicing them a lot, especially math and leetcode. It's not a criticism, as I am terrible at coding interviews and I can never muster the discipline to sit down and study it. However, its not because I am just innately bad at it, its because I don't practice it. Amadeus was probably more fiction than it was a true story. Mozart practiced a lot.
- cdoxsey 7y ago
  Indeed. That scene where he's running on the treadmill with a recorded heartbeat is so true to life.
mtmalla 7y ago
The one thing that I've learned by being surrounded by incredibly talented people is that you can't compare yourself to others in a singularly dimensional way. If you do, the odds are against you that you are the best in the world (1 in billions, in fact). This is the quickest path to defeat and nihilism. What I've chosen to do instead is compare myself across all dimensions that I have interest and passion for. The beauty of this is that the combinatorics of genetics normalized for individual circumstance leads to only one meaningful comparison, yourself. Internalizing this just leads to a more fun game.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

I learned this at a young age. Leaving my small community where I was the smartest, most educated person I knew. I went to college where there were easily 1/3 of the class doing as well or better. I came to understand we all stand on a spectrum. For everybody there's someone better, and someone not as good. So what? Do what you can with the skills you have, and you're doing more than 99% of the people who squander what they have.

aloisdg 7y ago
I learned this while learning chess. I could win against anyone in elementary school. Some years later, I went to a small tournament. I was wrecked by everyone including children half of my age. Humility lesson right here. I still play though. Playing for fun is fine. It is a game after all.

k__ 7y ago

Comparing you to some geniuses in the field isn't gonna help. Sure Mozart was better that Salieri, but there is just one Mozart. Companies are always talking about how they just take the best, but in the end they have to settle with what the market gives them.

injb 7y ago
I don't know why this was downvoted, but you're right. Geniuses of that level are rare and extremely lucky. It's like lamenting that you'll never be financially independent because you didn't win the Megamillions lottery. Only a tiny minority of people have that kind of luck and no one has any control over it.
- scoutt 7y ago
  I agree there is a degree of luck in some people, but I'll be wary about the term genius. Personally, when someone says Genius, in some contexts, I take it like an excuse to justify the existence of people that excel doing something, just because they are born-geniuses. The fact that some of these geniuses dedicated their entire lives to improve themselves (being it by practicing on an instrument or doing math, for example) is left aside, and the justification for doing practically nothing to achieve excellence is because "that guy/girl is a genius and I am not". PS: In the office that justification comes as being an expert: when someone doesn't know how about something, it's because some other person is an expert. When the boss asks the lab manager "how does that WiFi module work?" the answer is "let's call X because she is an expert", when the manager should already know how that works.
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    Genius is, in my experience and from what I know of history, is something people are born with though. I've met (and worked with) exactly one person I would place near the designation of "genius". I wasn't under the impression that he didn't work hard to gain knowledge, but he just had a different way of approaching problems. I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do, but I could be struggling with something for hours that he could break down in a way that just never occurred to me. So yes, he put in the time, but it was his thought process that made him great, and I'm not convinced that's something that can be taught to great effect.

euix 7y ago

This is true but there is also a time dimension to it. I was similar in undergrad, no matter how hard I tried I never really got passed A- while the class genius would ace everything. But as a I got older and I kept studying I began to close the gap with the "market leader". The star burns twice as bright burns half as long. Sometimes it's not about how well you do at the current point in time, but how you navigate changes in the external environment. Skills and people are always in flux.

blattimwind 7y ago

> Salieri is a tragic figure though - his response is one of contempt and hostility to the injustice of his life. But he's missed the point. This is a gross falsehood spread after Salieri's death.

afthonos 7y ago
GP is describing Salieri in Amadeus. It is an absolutely correct description of the character.
AstralStorm 7y ago
So what is the non-tragic response? Leaving music and working in some other craft, say, a carpenter or a doctor? This means a lot of sunk cost and further sunk cost of retraining. Ignoring the injustice? Then it will be perpetuated. Or attempting to correct it, then hope you're able to? Hope runs out. (Actually movie Salieri did some messing with Mozart to correct the injustice in a destructive way. It didn't make him happy.)

janpot 7y ago

In what sense would your interviewing history reflect your programming skills?

Madmallard 7y ago
Probably modest correlation between acceptance rate and skill

lordleft 7y ago

cdoxsey 7y ago
I can be very quick and can work diligently (grit my way through a problem) but I struggle with design and some high level concepts. Interviews ask abstract and theoretical computer sciency type questions and in real life I would usually google my way to a solution on those types of questions, so I do very poorly on the spot. (forget everything or say something dumb) But in practice I can usually deliver quicker than my teammates on real world problems.
- Swizec 7y ago
  > Interviews ask abstract and theoretical computer sciency type questions and in real life I would usually google my way to a solution on those types of questions, so I do very poorly on the spot. Fwiw some of us ask abstract questions with the sole purpose of breaking you out of coding mode and into thinking mode. I wanna see how you break down a problem you haven’t encountered before. Not how you google a solution to a known problem. If you’re talkinng to me, I already trust that you can write code and google solutions. One of my fav questions to ask is “Design a system to protect a skyscraper from flooding in a scifi Manhattan of 2140”
  - cdoxsey 7y ago
    Right. I'm not good at those kinds of questions. I can code quickly but rigorous thought takes time for me. I need to ponder a design question for a while or work on two or three prototypes before I feel like I know what to do. FWIW I've also seen the opposite. A developer who was a very good thinker and talker, but got stuck for two weeks on an issue with a Google API. It took me five minutes to figure out what was wrong. Not cause I'm smart, actually the opposite, I have to break problems down to things I can understand and it's that process which lends itself well to fixing bugs. But I'm sure he would've run circles around me when designing an API or architecting out multiple systems.

tyingq 7y ago

Personally have experienced the "star in a small pool" vs "anonymous in a big pool" thing many times. I was surprised that the "star" experience wasn't always as personally ego-rewarding. Occasionally surprising people was often superior to the expectation that you always would.

sjtindell 7y ago
Agreed. What got to me was that no matter how hard you kill it, there’s no one to share it with if you’re the “best” on the team. They’re always looking up to you. Also you need to feel like you have some backup.

yomly 7y ago

I don't know anything about you so I suppose take this with a pinch of salt as I'm probably not best placed to tell you about yourself. That said, I hold a general belief that attainment in something is not dependent on your "talent" for that thing. Your "talent" determines your ability to progress in that thing without direction and/or poorly specified direction. Genius allows you to push past everything that has come before and effectively discover new things. Yes I'm sure there are edge-cases it's a loose mental model or rule of thumb. So I'm sorry that despite your admirable persistence to work through all those problems you didn't achieve the grade you wanted, but if you haven't given up on calculus I would encourage you to seek alternative teachers / materials that will work for you, as it is fundamentally a thing that can be learned just like anything else. And not in a cruel way, but undergrad level calculus should be achievable for anyone given enough effort and good teaching (assuming you actually want to invest this energy and effort in the subject). Work smart and hard, but working hard in absence can at best be inefficient grind and at worst can crystallise bad habits...

bradknowles 7y ago
Agreed. The teacher you have is vitally important. I also had to take a lot of math classes, on my way to a BSCS. The first time I took Calc I, I got a D. The teacher was the Director of the Math department, and by all reports, he was actually a good teacher. Probably a good teacher for grad students, but his style didn't work well for me. The second time I took Calc I, I had a grad student as a teacher, and his style and method worked much better, because I really understood the material, and as a result I got an A. Same thing happened for me with Calc III. Ironically, I got the same grad student as my Calc III teacher as I had for Calc I. And with the same result -- his style and method really worked well for me. Now, if you really want to have your butt kicked across the room, torn to shreds, and then handed back to you, try Engineering Math, a.k.a, Differential Equations. I only barely escaped that one with my life -- and a very hard fought for C.

SkyBelow 7y ago

>Based on my interviewing history I'm not in the 95th percentile of programmers - I'm routinely outright rejected and don't even land the on-site interview. And this is basically my best skill for which I've invested an enormous amount of time and energy. This means you aren't high in the 'programming interview' skill set. While related, I consider it distinctly different than the 'programming' skill set. I think it shares more in common with other interview skill sets than it does with programming. I suggest not using this to judge your proficiency in programming, and if you want to improve this (say you plan to be job hunting soon), I would focus more on interviewing skills than programming skills. Especially if you aren't landing on-site interviews. For starters, improving your resume to have a good UX and working on how to answer interview questions, especially the non-technical ones, would likely help. Things like how to 'correctly' answer "What is your biggest weakness?" or "Why are you looking for a job?". A lot of it comes down to learning how to lie without appearing dishonest (personally I hate how much honesty during interviews is treated as a bad thing, but I have to play the game by the rules that already exist).

eshyong 7y ago
Agreed with your points, although I wouldn't use the word "lie". "Marketing yourself" would be a better way to put it. It's not about falsely representing your experience; it's about knowing and emphasizing your strengths, and aligning that with the needs of the team.
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  I'm talking things like "what is your biggest weakness". You don't answer that honestly, you come up with a 'nice to have' weakness but that still seems enough of a weakness to not appear to be holding the question in contempt. If it comes to why you are leaving your current job, depending upon why you actually left you could be able to give honest answers, half truths than hide the major reason, and twist the facts enough that it would be best described as a lie. When asked what you are looking for in a new company, rarely will it be perceived positive to give any importance to money at that stage of the interview. Benefits can be mentioned, but you will have a better interview if you can give an answer closer aligned to the business you are interviewing at. A major one is when you are asked what your current salary is, lying can be more beneficial than either not answering or telling the truth. You can stretch the truth a bit, say "A little under $130,000" when it is actually "101,000 plus a bonus that the company didn't give out last year". Is 101 a little under 130? It is subjective, and in some cases that wouldn't be a lie, but in this case it definitely stretches the truth. Now, I'm not advocating lying about stuff on the technical side. Well, not by much. If someone in HR is asking if you have 15+ years experience in Rust (to those not familiar, it has only been about about 10 years), responding with an affirmative style answer is probably reasonable if you are experienced in the language. Don't do something like saying "Yes". More "I am very experienced in Rust and have had 3 large scale Rust products deployed with numerous smaller ones." This ends up being much better than trying to correct the HR rep that the language hasn't been out long enough for someone to have 15 years experience and better than answering no.

eshyong 7y ago

I hope you've found success and happiness in life nowadays! Honestly interviewing is in some ways closer to dating than contests of skill. Sometimes your area of expertise is just not what the team is looking for. Sometimes that company just wouldn't be a good culture fit for you. I've had similar experiences with rejection and I've since learned that interviews are really bad at sorting out good engineers from bad engineers, and that networking goes a lot further than raw coding skill (although you still have to know some leetcode, unfortunately).

clarry 7y ago
The last two interviews I had involved no coding at all. I got an offer from both companies..

vibrolax 7y ago

Having attended a high school with a poor math program, I had a similar struggle with math in university. My understanding would catch up maybe too late for a grade, but I kept progressing. Seven years into my career I got a job working for an extremely gifted scientist/manager who gave me several projects that required me to learn math a couple levels above my education. Because the problems were interesting and the results really mattered, I had sufficient motivation to overcome the frustration of learning things that didn't come naturally. I found a way into a company that needed good programmers that grew more mathematical over time, and I was lucky enough to have a highly motivating and supported learning environment.

gowld 7y ago

Have you interviewed as places like Epic (Health Care) or Accenture or Knoxville Microsoft Certified Solution Providers, or only at Bay Area webtech?

cdoxsey 7y ago
I've interviewed mostly at startups. I've worked in Boulder, Menlo Park, Austin and NYC. Once I spent quite a while in NYC trying to get a job only to give up, move back to Boulder and reach out to a friend to get a job. I'm so grateful for what he did for me. If not for him I may not be in this industry anymore. My first job was for a non-startup web development shop. That interview was entirely non technical, but I fear it was the last of a dying breed. I did come very close to taking an offer at an insurance company once.

brtkdotse 7y ago

Hah! I often reflect on (the purely fictional Characterization of) Salieri in that movie. Especially when he talks about mediocrity - I am 100% a mediocre developer. And you know what? It’s perfectly fine. Most of the development work out there is LOB apps that don’t require programming Mozart’s.

gumby 7y ago

(This is a side point to your excellent comment) The movie really distorted what we know about Salieri and Mozart. That doesn’t matter in that Amadeus is just a fun story and doesn’t claim to be any sort of documentary, and such a story made a good case study for your comment. But Salieri was a very good composer and I personally like more of his work than Mozart’s (though Mozart at his best blew away most of his contemporaries, including Salieri). Mozart appears to have lived a more conventional middle class life and Salieri a more contemporaneously successful one which is kind of henopposite if he film.

ken 7y ago

"Amadeus" is famously fictitious. In real life Salieri and Mozart were friends. It's good dramatic writing but that's all. I'm somewhat disappointed that, of all the possible stories and lessons one could tell about Mozart's life, the one that Hollywood chose to immortalize on the silver screen is simultaneously depressing, disparaging, and false.

Mountain_Skies 7y ago
More recently the movie "Sully" portrayed the NTSB as being some conniving government organization that is out to get airline pilots for some reason. The real world Captain Sullenberger had to release a statement to correct this false injected dramatization of the investigation. There was no reason to do this other than to spice up the story, which is unfortunate especially given most of the people depicted in the movie are alive.

gauravjain13 7y ago

Amadeus is a movie that really resonated for the reasons you mention. However, another movie that really resonated, and offers a counterpoint to you’re-either-born-with-it-or-not fatalism is Gattaca. (Of course, one could argue that Amadeus is a “true story”, whereas Gattaca is science fiction.)

autokad 7y ago
I think the OP's 'problem' is that they do not sit down and have focused practice properly. They are not good at coding interviews, they were not good at math, and freely admits they "didn't study at all". You get really good at things by practicing them a lot, especially math and leetcode. It's not a criticism, as I am terrible at coding interviews and I can never muster the discipline to sit down and study it. However, its not because I am just innately bad at it, its because I don't practice it. Amadeus was probably more fiction than it was a true story. Mozart practiced a lot.
cdoxsey 7y ago
Indeed. That scene where he's running on the treadmill with a recorded heartbeat is so true to life.

mtmalla 7y ago

The one thing that I've learned by being surrounded by incredibly talented people is that you can't compare yourself to others in a singularly dimensional way. If you do, the odds are against you that you are the best in the world (1 in billions, in fact). This is the quickest path to defeat and nihilism. What I've chosen to do instead is compare myself across all dimensions that I have interest and passion for. The beauty of this is that the combinatorics of genetics normalized for individual circumstance leads to only one meaningful comparison, yourself. Internalizing this just leads to a more fun game.