10 ms·

> ...whiteboard questions on basic data structures and algorithms (I'm 40 and I still absolutely suck at those)... at my age it's time to accept that the windo

• fossuser 6y ago
  Did you do leetcode/CTCI, interview cake? Any of the fancier in person practice stuff? I'm always curious what people find most effective.
• jtdev 6y ago
  It’s difficult to find the motivation to spend hundreds of hours working on imaginary problems. Kudos to you for doing this though. Many/most of the best developers I’ve ever worked with wouldn’t consider wasting their time on such nonsense. It seems to be somewhat of a litmus test for determining how subservient one is.
  • winphone1974 6y ago
    This a pretty mean way to dismiss someone who has a different viewpoint from you. Many developers enjoy these problems the same way someone might study a niche subject for fun or attend a Simpsons trivia contest; it's fun. No need to call them a sheep
  • triceratops 6y ago
    > It seems to be somewhat of a litmus test for determining how subservient one is. Or driven to make outlandishly high salaries.
  • MiroF 6y ago
    > Many/most of the best developers I’ve ever worked with wouldn’t consider wasting their time on such nonsense Interview practices aside - I find them to be fun puzzles and know plenty of accomplished CS/math people who do too. I understand the anger at corporate tech practices but let's not malign those who find the questions interesting.
• gowld 6y ago
  Please don't make presumptions and insults about people you don't know.
  • thrownaway954 6y ago
    don't gaslight people. dude wasn't insulting anyone.
• 98codes 6y ago
  You mean doing the work _again_. I had all the algorithm stuff down cold out of college and maybe for another 5 years after. Now after 20 years of rarely needing any of it and having it be a web search away when I did, I couldn't come up with any of it on demand. "Doing the work" meaning having to study to relearn a thing that I'll maybe use sparingly in my work means the interview process is broken, not anyone's motivation.
  • MR4D 6y ago
    Lots of things are broken. The question is do you want to work hard enough to overcome it? My guess is you’ve got a good enough job already, so it’s not worth the effort.
    • bird_monster 6y ago
      I think that, as you get older (or maybe further into your career? More tenured? I don't know that it's inherent with age as much as experience), you become less interested in doing ridiculous things just to prove that you can. That's not to say that other people shouldn't, just that, the value-add seems less and less worth it as time goes on. It is possible (and in fact common) to lead a full and successful career as a dev, where A.) you don't ever work for FAANG or SV, and B.) You make plenty of money, have plenty of freedom, build high profile, successful technology, have plenty of career mobility. So, if you believe those things, "Learn these things that you learned in college and then never really touched again directly" seems like an absolute waste of time. You've seen them, and you've seen that while you were _actually building things_, they didn't really come up, or at least directly. And when the value add is "Work for big fancy company for a couple % more money per year", it doesn't really seem like that much of a value add.
      • nkingsy 6y ago
        I had the “misfortune” of getting fired for going to bat for a junior co-worker who was being taken advantage of by the company. If I hadn’t taken 2 months to do nothing but grind on leetcode problems, there’s no way I was ever going to do it in my precious free time (2 kids, lots of hobbies). I’d never make a bet like that on myself by choice, but in hindsight it would have been an excellent investment years ago. My quality of life is immensely better working for a big tech co than it was at any startup.
• curiousllama 6y ago
  > Your age isn’t the problem; I know plenty of young people that don’t want to do the work also. It's fascinating, coming from the world of "Strategy" Consulting, to see the byzantine, bureaucratic shibboleths of dinosaur companies recreated in SV in real time. And justified the same way, no less!
• jcadam 6y ago
  It's a specific kind of work - I assure you I spend a lot of my spare time learning and working on hobby projects. The grind of drilling on brain teasers and toy interview problems is something I have little patience for anymore. In any case I'm doing ok these days. Most CA employers (short of, say, Google or Netflix) wouldn't offer a big enough pay increase to offset the cost of living, and besides, I hate living in cities. My current dream is to find a good paying remote gig and live someplace... remote :)
• mixmastamyk 6y ago
  I don't think that's the point, capability vs. age. It's only an indirect factor, in that of someone at a certain age, tends to focus on more important things, like what it takes to build large systems, avoid mistakes, work well with people. Shooing away folks with experience is a significant loss. Also, just because you "do the work," it is no guarantee. Very likely they could pull a random question from a subject you haven't done recently.
  • nullsense 6y ago
    Are they actually shooing away folks with experience, or do they get a tonne of successful applications from people with experience, and to limit the overwhelmingly large number of applications they filter for those who have experience and can do leetcode?
    • mixmastamyk 6y ago
      A person from Netflix would have to respond, but if they're anything like other tech companies, they're doing a shit job of hiring. Huge salaries are one way to mitigate that, by holding on tight to the good ones.
      • notacoward 6y ago
        > if they're anything like other tech companies, they're doing a shit job of hiring Facebook grew from 17K employees in 2016 to 45K in 2019. 38% annual growth, and the vast bulk of that was in engineering. "Only" 17% at Google, but it was already larger so the absolute numbers are higher. 22% at Netflix. This is hardly a "shit job of hiring" as you say. I often saw such growth numbers at startups, but never at companies with headcounts already in the thousands let alone tens of thousands. They're doing a fantastic job at hiring. Part of the reason they're hiring so much is because they have to. Again contrary to what you say, they are not holding on tight to the good ones. The number of people who leave after two years - at all levels - is almost as stunning as the number coming in. Big Tech is notorious for this. The good ones might leave to found or join startups, but leave they still do. The high compensation actually facilitates such departures as much as it discourages them (certainly did for recently-retired me), except among the exceptionally greedy. These companies are not pools of carefully selected and tended talent, with low rates coming in or going out. They're more like massive pipelines, with huge numbers entering and leaving all the time. The coding interviews are a very coarse filter to keep out the worst of the dreck, but they also keep out many good engineers. I've known several demonstrably excellent engineers who failed in that moment, and more who self-selected out of the process for various reasons. The people who can get in are barely distinguishable from those who got jobs elsewhere via more traditional interview processes, except for skewing very young.
• dekhn 6y ago
  I think the question really is, when are these companies going to wake up to the idea that most people in their mid-40s who are successful programmers aren't writing leetcode, they're preventing junior engineers from checking in bad code, and handling large-scale outages with a few lines of analytics and config changes.
  • vecter 6y ago
    I think you're absolutely right in terms of senior engineers' responsibilities. My take is the following: - It's hard to evaluate the skills you mentioned. They're important, but generally "softer". - It's easy to validate if someone solved a cut and dry algorithms questions. As far as I can tell, it's basically a proxy for an IQ test. I'm not justifying this, but that's my guess for why companies do this.
    • nullsense 6y ago
      I think it's less of an IQ test and more akin to a gang initiation ritual. Instead of "the condition of joining our gang is you need to murder a random in cold blood" they are saying "our hazing ritual is grinding several hundred hours of leetcode and finally running the leetcode gauntlet, if you can endure that, you're in".
    • Pet_Ant 6y ago
      It's almost as if the qualities you want are someone's EQ (emotional quotient) and not IQ. ...which sucks for high IQ low EQ persons like myself. My hardest problem to solve at work is always myself.
  • triceratops 6y ago
    Because they can get leetcoding programmers who can also do all those things you mentioned.
  • avip 6y ago
    The harsh truth is there are enough 40th out there who can do that AND implement DFS on a whiteboard, so why not take them? At min. it arbitrarily shows their motivation to get the job.
• dastx 6y ago
  In my short career of ~10 years I've yet to use any of those the algorithms they ask about in these interviews. I've gone from full stack on php, to java backends,to devops engineering, and never have I ever had to use any of these algorithms. I got a decent score at university where we learned it, but it's ridiculous to be asked about something I'll never use. Even if I knew the theory, and was able to ace it, it would be rare for me to use it, because it's all available in libraries, and they definitely will have done a better job than I will do. "It's not about the solution, it's about how you get to the solution" you say, I say there's better ways of figuring out if you have problem solving skills. For sure, there are jobs that require such theory, but many do not. And if it's not required, managers need to realise they're potentially missing out on good talent.
  • nullsense 6y ago
    They're not optimizing for knowing the theory or problem solving ability. They're optimizing for how far are you willing to go to jump through this here hoop of ours?
  • lliamander 6y ago
    Algorithms are often treated as a trivia challenge, which is the complete wrong way to use them. What you really want to know is whether a person can translate a set of requirements into working code. Algorithms are useful because they reduce the possibility that the candidate failed in the coding test because of poorly specified requirements. "Problem solving" ability is a different beast altogether.
• y-c-o-m-b 6y ago
  What's a good "ELI5" resource for learning these things again?
• arthurjj 6y ago
  > you can do it. It will take some number of weeks or months I think you're overstating the time needed. Passing those interviews for someone who reads HN is basically just reading Cracking the Coding Interview [1] or Programming Interviews Exposed [2] and doing the ~50% of the exercises. Source: Worked at 2 of FAAMG and got rejected from 2 of them (because I forgot to read those book before the interview) [1] https://amzn.to/30g9vRQ https://amzn.to/30g9vRQ [2] https://amzn.to/3iaZknD https://amzn.to/3iaZknD
• AnonHP 6y ago
  > I read and practiced for a few months before getting my job at Microsoft at age 45. What resources did you use and what resources would you recommend?