13 ms·

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 needin

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.
    - bird_monster 6y ago
      I suppose I'm pointing out the nuance between "Big Tech Co", "Startup" and FAANG. There are plenty of big tech companies that pay well, offer a lot of freedom, interesting tech, but are also not FAANG companies with silly interviewing practices.
      - nkingsy 6y ago
        I think I’ve done maybe 30 interviews? Only three of them were the full blown whiteboard for 5 hours process. The first two I failed at the beginning of my career and in hindsight I was properly rejected. The most recent one just made me feel like I’d earned it. The leetcode grinding helped, but my years of experience helped more. IMO if a company messes around with soft skills, take homes, techno chit chat, long lunches, brutal arcane automated domain knowledge screenings, shibboleths, “day in the life”, present your solution to the group, heuristics, or some other creative way to justify their own biases, I can be fairly confident that I’ll have at least a few co-workers that really just can’t code very well. I have not met an engineer at my current company who didn’t impress me when I dig into their code a little. There are low performers, but even they produce excellent code when they feel like it. Nothing is more frustrating than taking a day to interview and getting maybe 30 minutes of watery technical challenge.
        bird_monster 6y ago
        I guess the splitting point is thinking that whiteboard interviews select candidates that are good coders - a point I have an entire career of anecdotes to disagree with. YMMV, as with everything. edit Also, to be clear, you seem very proud of your interview, your company and coworkers, and I do not mean to discredit your pride or success. I am simply pointing out that your experiences are not universal experiences and might be due to lots of other factors, totally unrelated to interview methodology (healthy attrition rates, supportive teams, constructive code review, etc).
        nkingsy 6y ago
        To the edit: more like I was deeply unsatisfied with each and every non-whiteboard interview process. This is regardless of outcome, including many offers and years of working at companies with broken interview processes. I don’t think whiteboarding is a great methodology, but the other methodologies are worse. As an interviewer, I find it stressful to give whiteboard problems and my data point usually feels fairly noisy. At startups I preferred giving a tiny take home and working with the candidate on extending it in an open ended way. As a candidate, I refuse to do take homes (known too many take homes)
- winphone1974 6y ago
  But these are the people we need to entice to leave their jobs! The best potential hires always have jobs; they rarely go to the open market. They rarely respond to open casting calls and don't need to go through the broken song and dance routine. We know this as the most reliable metric is prior work directly with someone who you trust who vouches for them. Everything else like whiteboarding data algos is weak sauce.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    We're talking about what this person should do though. They can't change the broken system but they can best work it to their advantage with some effort.
  - oblio 6y ago
    Big companies don't care. Enough people still through themselves in the grinder, regardless. They have infinite talent lining up.
  - MR4D 6y ago
    Maybe the best employees are the people that can best overcome broken processes? And yes, I meant that seriously. Every fortune 500 company is held together at some level with bandaids and bailing wire. Being able to deal with things like that might be important. In my firm, I know we place a much higher emphasis on being able to just roll with it than technical perfection. But my firm is but a drop in the ocean compared to everyone else.
    - oscargrouch 6y ago
      One problem with this approach is that with time people tend to optimize to gaming the game. With enough time you are just hiring people that are good in the game and not the best fit for the position. Companies also need a lot of people that are creative and "think outside the box". With this you are optimizing for conformists and people that "think inside the box", and that optimize to fit the game. No wonder the big companies have a hard time to create things.. Western society need badly to know how to deal well with impermanence, and this are such a case were there's not much prediction that can be done.. its just like dancing expecting the rain will come.. sometimes it will, and we will gladly think it was because we danced. The best tip for hiring is someone that you know that knows a little bit to point a couple of good people for you. Because those things are pretty hard to know, and there are very little we can do, without the experience to show for some specific characteristics we need.
- LordFast 6y ago
  Agreed. It always comes down to a base equation of who is willing to do what kind of work for what kind of reward under what kind of circumstances. After a decade of software being a desirable job and everyone trying to get into it, we can bet good money that it's now a buyer's market rather than a seller's market.
CydeWeys 6y ago
Even better. The second time will be much easier than learning it all from scratch the first time.
nullsense 6y ago
>"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 I used to think this too, but as a filter I think it's having the desired effect. From the outside looking in Life at a FAANG seems competitive in nature and they are optimizing for the people willing to push themselves that far to learn something. The added bonus is all new hires at least know the effects of space/time complexity and how to make space/time trade-offs deeply well. Given they operate at the scale they do, mistakes with those concerns are more likely to have a material impact. Requesting that you know it _now_ and now that you _used_to_ know back in the day seems reasonable. The upside from the candidates perspective, as ridiculous as leetcode study is, is one set of study applies across multiple companies, so candidates don't have to expend much energy on trying to optimize for how to study for a particular companies interview process. If that's the way in and you want in, that's just what you have to do. If you aren't prepared to do it, you won't be getting in. If you are prepared to do it, and you do, it seems achievable.
- criddell 6y ago
  I would think these companies that are built on measuring data would have some idea if the whiteboard interview works. Otherwise, why would they do it?
  - indigochill 6y ago
    Q. Why does 90% of human society work the way it does? A. Because that's the way we've always done it. I can't speak for SV companies, but my experience of data is that it can just as easily rationalize preconceptions as be used to inform decision-making. Somebody has to interpret that data, after all.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      If our way of hiring doesn't work then how come we're so rich!?
- function_seven 6y ago
karolist 6y ago
The rampup at FAANG can be brutal and you'd be doing lots of learning even after getting in. The leetcode style interviews are designed to select people capable of studying and materialising broad problems in depth and scope under time constraints. They are also objective and can't really be faked nor you can talk your way in like in most banking/finance IT jobs. I was of similar opinion at some point but these realisations made me change my mind and I've come to like leetcode interviews. But I also think they only make sense in FAANG scoped companies where all the stack is proprietary. Small companies or companies using opensource tools don't really have this rampup and doing such interviews mostly because others (FAANG) do it.
- lwansbrough 6y ago
  Congratulations on your indoctrination.
  - dang 6y ago
    Please don't post unsubstantive or flamebait comments to HN, and especially please don't cross into personal attack. It only makes things even worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ausjke 6y ago
can't agree with you more here. I just rejected Amazon's "onsite" interview as I could not find(not motivated either) time to redo all those only-useful-for-interview-leetcode questions before the interview. I for one, _never_ need use those in a 20+ year career as a software programmer. Most of the time is issue tracking, feature addition, and if I do need an algorithm, I know where to find them and which one is the best, which are enough and are 100% of the time done, I don't need reinvent the wheel for that at all.
arwhatever 6y ago
Have to take the opportunity to shill https://sievejobs.com https://sievejobs.com - a jobs website I've created that let's you hard-block jobs with "broken" hiring practices such as discussed here. Create a Job Seeker profile to help the website overcome the chicken-and-egg dilemma - As with any job site, it's free for job seekers and I've tried to streamline the signup as much as possible.

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.
  - bird_monster 6y ago
    I suppose I'm pointing out the nuance between "Big Tech Co", "Startup" and FAANG. There are plenty of big tech companies that pay well, offer a lot of freedom, interesting tech, but are also not FAANG companies with silly interviewing practices.
    - nkingsy 6y ago
      I think I’ve done maybe 30 interviews? Only three of them were the full blown whiteboard for 5 hours process. The first two I failed at the beginning of my career and in hindsight I was properly rejected. The most recent one just made me feel like I’d earned it. The leetcode grinding helped, but my years of experience helped more. IMO if a company messes around with soft skills, take homes, techno chit chat, long lunches, brutal arcane automated domain knowledge screenings, shibboleths, “day in the life”, present your solution to the group, heuristics, or some other creative way to justify their own biases, I can be fairly confident that I’ll have at least a few co-workers that really just can’t code very well. I have not met an engineer at my current company who didn’t impress me when I dig into their code a little. There are low performers, but even they produce excellent code when they feel like it. Nothing is more frustrating than taking a day to interview and getting maybe 30 minutes of watery technical challenge.
      - bird_monster 6y ago
        I guess the splitting point is thinking that whiteboard interviews select candidates that are good coders - a point I have an entire career of anecdotes to disagree with. YMMV, as with everything. edit Also, to be clear, you seem very proud of your interview, your company and coworkers, and I do not mean to discredit your pride or success. I am simply pointing out that your experiences are not universal experiences and might be due to lots of other factors, totally unrelated to interview methodology (healthy attrition rates, supportive teams, constructive code review, etc).
        nkingsy 6y ago
        To the edit: more like I was deeply unsatisfied with each and every non-whiteboard interview process. This is regardless of outcome, including many offers and years of working at companies with broken interview processes. I don’t think whiteboarding is a great methodology, but the other methodologies are worse. As an interviewer, I find it stressful to give whiteboard problems and my data point usually feels fairly noisy. At startups I preferred giving a tiny take home and working with the candidate on extending it in an open ended way. As a candidate, I refuse to do take homes (known too many take homes)
winphone1974 6y ago
But these are the people we need to entice to leave their jobs! The best potential hires always have jobs; they rarely go to the open market. They rarely respond to open casting calls and don't need to go through the broken song and dance routine. We know this as the most reliable metric is prior work directly with someone who you trust who vouches for them. Everything else like whiteboarding data algos is weak sauce.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  We're talking about what this person should do though. They can't change the broken system but they can best work it to their advantage with some effort.
- oblio 6y ago
  Big companies don't care. Enough people still through themselves in the grinder, regardless. They have infinite talent lining up.
- MR4D 6y ago
  Maybe the best employees are the people that can best overcome broken processes? And yes, I meant that seriously. Every fortune 500 company is held together at some level with bandaids and bailing wire. Being able to deal with things like that might be important. In my firm, I know we place a much higher emphasis on being able to just roll with it than technical perfection. But my firm is but a drop in the ocean compared to everyone else.
  - oscargrouch 6y ago
    One problem with this approach is that with time people tend to optimize to gaming the game. With enough time you are just hiring people that are good in the game and not the best fit for the position. Companies also need a lot of people that are creative and "think outside the box". With this you are optimizing for conformists and people that "think inside the box", and that optimize to fit the game. No wonder the big companies have a hard time to create things.. Western society need badly to know how to deal well with impermanence, and this are such a case were there's not much prediction that can be done.. its just like dancing expecting the rain will come.. sometimes it will, and we will gladly think it was because we danced. The best tip for hiring is someone that you know that knows a little bit to point a couple of good people for you. Because those things are pretty hard to know, and there are very little we can do, without the experience to show for some specific characteristics we need.
LordFast 6y ago
Agreed. It always comes down to a base equation of who is willing to do what kind of work for what kind of reward under what kind of circumstances. After a decade of software being a desirable job and everyone trying to get into it, we can bet good money that it's now a buyer's market rather than a seller's market.

CydeWeys 6y ago

Even better. The second time will be much easier than learning it all from scratch the first time.

nullsense 6y ago

>"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 I used to think this too, but as a filter I think it's having the desired effect. From the outside looking in Life at a FAANG seems competitive in nature and they are optimizing for the people willing to push themselves that far to learn something. The added bonus is all new hires at least know the effects of space/time complexity and how to make space/time trade-offs deeply well. Given they operate at the scale they do, mistakes with those concerns are more likely to have a material impact. Requesting that you know it _now_ and now that you _used_to_ know back in the day seems reasonable. The upside from the candidates perspective, as ridiculous as leetcode study is, is one set of study applies across multiple companies, so candidates don't have to expend much energy on trying to optimize for how to study for a particular companies interview process. If that's the way in and you want in, that's just what you have to do. If you aren't prepared to do it, you won't be getting in. If you are prepared to do it, and you do, it seems achievable.

criddell 6y ago
I would think these companies that are built on measuring data would have some idea if the whiteboard interview works. Otherwise, why would they do it?
- indigochill 6y ago
  Q. Why does 90% of human society work the way it does? A. Because that's the way we've always done it. I can't speak for SV companies, but my experience of data is that it can just as easily rationalize preconceptions as be used to inform decision-making. Somebody has to interpret that data, after all.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    If our way of hiring doesn't work then how come we're so rich!?
function_seven 6y ago

karolist 6y ago

The rampup at FAANG can be brutal and you'd be doing lots of learning even after getting in. The leetcode style interviews are designed to select people capable of studying and materialising broad problems in depth and scope under time constraints. They are also objective and can't really be faked nor you can talk your way in like in most banking/finance IT jobs. I was of similar opinion at some point but these realisations made me change my mind and I've come to like leetcode interviews. But I also think they only make sense in FAANG scoped companies where all the stack is proprietary. Small companies or companies using opensource tools don't really have this rampup and doing such interviews mostly because others (FAANG) do it.

lwansbrough 6y ago
Congratulations on your indoctrination.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive or flamebait comments to HN, and especially please don't cross into personal attack. It only makes things even worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ausjke 6y ago

can't agree with you more here. I just rejected Amazon's "onsite" interview as I could not find(not motivated either) time to redo all those only-useful-for-interview-leetcode questions before the interview. I for one, _never_ need use those in a 20+ year career as a software programmer. Most of the time is issue tracking, feature addition, and if I do need an algorithm, I know where to find them and which one is the best, which are enough and are 100% of the time done, I don't need reinvent the wheel for that at all.

arwhatever 6y ago

Have to take the opportunity to shill https://sievejobs.com https://sievejobs.com - a jobs website I've created that let's you hard-block jobs with "broken" hiring practices such as discussed here. Create a Job Seeker profile to help the website overcome the chicken-and-egg dilemma - As with any job site, it's free for job seekers and I've tried to streamline the signup as much as possible.