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The usual HackerNews advice here is something like find a way to commit a few hours a week to LeetCode.
by MaxBarraclough 6y ago
The usual HackerNews advice here is something like find a way to commit a few hours a week to LeetCode.
- EVdotIO 6y agoThis entire industry is just awful, and the antithesis of anything resembling the compassionate virtues they claim to espouse. I'm done with programming, and maybe that's what is supposed to happen, but it has left a very bitter taste in my mouth. If you have serious chops, go for it. Otherwise, give it a wide berth.
- Ancalagon 6y agoTo continue the normal HackerNews go-around on this topic: there are plenty of companies that don't interview like this, at least outside of Silicon Valley.
- jrib 6y ago> I'm done with programming Curious: what did you switch to?
- EVdotIO 6y agoI DJ. Not something I would recommend as a career choice. Pay isn't as good and I don't have benefits, but the lack of dread is nice.
- danlugo92 6y agoNever thought of freelancing?
- BossingAround 6y agoOh I don't know that freelancing is the best choice when one wants "lack of dread"... :))
- danjac 6y agoIt's like tech interviewing has become the modern equivalent of the old Chinese Imperial examination: keep your head down, don't rock the boat, study these arbitrary tests to rise in status. A far cry from the early days of HN when the culture was more "think different".
- pavas 6y agoI would be wary of new teammates whose motto is "think different" when it comes to operating services at $B scale, because if they break something, someone else on the team will have to work all day and night to get things fixed and it won't be them. That does probably depend on whether you're doing greenfield work or not, but even then these costs are there but just not immediately visible.
- danjac 6y agoWhich is understandable, if you have services at $B scale. It's a bit like teams that adopt microservices or Kubernetes for their three-person startup: just because Amazon or Facebook do it doesn't mean you should.
- nexus2045 6y agoThe usual HN sentiment seems to be that take-home assignments are degrading, whiteboarding interviews are broken, which can be summarized as "I take a lot of pride in my craft, how dare you ask me undergrad trivia"; whereas the Blind sentiment is that all you need to do to get a 300K+ salary is to grind Leetcode and system design prep, which can be summarized as "I'll do anything to get money and that's the only thing that matters". I guess there's also cscareerquestions, which is more "I've applied to 500 jobs and heard back from none, help!".
- Apocryphon 6y agoSo you're saying we need more different programmer communities.