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the process is incredibly inefficient and disrespectful. people have already paid for university degrees and getting a degree is no joke, certainly not at a eur
by b20000 5y ago
the process is incredibly inefficient and disrespectful. people have already paid for university degrees and getting a degree is no joke, certainly not at a european university. graduating without programming skills is impossible.
what companies should do is ask you to walk them through a piece of code of your choice and discuss that and/or hire you for a month as a contractor and pay you a fair market rate.
- ex_amazon_sde 5y ago> graduating without programming skills is impossible I interviewed a lot of people and quite a few could not implement fizzbuzz.
- prepend 5y ago> graduating without programming skills is impossible I’ve encountered many who graduated from bachelor and even PhD programs without programming skills (even from European universities), so your statement is false. It also seems pretty weird to assume that a degree or certificate is foolproof for demonstrating programming skills. That seems like a lack of critical thinking skills.
- b20000 5y agowell, where i graduated, people DID have those skills. so you are wrong. besides, companies already ask what university you went to and could get your records and individual class grades and use that combined with number of people fired that had the same degree to figure out if they want to hire you or not. after all, we are in the era of data science? and instead of paying recruiters lots of money for shuffling word documents around, they can use that money to pay prospective candidates for a month. it will be cheaper. the real reason for coding interviews is to wear you out so they can pay you less. the problem is that people go along with this clown show instead of simply walking away and doing something else.
- overrun11 5y agoYou end up with a far less merit based hiring pipeline. I work at a top tech company and don't have any degree at all. The current process gives people like me a chance, yours wouldn't.
- b20000 5y agothe current process rewards people who memorize and grind leetcode answers, rather than those with an actual education and skills, which is a problem. so no, the current process is not merit based but rather measures to what extent you are willing to exhaust yourself to get a job.
- overrun11 5y agoI did maybe 5-10 hours of preparation for my current job's interview and most of my colleagues didn't grind either. I'm skeptical of this idea that the only people who work at FAANG are Leetcode machines that have sacrificed their lives to grind questions.
- b20000 5y agothen maybe you are an outlier and were asked the exact questions you prepared for. most people here mentioned 2-3 months of grinding and that is what i also experienced firsthand.
- prepend 5y agoPart of the interview process is to find positive outliers. I don’t want average people. I want great people.
- b20000 5y agothe interview process does not optimize for great people with relevant experience but for those who repeatedly grind leetcode problems irrelevant to the job. i interviewed a while ago at a FAANG where they had a long standing problem related to their OS. i knew the solution because i recently brought a product to market built on top of a similar OS and had to address the same problem. but it was more important to them i passed their coding test within a few minutes, and that i choose the optimum solution, which can only be found if you can spend an hour thinking about it. i bombed the interview due to not being used to coding interviews and having to talk while i think, and having to do all this in a few minutes. they are probably still wondering how to fix their problem.
- TrackerFF 5y agoI can only speak for myself, but I've never met a (CS) candidate from an accredited Scandinavian university / college that simply could not write code. There are obviously candidates that struggle with performing under pressure - even those that have gone completely blank, but through some simple guiding have bounced back. To be frank, at the schools I studied at, it would be impossible to fake your way through a whole degree, unless you either got someone to impersonate you and take your exams, or you cheated your way through every single exam...but even then, your grades would be a big red flag. Sure, there are bad programmers out there - but not being able to punch out a line of valid code, after obtaining a whole degree in the subject...seems extremely unlikely - sans the extreme edge cases. Even the straight E / D students I've worked with managed to cobble together working stuff, without the aid of search engines or stack exchange.
- b20000 5y agoand it's the same for most other (non private) universities in europe.
- overrun11 5y agoMaybe Scandinavian countries have more rigorous degree programs. If so they are fairly unique in that regard. I don't see how we can use that during hiring thought. What are tech companies supposed to do: only hire from these universities? That seems less fair than the current process.
- b20000 5y agohow so? you are rewarding students for working hard to get their degree? the current process basically tells them: we don’t care you worked crazy hard, it’s back to square 1. they might just as well gone straight into an internship after high school… also: this is not just the case for scandinavian universities but also the case for universities in most of western europe especially if they are non-private.
- overrun11 5y agoI believe you that this is the level of talent at western European universities but what about all the other universities outside of Western Europe that aren't like this. Should companies exempt you from a grueling interview process only if you are from one of these schools?
- overrun11 5y ago> hire you for a month as a contractor and pay you a fair market rate. Huge risk for anyone who currently has a job. I'd much rather the technical interview.
- b20000 5y agowhat risk? companies already pay crazy fees to recruiters. just give the cash to the prospects.