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In the last several years I've done work for some three letter agencies and fortune 500s. None of them required a technical interview really, only about half re

In the last several years I've done work for some three letter agencies and fortune 500s. None of them required a technical interview really, only about half required a social fit interview. I'm starting to think my experience is really unusual. Edit: I just remembered I did a piece of work for a power company. The technical lead talked to me before hand and told me the one technical question he was going to ask me during the otherwise social fit interview.

duxup 3y ago
I think there is a lot of the tech world that isn’t quite the stereotype / big tech type world we think of… it just doesn’t get much attention.
- pc86 3y ago
  FAANG / BigTech is the exception in almost all areas. Scale, pay, interview, just about everything. Some for the better - anyone reading HN can pass just about any non-BigTech (or companies trying to pretend they're BigTech) technical interview without a ton of studying beforehand, especially once they have breadth of experience. And some for the worse - BigTech pay is also the exception, the median programmer salary in the US is something like $110k. 99% of companies give you zero equity, and in my anecdotal experience only 10-20% of companies give any sort of bonus with any sort of regularity.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - duxup 3y ago
    Work life balance too. I hear folks talking about insane hours and feeling pressure to work them. I uh… work when I want… and that’s not uncommon from other folks I talk to. I think big tech and squeezing out every last dollar in compensation gets folks into a bit of a skewed world where their employer wants to do the same and they don’t always know it.
    - deleted 3y ago
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dawnerd 3y ago
I’ve never been subject to those crazy programming questions either and I’ve done work for some big companies including Discovery Channel. They were all mainly culture fit. Granted it’s been a long time since I’ve interviewed anywhere. I do however interview people and make a point to not try gotcha questions or leetcode. It’s a how would you do this. Make it clear as long as there’s a solution there’s no wrong answer. I just want to know how they think and approach problems. And not made up hypothetical will never happen questions. Day to day what they’d be doing kinda things. 90% of our interviews is conversation.
gumballindie 3y ago
The only time I was asked such "leetcode" interview questions was for a contract at a company that coincidentally went under a few months later. Asked something about css colours in HEX and doing some magic stuff with them. When I asked what is the relevance to the task at hand they told me this was a question a friend of theirs was given at a google interview. Hilarious.
alexjplant 3y ago
I've done more than a few software/"DevOps" engineering interviews at DoD contractors and the only three practical technical questions that I was asked across _all_ of them were 1) what is a CSS selector, 2) how would you join an array of strings into a comma-separated list in C#, and 3) what Linux command one would use to determine disk usage... not exactly LC medium-level problems. These types of places don't seem to be big on even attempting to rigorously test for technical acumen - as long as you had a pulse and sounded like you knew what you were talking about they were happy to extend an offer.

duxup 3y ago

I think there is a lot of the tech world that isn’t quite the stereotype / big tech type world we think of… it just doesn’t get much attention.

pc86 3y ago
FAANG / BigTech is the exception in almost all areas. Scale, pay, interview, just about everything. Some for the better - anyone reading HN can pass just about any non-BigTech (or companies trying to pretend they're BigTech) technical interview without a ton of studying beforehand, especially once they have breadth of experience. And some for the worse - BigTech pay is also the exception, the median programmer salary in the US is something like $110k. 99% of companies give you zero equity, and in my anecdotal experience only 10-20% of companies give any sort of bonus with any sort of regularity.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- duxup 3y ago
  Work life balance too. I hear folks talking about insane hours and feeling pressure to work them. I uh… work when I want… and that’s not uncommon from other folks I talk to. I think big tech and squeezing out every last dollar in compensation gets folks into a bit of a skewed world where their employer wants to do the same and they don’t always know it.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

dawnerd 3y ago

I’ve never been subject to those crazy programming questions either and I’ve done work for some big companies including Discovery Channel. They were all mainly culture fit. Granted it’s been a long time since I’ve interviewed anywhere. I do however interview people and make a point to not try gotcha questions or leetcode. It’s a how would you do this. Make it clear as long as there’s a solution there’s no wrong answer. I just want to know how they think and approach problems. And not made up hypothetical will never happen questions. Day to day what they’d be doing kinda things. 90% of our interviews is conversation.

gumballindie 3y ago

The only time I was asked such "leetcode" interview questions was for a contract at a company that coincidentally went under a few months later. Asked something about css colours in HEX and doing some magic stuff with them. When I asked what is the relevance to the task at hand they told me this was a question a friend of theirs was given at a google interview. Hilarious.

alexjplant 3y ago

I've done more than a few software/"DevOps" engineering interviews at DoD contractors and the only three practical technical questions that I was asked across _all_ of them were 1) what is a CSS selector, 2) how would you join an array of strings into a comma-separated list in C#, and 3) what Linux command one would use to determine disk usage... not exactly LC medium-level problems. These types of places don't seem to be big on even attempting to rigorously test for technical acumen - as long as you had a pulse and sounded like you knew what you were talking about they were happy to extend an offer.