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I don’t think anyone is saying in a traditional SWE role data structures and algorithms aren’t useful things to have some me amount of mastery about (higher lev

I don’t think anyone is saying in a traditional SWE role data structures and algorithms aren’t useful things to have some me amount of mastery about (higher levels required for higher levels of seniority maybe)… but it’s just hilarious and also sad that we’ve, as an industry, not been able to move away from these logic puzzles disguised as programming tasks that ostensibly should mimic a typical task but serve only to filter out groups of people. Of course I don’t know the replacement I just know I loathe doing these things and would rather learn more about what the day to day would be like, what’s the team like, the manager, the growth potential, etc. I am all proving my skills but can I do so in an environment that is more congruent with my actual work?

sethammons 2y ago
See: work sample test. My best received interview question was for a bug/firefighting team. Based on a real bug we had, here is a sanitized repo (perl or python, our languages at the time) with some sql and data. We gave them three made up support tickets about some settings values being incorrect causing $issue. Dig into the utility script, find bugs, fix the data. Even folks who didn't pass complemented the task
- gigatexal 2y ago
  That kind of out of the box thinking is where I think the industry should go. But would it scale to the Google's of the world? Probably not. They'll continue filtering people through the sieve that is the leet-code style interview.
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    Sure it would. The problem described above can be manufactured. Every team of every job you enter does things in their own snowflakey way. If that's new or foreign to you, good luck. You can permute some base instance in many ways. Filter out the comments in the code or change the variables and function names to be terse and cryptic.
surfingdino 2y ago
Our industry doesn't value experience. I have 20+ years of experience but every time I apply for a new role I am being treated like a 19-year old. I was once give a travelling salesman problem by a company that needed a bunch of APIs implemented in Flask. I am a contractor so mostly do 12-month engagements with different clients and I'd say I have more practical experience designing and delivering software, but it doesn't matter to the potential clients, because they cannot judge experience from the past work history. So everyone gets the same treatment and you have software written by recent graduates (or drop-outs) with no industry experience.

sethammons 2y ago

See: work sample test. My best received interview question was for a bug/firefighting team. Based on a real bug we had, here is a sanitized repo (perl or python, our languages at the time) with some sql and data. We gave them three made up support tickets about some settings values being incorrect causing $issue. Dig into the utility script, find bugs, fix the data. Even folks who didn't pass complemented the task

gigatexal 2y ago
That kind of out of the box thinking is where I think the industry should go. But would it scale to the Google's of the world? Probably not. They'll continue filtering people through the sieve that is the leet-code style interview.
- kristopolous 2y ago
  Sure it would. The problem described above can be manufactured. Every team of every job you enter does things in their own snowflakey way. If that's new or foreign to you, good luck. You can permute some base instance in many ways. Filter out the comments in the code or change the variables and function names to be terse and cryptic.

surfingdino 2y ago

Our industry doesn't value experience. I have 20+ years of experience but every time I apply for a new role I am being treated like a 19-year old. I was once give a travelling salesman problem by a company that needed a bunch of APIs implemented in Flask. I am a contractor so mostly do 12-month engagements with different clients and I'd say I have more practical experience designing and delivering software, but it doesn't matter to the potential clients, because they cannot judge experience from the past work history. So everyone gets the same treatment and you have software written by recent graduates (or drop-outs) with no industry experience.