8 ms·

I won't attempt to generalize from my case, but let me offer a personal anecdote. I'm now a successful, self-employed indie developer. One of the main reasons

by lapcat 1y ago

I won't attempt to generalize from my case, but let me offer a personal anecdote. I'm now a successful, self-employed indie developer. One of the main reasons I stuck with indie development through the hard times—the maxim that it takes 5 years to become an overnight success was true for me—was that I became practically unhireable. There are multiple strikes against me: I'm middle age in an industry rife with age discrimination, I don't have a computer science degree, and I experience brain freeze during live coding interviews. I would note that not all stress is the same. Firefighters rush into burning buildings for a living, and what could be more stressful, yet many of them would panic at the idea of giving a speech to a non-burning roomful of strangers. I have no problem with stress on the job, and I've successfully navigated many work emergencies during my career, but something about strangers standing over my shoulder judging me, determining my financial future by providing or withholding a job, like the sword of Damocles, turns my stomach inside out. And like the article author, I can revisit the coding problems and solve them afterward, as soon as the interview is over. Interviewers must think I'm a fraud who can't code, yet all evidence from my career, now almost 2 decades long, suggests otherwise. A lot of commenters causally speak of "false negatives" as if they were random, but some people, myself included, are always the false negative. I am consistently filtered out by audition-style interviews. I'm not a stage performer. [Edit:] I didn't expect my comment to rise to the top of an already crowded discussion. I feel a little self-conscious about it. ;-)

linotype 1y ago
> I'm not a stage performer. This. So much this. I’m over leetcode interviews and will no longer do them.
scarface_74 1y ago
I find that “age discrimination” in the industry not to be a myth. But it is more nuanced. If you’re older and have the skills and experience, “you should have”, the world is your oyster. I am 51 and found a job quickly both in 2023 after being Amazoned and last year. Admittedly, I wouldn’t make it through a coding interview even though my jobs have always involved some coding. But at 51 years old, if I were still competing for jobs based on my ability to invert a btree on the white board, I’ve done something horribly wrong in my life. I can do a system design interview with my eyes closed though. It’s been part of my $DayJob to come up with real world system solutions on the fly in front of clients.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  > Amazoned We have a data point. I came from a world-class company, but it wasn't a MANGA, so I wasn't given the "implicit points" for coming from an environment with the right perfume. I was a radioactive 55-year-old. I almost never got to a second interview. As soon as someone figured out my age, the process stopped cold. I was usually ghosted. As for coding interviews, I spend exactly zero time practicing. I've seldom practiced for tests, and have usually done well. I do pretty well, under stress. That's been my life, since I was 22, or so. I do suck at simple college tests, like balancing btrees, because I have never encountered one in my work. I do well at the stuff I encounter regularly. As someone with no college degree, I found that absolutely no one has ever cut me slack, or given me the benefit of the doubt, so my entire career was having to prove myself, over and over again, with almost no room for error. I worked with top-shelf engineers and scientists, and they didn't really suffer fools. Bit exhausting, frankly. But my entire adult life has been about getting high-Quality deliverables out the door, and being personally held to account for the work. That doesn't really seem to be what today's companies want, though. Pissed me off, for a while, but it has ended up being a very good thing for me.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    I doubt my degree in CS from 1996 where I learned COBOL and FORTRAN at a no name college in south GA makes a difference. Heck I doubt it made a difference after my first job, let alone after my second looking for my third in 2008z I didn’t get a job at a company that anyone has heard of until I was 46 (AWS). My career before then was a journeymen enterprise developer until 2016 when I started leading projects. Now I still do hands on coding. But it’s now strategy cloud consulting specializing in “modernization” (ie app dev) with 50/50 client facing post sales architecture and coding and leading larger implementations. Now admittedly, one of my secrets is that I keep completely clean shaven of all facial hair so there is no signs of balding or grey and I’m in decent shape. No one can tell my age. According to Bill Burr it’s probably the lotion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sSSrtbujO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sSSrtbujO4)
    - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
gwd 1y ago
I've been on the other side of this interaction, and it's just as frustrating -- we do a phone interview a student who's been doing random stuff with the project for a while; and some combination of stress, the phone, not being in his native language, and he's totally not performing, in a way that seems almost certain to be situational and temporary. We were all open to trying some other format that would help him perform better, but he decided to cut his losses and apply elsewhere. But unfortunately, it seems pretty likely to me that non-live coding interviews will measure the ability to query LLMs. If it's a choice between filtering out people who freeze up at interviews, or letting in scammers who have no ability whatsoever, I'm afraid the first is still the best option.
- Herring 1y ago
  If you think they're good, why not do a paid day of work then? They'll probably be querying LLMs all day after you hire them anyway.
  - collingreen 1y ago
    I think this is impractical without at least some filter first. Some jobs get thousands of applications and some of those are fully fraud. I'm all for a paid work stint but where do you draw the line, how do you evaluate it fairly, and how do you make that possible and attractive for people already working?
    - whstl 1y ago
      Also: as someone who interviews and handles hiring, the biggest bottleneck for me is my time. In enterprise sure, I had whole weeks where not much was going on, but in tech or in startups? An hour is already precious.
  - freedomben 1y ago
    I love this idea in theory, but in practice this would just mean coming up with some throwaway project and then paying them a full day to build on it. I've never had a job where there wasn't at least a few days of onboarding (often times a few weeks) before somebody could productively contribute to our applications. If it's a brand new project then sure, but how often does that happen? And when it does, do you want your completely unknown candidate doing it or one of your senior engineers who understands the big picture, how it will fit in, your company culture/values/etc?
almost_usual 1y ago
It takes a lot of practice and is a skill in itself. Most interviewers would fail a similar live coding exercise if they interviewed at another company without practice. The goal is to keep yourself grounded and focus on the problem at hand. Practicing under these circumstances of course makes it easier.
- jt2190 1y ago
  Yes I think this is worth emphasizing: Just as firefighters are’t interviewed by sending them into a burning building, and aspiring public speakers don’t walk onstage at TED but join groups like Toastmasters, you can train toward performing better in live coding interviews.
  - UncleOxidant 1y ago
    > you can train toward performing better in live coding interviews. I have no doubt that you can. But how much time do I want to waste on this kind of training? Personally, I don't need to do these kinds of interviews anymore because I decided I could retire instead. I suppose if I were in my 20s, 30s or 40s I'd have to "waste" time training to interview (and let's be honest, it could take a lot of time) - or just decide to change to another industry.
- xedrac 1y ago
  This is why I start with something very simple. If I detect the candidate is getting paralyzed with nerves, I'll reassure them and give little hints to help bring them out of it. After successfully completing a simple exercise, they usually feel more confident and relaxed. Only then will I give them a more challenging problem, with the caveat that I'm mostly interested in seeing how they might approach the problem and what things they can tell me about it. If they solve it, great. If they don't, did they show an ability to reason about the problem well, or identify key aspects of the problem that make it challenging? Can they communicate their thoughts as they think about it?
rvz 1y ago
> I'm now a successful, self-employed indie developer. That's the true goal. As long as you can independently make more than what they are offering and you won't need to be playing by their interview games.
- incone123 1y ago
  Even if the cash headline is less, some people will consider being your own boss makes up for that.
lubujackson 1y ago
Yup, it's a gross system, designed only for checking if the kids did their CS data structures homework last week. This may have relevance at the FAANGs in the 2010s when they were hiring cattle, but small to midsize companies need about zero of that and would much better suited testing someone's ability to read/review code, or discuss edge cases for a feature, or any number of other soft, real world situations. I've worked at startups for more than 20 years and I still fail these stupid tests because I refuse to "cram". And that's fine. Those are bad fits for me anyway - I've been a CTO, built and launched multiple companies, managed teams, worked well in teams, etc. But I am still treated like a new grad in most of these interviews. I failed to implement a LRU cache fast and clean enough in one of these interviews. How many statups need this? I haven't done that since the 90s. And I fully understand how someone can look like an idiot for not being able to do some these tasks instinctively when they may be so recent in your mind, but if you never use them at your job, what's the actual point here? It's like hiring an architect based on their slide rule skills. To me it shows a lack of care given to hiring in general. At best it reveals workers that will throw hours at problems rather than thought. Mercenaries, I guess. But companies that hire like that tend to have highly complex code. And not because it needs to be complex, but because the company culture tends to focus on clever solutions above solving business goals. I would rather hire and work with people who focus on breaking down problems and keeping logic and structure as simple as possible. Complexity is the enemy of progress. If there is one benefit of leetcode is that it finds smart people who can handle lots of complexity. Which is useful! But I would rather hire someone who isn't and can't, but can solve real world problems effectively and consistently. Wild concept, I know!
- scarface_74 1y ago
  Don’t get me wrong, at 51 years old with my experience, I wouldn’t even think about doing a coding interview and in fact the only reason I got into BigTech at 46 was because a position at AWS ProServe fell into my lap in 2020 (no longer there). But given the choice between making BigTech compensation and enterprise CRUD compensation if I were 25-30 I with today’s opportunities (well not the current shit show) instead of when I was 25-30, of course I would “grind leetCode” and do what it takes. > I would rather hire and work with people who focus on breaking down problems and keeping logic and structure as simple as possible At my stage in life, I can afford to be picky about where I work and optimize my lifestyle choices over money. But if I were 25? If I had to work 40 hours a week anyway, my only concern would be where could I get the most money in my bank account and as much (public company) stock in my brokerage account via RSUs. You act as if being a “mercenary” is a bad thing. The only reason I work is to exchange labor for money. That’s been the case since 1996. It ain’t about “passion” or the “mission”.
UncleOxidant 1y ago
> but something about strangers standing over my shoulder judging me, determining my financial future by providing or withholding a job, like the sword of Damocles, turns my stomach inside out ... I'm not a stage performer. This resonates. I'm now in my early 60s. Oddly, in my 20s and 30s I could interview reasonably well. But as time went on, I think the interviewing styles became more confrontational.Whereas earlier on they were trying to find reasons to hire you, later on it was more that they were trying to find reasons not to hire you. Possibly this is somewhat attributable to ageism, but I think it was a change in the industry as well. Over the last 15 years or so I found interviewing to be increasingly unpleasant. Started having panic attacks in interviews. Somehow I still managed to get hired places (and I started doing more contracting where interviewing wasn't required because they were familiar with my work). When the startup I was working in lost it's funding at the end of '22 I decided it was time to hang it up and retire. Not because I don't like the work (I really do) and not because my skills were out of date (in the last startup I was working on optimizing AI algorithms to various hardware - CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs), but because I just couldn't face interviewing anymore and I really didn't need to.
- mathgeek 1y ago
  Exactly this for me the last couple of years. Interviewing at most companies these days results in me getting through the final rounds only to be presented with “feedback” about all the secret things they really wanted that I didn’t meet the bar for. The feedback is often extremely vague but is always a list of shortcomings and rarely a list of strengths. The companies that do provide strengths are the ones I feel bad about missing.
- gedy 1y ago
  > I think it was a change in the industry as well. It's very true, I did not interview from about 2006 to 2014, and had no problems before, but had a noticeable feeling of "wtf is going on?" after this (and still do feel that way tbh).
- ramesh31 1y ago
  It's the money. It's all about the money. Things are pretty low stress and low stakes when you're hiring for a 50k pure salary role. When things blew up into the mid six figures with stock incentives, it became a whole thing. This pervades the work environment too. Everyone is scared to death of saying the wrong thing or messing something up or sounding stupid because it means your 800k mortgage won't be getting paid next month. I hate it.
scruple 1y ago
> but something about strangers standing over my shoulder judging me I don't like it when people I do know do it all that much, either, to be completely honest.
osigurdson 1y ago
That may be true but what proponents of Leetcode style interviews say, is that they don't care. This process filters out good and bad candidates but "post filter", what remains is higher quality candidates. It is absolutely questionable from a scientific perspective (where is the tracking of the "B" group for instance), but if companies want to do irrational things they are allowed to do it.
- sgerenser 1y ago
  I think this wouldn't even be that bad of a thing (assuming that there's just so many candidates that you need some kind of filter), if it weren't for the issue pointed out in the study cited by the article: "But here’s a surprising finding: not a single woman in the public setting passed, while every woman in the private setting did." That to me implies this isn't just an imperfect filter, but actually a very biased filter.
  - osigurdson 1y ago
    I expect for some companies, that pay 3-8X above average there should be a very large number of candidates. The really odd situation is the low paying, enterprise CRUD job that feels the need to use leetcode hard on their tiny pool of candidates that can't get jobs anywhere else.
WalterBright 1y ago
> turns my stomach inside out The most effective way to deal with this is to do it again and again until you get used to it. It's the same thing as dealing with stage fright. Just keep doing it. The stage fright will fade away.
- loa_in_ 1y ago
  It's like moving, first time is very stressful and it's a whole ordeal, but after repetition it's a familiar, whole ordeal.
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  If one could line up several interviews a day it could work. I haven't had a real interview this year.
- jufter 1y ago
  There is truth to this but it's important to acknowledge that exposure therapy alone may not be sufficient for everyone and will require alternative modalities.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    Nothing is sufficient for everyone. You set an impossible bar.
crystal_revenge 1y ago
> A lot of commenters causally speak of "false negatives" as if they were random They also don't talk about, what my experience has shown me, is an extremely high false positive rate. I've passed these style interview for a few large companies and those places easily had the least skilled developers I've worked with. Similarly, I've been shocked by the lack of technical skill in many ex-FAANG coworkers I've had. Their are some exceptions, but those are typically people who worked for a FAANG nearly a decade ago. In the early days when Google was doing more CS style algorithmic thinking tests, it might have been a better measure, but this world of "grinding leetcode" as a skill provides very poor signal on developer skill. For an MLE position Meta currently requires two leetcode mediums to be completed within 40 minutes and the solution must be absolutely optimal, and this is as a screen. This can only be reasonably accomplished by studying all 100+ of their problems on leetcode so you know the answer before hand. I do think thoughtful algorithm design interviews can be high signal, but in it's current form you can't test anything other than "how many hours did you study this?" Most of the smartest people I've known and worked with have much more interesting things to do with their time than grind leetcode. Additionally, at this level of grilling, you're not even thinking anymore. In fact, the interviewers seems genuinely surprised if you give a correct answer that is not exactly performed in the canned way expected. White boarding algorithm interviews can be great, but what we have to take is a sad facsimile of what was originally being tested.
platevoltage 1y ago
This is exactly why i'm now a couple years in to being a hopefully-one-day-successful self-employed indie developer. I somehow have a couple of clients who think i'm some kind of genius (i'm not), while being completely unemployable by "real" companies. Thank you for sharing this.
- quaintdev 1y ago
  How did you land clients?
  - platevoltage 1y ago
    I started on Upwork.
SamPatt 1y ago
How did you begin to succeed in indie development? I'm almost 40 and I've always loved programming as a hobby, but I decided to try it professionally last year. I know, I know, not the best timing! I have an active Github of (what I think are) interesting projects, success in other fields before I tried software development professionally, good communication skills, etc. But my experience with live coding sounds like yours. So I'm very curious if you have thoughts on the routes to independent contribution where all that matters is being able to do the thing, not signaling ability to do the thing. I know I can do the thing (or I'm confident I can learn how), so I'd rather get paid to do it myself, if that makes sense.
gitprolinux 1y ago
I absolutely agree with you. Coding under pressure and duress results in code that may not operate as intended. Im in the camp of code is both a creative activity and that code has to be accurate in its implementation so it works nicely. I may refine the code several times to get the version I really want that I am satisfied with.
m463 1y ago
I've thought about this kind of thing. There are a few huge personality disconnects at many companies. One is that a lot of programmers are introverts and the people who hire them frequently are not. If not managed well, this can lead to like hiring like and other problems where people who like to think deeply about problems are excluded or just not understood. The open seating problem is adjacent. Managers might love to collaborate all day but a lot of introverts are working in a difficult environment.
mixmastamyk 1y ago
Same. How does one become an indie developer?

by lapcat 1y ago

linotype 1y ago

> I'm not a stage performer. This. So much this. I’m over leetcode interviews and will no longer do them.

scarface_74 1y ago

I find that “age discrimination” in the industry not to be a myth. But it is more nuanced. If you’re older and have the skills and experience, “you should have”, the world is your oyster. I am 51 and found a job quickly both in 2023 after being Amazoned and last year. Admittedly, I wouldn’t make it through a coding interview even though my jobs have always involved some coding. But at 51 years old, if I were still competing for jobs based on my ability to invert a btree on the white board, I’ve done something horribly wrong in my life. I can do a system design interview with my eyes closed though. It’s been part of my $DayJob to come up with real world system solutions on the fly in front of clients.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
> Amazoned We have a data point. I came from a world-class company, but it wasn't a MANGA, so I wasn't given the "implicit points" for coming from an environment with the right perfume. I was a radioactive 55-year-old. I almost never got to a second interview. As soon as someone figured out my age, the process stopped cold. I was usually ghosted. As for coding interviews, I spend exactly zero time practicing. I've seldom practiced for tests, and have usually done well. I do pretty well, under stress. That's been my life, since I was 22, or so. I do suck at simple college tests, like balancing btrees, because I have never encountered one in my work. I do well at the stuff I encounter regularly. As someone with no college degree, I found that absolutely no one has ever cut me slack, or given me the benefit of the doubt, so my entire career was having to prove myself, over and over again, with almost no room for error. I worked with top-shelf engineers and scientists, and they didn't really suffer fools. Bit exhausting, frankly. But my entire adult life has been about getting high-Quality deliverables out the door, and being personally held to account for the work. That doesn't really seem to be what today's companies want, though. Pissed me off, for a while, but it has ended up being a very good thing for me.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  I doubt my degree in CS from 1996 where I learned COBOL and FORTRAN at a no name college in south GA makes a difference. Heck I doubt it made a difference after my first job, let alone after my second looking for my third in 2008z I didn’t get a job at a company that anyone has heard of until I was 46 (AWS). My career before then was a journeymen enterprise developer until 2016 when I started leading projects. Now I still do hands on coding. But it’s now strategy cloud consulting specializing in “modernization” (ie app dev) with 50/50 client facing post sales architecture and coding and leading larger implementations. Now admittedly, one of my secrets is that I keep completely clean shaven of all facial hair so there is no signs of balding or grey and I’m in decent shape. No one can tell my age. According to Bill Burr it’s probably the lotion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sSSrtbujO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sSSrtbujO4)
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

gwd 1y ago

I've been on the other side of this interaction, and it's just as frustrating -- we do a phone interview a student who's been doing random stuff with the project for a while; and some combination of stress, the phone, not being in his native language, and he's totally not performing, in a way that seems almost certain to be situational and temporary. We were all open to trying some other format that would help him perform better, but he decided to cut his losses and apply elsewhere. But unfortunately, it seems pretty likely to me that non-live coding interviews will measure the ability to query LLMs. If it's a choice between filtering out people who freeze up at interviews, or letting in scammers who have no ability whatsoever, I'm afraid the first is still the best option.

Herring 1y ago
If you think they're good, why not do a paid day of work then? They'll probably be querying LLMs all day after you hire them anyway.
- collingreen 1y ago
  I think this is impractical without at least some filter first. Some jobs get thousands of applications and some of those are fully fraud. I'm all for a paid work stint but where do you draw the line, how do you evaluate it fairly, and how do you make that possible and attractive for people already working?
  - whstl 1y ago
    Also: as someone who interviews and handles hiring, the biggest bottleneck for me is my time. In enterprise sure, I had whole weeks where not much was going on, but in tech or in startups? An hour is already precious.
- freedomben 1y ago
  I love this idea in theory, but in practice this would just mean coming up with some throwaway project and then paying them a full day to build on it. I've never had a job where there wasn't at least a few days of onboarding (often times a few weeks) before somebody could productively contribute to our applications. If it's a brand new project then sure, but how often does that happen? And when it does, do you want your completely unknown candidate doing it or one of your senior engineers who understands the big picture, how it will fit in, your company culture/values/etc?

almost_usual 1y ago

It takes a lot of practice and is a skill in itself. Most interviewers would fail a similar live coding exercise if they interviewed at another company without practice. The goal is to keep yourself grounded and focus on the problem at hand. Practicing under these circumstances of course makes it easier.

jt2190 1y ago
Yes I think this is worth emphasizing: Just as firefighters are’t interviewed by sending them into a burning building, and aspiring public speakers don’t walk onstage at TED but join groups like Toastmasters, you can train toward performing better in live coding interviews.
- UncleOxidant 1y ago
  > you can train toward performing better in live coding interviews. I have no doubt that you can. But how much time do I want to waste on this kind of training? Personally, I don't need to do these kinds of interviews anymore because I decided I could retire instead. I suppose if I were in my 20s, 30s or 40s I'd have to "waste" time training to interview (and let's be honest, it could take a lot of time) - or just decide to change to another industry.
xedrac 1y ago
This is why I start with something very simple. If I detect the candidate is getting paralyzed with nerves, I'll reassure them and give little hints to help bring them out of it. After successfully completing a simple exercise, they usually feel more confident and relaxed. Only then will I give them a more challenging problem, with the caveat that I'm mostly interested in seeing how they might approach the problem and what things they can tell me about it. If they solve it, great. If they don't, did they show an ability to reason about the problem well, or identify key aspects of the problem that make it challenging? Can they communicate their thoughts as they think about it?

rvz 1y ago

> I'm now a successful, self-employed indie developer. That's the true goal. As long as you can independently make more than what they are offering and you won't need to be playing by their interview games.

incone123 1y ago
Even if the cash headline is less, some people will consider being your own boss makes up for that.

lubujackson 1y ago

Yup, it's a gross system, designed only for checking if the kids did their CS data structures homework last week. This may have relevance at the FAANGs in the 2010s when they were hiring cattle, but small to midsize companies need about zero of that and would much better suited testing someone's ability to read/review code, or discuss edge cases for a feature, or any number of other soft, real world situations. I've worked at startups for more than 20 years and I still fail these stupid tests because I refuse to "cram". And that's fine. Those are bad fits for me anyway - I've been a CTO, built and launched multiple companies, managed teams, worked well in teams, etc. But I am still treated like a new grad in most of these interviews. I failed to implement a LRU cache fast and clean enough in one of these interviews. How many statups need this? I haven't done that since the 90s. And I fully understand how someone can look like an idiot for not being able to do some these tasks instinctively when they may be so recent in your mind, but if you never use them at your job, what's the actual point here? It's like hiring an architect based on their slide rule skills. To me it shows a lack of care given to hiring in general. At best it reveals workers that will throw hours at problems rather than thought. Mercenaries, I guess. But companies that hire like that tend to have highly complex code. And not because it needs to be complex, but because the company culture tends to focus on clever solutions above solving business goals. I would rather hire and work with people who focus on breaking down problems and keeping logic and structure as simple as possible. Complexity is the enemy of progress. If there is one benefit of leetcode is that it finds smart people who can handle lots of complexity. Which is useful! But I would rather hire someone who isn't and can't, but can solve real world problems effectively and consistently. Wild concept, I know!

scarface_74 1y ago
Don’t get me wrong, at 51 years old with my experience, I wouldn’t even think about doing a coding interview and in fact the only reason I got into BigTech at 46 was because a position at AWS ProServe fell into my lap in 2020 (no longer there). But given the choice between making BigTech compensation and enterprise CRUD compensation if I were 25-30 I with today’s opportunities (well not the current shit show) instead of when I was 25-30, of course I would “grind leetCode” and do what it takes. > I would rather hire and work with people who focus on breaking down problems and keeping logic and structure as simple as possible At my stage in life, I can afford to be picky about where I work and optimize my lifestyle choices over money. But if I were 25? If I had to work 40 hours a week anyway, my only concern would be where could I get the most money in my bank account and as much (public company) stock in my brokerage account via RSUs. You act as if being a “mercenary” is a bad thing. The only reason I work is to exchange labor for money. That’s been the case since 1996. It ain’t about “passion” or the “mission”.

UncleOxidant 1y ago

> but something about strangers standing over my shoulder judging me, determining my financial future by providing or withholding a job, like the sword of Damocles, turns my stomach inside out ... I'm not a stage performer. This resonates. I'm now in my early 60s. Oddly, in my 20s and 30s I could interview reasonably well. But as time went on, I think the interviewing styles became more confrontational.Whereas earlier on they were trying to find reasons to hire you, later on it was more that they were trying to find reasons not to hire you. Possibly this is somewhat attributable to ageism, but I think it was a change in the industry as well. Over the last 15 years or so I found interviewing to be increasingly unpleasant. Started having panic attacks in interviews. Somehow I still managed to get hired places (and I started doing more contracting where interviewing wasn't required because they were familiar with my work). When the startup I was working in lost it's funding at the end of '22 I decided it was time to hang it up and retire. Not because I don't like the work (I really do) and not because my skills were out of date (in the last startup I was working on optimizing AI algorithms to various hardware - CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs), but because I just couldn't face interviewing anymore and I really didn't need to.

mathgeek 1y ago
Exactly this for me the last couple of years. Interviewing at most companies these days results in me getting through the final rounds only to be presented with “feedback” about all the secret things they really wanted that I didn’t meet the bar for. The feedback is often extremely vague but is always a list of shortcomings and rarely a list of strengths. The companies that do provide strengths are the ones I feel bad about missing.
gedy 1y ago
> I think it was a change in the industry as well. It's very true, I did not interview from about 2006 to 2014, and had no problems before, but had a noticeable feeling of "wtf is going on?" after this (and still do feel that way tbh).
ramesh31 1y ago
It's the money. It's all about the money. Things are pretty low stress and low stakes when you're hiring for a 50k pure salary role. When things blew up into the mid six figures with stock incentives, it became a whole thing. This pervades the work environment too. Everyone is scared to death of saying the wrong thing or messing something up or sounding stupid because it means your 800k mortgage won't be getting paid next month. I hate it.

scruple 1y ago

> but something about strangers standing over my shoulder judging me I don't like it when people I do know do it all that much, either, to be completely honest.

osigurdson 1y ago

That may be true but what proponents of Leetcode style interviews say, is that they don't care. This process filters out good and bad candidates but "post filter", what remains is higher quality candidates. It is absolutely questionable from a scientific perspective (where is the tracking of the "B" group for instance), but if companies want to do irrational things they are allowed to do it.

sgerenser 1y ago
I think this wouldn't even be that bad of a thing (assuming that there's just so many candidates that you need some kind of filter), if it weren't for the issue pointed out in the study cited by the article: "But here’s a surprising finding: not a single woman in the public setting passed, while every woman in the private setting did." That to me implies this isn't just an imperfect filter, but actually a very biased filter.
- osigurdson 1y ago
  I expect for some companies, that pay 3-8X above average there should be a very large number of candidates. The really odd situation is the low paying, enterprise CRUD job that feels the need to use leetcode hard on their tiny pool of candidates that can't get jobs anywhere else.

WalterBright 1y ago

> turns my stomach inside out The most effective way to deal with this is to do it again and again until you get used to it. It's the same thing as dealing with stage fright. Just keep doing it. The stage fright will fade away.

loa_in_ 1y ago
It's like moving, first time is very stressful and it's a whole ordeal, but after repetition it's a familiar, whole ordeal.
mixmastamyk 1y ago
If one could line up several interviews a day it could work. I haven't had a real interview this year.
jufter 1y ago
There is truth to this but it's important to acknowledge that exposure therapy alone may not be sufficient for everyone and will require alternative modalities.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  Nothing is sufficient for everyone. You set an impossible bar.

crystal_revenge 1y ago

> A lot of commenters causally speak of "false negatives" as if they were random They also don't talk about, what my experience has shown me, is an extremely high false positive rate. I've passed these style interview for a few large companies and those places easily had the least skilled developers I've worked with. Similarly, I've been shocked by the lack of technical skill in many ex-FAANG coworkers I've had. Their are some exceptions, but those are typically people who worked for a FAANG nearly a decade ago. In the early days when Google was doing more CS style algorithmic thinking tests, it might have been a better measure, but this world of "grinding leetcode" as a skill provides very poor signal on developer skill. For an MLE position Meta currently requires two leetcode mediums to be completed within 40 minutes and the solution must be absolutely optimal, and this is as a screen. This can only be reasonably accomplished by studying all 100+ of their problems on leetcode so you know the answer before hand. I do think thoughtful algorithm design interviews can be high signal, but in it's current form you can't test anything other than "how many hours did you study this?" Most of the smartest people I've known and worked with have much more interesting things to do with their time than grind leetcode. Additionally, at this level of grilling, you're not even thinking anymore. In fact, the interviewers seems genuinely surprised if you give a correct answer that is not exactly performed in the canned way expected. White boarding algorithm interviews can be great, but what we have to take is a sad facsimile of what was originally being tested.

platevoltage 1y ago

This is exactly why i'm now a couple years in to being a hopefully-one-day-successful self-employed indie developer. I somehow have a couple of clients who think i'm some kind of genius (i'm not), while being completely unemployable by "real" companies. Thank you for sharing this.

quaintdev 1y ago
How did you land clients?
- platevoltage 1y ago
  I started on Upwork.

SamPatt 1y ago

How did you begin to succeed in indie development? I'm almost 40 and I've always loved programming as a hobby, but I decided to try it professionally last year. I know, I know, not the best timing! I have an active Github of (what I think are) interesting projects, success in other fields before I tried software development professionally, good communication skills, etc. But my experience with live coding sounds like yours. So I'm very curious if you have thoughts on the routes to independent contribution where all that matters is being able to do the thing, not signaling ability to do the thing. I know I can do the thing (or I'm confident I can learn how), so I'd rather get paid to do it myself, if that makes sense.

gitprolinux 1y ago

I absolutely agree with you. Coding under pressure and duress results in code that may not operate as intended. Im in the camp of code is both a creative activity and that code has to be accurate in its implementation so it works nicely. I may refine the code several times to get the version I really want that I am satisfied with.

m463 1y ago

I've thought about this kind of thing. There are a few huge personality disconnects at many companies. One is that a lot of programmers are introverts and the people who hire them frequently are not. If not managed well, this can lead to like hiring like and other problems where people who like to think deeply about problems are excluded or just not understood. The open seating problem is adjacent. Managers might love to collaborate all day but a lot of introverts are working in a difficult environment.

mixmastamyk 1y ago

Same. How does one become an indie developer?