ken47

12 ms·

121.
by ken47 3y ago
> AFAIK communication skills are routinely evaluated in those interviews: if you have the best code but can't explain how it works, you won't score highly on them. You should be able to discuss tradeoffs, how you reason, etc.
122.
by ken47 3y ago
I’ve don’t think I’ve ever seen engineers complain about the rejection rate of Google’s interview process. The more common criticism/meme regards the laziness of running candidates through a unidimensional leetcode gauntlet. Half jokin
123.
by ken47 3y ago
1. I would guess that many of the commenters in this subthread work for Silicon Valley big tech, including some apparent (ex-)Googlers who are openly skeptical of their company’s interview process. 2. By reputation, most big Silicon Valley
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by ken47 3y ago
Talent that is evaluated in, effectively, one dimension? Commercializing a product successfully is a highly multi-dimensional endeavor. Even building a reasonably well-functioning engineering team is highly multi-dimensional.
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by ken47 3y ago
Google reached out to me a few times to see if I'd interview with them. On the one or two phone calls I had with their recruiters, they explicitly advised me to practice algorithms (leetcode et al) if I wanted to move forward. Perhaps
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by ken47 3y ago
> people who hire for software engineers who write CRUD apps used by 20 people It seems like you believe that anyone who doesn't work for Google works for a boutique web design firm?
127.
by ken47 3y ago
> Internal restructuring of the company may even take you from working on backend web apis to distributed databases This is a stretch. It's unlikely that an interview process would test such disparate skills directly, and a compet
128.
by ken47 3y ago
Agreed. The implication that a lack of algorithms testing during software engineering interviews has much of anything to do with successful innovation, as opposed to the infinitude of other factors that go into commercializing a product, is
129.
by ken47 3y ago
Your assertion is that Google asks “just easy level programming problems.” Assuming we accept this argument, that probably tells most of us more about Google than it does about some straw-man developer. But I’ll give Google a bit more credi
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by ken47 3y ago
I've seen plenty of HN threads where good alternative processes were described. I'm not going to be exhaustive here: writing a program over a few hours that is reflective of the kind of work that the company actually does, coming
131.
by ken47 3y ago
Agreed, but highly doubt the effect is nearly as dramatic as claimed. If the effect is to the extent that engineers in their 40s can never make the money they made in their 30s, that would be trivial to prove. Even a big corp would have sig
132.
by ken47 3y ago
Google is overrated. It's been obvious for over a decade after they built an interview process that is heavily biased towards those who recently took an algorithms class. You had talking heads yammering about how hard it was to get int
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by ken47 3y ago
You're never going to make as much again after 40: based on what metrics? Ageism is illegal in the US, and if this is true for you, you probably did not cultivate the type of software engineering skillset that scales well as you advanc
134.
by ken47 3y ago
Pretty sure that if you have glowing perf reviews, your job is safe. The "best engineers" you're talking about were the best by which metrics, and why were these metrics so different from those that execs used to determine wh
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by ken47 3y ago
I’ve lived in America all my life, and it isn’t commonly brought up in my American peer group. You’re also conflating the perception of intellect with the actual possession of it. It seems like you don’t have much confident in your measure
136.
by ken47 3y ago
I don't know what subset of society you live in, but the university you attended is not commonly brought up in America. If you're referring to your intellectual aptitude rather than the credentials attached to your name, just try
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by ken47 3y ago
What I meant is that China will be able to - at least - replicate all of these things within a few generations, even without us handing over the tech to them. As an aside, I don't see why India wouldn't be capable of the same, as
138.
by ken47 3y ago
I think this varies by corporation, but large corporations at their root have a desire to treat their employees as cogs, because that is the simplest system for them to implement. It is on the employees to make it clear that they are not co
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by ken47 3y ago
I don't think China "needs" American tech. My impression is that, while they have not yet reached technological parity with America, given the country's intellectual capital and culture, that can only remain true for so
140.
by ken47 3y ago
I think the better question is, if we didn't think they were so good at this stuff, why would we limit their access? I believe the US possesses the human capital within it to compete with the likes of China in terms of STEM, but Americ
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by ken47 3y ago
This is why acceptance rates cannot be considered in a vacuum as a measure of universal quality. Informed people generally understand that there is a lot of overlap in the bell curves of the intellectual abilities of Stanford and Berkeley u
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by ken47 3y ago
We do. Even just recently, US presidents have been cutting off China’s access to US tech out of fear.
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by ken47 3y ago
If the kind of work these people do at your company doesn’t pressure test the skills they exhibited to get into MIT, then that stands to reason.
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by ken47 3y ago
It’s nowhere near the stature or notoriety of Princeton, Harvard, Yale, etc. It feels like you’re moving the goalpost. Anyway, maybe you should change the way you measure yourself.
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by ken47 3y ago
I’ve personally witnessed schools of Stanford’s stature accepting students on multiple occasions, who were unable to handle AP Calculus AB in high school, or at least without significant assistance. When I mention this to associates from As
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by ken47 3y ago
These schools can offer harder, accelerated courses under the presumption that the floor of the student body’s ability is higher than average. In that sense, the education can be more rigorous and faster. Is that actually the case in practi
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by ken47 3y ago
You mean like Steve Jobs who, by your definition, didn’t go to a top school, but is more highly regarded than 99.99% of graduates of top schools?
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by ken47 3y ago
What is your class of people? The 99.99% that you alluded to in another comment? Can that be called a class of people?
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by ken47 3y ago
Throwing out numbers like 83% and 33% seems like a handwavy attempt at precision and diminishes your argument. The real world is not like university, unless you live in the very small subset of the world that makes its living off research.
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by ken47 3y ago
Do you have any first hand sources of Disney’s thought process and strategy as you’ve summarized them here? Calling Disney naive is bold.

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