When did interviews diverge so much from the actual job?
Posted by McFlurriez@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 218 comments
I've been in the industry for about a decade, and I've been having some recent revelations from the tech market in 2024. In my mind, I visualize the process of getting a new job in tech as climbing up a staircase to immediately descend it afterwards. To climb up the staircase is to prep all the necessities for the interview process, while to descend the staircase is to throw it all away.
The Interview
- write clean code
- understand complex algorithms
- design complicated systems
- show cross-team leadership
- be a team player
- share documentation
- own flaws & failures
- humanly resolve conflicts
The Job
- accumulating tech debt
- pushing fast fixes
- solving simple problems
- not enough complex projects
- playing politics
- throwing people under the bus
- broken feedback loops
- knowledge silos
I could be ill-informed, but it didn't feel like this 5+ years ago. It felt like there was still some sort of connection between doing the interview and the day to day job. I especially feel like this towards the behavioral parts of the interview process. With quarterly layoffs being the norm, the behavioral part of the interview feels like an acting session. Hide all the toxicity that occurred in your previous work environments, and present a story that is as idealistic as possible. If I had a dollar every time I was asked, "You will be an IC, right? You don't want to be a manager, right?", I'd have several dollars.
Will it ever change? Or is this the new norm, and blue-collar jobs will start being cool again?
MassiveStallion@reddit
Since the early 2000s when Google hit the top of the F500 and their 'wacky interview questions' became a meme. Then every tech bro wanted to be fucking Gollum.
In the 90s and the days of Microsoft, Nintendo, Sega, computer programming was more or less like any scientist/mathetician/medical job. They looked at your resume, did an interview and that was the end of it.
These days, surgeons, lawyers, engineers and fucking nuclear physicists have less stringent and rigorous interviews.
This culture exists in many ways because we idolized anti-social gatekeepers like Zuckerberg and allowed capitalists to farm out all the risk to employees and customers instead of making them take any themselves.
Clean_Plantain_7403@reddit
God I have a friend who is in medicine (doctor) and I was just complaining about our interview processes. He was super surprise by the hoops we have to go through there is nothing like this in his field.
-Quiche-@reddit
Because the hoops he had to go through was studying for the MCAT, applying to medical school, doing an internship while there (probably had one in undergrad too), rotations, residency, and then the job interview.
HonorGuardInsurance@reddit
Don't forget the USMLE Step Exams!
valence_engineer@reddit
I mean if you'd prefer 8 years of schooling, 2 years of residency, tons of exams that can end your career if you fail too much, multiple standardized exams that you need to do amazingly on, and periodic re-certification then not sure what to tell you. If you can't memorize some leetcode questions then why do you consider memorizing books worth of medical information, that you'll likely never use, easier?
valence_engineer@reddit
gatekeepers
You do realize the hilarity of these two statements right? Right? The only reason those professions you listed have easier interviews is because of legally mandated gatekeeping for who can work in them. Including literal quotas on how many new doctors can exist in the US per year. You're just unhappy that the gatekeeping keeps you out but not other people.
Unless you're a top graduate from a top university you'd probably make 25% of your current salary in one of the other systems you mention. You wouldn't be a surgeon. You'd be a nurse. So would we all. And the surgeons will damn well make sure we're kept out.
8x4Ply@reddit
If you are a graduate from a top university, and did better than your peers who went into these areas, it can be a bit frustrating to see this attitude. Software is becoming a sub optimal pick if you were good at school due to its lack of barrier to entry and disregard of the education in favor of these LC tests.
function3@reddit
Okay, and? Every one of those professions has much, much more rigorous education and licensing requirements. There are also far fewer people in those fields, on top of the sheer amount of incompetent developers that apply for roles
The interview process isn't just leetcode, there are also behavioral and system design rounds where you can show your experience and knowledge. If I have to practice a little leetcode here and there to keep my comfortable office/remote job, I'm not gonna cry about it.
MassiveStallion@reddit
We need to start taking interviews and declining to do these ridiculous tests.
Like as a movement, we should do it. And of course, I'm not saying people actively looking for work should do this. If you already have a job and are just flirting with the idea, do that
neopointer@reddit
I always ask upfront in the interview process whether there's whiteboard/leetcode kind of test. If there is, then I respectfully decline the process.
But, I'm in a good position because I have 10+ YOE. People that are more in the beginning of their career might not be able to afford doing that unfortunately.
PeterHickman@reddit
A company I worked at a long time ago had a whiteboard question for Java candidates. "Write a function that takes a list of integers and returns the sum"
It's a really dumb and worthless question, until you find out some of the candidates couldn't actually do even that!
The rest of the questions were more complex, architect a pipleline to ingest XML/SGML into a database whilest building a searchable index of the data. We were not looking for actual code but for the candidate to identify the sorts of issues that might need to be handled (like how would we update the search index for the document we have imported or do we need to rebuild it each time)
This would hopefully give us an idea if they could see the big picture. The sum the integers question was to see if they could actually program
Don't underestimate the number of Business Studies gradutaes with a minor in computers for business who thought they were programmers
Blazing1@reddit
XML?
bro what is this 2006?
PeterHickman@reddit
Publishing houses are slow in taking up new tech so XML was new for them. They though that SGML was enough and some of the data was in the Miles typesetting format because some of the presses still used it
"If it aint broke dont fix it"
bluesquare2543@reddit
won't happen without a union
MassiveStallion@reddit
I agree with unions entirely, but in a political climate where Trump has a 50% chance of winning it's just not a realistic or timely prospect. A software engineers union might come around 5, 10, 20 years from now.
What's more likely is a hashtag or Tiktok going viral, an article in the NYT or WSJ. Something like #MeToo hitting social media but...for programming interviews is gonna hit harder and faster than a push for unions. The push back is already starting, all it takes is for the people here to start taking on interview positions and NOT pushing leetcode, and for interviewers to make it unpleasant and unprofitable for those who do.
We are almost there. All we need to push is AI/cheating on leetcodes and if a critical enough mass of people obviously cheat on leetcodes then companies are just going to stop using it as a metric. The bootcamps are already doing it for us.
bluesquare2543@reddit
yeah I am having such a difficult time with interviews that I am considering cheating. Sorry!- employers just keep denying me and I have a family to feed. Leetcodes are not an accurate assessment of skills, anyway. They test memorization, not problem-solving skills.
Hashtag could work, but like you said, it needs to be a culture shift. Unions are just another angle we can attack this from.
MassiveStallion@reddit
A strong cheating solution would break the back of the whole thing.
bluesquare2543@reddit
https://interviewcopilot.io/
valence_engineer@reddit
What makes you think this is what a union will focus on? And why do you think union members will want lower barriers to hiring their replacements versus improving their own working conditions (severance, WFH, etc.)? Unions aren't some magic solution to all your work problems and, right now, the existing tech unions seem more focused on "ethics" versus job improvement.
bluesquare2543@reddit
A union can focus on whatever its members vote on.
I don't know what you are talking about with lowering barriers to hiring replacements.
Tech unions that are focused on identity politics and whatever the flavor of the month is are not pro-worker.
This is why socialists speak of a vanguard party. There needs to be hard-liners to keep us focused on the true enemy: the capitalists.
darkapplepolisher@reddit
I think the incentives belong more strongly at the hiring manager level along with their staff engineers that are generally responsible for the technical interview questions.
If they're aware that restricting their hiring criteria based on this selection instead of alternative criteria which may be more appropriate for the position, they're in a position to change and make that happen.
If middle management is superseding their desires, that's a more fundamental problem of micromanagement where middle management doesn't trust lower management to do what is best for them, which has consequences well beyond just the hiring process.
MassiveStallion@reddit
You can see it in these threads, hiring managers are basically saying "fu nothing else works, but also this doesn't". ..so basically we make it so this REALLY doesn't work and they'll get fired if they keep it up.
H1Supreme@reddit
After two leetcode tests where I crashed and burned, I did exactly this. It limited my search to smaller companies, which honestly turned out to be a blessing.
h4l@reddit
It's a variation of Goodhart's law ("When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"). We need a way to measure who will be good at a job without actually hiring them to do the job. So we come up with something that correlates with job performance. Inevitably people train to be good at the proxy measure rather than the actual job's skills, and people forget that the proxy measure is different to the actual job.
NoCoolNameMatt@reddit
The answer to the problem is the same as it ever was. Ask them for stories of what they've actually done, then dig into detailed questions to see if they've actually done it and understand it.
This isn't hard, we make it hard.
xpingu69@reddit
But if the proxy measure is well done it shouldn't be a problem
densekhz@reddit
The whole point is it can't be done well. The very act of doing it destroys its efficacy.
xpingu69@reddit
Why can't it be done well?
densekhz@reddit
I'm sure there are lots of theories. Mine is the proxy measure isn't in a 1-to-1 causal relationship with the desired outcome. Say you want "good at job" (called this 'A') and notice all people good at the job are also "good at solving word puzzles" ('B'). That is: A implies B. To conclude B implies A is a logical fallacy. However, in practice, A and B are correlated. So, in the beginning, B is a good approximation for A.
As more people discover the importance of B, people who won't have A figure out how to generate B. For example, memorize a bunch of puzzles; but have no ability to generalize from those memorized answers to the job's needs.
Once something desirable is involved (ex. money) people _very_ quickly find ways to generate B with no A.
xpingu69@reddit
Thanks for taking the time to write it out. I understand the original thought. My question was, why can't we find a good B
densekhz@reddit
Ah, sorry. Not sure we know, so it all becomes philosophical: I'm guessing, it's because life is complicated humans understand the world poorly (A and B [plus D, E, F, G, ... Z] are fuzzy clouds probabilistic implications that intersect in unobvious ways). So we fumble through with approximations.
A crap answer, but you go to war with the army you've got [to politely phrase the sentiment].
Of the people you know who are good at writing software systems, are they all successful at their tasks for the same reason? Do all employers even want the same things?
In the case of writing software, it really does help to be intelligent, clever, dedicated enough to have learned algorithms & data-structures, and well versed enough (in at least one language) to express your thoughts quickly & effectively in that language. Initially filtering for those gives you a better chance of hiring someone decent.
Right now, there appears to be an oversupply of people applying for technical work, so companies can afford to filter out the folk that might be good at writing software, but not good at passing that type of interview.
xpingu69@reddit
I asked the new chatgpt o1 model to solve this problem. Here is the TLDR: To effectively hire software engineers without candidates merely optimizing for proxies, implement a 3-step process: First, give them a realistic work simulation that mirrors actual job tasks to assess their technical skills and problem-solving abilities. Second, conduct a collaborative working session—like pair programming—to evaluate their communication, teamwork, and adaptability in a real-time setting. Finally, have a behavioral and cultural fit interview with structured questions about past experiences and hypothetical scenarios to gauge their soft skills and alignment with your company values. This approach minimizes reliance on proxy measures, reduces the chance of candidates gaming the system, and provides a holistic view of their suitability for the role.
sunnnnnyyy@reddit
Sounds like an internship 🤣. Too bad it’s usually a take-home assignment instead. Corpo always wins.
densekhz@reddit
code + people = value. A chunk of code from someone's take home assignment generates very little value for a company. However, assigning an excessive take home project, does show a tendency toward foolishness and disrespect of other people's time. Probably a strong indicator you shouldn't work for that company.
Otoh, if you're going to do a "free" project, then plan on rockstaring that shit: find a company you want to work for, figure out what they might need, then go over the top and make one.
densekhz@reddit
u/xpingu69 You'll make an excellent VP Eng.
Something like a paid probationary period is a decent idea. Brief screening interview ; followed by a 1 month trial where you pay the person 50% (or less) of proposed salary. At end of month you either hire & back-pay to 100% or part ways. Up front, encourage the applicant to continue interviewing and tell them if they pass probation, you'll match their best offer.
Plus, this approach also encourages you to keep a tight DevEx so someone can actually be productive during that time.
Careless_Insect1958@reddit
He answered it in the first 2 lines, it is very difficult to have a 1-1 casual relationship between A and B if not impossible.
xpingu69@reddit
How do you know?
sunnnnnyyy@reddit
I love this A vs. B discussion, but here’s the practical solution: interns (and similar).
Inductively, it’s also one of the reasons we have juniors. What’s better than a risky new senior? A junior you trust that grew into a senior. Promotion bar for that intern/junior/etc. is probably your closest approximator for A.
RageFucker_@reddit
You just described leetcode problems and the insanity around memorizing them to be regurgitated during interviews to show how amazing of an engineer you are 😆
monkorn@reddit
Wherever you go, there you are.
Unlikely-Sympathy626@reddit
I really cannot say I feel for the OP enough as it is true.
And this comment really is one of the top ten I have seen. Bloody nicely done guys!
Slight-Rent-883@reddit
Damn, never heard of this
dinomansion@reddit
Interview 10 years ago be like:
How many grains of sand are in Miami beach?
al_vo@reddit
It was this, one round of OOP trivia, one round of whiteboarding that was mostly db design, and one whiteboard programming question. Not sure the questions were any easier as a whole, but there felt like more room to bomb something, vs now where leetcode / algos are pretty much a first gate.
SituationSoap@reddit
There is a correct answer to this. It was in October, 2006. Joel Spoelsky published this blog post: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guide-to-interviewing-version-30/
That was the point where Spoelsky argued that it was better to hire someone smart, who gets things done, as opposed to someone who is going to be specifically well-versed in the work you're trying to accomplish.
Broadly, Spoelsky is right. But the problem is that an entire generation (and since, at least two more) of interviewers came along who saw the questions that people like Spoelsky were asking, and they didn't understand why. They didn't understand what those questions were intended to uncover, and simply copied them (and then expanded on them, when the measure became a target).
It was absolutely this way 5+ years ago, and any trip to CSCQ from 2019 will disabuse you of this notion pretty quickly.
al_vo@reddit
Back in the mid 00s a lot of interviews were basically screening for this already. Companies either copied Microsoft and Google and asked brain teasers or asked hard white board questions or did mostly language/ OOP trivia with a take home screen. Sure you'd get rejected at Google for failing these but many companies offered jobs if you could struggle through it and seemed like a good cultural fit. I think in the end the industry got pumped full of people that seemed smart but absolutely could not program, which led to Jeff Atwood writing about how candidates would fail FizzBuzz.
I interviewed a ton of candidates for a smaller company around 2015 and it was shocking how many candidates with 5+ years of experience could barely program. You can be extremely smart and not no how to program due to lack of experience programming, and honestly the only way to vet that is live coding. This problem seems to have fixed itself with the pandemic where live coding is now the norm. Yes it's a high pressure situation but I hardly see candidates now who can't program a simple fizzbuzz question, and it seems to be one of the best signals of future success of the candidates I've hired.
ashultz@reddit
When I first started interviewing in closing years of the last century, interviews had a lot of brain teasers in them.
So it was a long time ago. It's not the same style now but it wasn't a lot like the job even then.
Whoz_Yerdaddi@reddit
Brain teasers are the worst. You either get it right away or sit there feeling like an idiot. From what I hear, Google banned them.
systematico@reddit
I have to ask brain teasers in interviews. I disagree that it's black and white. If you don't get it, I will help with hints. Sometimes lots of hints. People end up getting it in the end, even feeling accomplished that they could do it.
I, myself, passed the interview with lots of hints.
Now, what is the point of the brain teasers? Not exactly sure.
Desperate-Point-9988@reddit
The problem with this, and with coding challenges, is that it requires a skilled interviewer to provide the right level of nudges to get a candidate unstuck and still get the right signal.
The vast majority of interviewers I have seen in my own organizations are not skilled.
scoberry5@reddit
The idea of brain teasers is that you want to hire people who are smart. I agree that it's not black and white: if you're good at brain teasers (which correlates to smart, but isn't the same), you can likely get the answer (especially with hints) even if you haven't heard it.
There are some problems with using brain teasers:
You're not testing what you're trying to test. There are people who are smart who don't like brain teasers, and people who have heard this particular brain teaser are at a huge advantage.
Brain teasers often live outside the real world. You may have to assume things like money being continuous instead of discrete, current not being measurable, etc.
Even without (1) and (2), brain teasers aren't how you should test what you want to test.
If you make a list of what qualities you're looking for in a dev, it might include things like:
* smart
* can write code
* can test code reasonably
* can design code
* can communicate their designs
You can write your own list. It may be different than this one. But once you have a list, think about how you might check for these qualities.
If this is your list, you might reasonably think you should give them a small problem and have them design/test/write code and communicate their design. This will give you signal on all these items, while brain teasers only gives you signal on one.
To the extent that writing code gets the "smart" signal wrong...meh. It's not so much of a problem. If they're not that smart but can still write good code for some reason, that's not a terrible hire. But if they're not that smart but can solve brain teasers? That's a bad hire.
Moloch_17@reddit
You can sit down and talk to someone about each one of those points (maybe not the first one) and get a very good idea of how much they know about and what they think about each one. It's not difficult.
Desperate-Point-9988@reddit
That's exactly the same problem with the coding challenges of today. You either get it right away, or fiddle for a bit before the interviewer gives up on you.
It is possible to give coding interviews that are not like this, but just dumping leetcode problems on a candidate is no better than the brain teasing.
-Quiche-@reddit
I just ask them "Do you know Francis Far?" and when they say no I just follow up with "It is".
And if they laugh they get hired on the spot!!
^/s
TheOneWhoDidntCum@reddit
If Iran sent 200 rockets and Israel sent 200 rockets, calculate the percentage of those rockets colliding midair in the skies of Irak
xpingu69@reddit
Do you know if France is far?
Tall_Kale_3181@reddit
Gottem!
Bagabundoman@reddit
What if they respond with “And Iran, Iran’s so far away”?
-Quiche-@reddit
Straight to jail
IvanKr@reddit
No it's not.
IamImposter@reddit
Took me a minute
-Quiche-@reddit
Hired!
djnattyp@reddit
They didn't ban them - they codified them as "Leetcode"...
RageFucker_@reddit
Exactly!
JoeBidensLongFart@reddit
Damn, it was actually better back when they just asked dumb shit like "how many golf balls can fit into a school bus?"
TangerineSorry8463@reddit
Tell me straight to the username, that you don't see any of the "golf balls in school bus" in the "trapping rainwater" problem.
8x4Ply@reddit
Most LC come down to whether you have studied that pattern or not already anyway - good luck figuring out an unseen type in the interview.
I suspect they moved away from brainteasers because they are easy to memorize. I normally can remember the answer to any one that I've seen before. I can also remember LC hards like 'median of two sorted arrays', but whether i can churn the answer out in 20 minutes on a web based editor is a different matter.
_176_@reddit
Yeah, 15 years ago it was like math logic problems and brain teasers. Which was good for me because I love that stuff.
Tangurena@reddit
One book that I think pointed them out for the derision they deserved was How Would You Move Mt Fuji? They got popular only because the big tech companies were doing them. One of the early semiconductor companies in Silicon Valley used them because the boss was a fan of Fermi Questions.
remington_noiseless@reddit
There's two parts to this. The interview part and the job part. For why interviews are the way they are it's because of a load of articles telling people that FAANG companies do 5-6 interviews and cover clean code/documentation/whatever. What these people don't know is why those areas are covered and what happens. So they just do the cargo cult thing and copy the number of interviews FAANGs do with no clue about why.
For all that the interviewer figures out from hours of interviews they might as well have a half hour chat to make sure the person isn't totally bluffing and then go on their gut instinct. All the rest is cargo cult nonsense.
As for the job part of this, could you imagine an honest job advert? They'd never get any applicants. For my current job it would be something like:
No one in their right mind would apply for a job like that. All job adverts lie through their teeth.
eemamedo@reddit
You mean before "Day in the life of a software engineers" videos became viral and everyone enrolled in "we will get you a job in 12 weeks" bootcamps? Supply-demand curve.
Sure. Once that curve flattens a bit, we will see engineers not having to jump through hoops and saying "Sorry, how many rounds? I think I will pass", then we will see more reasonable interviews. Don't ask me when though. I have some ideas but those are just ideas.
sunnnnnyyy@reddit
I’ve been giving a lot of interviews at my FAANG lately, and when I complain that it’s so hard to find someone we should hire, people are very surprised — “but aren’t there so many applicants?”
I genuinely wonder — for the old farts here — has the interview bar actually gotten significantly higher?
Or, is it (to put it delicately..?) that there are now much more unqualified applicants in number being loud about the “the bar”.
I judge primarily based on what it takes to succeed on my team now, so it’s tricky to calibrate temporally or against other teams/companies. However, I do think our bar is ultimately accurate for us.
fried_green_baloney@reddit
If the FAANGs suddenly don't have 20 qualified applicants for every opening, the idea that there's no cost to having endless false negatives may suddenly need reexamination.
X_Toppo@reddit
I think this day will never come sadly. There will always be more people willing and able to do the job than slots available (at FAANG at least)
pan0ramic@reddit
I do a lot of interviews and I’ve noticed that the quality of candidates has gone down. I madly interview people in the middle of their career so senior/lead/staff level and I’m really shocked at how lo
tripsafe@reddit
Depends what you mean by poorly. If by poorly you mean they can’t pull out any syntax from their head or can implement fizz buzz then yeah. If by poorly you mean they can’t do an easy or medium LC then that’s not really shocking given people never do LC problems as part of their jobs.
fried_green_baloney@reddit
One interview, manager started on FizzBuzz, I told him I already knew it. He asked me to sketch a solution.
Then he told me that he asked for a solution because he had "senior" people come in and they couldn't even get started. Not that they didn't know the modulo operator (HINT: You don't need that to solve the problem) but that they couldn't even get started.
This was for a contract job so this was almost the entirety of the technical screening.
BonnetSlurps@reddit
I interview pretty much weekly and I see people failing FizzBuzz all the time, often with great resumes.
Another big issue is SQL. A lot of people barely know how to do a select and struggle with joins, and still mark "advanced SQL" in our self-assessment questionnaire.
pan0ramic@reddit
Not LC - data structure manipulation. I built the interview off of the real problems we face at the job. (I agree about LC)
StarWarsKnitwear@reddit
Maybe because your interview questions are far removed from the real world.
sunnnnnyyy@reddit
TBH, I think it’s overblown how often these crazy “LC hard” arcane problems are asked. I’ve taken countless interviews and also been on countless interviews panels where we establish propose questions beforehand. Interviewer’s preference seem to fall into two buckets:
Questions where it is “LC easy” to get a complete, non-brute force solution, but may be taken extremely far in elegance/creativity/finesse. I only give these.
“LC medium” questions. More upfront about the challenge.
I can’t bring myself to ask any “LC hards” because I genuinely want to recommend for hire and want folks to succeed. Those that do don’t give a shit, are lazy, and/or trying to stack up interview numbers to become “interview bar raisers” like it’s some trophy.
the-code-father@reddit
Not sure why you are being down voted here.
This is exactly my experience as well both interviewing and getting interviewed at Meta and Google.
I exclusively ask questions that are about thinking through the problem and identifying the edge cases and handling them appropriately. No weird algorithmic tricks.
My L4 interviews at Google were pretty straightforward. The only question that I felt was unfair was asked by an interviewer who was also confused by the question. All were easy/medium at most, stuff like what is Dependency Injection and can you describe how it might be implemented with a simple example.
My L5 interviews at Meta were also all easy/mediums, and they explicitly told me upfront that there would be no hards. There was one tree question which I felt was a bit dumb, but everything else was fine.
malln1nja@reddit
They're probably being downvoted because their (and your) post is basically discounting general sentiment with anecdata along the lines of "I haven't experienced this therefore it must not be true".
sunnnnnyyy@reddit
Ah yes the classic “my anecdote” vs “your anecdote”. True observation.
Most people are underqualified, so most people have anecdotes of them falling below the interview bar. No surprises over the disagreement.
What’s perhaps more interesting is: (1) is the general interview bar “right” and (2) are the folks here even representative of average mid-level+ applicants.
malln1nja@reddit
The post questioned the frequency of "LC hard" questions being asked, which has nothing to do with whether the candidates fail or pass the bar.
pan0ramic@reddit
No. It’s just data structure manipulation. Stuff like fetch a sorted set of names of users from a nested dictionary. I interview data engineers and I get the sense that few work on skills other than SQL.
eemamedo@reddit
Same. We don’t ask leetcode questions and focus more on system design.
crazyeddie123@reddit
The quality of workers has gone down across the board, as seen by the quality of everything they produce going down across the board. COVID literally fucks with people's brains.
QueenNebudchadnezzar@reddit
All their employers must be wrong.
pan0ramic@reddit
Yes. I don’t know how long you’ve been in tech but I have 20 years of existence. I’ve met my fare share of people that got jobs despite not being very good. There are a lot of false positives in hiring (and false negatives of course).
So there’s some non insignificant number of engineers that aren’t very good.
Now add that the pool people trying to get jobs are going to be a mix of good and bad - and the worse you are, the more interviews you’re going to have to do in order to land something. So there’s a bias towards there being more weekly skilled people
Finally - my interview was socialized and has gone through rounds of reviews with my peers. Not to say that there’s no way to improve it (I’m sure there are) and I’m sure that I get some false negatives … but there’s some data here to suggest that the number of poor performers has risen. The percentage of people that passed was much higher 5 years ago
SSA22_HCM1@reddit
My value isn't in coding. My value is in knowing what I don't know, and what problems have been solved.
If your interview asks me to write a hashing algorithm I will likely fail. If your interview asked me something about hashes, and how to select an algorithm for a task, I can give you a decent answer.
So do you really want someone to write that code on company time, or do you want someone who understands the difference between argon2 and md5 and knows when to import one library vs. the other?
bjogc42069@reddit
I wonder how much of this is due to the use of "recruiters". I swear this isn't cscareerquestions sour grapes but I have been failing phone screens the past 6 months. They aren't asking me behavioral or anything deep, just boilerplate "do you have experience with X?" questions. I have been applying to jobs that are either a lateral move or a one level bump so I typically meet 50-75% of the requirements. I tend to do pretty well when I have a screening with someone even vaguely technical.
WolfNo680@reddit
This is what kills my motivation to apply for jobs. I work in a Java shop now and I...kinda wanna leave. I've been using node and typescript in my free time for small projects and wouldn't mind getting a job that uses these but none of those are really fleshed out enough to put on a resume (in my opinion) and since I don't have professional experience with these languages, I can't get past the recruiters at the initial phone screen. It's rather frustrating.
squeasy_2202@reddit
Flesh out a project or two and put it on your resume
BonnetSlurps@reddit
I always use a bit of React and Python at each company I work just to keep it fresh in my CV.
Sure, for React it was 3 or 4 prototypes or demos that never came close to prod, but it's still resume material. And Python is great for scripts anyway.
JoeBidensLongFart@reddit
That's very odd, I've never heard of anyone actually failing these. Note that it doesn't mean I'd always get a call back, sometimes they already hired someone else farther along in the pipeline, position was cancelled, etc.
uFi3rynvF46U@reddit
Almost by definition we should expect most candidates to suck.
What does someone do when they don't get hired? They apply somewhere else, and then at a third place, etc.
I know a few people whom I would consider low-skilled engineers. One of them submitted hundreds of applications before getting hired (this was years ago in a stronger job market--i understand that that experience is sadly becoming more common).
On the other hand, a great engineer will get offers almost immediately. In fact many times they're looking for work before leaving their current employer, and thus will only bring their candidacy to openings that seem like an upgrade. For these reasons, very few companies will see that applicant.
So of course, from the perspective of the company that's hiring, the moment they open a position they're inundated with applications from all the same chronically unemployed low skill candidates that apply to every opening, while the good candidates already all have a job.
lunatic_dreamer@reddit
That used to be the case but it’s not anymore with mass layoffs across the industry. Remember when FizzBuzz was the bar? The competition is higher and the people that used to look while employed are competing against each other now. I see very high quality candidates nowadays with a ton of experience applying for open positions. We used to have to spend time sifting through candidates and be proactive recruiting but now everyone comes to us.
BonnetSlurps@reddit
I agree but as a counterpoint: I still see plenty of candidates (often with crazy good resumes) unable to do a FizzBuzz.
8x4Ply@reddit
Also they put up screening tests with a high bar, to manage the inundation, but that may adversely select against the good devs who are already employed and don't have time to practice as much as the unemployed.
gopher_space@reddit
The bar is actually lower once you make it past the robots, but that's become weirdly difficult.
prisencotech@reddit
My problem with these interviews has never been with FAANG or global scale companies doing them. I figure they're probably not ideal but the best that anyone can come up with when you're building software at that level.
My problem has always been when 15 person (or less!) startups latched onto these grueling interviews. This feels like pure cargo cutting and cannot possibly be the best way to interview for the kind of programmer an early stage startup needs.
sunnnnnyyy@reddit
Great point. Like if you’re interviewing for a no-name startup, you’d get the devs who personally vet 1000s of LinkedIn apps and resumes from every John, Mary, and bot. They could be any ol’ jackass who themselves may probably has no idea what they’re doing.
If you’re applying to 100s and many of them are these randos, why index so hard on them or expect anything different? Why expect The Interview or The Job to be anything less than a random shit show?
Echleon@reddit
The latter. I interviewed someone with some ML Python university class on their resume and asked them to write a basic algorithm: given a list of integers, return true if the list contains a duplicate. They got the answer pretty quick but when I asked them to explain their code, they couldn’t (they clearly had googled the answer). That person could totally post on one of the CS subs here with their resume and say “I got the question right and didn’t get moved on wtf” and people will eat it up as evidence that the bar is crazy high.
dexx4d@reddit
That's why you're finding it hard to get people - otherwise qualified people who may not have the exact qualifications you're looking for are being filtered out, along with those who have no qualifications for the role.
As an old fart, it used to be quite different, as the applications were not screened for an exact match on the skills list. At a small company we still had over 100 applicants for an open, local role, but we did talk to everybody with relevant experience at least once, even if they weren't familiar with our tech stack.
thatbigblackblack@reddit
When ? I think not that soon. I would have said 2 - 4 years from now if new AI products for devs were not a thing. It creates more mistrust from recruiters. So people are eager to make predictions, but really, no one knows if it'll get better
eemamedo@reddit
That’s why I said that I have some ideas but it’s just speculation ))
MargretTatchersParty@reddit
It changed arround 2016ish when Google popularized it.
Before that some companies tried to copy Microsoft with brain teaser puzzles.
Amazon tried doing this in 2011 with weird abstract questions based on CS research.
Swimming_Search6971@reddit
To me it's funny that every single CTO, even in the the shittiest company, want to apply "the method", as if a method designed for a mega-company would work magic.
subma-fuckin-rine@reddit
yea, google was getting millions of applications a year and they needed a way to automate the process somehow. but then, every random company thought themselves the same level as Google and implemented it too. i remember getting a LC hard DP problem in 2017 at a no name company for just a regular "software developer" title. lol
eemamedo@reddit
Lol. I got 4 hour interview full of Leetcode questions for a beer company haha.
Dx2TT@reddit
These "jobs" are just honey pots. They aren't actively hiring, they are just seeing if a rockstar comes by. So they don't care if 99% of candidates fail, they don't need a person, they just want to keep the door open.
Its easy to do this when you take apps electronically, screen electronically and only do an interview after a few rounds. You can screen 1000 candidates for the same effort as screening 5 candidates.
eemamedo@reddit
I want to meet a rockstar dev who decided to go work for brewery lol
Dx2TT@reddit
Inbev is worth 115b, you don't think they have devs? Breweries have massive amounts of automation and monitoring and device communication. I bet they have hundreds to thousands of engineers.
eemamedo@reddit
and you think they all passed 4 hour long lc test?
_176_@reddit
I was, I guess, guilty of this. I worked at a small company that needed very smart engineers. It was really tough to hire so we basically were always hiring. Almost nobody made it past the phone screen though. It would take maybe 4 months to hire one person. We did that for years and had a really solid team but our lack of ability to scale the team was always a pain point.
Background-Rub-3017@reddit
Many good candidates won't even bother doing your test so you're missing out. Or sometimes they are only casually looking for new opportunities. Leetcode will demotivate to keep moving forward with your company.
8x4Ply@reddit
It's painful seeing the same job advertised for months and months when they are screening with hard LC for no reason. Had recruiters reaching out to me saying I'm perfect for role for nearly a year.
Gets annoying having to say "yeah I know but I didn't get their last question in time so no thanks".
_176_@reddit
That was never much of a concern at the time. I've since met a few really great devs who hate typical interviews. But my experience has been that most of the really talented devs I've met don't mind working through hard coding problems in an interview. We were a small company in SF and routinely lost candidates to FAANG or big start-ups. We were almost as selective but didn't pay quite as much and were fine with growing slowly. It was a good role for the right person. For eg, we were fine with fully remote long before that was normal.
ryo3000@reddit
These are the same companies currently complaining how candidates are using tools like AI, Google or just plain old hiring someone to produce the code for them to cheat their hiring process
xelah1@reddit
An awful lot of people manage through mimicry. It's why management as a field is so full of fads. People don't have strong fundamental principles to reason from, most people never study management (or read any management research), few people really test what works, and people don't really know what to do.
So they do what their culture tells them to and what's seen as practiced by successful people and companies (and they want to be seen as part of that group, too).
Unfortunately, people often copy the surface behaviour and never look at why it works or what the goal is. That's how we've got an infestation of fake agile and the devops team, and it's how the downsizing wave in the 80s went on so long without really improving profitability or performance.
MargretTatchersParty@reddit
I got weird LC DP problems at Groupon. (Rolls eyes)
devoutsalsa@reddit
I remember interviewing for a recruiting position at Google in 2007. The interviewer asked me how to design an elevator system for a skyscraper.
Whoz_Yerdaddi@reddit
That’s a classic SWE question.
SirChasm@reddit
Missed the part where they were interviewing for a RECRUITING position?
TangerineSorry8463@reddit
I want my recruiters to have *some* non-zero understanding of the field.
If I have to have another conversation that yes, 5 years of Java and 1 year of Python means I'm a developer with 6 YoE, not a Python Developer with 1 YoE, someone will get physically harmed.
testsonproduction@reddit
It's a variation of a question I ask today in interviews
Background-Rub-3017@reddit
Makes sense, you have got to be a rockstar developer to be able to evaluate other rockstar developers.
McFlurriez@reddit (OP)
lol...
okayNowThrowItAway@reddit
Hot take, Amazon is a poorly run company. Bezos has basically built a cult of personality with private equity, but his fundamental theory of business, a weird sort of deliberately unpleasant essentialism, is fundamentally unproductive.
Everything they do is just a little bit wrong. And that stops them from ever doing anything particularly well. From running a grocery store, to doing technical interviews, to competing in high-end business-facing tech.
Turbulent-Week1136@reddit
A poorly run company that almost everyone uses and is worth trillions of dollars.
okayNowThrowItAway@reddit
Yeah. Weird, right?
RockleyBob@reddit
I applied on a lark and I'm doing some preliminary online assessment stuff. They push their "Leadership Principles" hard, and expect candidates to have fully drunk this Kool Ade before interviewing.
Now, I don't have a problem with a company having a mission statement or a set of overarching guidelines, and I'm cool with the expectation that I familiarize myself with them.
Amazon, though, has sixteen leadership principles. That's an absurd number of metrics to expect people to be mindful of as they go about their daily work.
When I read something like
...I imagine it was conceived in a board room full of MBAs in $2 thousand suits snorting lines of Adderrall off a mahogany conference table while swapping congratulatory high-fives.
How is this a guiding principle? How does one use this motto in their daily life at Amazon? Amazon wants everyone to be a leader, and so everyone should assume that, as a leader, they are "right a lot"? Am I reading that right? So the person who embodies this Leadership Principle is one who has conviction that they, being a LEADER, are right. A lot. Except... wouldn't that cause a lot of friction with, you know, everyone else operating under that same assumption? Not everyone can be right a lot.
But wait - "Are Right, A Lot" comes with a caveat. That should clear things up. Let's see... As a LEADER who IS RIGHT, A LOT, you're also supposed to "seek diverse perspectives" and challenge your beliefs. Ah ok, so 1.) Be a leader. As a leader, I'm right. A lot. However, I should 2.) Invite other perspectives and constantly challenge the notion that I am right. Makes total sense now. Amazon wants LEADERS with STRONG JUDGEMENT and GOOD INSTINCTS and that entitles them to the presumption that they ARE RIGHT, A LOT but don't assume you are RIGHT because you have to question yourself constantly and seek out DIFFERING PERSPECTIVES which might mean I am NOT RIGHT THAT OFTEN.
And that's just the tip of the corpo babble iceberg. That's not saying anything about how, often, different principles conflict with each other. INSIST ON THE HIGHEST STANDARDS and EARN TRUST while being FRUGAL and TAKING RISKS. Wat?
This is corporate doublespeak at its finest. Apparently Amazon uses these core principles to evaluate employee performance. To me it seems like this pseudo intellectual, cognitively dissonant value system of "principles" are really just an elaborate way of arming managers with the ammunition they need to praise or deride anyone they want simply by cherry picking whichever one of these guiding lights is most suited to the task.
Took too long to deliver that feature? "Well I was taking OWNERSHIP over the success of this project by DIVING DEEP and being OBSESSED about our CUSTOMERS by INSISTING ON THE HIGHEST STANDARDS of code quality sir!"
"Oooh, sorry, but instead of demanding clear expectations from architects and product owners, you were supposed to THINK BIG, and demonstrate a BIAS FOR ACTION to DELIVER RESULTS. Thanks for playing though, here's a PIP."
TokenGrowNutes@reddit
This is why I will never ever attempt a job at Amazon. Or any Faang job, for that matter.
It pays well, but will chew you up and spit you out if you’re in the bottom 10% of whatever they measure. It can’t be healthy for the mind or soul.
okayNowThrowItAway@reddit
Well, the "disconfirm" language is Eleazar Yudkowsky fanboyism.
And the "right, a lot" idea is the very culturally Amazon ideal that decisive action that achieves a measurable result is not improved by giving consideration to other stakeholders.
This ethos everages a well-understood business principle that it is intellectually easy to come up with a solution to a problem that works. The hard part is coming up with a solution that is practical or fits within constraints. So Amazon just does away with the hard part.
This stops Amazon from doing a really good job at anything. But it allows it to compete somewhat ruthlessly. It also makes the internal workplace feel somewhat cutthroat, because there is no incentive to make your work play nicely with other projects.
Xgamer4@reddit
Amazon is just confusing me. The Amazon app changes UI/UX design what seems to be monthly, with no rhyme or reason.
But this most recent iteration is just an all-around design failure. For reasons I can't even begin to guess, they reskinned their bright yellow distinctive color to Walmart-blue. I opened Amazon, saw the blue, then immediately closed it because I thought I'd opened the Walmart app by mistake. Apparently my wife did the same. I have literally no idea how that managed to pass a design review.
BushLeagueResearch@reddit
Amazon AB tests all these changes. While you may not like it I guarantee you it was a revenue positive
Xgamer4@reddit
I'm sure it was. My main complaint is that changing out one of your core brand colors to mimic an indirect competitor's core brand color is insane. I associate that weird bright yellow with Amazon. Now I do not associate the Amazon app with Amazon anymore, I associate it with Walmart, which just means that every time I open the Amazon app I instinctively think "huh, I wonder if I could get ITEM from Walmart instead".
The fact that there isn't a designer or marketer or something, somewhere, in Amazon that vetoed this change is insane to me. Branding is important.
okayNowThrowItAway@reddit
Because Amazon has an institutional contempt for industrial design.
HurasmusBDraggin@reddit
Jony Ive cries 😭
quiI@reddit
I joined a startup a while ago. It was filled with mostly, very young, hard working, very enthusiastic people, with odd pockets of people like me in their late 30s.
Before joining, they recommended I read "Working Backwards", which is a book about working in amazon, laying out some of their ways of work, principles etc. Whilst some of it resonated with me, a lot of it certainly did not, and I generally found it quite unpleasant to read.
A year into my tenure, an amazon guy joined, and of course brought all the amazon-ness with it. All the unpleasantness you hear about. Measuring stuff that doesn't matter, for example I was asked to enumerate how many PRs each of my engineers had done, JFC. And of course stack ranking.
All my bad feelings about the book were validated within about 3 months, and I left soon after.
dexx4d@reddit
Sounds about right, TBH.
simalicrum@reddit
Not a hot take at all. They more or less have monopolies on their lines of business, They don't have to be good at things that got them there in the first place. I was around big corps for a couple of decades. They're all like this.
Animostas@reddit
Amazon has historically been very good at taking existing solutions and scaling them out better and bigger because of AWS. They're not very good at moonshot projects or anything creative or innovative - the Fire phone, Amazon Games, etc
Turbulent-Week1136@reddit
It was way way way before 2016. More like 2001 for Google.
wstewartXYZ@reddit
It changed way before 2016.
MargretTatchersParty@reddit
I'm only speaking from my experience and where I saw most of the interviews becoming leet code exercises.
Queasy_Artist6646@reddit
The problem:
a) Companies think they're Google. b) Companies being lazy. c) Desperate job applicants enabling them by agreeing to leet code.
PeterHickman@reddit
I think the problem is really that they have no confidence in being able to select a suitable candidate and so look for some 'Cover Your Ass' procedure so that they do not have to take the blame if it all goes wrong. "I followed the process but the candidate was a bust, perhaps we need to update the process?"
Or they don't (want to) trust the people who can make these decisions who are probably lower in the hierachy than themselves
Queasy_Artist6646@reddit
A good way to resolve the issue would be to invite the person in office to pair for a day, or remote on a real life assignment. Whichever works.
Engineering-Mean@reddit
I don't want to work there because I've written enough perl for this lifetime, but I like DuckDuckGo's approach of paying you to do a project as part of the hiring process. Addresses the complaints about take-homes because they're paying, lets them evaluate you actually doing the job.
eemamedo@reddit
I wonder how did they find folks. Without having PhD level knowledge of CS, I cannot imagine being able to answer those questions.
MargretTatchersParty@reddit
I applied directly. Graduated from grad school. They asked something that was about a doublly linked list and using 2 stacks or something. I can't remember the exact question.
bluetrust@reddit
Ha. I got a question like that for a startup that had a website that taught you ways to save energy.
coweatyou@reddit
Around the time glassdoor (at least they were the first that I relent doing this) started allowing users to share the interview questions on company profiles. After that, it wasn't enough to have a few good interview questions that related to the job you were hiring for, you needed a pool of hundreds to prevent people from studying for your test, and the leetcode arms race began.
Pad-Thai-Enjoyer@reddit
Practicing leetcode is basically just studying for the test
big-papito@reddit
It started with Google, so for most of our longer careers.
My former boss once got a coding job in the 90s when he just skimmed a Perl book on the way to the interview. It really didn't take a lot. People got into coding out of passion mostly, and it was a small club.
Then all these startups decided they "wanted to be like Google", but the problem was that the Google culture sprouted organically. You can't just "reverse engineer" it by mimicking their process.
It began with brain teaser questions, which Google itself backtracked on as "ineffective". They have so much financial moat that they can absorb the hit of thousands of bad hires, but most other companies will, and did fail because of this.
ExpertCount8119@reddit
It’s so unfortunate
Professional_Bank50@reddit
The AI penalty is real. And will bite them in the butt when things go south
netderper@reddit
Everyone's pretending. Their shit doesn't stink and they do incredibly difficult, high quality engineering work. Meanwhile, most jobs are about polishing turds. It has become worse, but even 5 years ago we were down this path.
tinmru@reddit
Lmao, high quality engineering work being basic CRUD apps 😂
netderper@reddit
Yep. Basic CRUD apps where the previous developers didn't even know about transactions or even how to create an index... Just the other day I was reviewing code for a DB schema that didn't even have primary keys.
hola-mundo@reddit
This phenomenon seems recent to me too, maybe not 5 years ago but definitely 10. In almost a decade as a developer, I've never used leetcode or even swap two variables without a third variable.
My theory is that every manager and/or recruiter wants a way to measure and compare candidates, and that makes sense. But traditional metrics, like number of years of experience or education is no longer a reliable metric. And not because those don't matter, but because the market has become a bit saturated so that there are too many people with experience and/or education.
So, it seems like the new codified metric is leetcode ability since it's able to be tracked, measurable, and "seems" to prove some level of competent. Of course, most developers don't go out of their way to do leetcode if not to train for interviews, so it basically becomes a memorization of a certain type of questions and testing if the candidate has memorized it. Consequently, the market becomes more saturated with people with these abilities, so new informal metrics have been introduced which are basically on to the breakdown what this post talks about, points like:.. don't use AI
I'm not sure if this is true or not, it's just a theory, but it definitely feels like it. I mean, I'm a developer that has been laid off twice in the last 12 months because of economic conditions and I basically have no way of showcase my actual ability as a developer other than talk about it and even then I've been told that I'm lying about things that I've definitely done. Ironically, I've discarded projects more than once because some teams can't catch up given the fast-paced environment of my previous employers... I keep getting feedback that I'm inexperienced or not serious because they don't believe my stories, but 3-5Rs is definitely a thing, specially when I had to rewrite someone else's code in 1-2 months because someone was fired after realizing he wasn't a real developer despite having a masters degree, 5y -exp
I think it will change, but not sure how or when. In the meantime, I'm just posting tiktoks and youtube shorts of side projects hoping that it reaches someone who may be interested, but even those are paradoxically getting gatekept (It's exactly how that meme appears, like the higher ups realize that projects can get done in a competent and timely manner, either accept the truth or assumed that the person that did the project didn't know what it was doing, rejected)
Rain-And-Coffee@reddit
I have a tech blog, where I discuss various projects. It showcases my knowledge, and also helped me improve my writing skills.
It’s included in my resume, seems a tiny bit more professional than Tik Toks.
pan0ramic@reddit
+1 to experience not meaning much on paper. There seems to be a glut of people with 5-10 years of experience who aren’t very good / know very little.
That window lines up with the period of super high demand for people
MassiveStallion@reddit
I mean, you've hit the nail on the head. Managers and HR have been incompetent in tech hiring for decades. There is no leetcode equivalent for them or sales. Perhaps we should really start turning the screws on that side and see how they like it.
Clean_Plantain_7403@reddit
Would you mind sharing some of the shorts? You can PM me if you are not comfortable sharing them here.
Material_Policy6327@reddit
I’d say it happened due to google and amazon doing all those news stories about their weird interview questions to find devs and every one ran with ot
caseyanthonyftw@reddit
It really seems like the worst parts of our industry are the result of the some people just copying everything FAANG does for their small-to-medium size companies without actually thinking about whether said practices are actually good for their company or not.
8x4Ply@reddit
Doing system design interviews that are based on apps with millions of users when you have 10 internal users.
I feel like it shows more knowledge to recognise your unique situation and develop a sensible solution to it than just try and copy big tech style where it's not needed.
Material_Policy6327@reddit
Yeah def. For a short while I had a director that wanted to run our team like Amazon but all they did was yell at us to do more with less. Surprise surprise that didn’t work and we were behind a year
eemamedo@reddit
Funny but "Amazon's 12 leadership" helped me so much when I was interviewing with other companies. I literally prepared all my behaviour answers to follow that pattern.
946789987649@reddit
Cracking the coding interview came out in 2008. I definitely used and read it back in 2015 for job interviews. It's been like this for a while.
tinmru@reddit
Damn, I honestly thought CTCI was more recent 🤔
winnie_the_slayer@reddit
Fwiw, when I interviewed at Goldman Sachs, the behavioral part was surprisingly all about how I deal with backstabbing coworkers. I gave answers that I thought were quite reasonable and about being a decent person and respectful toward others. Got rejected after that. At least they are honest and know what they want.
tinmru@reddit
They were looking for a backstabber 🗡️
Rain-And-Coffee@reddit
You can skip all of this if you network, my last 3 or so jobs have been through referrals.
One of the interviews was just coming in and meeting the team, chatting, super casual, got hired.
At another I had the classic 3 rounds, but the results didn't matter much. I blew the coding test due to a series of mixups (I thought it would be Java, it was React lol, which I had never used). Still got hired.
Another thing that helps is not applying to companies that think they are Google or Amazon.
tinmru@reddit
That’s the biggest regret of my career - neglecting networking. I ignored this aspect, and if I were to look for a job now, I wouldn’t have even one person to ask for a referral.
Turbulent-Week1136@reddit
You are ill-informed.
Tango1777@reddit
I don't think I ever had even 5% of good tech interviews, they were mostly garbage. I don't see anything changing about it. I get like 1 decent per 20-30 interviews.
fried_green_baloney@reddit
Interview: Six rounds of LeetCode Hard, ten 1 hour behavioral interviews, fifteen 1 hour technical interviews, three 4 hour panel interviews.
Job: Change these 4,491 buttons from Light Sky Blue to Cyan, except on the Invoice Confirmation pages, where it's Pale Goldenrod. And don't use any of that fancy CSS stuff, we all know Jeff doesn't like it since that fiasco in 2007. Start as soon as our morning 10 minute standup that didn't begin until 2:30 PM finishes when Jeff's voice gives out from yelling nonstop, around 4:00 PM
dethswatch@reddit
how was the pay?
fried_green_baloney@reddit
Somewhere between $50K and $500K depending on the employer.
invest2018@reddit
It started with Google, with all its hype about hiring the “best,” a claim that was not based on any real metrics, just hype. Then other companies started jumping on board the hype wagon to bask in the hype glow.
AchillesDev@reddit
I've been in the field since 2014, and have done interviews (for practice and curiosity) pretty much every year since. This is how interviews have always been.
CalmTheMcFarm@reddit
Bzzzzzt. No.
When I interviewed with the big O 2 decades ago the interviewers were much more interested in how I thought about problem solving than whether I knew the most leet way of writing code.
AchillesDev@reddit
Luckily for both of us, 2014 wasn't 2 decades ago
bippityboppityboo_69@reddit
Like everywhere else, a big filter of where you went to school, or where you worked was a huge part of it.
You can hate LC, but it's been a huge equalizer in terms of who can actually land these jobs.
neopointer@reddit
You're right. For the people that are happy or able to invest A LOT of time to grind leetcode, that has been a huge equalizer indeed.
ninetofivedev@reddit
Everyone has time to grind leetcode the same way that everyone has time to goto the gym. Most people would just rather not do those things.
neopointer@reddit
Seriously? How about instead of doing leetcode, you read articles/books, study new tech, consume actual content that's helpful in your job instead of wasting time with leetcode? 😅
Or is only leetcode equivalent to going to the gym?
Leetcode is not the only thing you can do, just saying.
ninetofivedev@reddit
Well you make a good point. The gym is something you should never stop doing. Leetcode is something you grind when you're getting ready to apply for jobs.
And listen, this is coming from a guy who hates that leetcode is the standard for the hiring process. But "I don't have time for it" is the lamest excuse you can have. Maybe it's just a pet peeve. But people who say they don't have time for it always mean "I would rather waste my time doing something else"... you have time, you just don't want to do it over something else.
trojan_soldier@reddit
Well imagine if the interview process actually tests candidates by "the actual job" criteria? I wouldn't want to work with people who don't know how to resolve tech debt, good at backstabbing, playing politics, etc.
The ideal candidates are expected to be beyond that.
sunnnnnyyy@reddit
Why The Interview process is so wild now is certainly one part. But the other part is about The Job.
Would The Company rather accumulate the debt from a “good” coder who’s cognizant of the precise trade offs taken? Or from a god awful coder who took out crazy loans that other coders have to help claw back.
Would The Company take someone with complex system design experience and knows how to identity “simple problems” for delegation for a “fast fix”. Or someone who can’t recognize any problems, much less how complex it is?
This is more so an observation of the realities I’ve seen at The Job.
To put it into your analogy.. if you’re forced to descend some stairs, you better know how to climb stairs. Otherwise, you tumble to the bottom.
dexx4d@reddit
That seems to depend entirely on the business reasons for the trade-off.
Habanero_Eyeball@reddit
Well I remember being in college in like 05 or 06and seeing something like a post card saying "GOOGLE IS HIRING" and then had some weird question on it. It said something like "we're looking for exceptional people so be sure to not only answer the question on the card but explain how you arrived at that answer cuz not everyone thinks the same and blah blah blah"
I remember thinking it was really an odd question and I couldn't answer it and thought 'Hmm glad I'm not looking to get on at google.....that's just weird" and it just seemed to get worse and worse from there.
squeasy_2202@reddit
Upvote just because "didn't know shit about fuck."
ninetofivedev@reddit
You are ill-informed. Interview processes have not changed that much in at least 2 decades, and prior to that, they were somehow worse. Prior to leetcode + system design, we had brain teasers.
Public-Ambassador527@reddit
Those types of interviews give me so much anxiety to the point self-sabotage kicks in and I ultimately beef it at some point. that's why I usually end up at no name or small companies. Small companies are where it's at, typically asking open ended questions relevant to the tech stack they use and probing into your experience to determine if it's a fit.
jjanderson3or9@reddit
It has become membership in a cult.
space_iio@reddit
hey that exactly describes my job wtf
frteefamily123@reddit
Seems like interviews went from 'can you code?' to 'can you solve this obscure puzzle under pressure?'
rudiXOR@reddit
Because of the success of big tech monopolies. Other players thought it's a good idea to copy their interview practices and also software development processes and also architectures, because it's the way to be successful as well. The problem is that the success of big tech is not really because of that, but more likely because of the monopoly status and initial great product/innovation.
Everyone wants to be a tech company and interviews like that, even if they just built a crappy CRUD application in a legacy codebase full of tech debt.
forrestthewoods@reddit
It doesn't matter. At all. In even the slightest. The fact that interviews question are not the same as job responsibilities DOES NOT MATTER.
Interviews are a proxy for job performance. Either the identify accurately identifies good employees or it doesn't.
If you want to argue that interviews do not identify good workers that's fine. Go for it. But I'm super over people complaining that interviews diverge from the actual job. Because it doesn't bloody matter.
This argument could not have been beaten to death any harder. Everything that can possibly have been said on the topic has been said. At this point the only people I am interested in hearing about are hiring managers who are reporting success/failure results of either existing or new interview styles. Go interview 100 people, hire 10, and report back.
MassiveStallion@reddit
Pissing you off is entirely the point. We should completely ruin and infest leetcode with cheating/AI/test takers so it is no longer used and the companies that pull that shit go out of business.
Whining is the point, so that managers who bring up the process can eat thousands of threads whenever they google the process, and when that ask chatgpt, the answer comes back 'thousands of software engineers say it sucks'
teoska91@reddit
Known the market has been unstable for a while, the skyrocketing number of applicants for a position should have made interviews turn into very tough play-off games as well.
These unnerving interviews stand up for my loyalty to my employee somewhat involuntarily although I am not super happy to work at my current position because the whole process looms large assuming I'd be lucky enough to pass the initial screening.
Izacus@reddit
This is yet another "I hate interviews" post banned by Rule 6 and ranting (banned by rule 9) without actually contributing anything to conversation.
OP, experienced dev, pray tell us just how exactly would you interview 200-500 applicants in your company to choose applicants that are actually competent? What approaches did you take in your teams and how did you measure their success and what that success was?
Whining is easy. Solving problems is hard. Lets hear the solutions.
Arthix@reddit
We need unions
akornato@reddit
The disconnect between interviews and actual job responsibilities is frustrating as hell. It's like we're all playing this ridiculous game where we pretend to be perfect coding machines during interviews, only to face the messy reality of tech work once we're hired. The emphasis on algorithmic puzzles and system design questions often feels completely detached from the day-to-day grind of fixing bugs, dealing with legacy code, and navigating office politics.
The behavioral part of interviews has indeed become a performance art. We're expected to spin every negative experience into a growth opportunity and present ourselves as flawless team players, even if our last job was a toxic hellscape. It's exhausting and feels increasingly disconnected from reality, especially in this era of frequent layoffs and job instability. Unfortunately, I don't see this changing anytime soon - companies seem addicted to these processes, despite their flaws. But hey, there's a bit of hope. Tools like this interview copilot can help you navigate these tricky interview questions and present your best self, even when the process feels like a circus. I'm part of the team that created it, and we're all about helping folks ace those interviews, no matter how disconnected they might seem from the actual job.
function3@reddit
gtfo of here with this ai spam
orlandoduran@reddit
Cargo cult shit. I don’t think that the faang dipshits have brilliant hiring practices, but lots of companies are aping their technical interview practices without understanding the original purposes of those practices. A technical interview at its most useful is an opportunity to see how someone thinks and struggles — and communicates about those thoughts and struggles — and that’s literally it. I have hired people who have failed miserably to solve the problems posed to them in tech interviews and absolutely declined to hire people who nailed it bc the former evinced intelligence and thoughtfulness and the latter just looked at me smugly but then couldn’t explain their reasoning because no reasoning actually went into their work.
The job is to solve problems every day that not only have you never seen before but in fact no one has ever seen before, because every company’s stack is hilariously specific if your tech interviews are only testing for correct answers you’re doing it wrong imo. Unfortunately most of the people who influence the tech interview process don’t understand that in tech interviews failure is the point
pogogram@reddit
To be fair this stuff used to be stupidly hard. Now it’s stupidly hard, overly complicated with overinflated valuations and investors demanding growth, new features and positive cash flow at all times. So there is an overcorrection to find Woz in every new candidate. Not saying that people aren’t capable, but if you are looking for someone so incredibly talented that they could invent new things almost out of whole cloth this process is not the way to do it. Instead it just creates a cottage industry of tutorial hell and soul crushing leetcode whole never focusing on the real issue of finding actual problems and solving them instead of “can you configure this aws stack with terraform while solving n-queens using a potato peeler”
pfc-anon@reddit
Well when there's money to be made, people will go to all lengths to game the system. When everyone's busy gaming the system, no one's actually focusing on building the said system. The bar will keep rising, but only for the interviews and not actually for the day-to-day work you do.
At my work, we push for excellent candidates, ironically I've been called out for being pedantic and pushing for higher standards.
apfelbeck@reddit
I feel like it really turned in the Great Recession, 2010-2012 ish. Before then white board coding and such existed for sure, but more to verify you can break a problem down to a logical solution and code up the logic for it. There were more programming jobs than qualified candidates then.
For example my first job was as a C++ developer and I admitted in the interview that I wasn’t a strong in c++. Second was C# and I’d never touched C# before. Third was Lua and the same story. This was all pre recession and these companies hired a programmer that could pick up the details along the way.
PrestigiousRecipe736@reddit
The only way it changes is if everyone reading this decides to change it. I have, but most people are just dialed in propagating the bullshit. As if the one thing AI can't actually do fairly well is solving dumb algorithm trivia.
Zealousideal_Hawk240@reddit
I’m not sure if I’ll ever have a good answer for “The Job”. I have yet to see a technical organization not end up falling apart, slipping standards and tech debt accumulation due to business demands and it becoming acceptable to trade quality for burnout timelines.
That being said in a place that has the best qualities of this work is going to have more politics, engineers throwing each other under the bus and hoarding knowledge.
Constant-Listen834@reddit
Oh look it’s this thread again
lord_of_reeeeeee@reddit
My job now looks like your interview list. At the same company it looked like your list. Out of app dev and into research development.
It's exhausting, but it is fun