[jameshush]

I 100% agree. I used to be in the boat of "I shouldn't have to study to pass a job interview" when I was younger.

Now that I'm older and I've interviewed a lot of people too, I realize sometimes life is un-fun and kinda sucks but you gotta do what you gotta do. There's a strong co-relation between people who spend two hours a night for three months studying algorithm questions and people who are willing to spend 8 hours a day debugging un-fun code. Which, more often than not, is what I need my team mates to do.

I work in AdTech. It's not particularly sexy. We don't have particularly sexy projects but we do have a large (millions of users per day) scale. A lot of our projects just require a engineer who has base level of experience plus a positive attitude and a slightly above average level of responsibility because we have to avoid outages. I need people to do work that is oftentimes not particularly fun but particularly important and revenue driving. My best filter, apart from actually having worked with the person for years beforehand, is asking a low-ball JavaScript "can you debug this asynchronous JavaScript" question.

So while the current system is frustrating, until we can figure out a best solution, unfortunately you just gotta play the game how the rules are laid out now.

[pdimitar]

This is all true, I just wish people didn't put that much weight on some pretty random and oddly specific tech interview questions.

I've practically [re-]invented Redis back in 2008 while working for a company, and wrote something very akin to the Google crawler bot in 2009 yet at some point 2 months ago I "fail" an interview because I didn't do the best possible optimization of a basic stock storage system that has packages at different weights (and valued in different currencies) and since I had to fit a whole mini web project in 2h I of course didn't pursue perfect optimization. But the thing was working pretty well and ticked all boxes that were required -- and perfect optimization wasn't mentioned otherwise I'd probably skip 1-2 features to achieve it and fit in the [arbitrary] schedule of the homework assignment.

And then boom, you are no good because of a hidden requirement and unclear communication which aren't my fault.

I do get your point. Really. But people put too much value on some pretty random questions / assignments as well.

[jameshush]

pdimitar I totally feel you. For full context: I have never passed a leetcode style phone screen in my entire life. Even after studying for 6 weeks, every night for 2 hours and buying a couple of courses on how to pass coding interviews.

I've gotten my last few jobs and oppertunities by following co-workers from job to job. AKA doing good work and building good relationships with the people I worked with. I've been able to leverage these relationships to skip the phone screen at some of the big tech companies but still freeze up on the the white board interviews unfortunately in real life.

At the end of the day though I know what I have to do: Either study for 3 more months, stay where I'm at with my current pay, or switch careers entirely. Right now I'm leaning towards switching careers entirely.

At the end of the day though, if you've never worked with a person before, and your company doesn't do a good job firing people who aren't performing, I'm not sure of a better way to screen people in 45 minutes :(. And this is coming from the guy who's screened out himself.

There's _plenty_ of engineers out there. We're not special.

[pdimitar]

> At the end of the day though I know what I have to do: Either study for 3 more months, stay where I'm at with my current pay, or switch careers entirely. Right now I'm leaning towards switching careers entirely.

One person who wrote a Python book was spot on in their conclusion: "At one point you should stop working as a programmer. You'll get no respect and your pay will be mercilessly negotiated down. Better to start another business and utilize programming as a secret weapon."

(Grossly inaccurate rephrasing but that was the gist of the paragraph.)

Still though, maybe you are too shy for the brutal game of numbers and chance that job hunting is even for seasoned programmers. That's fine. But you should know -- there are a ton of really mature and interesting people out there who know how to recruit. But it's a fact of life that you rarely find them; more often than not, they find you. And that's not happening to everyone who needs such an approach (sadly).

If you feel you want to switch careers and can't bear the thought of working programming anymore then do it. But if you just kind of feel giving up because of bad interviews -- don't give up just yet.

And I absolutely agree: we like to think we're special but there are a lot of very talented people out there. Very few are actually standing above the crowd. I am fine being one of many though; we each bring our own flavour to the company and some of these flavours do bring serious competitive advantages. :)