[rafiki6]

Honestly, I think it's a sign of the times. We might be at the peak here. I have recently interviewed at a couple of "AI" labs at banks and some MLE positions at insurance companies and one startup, and they are all requiring leetcode. Most of them have asked dynamic programming questions and expected working solutions in 20 mins. IMO it's a sign of higher supply than demand. I think it's about to get much much worse with many companies moving to remote work, meaning we are competing with folks in countries like India (no offence meant here, it's just a product of the education system) who are much hungrier and will literally do every possible Leetcode problem out there.

I think we are about to experience a tech bubble bursting type of situation (especially given the over inflated valuations + ridiculous stock prices of FAANG), meaning much less jobs, much higher competition and a whole world of pain, which will result in many folks leaving this profession (especially those with little experience and with no real formal education).

Now with the emergence of things like GPT-3 expect further automation of annoying software dev tasks and a lot of front end roles transforming or going away entirely. I think future devs will need more ML exposure and experience as that will become a standard part of the job soon enough, and we might enter an era of growth after the bust with much more ML integration into products and new companies forming around that.

In 5 years, the world of software dev will be a different place.

In the meantime, take a vacation, relax your brain, understand that most of us are getting rejected and it has little to do with our skill, and get back to leetcoding if you want those high paying cushy jobs. Use the smaller companies who insist of pretending they are FAANG as practice, and aim for FAANG my friend.

That's the best advice I can give because I feel the same pain and that's what I'm doing.

[throwawayc2020]

Thanks for the comment. I pretty much feel the same way as you, especially the bit about a higher supply than demand and the expectation that it will only get worse.

I appreciate the advice of relaxing for a bit. Although I wouldn't want to wish this on anyone, it is a bit relieving to hear that others are experience something similar. Best of luck to you

[dave_sid]

Yes I’ll second this. I’ve been through interviews recently and, given the current climate, it’s pretty gruelling compared to this time last year.

Most of them had 3 stages and a technical task that was expected to be your best work ever.

You’re not alone in feeling this way so just stick at it until the right role comes along. Read, study and improve in the meantime while you prepare for each interview. You’ll come out the other end a stronger engineer.

[runawaybottle]

I’ll say that I‘ve dipped my toes recently as well, and sense it might be a real buyers market.

I also could just suck. Like all things, the answer is probably some combination.

[rafiki6]

You too! Something will come along. In the meantime I think the industry is about to have a lot of algo experts lol

[dave_sid]

Haha. Yes the software engineering community’s grasp of bubble sort and binary searches has never been so good!!

[mrfusion]

Great thoughts. What changes in the industry are you expecting from GPT-3?