[logicslave12]

It’s been really stressful. I know python, but not really any other languages. I’m able to get work done. But I’m really nearly the same as a fresh grad. But really, I was just bumming around, then studied for four months and destroyed their algorithms questions, so much so that expectations for me are really high. But all I know is leetcode, literally nothing else...

[manquer]

Being on other side of the interviews like this , trust me most interviewers know that .

The logic being if you can pick up leetcode in few months you can pick up most things on the job fast.

Understand that interviewers are first and foremost are looking for ability to learn and understand complex topics , it is not all that important which specific topic it is.

nobody really knows what you will be working on by the time you join or 6months later , even if the interviewer wanted to it he is not able to ask the right questions beyond the basgics.

Also university education in IT is woefully behind the industry. Functional programming, or dev tooling is barely covered in most places . Maybe they teach MVC a bit , I don’t expect most kids to understand CQRS or event programming .

Similarly I would be pleasantly surprised if you have setup a simple app, I wouldn’t expect you to know nuances between different cloud vendors , or have experience with zipkin,istio, helm , grafana or similar tools or be able to grok a explain analyse and fine tune a 500GB dB.

it is unlikely a fresh grad has production experience at best they may already know some frameworks and maybe developed a few small apps of their own, however working in large project with 1m+ lines and complex tooling is a skill that takes time to learn , there is a lot of gotchas in every area you will learn only when you see it .

So all I am left with is, does this candidate know the basics , can he understand and learn fast .

That is why these questions make sense for junior developers and never for senior devs.

[melvinroest]

N = 1 but here we go. Let's look at the CS bachelor/master offered at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam [0]. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle and I understand that university programs are heterogeneous.

So let's look at my university experience and use your post as a checklist, for funzies! :D

Functional programming: covered

Dev tooling: covered to some extent through electives where you'd teach it yourself (I also call it the Magical Course) [1]

MVC: Magical Course

event programming: never heard of it :) Reading the wikipedia page, the following courses will probably help in aiding understanding:

+ Hardware interrupts: kernel programming, binary and malware analysis and hardware security

+ User events (e.g. via JavaScript): The Magical Course and Computer Graphics

CQRS: never heard of it :D And while I get the need when reading the article from Martin Fowler, I do not have a backlog of knowledge where I've encountered this before.

Simple app: computer graphics, the Magical Course, Distributed Multimedia Systems (the practical assignments were in HTML5/JS).

Cloud vendors: nope, I learned about that when I started teaching for a coding school

zipkin, istio, helm, grafana: never heard of it :D

be able to grok a explain analyse and fine tune a 500GB dB: No. We did learn SQL though and how to model relationships with UML and entity diagrams.

it is unlikely a fresh grad has production experience: I do, because my thesis was harder than whatever production experience I was acquiring. Going to work as a web dev and web dev instructor was my form of fleeing for my much more difficult thesis. Also, computer graphics taught me volume as my OpenGL engine was 10K lines of code. The Magical Course allowed me to produce an app that I sold for 2000 euro's.

Diving into a 1 million line codebase: We did that way too briefly (the Linux OS) for just 15 minutes, unfortunately. The startups I've been at had about 100K lines of code for their complete product. In other words, a lot of companies don't have a 1M+ codebase.

Anyways, when you have someone from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, you can have some idea of what they do learn ;-)

[0] My knowledge of the curriculum is a bit stale, so it could've changed.

[1] Whenever I use this sentence, I happen to refer to one course where the teacher decided not to really teach but coach and the goal was to teach yourself whatever you wanted. I happen to have learned a lot of practical stuff that otherwise wouldn't be covered. So did many others. What did I specifically do? I created an iOS app by following Hegarthy's Stanford-based iOS course online ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI3pz7eFgfo ).

[manquer]

Firstly, thank you for sharing :)

Yours is above the par learning experience than most fresh graduates I have encountered. When we hire in Eupope I would very interested to try and convince some of your juniors to join!

> The startups I've been at had about 100K lines of code for their complete product. In other words, a lot of companies don't have a 1M+ codebase.

Most large companies who are also large employers sadly do have such complexity. In a startup it may not a single repo at 100k+, however overall 100+k lines for the product is very low for Saas product over two-three years it easily goes beyond.

My N=1 in a startup: we went from one monolithic 300-400k+ L repo to a ton of repos with each one perhaps < 100k . Traditional large codebases are not designed for releasing 4 times a day, even builds can take a lot of time [1], Smaller repos does not mean complexity goes away, developers need to still document, read and understand how it works. It applies also when you use libraries or third party services, while number of lines have become less, you need a lot more domain understanding.

> be able to grok a explain analyse and fine tune a 500GB dB: No. We did learn SQL though and how to model relationships with UML and entity diagrams.

The reality is that most jobs are not developing new apps from scratch, it is lot more likely to work on older codebase that has its fair share of kinks.

That means I am going to throw you deep end into large sized DB. Schema perhaps has evolved over time as product vision keeps changing, a dozen 'architects' have messed about it. In a typical job, you will be fixing bugs more than developing new features, handling tech debt - it doesn't matter stupid mistakes were made before, you still to work with/around those mistakes as someone will have to work with yours.

Even on theoretical level NoSQL is not well taught in universities. Purpose built dbs for graphing, Time Series, KV , document DBs, search indices are all important to really understand. Each has solutions to specific problem set and come with their limitations. In a typical basic storage stack there is going to probably be something like Redis|PostgreSQL|ElasticSearch: all of them solve more than one type of storage problem in more than one way.

This isn't to say the that is it all bad. Education is evolving , universities are more open to longer internships, while most don't think software engineering (not CS) should be treated as vocational course, there are positive trends. Alternative learning avenues have opened up like Coding Schools and Bootcamps who do lot better job at focusing on job skills.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 This is infamous post, and of course the extreme example, but you get the idea.

[melvinroest]

Ha! I remember the source you mention [1]. 25 million lines, haha. Man-made software mountains :)

Thanks for reading my comment by the way. I wish I had more time so I could write succinctly. If you're ever in the position to hire people from my uni send me an email if you'd like some introductions to professors and what not.

> Alternative learning avenues have opened up like Coding Schools and Bootcamps who do lot better job at focusing on job skills.

Ah, got you there! ;-) *

* Probably not, but it's fun to imagine that I did for a second.

My first job out of CS was being a web development instructor. You might think I wasn't qualified, since I never touched NodeJS in my life and wasn't super familiar with JavaScript. I told them this but my teaching skills were really good so they gave me a unique challenge.

My challenge: make one NodeJS app in one month. I pried a bit what they wanted me to showcase, and they'd be happy with a custom blog that had user login, CRUD on blog posts and user registration.

In that month I made:

- A voting app for the game Werewolf of Miller's Hollow / Maffia

- An online sentiment analysis app based on my bachelor thesis

- A simple CMS designed to list all the hackathons in The Netherlands (though you could also retrofit it into a job board or party calendar)

- A blog app with the extra feature of adding markdown to it (what they actually wanted)

When I showed all this to them they asked me: you learned this in a month?! The thing is, I think most of us CS grads would have. And I think a lot people with a master in CS wouldn't be surprised that I created 4 apps within a month instead of the blog app only.

It's all function calls, for loops, if-statements and variables in the end. Sure, JS has closures, but we had compilers in class, so understanding on a high level the JS engine internals work, it isn't that hard. The same goes for callbacks, promises and all the other fun JS stuff that makes JS quite unique. *

* I use the debugger a lot when I learn a new language. I do think this is a super power since not many programmers seem to do it, but it gives a lot more context. It's the only way how I was capable of getting a foothold to understand X86-64 in binary and malware analysis. I'm pretty bad at simulating code in my mind, but now that I've seen it 1000's of times in debuggers, I'm a lot better at it.

Moreover, even in 2017, the resources available to self-teach how to do it were available and I self-taught everything via the official NodeJS documentation, code school and random YouTube tutorials.

So, in my case, I've seen both sides. Ironically, I became one of the best JS teachers by virtue of my CS education (and my upbringing, had to teach family members a lot of stuff). I know what coding schools teach, IMO the CS education I had was superior to that. Maybe not in time effectiveness though, but of those 6 years I spent on it, I'd say that 1.5 years was super useful, 1.5 was useful and the other 3 years is where I got C's anyway and did other things to enrich my life (such as a course on Buddhism) :)

[manquer]

You mention CS education is not efficient way to learn to be a developer, the other problem it is expensive, maybe Europe is different it is certainly a major factor US and many other countries.

As you point out your strong background in CS helps a lot, which is why tech interviews want to filter by that skill, it is however not essential to be a good developer.

To be a good mechanic you don't need to know engineering, knowing engineering certainly helps and give you an edge over someone starting the same time as you, but not much for senior skilled hiring. I would rather have my car serviced by experienced high school dropout mechanic than MIT graduate out of college.

Personally, I have a background in electrical engineering, I started hiring tech startup right out of uni, neither knowing tech or hiring. It is been 7-8 years and we are now 150+ strong. My brother has PhD in CS and multiple post-docs, studied in top universities and now teaches at one. Between the two of us, you would hire me any day to build a real application. If both of us started careers as developers at the same time perhaps he may have become a better developer, however today my experience would count lot more than foundation knowledge his education will bring.

tldr: The background in CS helps early on as fresh grad, but it should not be a factor for senior hires, that is problem in FAANG hiring.

[melvinroest]

In The Netherlands the only expensive thing about it is opportunity cost, which is as amazing as it gets. Now, it's a bit worse though. 8 years ago, I received about 3000 euro's. My education was 1900, my travel was free (also sponsored) so the rest was for books and living on my own. I decided to stay at home and take a longer commute. 1100 euro's for books is more than enough in most cases. I know that this is in stark contrast to the US. And from my point of view (which is biased), I find the US to be in an unfortunate situation.

I agree with everything you said. Perhaps it might be interesting to remark that I feel this picture changes in the startup landscape were things aren't always that complicated, but where the people that hire you do seem to hold you to the same standards. This is why I'm always wary about the title of "senior" at a startup.

[thewarrior]

Take the same energy and apply it to learning to build testable and understandable code. If you can go from nothing to smoking an algo interview in months you’re a fast learner. You’ll be fine.

[TheMblabla]

I think that's what these leetcode type questions are good at. You're either naturally adept enough to do well, or internally motivated enough to memorize/learn them. Either way, it's a decent signal for a company that needs someone to learn their internal, proprietary techstack

[kudokatz]

> You're either naturally adept enough to do well, or ...

I'm personally very wary of using algorithms questions as a proxy for how "adept" someone is at software engineering. If I were running a business, I'd personally want to make sure people could manage technical debt and build decoupled systems.

I have had multiple positions at FAANG companies, and despite being "adept" according to these algorithms questions the systems built by these highly-paid (and, around me, generally experienced) people are pretty awful in terms of quality and maintenance.

Learning a proprietary stack also hampers effectiveness in future positions if wanting to opt-out of FAANG later on.

[thewarrior]

I have observed this problem and usually it’s not because the people are incapable but that the incentives are to ship things that move the needle to quickly get promoted. The financial rewards at these companies from promotions are huge.

Where the managers have incentivized quality and stability my team mates have moved mountains and I’ve seen some really good stuff but otherwise not.

[cik2e]

Why do you suppose these hires aren’t good at learning engineering best practices? I see comments like yours here all the time. Is it some kind of arrogance, perhaps amplified by a false signal sent by getting hired off leet code questions in the first place?

[thewarrior]

It’s false based on what I’ve seen. Plenty of people passionate about good engineering where I am. But they are sometimes trapped in a system which doesn’t always incentivize it.

[kudokatz]

> Why do you suppose these hires aren’t good at learning engineering best practices?

I guess what I was trying to convey is different: being good at algorithms doesn't give much of a signal (positive or negative) about other things I think really matter more on the whole.

(Of course, having enough people being aware of algorithms subtleties is important ... everyone, not so much)

[thewarrior]

I partially agree but this point of view has become very polarizing and controversial and I get the other side of it too. People who have spent ages getting better at their craft feel undervalued. However the two need not be mutually exclusive. One needs to learn to do their job while also navigating the system. That is part of the job just like selling your work is also work.

But having worked at both FANG and non FANG you can see the rigor of the interview process reflected in the quality of your colleagues. That’s something that is hard to deny having experienced it.

[_wldu]

You know algorithms (not leetcode). Most people struggle a lot with algorithms. It's the reason a lot of people flunk out of CS programs. That's why they hired you. If you can solve these problems on a white board, you can write the code in a programming language.

[nnd]

What was your prep strategy?