[jvik]

Moving closer to family so I need to change job. Applied to quite a few programming jobs in the nearby city. After probably 10-15 unsuccessful technical interviews with leetcode I've decided to go back to IT.

Now that I have kids and a house I don't want to spend hundreds of hours to learn this completely separate skill (leetcode) that I rarely if ever will get to use in my job and get no joy from.

[vmception]

I had a similar experience in my last dance with interviews.

Even when I got good enough to solve some easy/medium problems in interviews efficiently and faster than the average, I was still getting rejection letters. Kind of a waste of time when you can make so much solo these days, but interviewing is distracting because its like a full time job, while competing against the most driven people from Asia who trying to stand out against a very large population, while I'm just casually looking for a signing bonus for the year.

Basically the only data I have is that there is just a cap on what people are willing to pay me as an employee. Like they think much harder about approving me, than seems warranted. I start to think hmmm maybe I shitposted something on social media that nobody will tell me about.

But when I go down in asking comp range, the whole experience is completely pleasant and familiar again. That's kind of annoying. Makes me want to pay fees to professional groups under the hope that they can bus me though. Seems similar to stories I've read about random athletic clubs at Stanford all joining the same team at Facebook.

[smorgusofborg]

What kind of solo work do you mean? It seems to me like anything without some local client is getting into a global competition for peanuts, but I would be happy to be set straight!

[vmception]

You can launch DAOs that automate anything these days and take a small percentage from the users of it. Just automate any small aspect of what people do and auto-liquidate proceeds for USD* so that you aren't accidentally speculating on anything, your users can pay for the liquidation too.

*Your oracle server/cron job can incorporate a broker's API to get actual USD, your DAO can only get surrogates such as USDC which is redeemable 1:1 for USD at certain brokerages.

It's a boom town. Anybody can make 3x more than what a FAANG would pay annually, and that's being generous.

[jjav]

> Now that I have kids and a house I don't want to spend hundreds of hours to learn this completely separate skill (leetcode) that I rarely if ever will get to use in my job and get no joy from.

Great point and I do worry about the longer-term damage this leetcode-interviewing may do to the industry. Like any echo chamber, it perpetuates itself. So those who believe memorizing leetcode patterns is related to being a good programmer (it's not) will only hire those who are like themselves, making it worse and worse.

By the time the whiteboard leetcode craze started I was fortunately old enough and established enough that I never had to deal with that early in my career. And by now I have the confidence to tell anyone who wants to do that type of interview to go pound sand. But for younger engineers it's a huge problem so I worry.

Best we can collectively do is stop doing that type of interview. Instead interview people based on their experience and based on actual day to day job requirements (which is never to regurgitate algorithms on a whiteboard).

[mooreds]

I found the best way around leetcode is:

  * network network network
  * don't aim for the 1% of companies that have devs jumping to join them

If you can get an intro into a company, esp a one on the smaller size, with say 10-25 devs, you can sometimes skip the leetcode madness. Or, if you do a coding interview, it's more of a 'can this person navigate a codebase or comment on a PR'. That is to say, an interview closer to the real job.