[ergonaught]

Your list makes the case for being "good", but that doesn't matter.

The "job interview questions" are largely popularized by people who do not understand hiring, and probably don't understand much of anything else, with a cargo cult mindless copy/paste of practices that don't actually apply to them.

There is a niche of a niche of a niche of roles where deep specialized knowledge is actually a baseline requirement in order to be successful in the role. 99% of the other roles filled by human beings who write software don't require anything close to it, but the companies delight in wasting everyone's time anyway.

Most of the very best programmers I've ever known bomb these idiotic interviews and the companies (and their customers) lose because of it.

A fine place for me to stop babbling.

[jimmywetnips]

So I was building a side hustle right before I had to switch to job hunting due to illness. The side hustle is sooo enjoyable to me since I get to finally solve problems I've heard about tangentially but never got to work on in my day jobs.

I also don't mind leetcode, strictly as a way to learn esoteric algorithms that don't show up in 99% of crud engineering. It's also a fun game. aka facebook quizes for nerds.

But you can't just do the 75 blind questions and be done. You have to scope out the questions that a company is known for asking and commit those to memory, since everyone else is doing it. Last night I had to re-learn matrix operations and memorize how to do them for a company. I loved linear algebra, ...back in the day.

And I just had to laugh last night at the absurdity. "In what world would anyone implement their own matrix operations? Why the fuck am I being judged on coding in a shitty web ide and ability to sight read code like im at some fucking nerd recital? I should be able to use an ide with a debugger dammit"

Instead of just following my passion and intense desire to build my project, which incidentaly should be the same skills a good hire should have, I have to pull myself away from "real" engineering, in order to focus on gaming the test like I was taking the SATs again.

[hansvm]

> In what world would anyone implement their own matrix operations?

In any world where their matrices are "special" -- big, small, scattered across the internet, high read/write ratio, informationally independent columns with 0.01% error tolerable, poorly conditioned, blockwise sparse, used as a sub-component in differentiating anything hairy (like a function of eigenvalues), ....

You can often get halfway decent results stringing together existing matrix primitives, but throw in a 50 clock cycle latency budget, a $5k per-job compute budget, or all sorts of other constraints and you're just as likely to find >>10x performance that you left lying on the table (assuming your matrices are at all special, which is common but not at all guaranteed in arbitrary domains).

[anonym29]

This isn't babbling at all, the sentiment in your 2nd paragraph is so accurate that you could drop the qualifiers "largely" and "probably" and it would become even more accurate.

[majjgepolja]

And these are the people who post on LinkedIn as if their understanding of esoteric Leetcode string DP problems is essential for scaling Amazon and Google.

They may not quite understand their development or deployment environment but their knowledge of writing segment tree as a single dimension array in 15 minute is somehow essential to scaling the internal CRUD app these people end up working on.

Now everyone being interviewed by this person has to know by heart or magically derive on spot how to find minimum steps to obtain maximum length palindrome subsequence of even length from a string consisting of lower case letters, because apparently it's the gist of all computer science knowledge a developer will need.

[ted_bunny]

I wonder how much the culture of standardized testing has contributed to this pattern. The idea that it's somehow unfair to test relevant skills and knowledge because previous exposure comes down to simple chance. That for a test to be "objective" it should only ask about abstract matters no one would ever reasonably encounter. It strikes me as sort of essentialist.

It also seems sort of contradictory... if experience in the field is one of the most important criteria, why are they implicitly avoiding testing for that?

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> if experience in the field is one of the most important criteria, why are they implicitly avoiding testing for that?

That's easy. No one wants to hire "olds."

Since companies are now run by twenty-something CEOs, no one wants to hire people that make the CEO uncomfortable.

It really is that simple. Basic bigotry. In my experience, many companies don't even try to hide it. Recruiters are awful.

I just learned that if I see a binary tree problem, the company is just yanking my chain. It's not worth trying.

[gepardi]

This never occurred to me but it makes sense.

I’m in my late 30s. Not too far from being older than many tech CEOs and I have seen plenty of BS I could call out.

I have a family, mortgage, and am not “wowed” by some slick CEO.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Many of these young CEOs are really brilliant folks. They deserve to be given a fairly free rein.

However, there's a big difference between brilliance, and good judgment.

Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.

When a CEO makes a mistake, there's usually only one strike, and you're out (we won't talk about Steve Jobs, though -that SOB had nine lives). When lower-level managers make mistakes, it's often recoverable.

Until recently, it was fairly common for corporations to be run by folks (usually men, but that's another issue) in their fifties.

These folks had no problems considering older folks on their merits (which often included price). If they discriminated against older folks, it was usually because they didn't want to pay for something. It wasn't really personal (but that doesn't make it any less reprehensible). Younger folks, on the other hand, bring in the younger generation's resentment against their elders, so it is personal.

Many folks think that only younger folks are creative. I'd not argue that youth doesn't have a great deal of creative energy; mostly because they haven't encountered limitations, imposed by things like the laws of physics.

Creativity, however, does not equal results. What SpaceX has done with reusable boosters, is awesome. I do not know the details, but I'll bet the team that developed it was not just a bunch of enthusiastic kids. I'll lay odds there's a lot of well-coiffed grey pompadours in that team.

IBM is in hot water, because they adopted a "cargo cult" mentality, that, if they hired enough younger folks (and got rid of their "olds"), they'd magically transform into a startup unicorn.

I don't think that strategy has actually worked out too well.

[airbreather]

Maybe solo dev of niche product is a better alley for some?

[ChrisMarshallNY]

It's the one I chose.

Works for me, but I have different ambitions from most folks in the industry.

I've never really wanted to be rich. It would be nice, but it's never been a need.

I do, however, have skills that could make other people rich. They have been so fixated on my gray hair, though, that they never even realized that.

[itronitron]

It occurred to me just last week as I was reminiscing over some past interviews that while I have written a substantial amount of code, pseudocode, and algorithms it has never been while standing at a whiteboard.