I’d rather do neither. That’s the main reason I have never done in person or take home coding tests in the 20+ years I’ve been conducting interviews. So far we haven’t hired a dud.
I bet while you “weren’t doing in person coding tests” as a developer you also weren’t making the type of compensation that the people who were “grinding leetCode and working for a FAANG” (tm) r/cscareerquestions.
I use to brag like you, about “not doing take home test” for 25 years. Then I landed at BigTech and saw that returning interns were making about what I made two years earlier at 45.
I’m not complaining, my goal had been to get into $BigTech in 2020 and relocate when my youngest (step)son graduated I did so without a coding interview and without relocating by pivoting to “cloud consulting/application modernization” (cloud + enterprise application architecture/development). But I tell my younger relatives to practice coding interviews and go for the most compensation possible.
If you base your success on money, sure. Maybe tests are a good filter.
Personally, I'm seeking something more furfilling and the difference between 200k and 300k doesn't matter if I don't find the work furfilling. 300k to 400k would be negligible for any material possessions I'd want.
Sure it is, I had my 3200 square foot home built in 2016 in the northern burbs of Atlanta when I was making $135K.
But why given the choice (theoretically) would I give up making $ALotMore just by practicing for coding interviews?
Like I said, I personally didn’t have to thanks to years of industry experience, knowing “cloud”, and having soft skills. But why would anyone without the path dependencies I had (ie children in school that I didn’t want to relocate) hold their nose up at doing what it takes to make $160K+ straight out of college and a quarter million+ a year by the time they are 25?
>But why given the choice (theoretically) would I give up making $ALotMore just by practicing for coding interviews?
Because I am content in my current state of life? Because the type of work being offered is not engaging to me and I have the luxury to choose? Because I'm not trying to speedrun out of the job market and retire at 40?
I'm making more than $135k, but once I get a decent car and pay off my house... what next?
- Paid off student loans
- Already maxing out my 401k for retirement as well as investing in an IRA account
- I of course have hobbies and disposable goods to buy, but It's not $5000/month worth of stuff.
- I have a decent savings right now, and I imagine by the time I pay off my house I will have a very hefty buffer as well as some more of that going into stocks
The only consideration is potentially for kids, but that's not even in the cards right now. Maybe I'd consider traveling, but I've never had those dreams where I'm an adventurer, nor one where I retire in some vacation resort. I'll cross them bridge when I get there, and it's not like I don't have the savings buffer if I need a short term transition phase for $ALotMore down the line should the need arise.
As is it now, if I got a million dollars in 10 years after I paid off my house/car my first impulse would be... going to art school. Not investing in some more stocks or starting a busines or whatnot which tends to be popular here, I'd just continue to develop myself in skills I never had a chance to. And a million dollars would take that from being a part time side hobby to something I can focus on full time for a few years.
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so yea, given all that talk, guess my career in tech lol.
Or take my path, find a job that balances work and life priorities, doesn't require you to stress out on grinding rote memorized leet code problems, and work on a side business in your less stressed free time so that you can start your own company.
FAANG companies already have far too much power and influence, I'm ideologically opposed to giving them even more by subordinating myself to them for the almighty dollar.
I mean I agree with you on this, but the idea that you can gauge a person's skillset through conversation (gasp!) and talking about your craft and details about past projects, etc seems to be totally lost on people today.
I mean, it goes both ways. I feel that I am a fairly proficient engineer (built something with 10M+ downloads) but for a long period of my life I would do fine in every part of the interview except the part where you just chit chat a bit. I'd try to tell interviewers about myself and the smiles would just fall off their faces.
It took me a long time to understand that these sorts of conversations had their own "rules" to them, which I had to follow if I wanted to do well. These rules, of course, have virtually nothing to do with programming aptitude or ability, and seem to me, somewhat cynically, to be another way by which interviewers can allow their own biases to enter into the interview process. For instance, one time I got rejected because I seemed "too excited" about my personal side projects; it was deemed that I wouldn't be as excited about the work that I'd do at the company. Of course this is nonsense; I'm now happily employed and pretty excited about my work. I have plenty other examples of me saying reasonable things in interviews and being rejected for that reason.
There's really no silver bullet here. Getting rejected is always going to piss people off.
See, I take a bit of a different view in the example you've given. Like, if I got rejected because I seemed "too excited about my personal side projects" I'd come away from that thinking "if that's really their take away, I'm kinda glad I don't work with them!"
You're right that the conversational interviews (just like any social gathering, really) have their own rules. But I think the most important thing you can do during those interviews is to just be yourself. After all, you want them to get to know you, just as you want to get to know them, right? How else can you each be sure that you're a good fit for each other? If they reject you for something you said that is true but that they just didn't like (e.g. a difference of opinion on something), or they nitpicked some little thing you said even though the rest of the conversation went smoothly ... well, in my opinion, you're better off.
Normally I'd agree, but I got passed up by a large number of fairly reasonable-seeming companies for arbitrary reasons like this. If it's just one or two, sure, maybe I'm better off. But after that it starts to have a real impact; it becomes harder to negotiate, maybe one of those companies would have been just fine anyways, etc...
I use to brag like you, about “not doing take home test” for 25 years. Then I landed at BigTech and saw that returning interns were making about what I made two years earlier at 45.
I’m not complaining, my goal had been to get into $BigTech in 2020 and relocate when my youngest (step)son graduated I did so without a coding interview and without relocating by pivoting to “cloud consulting/application modernization” (cloud + enterprise application architecture/development). But I tell my younger relatives to practice coding interviews and go for the most compensation possible.