[lovich]

Maintaining a resume is burying the lede. Being "interview ready" in software means maintaining a separate set of skills that are rarely used in the day to day.

When companies are asking for people to reverse red black trees and then turn around and expect their employees to hook up wordpress sites, or build generic REST based CRUD apps, they are implicitly putting the burden of training on the employees.

I posit that the software field is one of the worst fields when it comes to this

[sfn42]

I have never been asked to reverse a red black tree. Maybe they all do that in SV but in my corner of the world I haven't seen nor heard about anyone doing that. I've been asked to write a class to store Car objects and get them by plate number and some stuff like that. I've been asked to write a simple tax calculator with the specific tax rules and brackets provided.

I thought these were perfectly reasonable tasks, certainly within my capabilities. To me, being "interview ready" is simply being competent at my job. Nobody's expecting me to memorize obscure algorithms that I could just look up if I needed them. They're just asking me to demonstrate that I can solve a simple task by programming. That's totally fair, I wouldn't want to work with the people who went through 3 years of university (and even years of actual work afterwards) without learning how to solve these kinds of basic tasks.

I don't even remember what a red black tree is, I think they were covered in our DSA class but not much. Despite that I think I could give a pretty solid go at reversing one, given an implementation and maybe a summary of how it works. I wouldn't mind getting that task, sounds like a fun challenge. Maybe I'd complete it in 30 minutes, maybe I wouldn't, in either case I'm sure I'd be able to show that I'm pretty good at programming. That's all I've ever needed for my interviews. Haven't done an interview that hasn't resulted in a job offer.

Meanwhile I see all you people on the internet complaining that interviews are so unfair and require this "interview prep", so I'm left to conclude that either employers in my country are way less selective than they are in yours, or you're only applying to the most selective employers, or you're simply exaggerating the difficulty of the interviews. If you want to work at Google earning $500k then you're going to have to be exceptional. For everyone else there's plenty of very lucrative jobs that aren't nearly as hard to get. And if you can't even get those then maybe you're just not particularly good?

[lovich]

I’m not young or new to the industry. Not every place is this bad but it’s still highly common to get asked questions that seek to test out how many algorithms you’ve memorized.

This is not 500k/yr jobs but 150-250k year jobs where companies try to ape the practices of mag7 but fail at it because they are unwilling to implement fundamental aspects of those processes.

I also(until this current economy, lol) didn’t really ever have a problem crossing this barrier and getting jobs. But I still hate the extra effort needed and the extra hours of my personal life I have to sacrifice to brush up on or keep up to date on skills that the employers have, in my experience, never once had me use or even worse, blocked my efforts on working on tasks that would make use of the skill.

I grin and bear it because the moneys worth it but I think it’s inefficient posturing done to filter out social classes at this point, like how unpaid internships are used in the finance field

[sfn42]

To be fair, $150k is still a very good salary. That's like 3 times as much as most other people make. So it seems to me like we're still talking about fairly high-tier jobs, where I live most developers make less than $100k. The only devs I know who make north of $150k are self-employed contractors which comes with a lot of downsides.

I can see how it might be frustrating to have to maintain a separate set of skills just for interviews. I just haven't experienced that myself.

[lovich]

High col area, was paying 3 grand per month before utilities for 1000 sq ft and rats. Surroundings are fun at least. 150k is well off still but not secure from financial problems after being out of work for even a few weeks.

Like I said, the moneys worth going through the hoops but it’s aggravating to go through them when I don’t think they are benefiting anyone, even the employer.

I also felt this way when I was on the other side of the table doing hiring mind you.

[JustExAWS]

I explicitly said “being interview ready” for me was not doing coding interviews on the whiteboard. It was being able to talk about my past accomplishments and how I would benefit the company.

Yes I am self aware enough to realize that I have been able to avoid that because I was 50 years old when I interviewed last year, with industry experience, connections and AWS ProServe.

But on the other hand, cry me a river that younger developers must prepare for coding interviews for a few months and make $160k+ straight out of school. A former intern I mentored when they were an intern and when they came back is now 25 years old and making over $200K as an SA at AWS.

I am not at all bitter. I am happy for all of the up and coming fresh college grads I met when I was there.