Tech Interviewing is Broken (Part 1 of n), How we got here and why we're still stuck here.
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- čas přidán 2. 06. 2024
- Tech Interviewing is so broken.
My first dry run at this topic clocked in at 73 minutes, so it's getting chopped into several videos.
This video talks about how interviewing is broken, and some of the history about how we got here, why companies KEEP interviewing like we do even though they should know better, and a bit of job hunting advice - to go along with the last jobs video I made at • Software Engineers REA...
Remember - no politics in the comments, or I'll delete them.
00:00 Intro
00:18 I am not trying to sell you anything related to this video
02:00 Advice for job seekers on how not to get ripped off
03:30 Book recommendation
04:29 What I do spend money on in between jobs
05:38 My Amazon Interviewing experience
10:04 My history/experience with 35 years of professional interviewing
12:43 My opinion on the effectiveness of companies that use LeetCode interviews
14:36 Live whiteboard coding and take home tests have roughly the same effectiveness
15:24 How did we get here?
20:32 Why do companies keep doing this?
25:52 Consequences for companies of this poor interview process
28:43 Somewhat off-topic rant I couldn't bring myself to cut out
29:47 Choices while job hunting
30:36 Signoff
Links from the video:
#Book about Microsoft's STUPID old hiring methods that started this whole nightmare:
www.amazon.com/How-Would-Move...
Origins of "SuperStar Candidate" obsessions, as well as Stack Overflow:
www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/1...
thenewstack.io/joel-spolsky-o...
Note: I do not believe in the concept of a Super Star candidate. Subscribe and stay tuned for my upcoming video, tentatively titled "The Myth of the 10x Developer"
This article from 2007 was SO dumb, but everyone teated it like Gospel.
web.archive.org/web/200804301...
Interviews do no correlate with job performance, says GOOGLE, in 2013:
www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/bu... ("what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess")
The book I would actually recommend for job seekers (you can probably find it used):
parachutebook.com/ - Věda a technologie
I had to go through nine interviews, seven of which were on the same day. The topics were machine learning, server-side on cloud, Mlops, Spark, system design, impact, and leadership. I failed at a leetcode style problem graded as hard (as I later discovered). The impression was: let's find something not to hire this guy,. They probably didn't have the budget to hire, and after months, that job opening is still there. Lesson learned. I prefer to start a career as electrician rather than work in this broken IT market
Did you apply for a fresher position ?
9 interviews WTF
I thought the 4 i had were already too much
@@horizon204 Principal ML engineer. You needed experience in the half-universe, some team-leading capabilities, and the ability to interface between two departments. So after meeting half the company, why you don't casually solve hard-level leet code fu***ing riddles? And I even managed to find the right intuition.
@@kindoblue WTF ... This is insane.
It did seem as though 10 years ago I would have said a lot of what is going on is most companies were preferring to hire internally or had HR put out a position that could have only been fulfilled by a specific individual. Now I am seeing things out there that are just to niche to be either believable in general or as being a "skills mismatch" thing. But recently I have been seeing more junior dev listings for different things I never seen before, so I feel the reality about the situation might not be so straightforward.
One thing which should mentioned is that some of the most experienced and busiest people just don't have the time to grind Leetcode and similar stuff. So, you'd probably weed out the potentially best employees during the hiring process.
I fall into that camp actually. I’d rather be working on paid or interesting projects instead of leet grinding.
That's why I used an AI service to help me answer these questions, if I can use it in the job I should be able to use it in the interview, it's not my problem that the system is broken.
I have 7 years of experience and I have gone through countless interviews. One wrong answer and you could blow your chance, so I did what I needed to do.
edit: for people who are asking the service called interviewhammer
@@AndrewAltman-cf7yz what was is called?
Which cheating AI service were you using? (asking for a friend) 💀
just a hint for anyone who can't find it, you need to write the URL fully, not search Google for it.
I think at this point interviews have become a sort of torture. Like a humiliation ritual.
*astronauts meme* Always were
What I don't understand is barely getting through a difficult interview process, getting hired, and then discovering that the other developers on the team literally can't write code. At 4:45pm I know at least one of them is going to ping me: "Can I call you?" Only to find out they haven't done any work all day and they need me to help with "just one problem". This has happened at multiple companies and I just can't figure out how someone gets hired as a C# developer without knowing what a class is or how to set a breakpoint.
Usunally this happens when someone is promoted inside the company because "they want to become" developer. In my early days I was employed as Data Analyst based solely on my Excel skills. I ended up in Data Engineering team doing complicated pipelines and maintaining data warehouse. I was massively underqualified but with tremendous help of senior people I learnt my way. 8 years forward and I got 4 "programmers" in my data team who just learnt what 'for i in range()' is, because they worked there for 20+ years and wanted to become programmers :)
@@klonopelki That would make sense, but these are often people with years of dev experience on their resume, sometimes working on complex, high-visibility projects with aggressive deadlines. And they refuse to do the minimum effort of, for example, reading an exception message and maybe googling it. This doesn't seem to be isolated to just one company or industry.
I'm more than happy to mentor junior developers who want to learn and contribute. My problem is with those who act totally helpless and expect me to do their job for them. It's baffling to me that they are developers at all.
@@klonopelkiat a rather large company I worked for - no, it wasn’t people who were promoted from within. I watched them get hired, struggle to open their development environment, and ask some of the dumbest questions ever.
@@klonopelkiEh, I’m dealt w/ exactly this issue recently, the hire, who basically hadn’t done application programming, was from the *manager’s* network
@@andywest5773This is insanely more prevalent in Frontend, I would know
I am a 50+ coder, currently out of work, and practicing with Leetcode. Most algorithms were designed for the 1970s when preserving space and processing time had a major impact on program performance. One topic you did not discuss was importance of domain knowledge. In the NYC area, a large portion of tech jobs are in the finance industry; having significant finance domain knowledge plus a degree in finance helped me get many of my jobs. However you are correct that the majority of my offer decisions came down to blind luck. Great content!
In my experience, most of the "LeetCode Uber Alles" companies don't spend much interview time on domain expertise.
But the last time I worked on Wall Street (actually on Fulton St) was back in the late 90's.
Domain knowledge is the quickest way around ridiculous interview loops.
No. They were designed to minimize O(.).
In this era of big data minimizing O(.) is even more relevant today than it was then.
I worked at this place they hired a guy who did really good at a coding thing I was at the end of my contract and I was moving onto another company, but I knew this new guy who did the coding thing didn't know the processes of pull requests or devops nothing and he ended up over writing code and messing up merges and that is just the beginning he also broke a bunch of nuget packages inside the artifacts in Devops. I trained him before I left on how to properly merge code and push up nuget packages without breaking everything lol
@@ItsTristan1st It's not that hard to minimize O() nowadays. Leetcode implementations are not the fastest/best way to program IRL. It's a useless proxy that measures if you have already seen this or that interview problem or a variation of it.
The other downside of the "brick" mentality is that developers don't get the time to learn the problem domain before being moved on. My general experience is that development is the easy bit, UNDERSTANDING what to develop is far harder. You need to understand the customer's problem in order to build the solution.
That's a whole different big company thing.
There will be some about that in the "10x developer myth" video, but it probably deserves its own, too.
Big company managers often don't want the worker bees to be the ones that are doing the understanding and deciding and customer communication. They want to do that themselves. Easier to take credit for it that way.
@@InternetOfBugs I don't know if that's just a "big company thing." My 10 devs company has 3+ intermediaries between developers and stakeholders (and even more between us and users). And management prevents devs from talking with stakeholders directly because "they don't know what they want."
Cost-effective way to find interviewer, cost-effective way to hire people, cost-effective way to fire people.
@@InternetOfBugs I think part of this is the whole jump companies to get more money/promotions, it takes time to understand the domain. I find it takes me 1-2 years to really understand what it is we're building and why.
There's a lack of interest, or a lack of priority, at both the manager and developer level for that understanding.
I'm just glad that VCs don't require us to do leetcode whiteboard interviews. It's funny that someone could be willing to invest millions into a pre-product company without a single whiteboard interview, but a junior engineer might need to do 6 whiteboard interviews
Lol that makes no sense to me either. Imagine if VC did? There would be little to no more new companies
Agreed. What is supposed to happen at a tech interview is they are supposed to judge you for HOW you went about solving the problem. Did you ask clarifying questions? What solution hypothesis did you contemplate? What debugging techniques did you use? Etc. Etc. With that criteria, you could get the wrong answer and still impress the interviewer with your problem-solving skills. Of course, that isn't how it goes. If you get the right answer, they might hire you. If you don't get the right answer, they definitely won't hire you. Simple as that.
Exactly correct. I recommended hiring a candidate just yesterday that did not complete the technical coding interview, and did not have the experience that we were looking for. However, they did show competence and real potential during the interview, and they were able to produce more code with better logic than several other candidates that had over 3x as much experience.
@@AftercastGames based
At my last job, I was used to research and teach other devs about the tech this company had ignored for years and was now desperate to get back to cutting edge. Not only did I learned more than the entire dev team combined, but I was gaslit, humiliated, ignored, passed and discarded when they decided to stick to the old tech. Even if you have the best intentions, no boss or senior dev wants to look dumb, even at the company expense. I'm now going through my burnout phase, slowly getting back in, but I learned much about what company culture to avoid like the plague. Much of it you mentioned here. Good video, tough lessons to learn.
i assume you're speeding up the dead air which makes perfect sense, but the flashbacks at 14:17 being sped up is something out of a horror movie lmao
I was thinking what the hell are those quick involuntary movements of eyes/face/hand/head.. like some seizure...
I remember doing an interview once where they had me program on a windows laptop with no internet and only notepad. So I immediately pressed Ctrl+V to see what was in the clipboard :) I told them that their previous candidate had gotten their recursive vs iterative question mixed up and asked if this is the type of dev environment I should expect if I ever started working there, because if so count me out. They laughed and made a note to get their "recruiter of the week" to clear the clipboard next time - my gosh are most of these "recruiters" useless.
Here's some of my favorite questions to ask candidates:
1) what is the hardest thing you've had to debug?
2) tell me something you've programmed that you are proud of.
3) tell me about the dirtiest hack you've ever had to make.
4) tell me about your dev environment, what makes you happy?
At the end of those, I have a pretty good idea of what type of programmer and experience I'm dealing with.
these are great. As a candidate I love this kinda stuff, although I don't have the greatest memory, so I feel like my on-the-spot answers might be kinda lackluster. Would have to mull this over a bit
I'm so glad I came across your channel. I've watched several of your videos. Your openness and sharing of your past experiences help so many! Thank you!
So I found your channel (thankfully) and I'm also a 30+ year developer. Well, yes from here the world is insane full of people who do nothing but speak about things they don't know.
It's so bad
Love your content Carl. You have blown up in a little amount of time and it’s well deserved. You give quality takes from a highly experienced background and I for one appreciate it!
This leetcode culture seems really dangerous and inefficient. How long before companies realize that there are better ways?
Probably as always: when it is too late. Or when one of the leaders make some changes, which also might be too late.
I don’t think they see it as a problem. The interviewers get paid to interview you. It’s just a job for them and at the end of these hazing cycles, you’d be surprised how they actually select people to hire.
bossese love having a number to point to, even if its arbitrary and actively harmful
Oh, they know.
Corporate Inertia is a thing, though.
And the "Hazing"
Aspect is huge.
We have to push. We have to do whatever is in our power to chance it
Thanks for making this video. I appreciate your perspective on all of this, and its a breath of fresh air to hear someone questioning the common narrative rather than the more often heard "you just need to suck it up to get paid". Whenever i bring this topic up, the constant retort i hear is "well we need some way to screen people, and this is the best thing we've got". which in my eyes, only highlights an intense lack of imagination. What strikes me with all of this is the complete lack of interest in who that person actually is, and what they personally bring to the table. It feels more like an IQ test than an interview (which would be illegal so this is the best alternative). Which id argue is just a convoluted puzzle, acting as an excuse to say empirically that they arent putting resources into the "wrong" people. Who would want to spend money on someone who is 'measurably' dumber than someone else? Also why are companies so afraid of that risk? It feels like they are unwilling to take any risks, so they prefer you jump through hoops to prove you aren't a risk, rather than just admitting how arbitrary the outcomes of this all is.
A video was floating around recently about how the navy seals prioritize trust over performance when deciding who goes on seal team 6, and apparently they avoid (on a graph of with an axis for performance and another for trust) high performing with low trust people, because they often degrade teams over time (massive egos, tell people what to do, dont listen), and instead they prioritize high trust candidates who werent the best performers. yet my time in corporate jobs shows me that there is no standards in place to even measure let alone reward trust worthy people, and atleast for me, ive never seen anyone speak about its importance and encourage that in a work place, let alone in interviews. I fear this fixation on productivity blinds us from what the real important things are in creating cohesive/productive teams. When you hire for only a single metric(performance), you roll the dice on the actually important part, the human part of the equation.
Lastly, i really appreciated you bringing up the more toxic leaning culture that leet code style interviewing encourages. Id love to hear you expand on it more, if you had more to say. If not, im just glad its acknowledged how detrimental this can be for new developers coming into the industry, and how competitive thinking can eat a team alive. Love your content!
I have a slightly different take on the trust thing coming up in a video I'm working on - not that I disagree, but the factor I focus on is more about getting everyone on the team incentivized to work toward the same outcome. I've never thought about it in terms of trust, really, although maybe I should. Thanks - you've given me something to consider.
I've got more coming up on toxicity, though not specifically related to interviewing.
Your video is great. I’m still early in my career but i have had many interviews, on both sides of the table. I think a coding problem can still give some insight into a candidate ability. However, some interviews use unreasonably hard questions, which are never seen again in the actual job. I usually prefer easier coding problems, and focus more on how the candidate approaches it, communicates with me, explains his/her solution and prepares some tests.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. This has helped me heaps to feel better about myself!
Another amazing video. I think what you touched upon in 24:30 is the core reason for those hilarious interview practices: standardization. I studied a subject called "theories of evaluation" in college and what I learned using real data is the evaluation process performance for most evaluations is no predictor of actual day to day performance. Basically you could pick people at random and have similar results.
But those standard procedures give a easy and quantifiable way to justify why x was hired over y. It's just to give 'fairness' to the process, meaning that if you actually picked people at random it would be unfair, but making whatever evaluation process, even if there is no better candidates at the end, is at least fair.
As you said, there is an intrinsic ridiculous amount of randomness in any evaluation process: you may feel bad at the day, the question they picked for you is the one you didn't studied, etc, etc. There is even highly subjective things: you may look like some that the interviewer don't like; your speech has the same tone of someone the intervier have a bad memory with.
The real predictor here to pass an interview is how many times you tried. Given enough chance, your dice roll eventually will get the magic number you need.
A couple of years ago, I was interviewed for a C++ junior developer position, and I was asked about pure virtual functions with implementation. To this day, I don't understand in which scenario you would need this and why you would ask someone in an interview about this. But I remember to this day that C++ has the ability to provide a default implementation for a pure virtual function, and in my 7 years of commercial C++ experience, I've never used this, nor have I seen anyone else use this.
Man I love your content. Awesome and refreshing to hear real honesty. Keep up the great content. I work as a part time developer and a firefighter. I see some of the same issues with people believing they are better than everyone else because they got a job and others didn’t. I often wonder how the world would be if everyone was willing to be honest. I feel like most job interviews are a complete waste of time and everyone involved is lying. If you were to go back to your days of interviewing would you be willing to hire a candidate that was bluntly honest about what they actually knew and what they didn’t?
This is genuinely a godsend, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. Everything you described is parallel to what I saw sinking a number of years into a large 'unicorn' company, starting as a junior and dealing with the very same dynamics, I had very different expectations going in. I was the brick until I wasn't.
Wow. Very in-depth video. Challenged some of my own assumptions on Leetcode.
I am an autistic ADHDer. The interview process is so horrendously broken and discriminatory against people like me. I mean I have been writing software since I was 7 years old because it is my special interest. I taught myself C when I was 9 from a compiler manual. Even now when I am unemployed I write code pretty much every day. I am very good at it. And yes, my autism gives me a disadvantage in the people skills department, thankfully my ADHD somewhat cancels that out. But eye contact is difficult still, and that's taken as a sign I am not confident or I am lying or something. And yet, if I can actually land a job (which so far has been 100% pure luck), I tend to be one of the most valuable employees the company has and they end up just throwing money at me to keep me. It's so bizarre that I can't pass an interview except in the most lucky of lucky situations, and yet if they take a chance on me, they find I am invaluable. It's frustrating to no end.
My sympathies. That must be miserable.
I got diagnosed with ADHD in my 50s after my kid got diagnosed and I started running through the symptom list and checking off the boxes. It's often rough enough - can't imagine how much more painful it would be to have other stuff piled on top of it.
Best of luck to you.
I'm in the same boat as you with both ADHD and autism, my people skills are decent but eye contact still makes me look bad, even if I have interviews in a zoom call, it looks like I am looking at a different monitor for answers. I also wasn't able to get a degree because school was rough but after not being able to pass interviews (not because I couldn't answer technical questions, just stressed out while talking about non technical things) I landed a job as a 2nd line of customer support. In 4 years I went from customer support rep to an advanced engineer (like mid++ at my company), together with a colleague we won our internal hackathon and now I'm leading a pretty big project because I built trust that I can handle the responsibilities. And all of that is luck that I had and people who took a chance and gave me ability to thrive and show my skillset.
Damn when even the autistics who been coding since 7 years old is having trouble what hope is there for most people 😂😢
Time to tell future male teenagers to just become nurses instead fr
Hey bro, how can I hit you up? I got a laundry list of projects and I’m wondering if you have any input on them, knowing C and all!
Hey, fellow neurodivergent dev here. I recently learned that Microsoft has a neurodiversity hiring program which uses a completely separate hiring process that might be beneficial for you.
Great series, I really hope the algorithm gets this video in front of the shot callers.
The reason I do short, simple coding tests is the number of "experienced" "senior" 5 years+ engineers I come across who simply can't do them. They pass behavioural interviews and they pass interviews where they list the technologies they've used when asked by other non-coding people. It doesn't matter if they fail to convince me they can code: I still need an actual data point to veto them. And "demonstrably does not know Python syntax for loops" is the sort of thing that makes a very solid data point.
Absolutely. Advanced coding tests have problems, but failing a simple coding test does happen with candidates and it says a lot, at all levels.
Really good video. Keep that work
So much of this is spot on. The process is broken from the inside. Unrealistic/veiled expectations for hiring managers/interviewers that trickle down to interviewees in the form of an 'tech interview industry' that is inherently valued by the broken-ness of the process.
Also, the industry's connection to immigration policy and the proposition of 'skilled labor' (or however the government defines it) is super interesting and sounds about right.
Every developer needs to watch this video. very informative.
I've been Software Engineer for 17 years now. I'm still at a loss for why an experienced engineer has to be leet coded or white boarded. It stands to reason that their experience paints a solid picture of performance. If anything, have the experienced engineers craft up an app that hits an endpoint that can use CRUD operations for persistence. Then you can have us discuss system architecture and design patterns.
Most experienced developers don't spend their time practicing binary tree search algorithms. We spend much more time on solving problem related to architecture and new feature implementation solutions.
I totally agree. I'm in the industry since 2010 and these are interviews I'm never conducting when I'm the interviewer. I need my new colleague to understand tradeoffs, to write clean code, not to throw wrenches in the system by being too attached to one programming paradigm they used in another language and so on. I look for simplifiers and solution oriented people capable of independent thought.
@@drrodopszin Indeed you are doing it the right way. I'm the same. When I interviewed candidates, I focused on how they come up with potential solutions for solving bugs, how they create a simple app that hits an endpoint (full stack). I also tested their knowledge on vanilla JavaScript to see how deep they go. There are many ways to check for efficient programming skills without leetcoding someone who already has years of experience
My tech interviews for people are probably the “weirdest” for many people. My peers talk about how they ask about how to implement stuff in the targeted platform or various design patterns and how to implement them. I just have a conversation. In 15 to 20 minutes I can tell if they per actually knows how to program and their general skill level or if they are there purely for a paycheck and don’t have any deep interest in technology or computers. “Leet code”, white boarding and homework interviews are such a waste of time.
Subscribed, your content is amazing
Some company now uses Hard level Leet Code question as the bottom line now, and fail people who can't resolve it during live the interview. That's really messed up.
Also, good video and opinion, this man is an industry gold.
What company is that? Asking so that I never apply.
That sounds like an avoid at all cost company.
I definitely agree one of the major factors is like you say at 22:29, it filters for candidates who really want to work at a particular company and are willing to put in the time to study even though it has no actual bearing on work they will do for the company!
I am currently in the process of applying for an apprenticeship (I don’t know how they work in other countries but in Germany you work for a company like a real job and you go to job school at the same time.) and I am required to take tests that are „supposed to be solved by anyone even if they have no prior experience.“ When I asked what I should learn in preparation, they said I look into PHP, JS, HTML and CSS. So basically I should aim to become a fullstack dev before they train me…
I think they asked you to learn the basics of web development. You need all of these if you want to get a dynamic web up and running.
That is hardly a stack. Those are foundational technologies. I got into an apprenticeship outside of "application season" because my predecessor jumped ship, however. I graduated 2 years ago and have stayed at that company. We are pretty basic in what we use and sort of stuck in 2013 or something when it comes to the tech. At this point I essentially do whatever comes up.
While I did go for media design, for which I relearned vanilla JS, CSS and HTML a little, I barely knew a thing and only scratched the surface. I assumed PHP is also needed for dev apprenticeships, which you kind of confirmed? I won't look that up tho. I was able to push back learning it to after the interviews due to going for media design.
Either way, do you know for a fact that they want you to know more than just the bare-bones basics? I doubt it, even if it's now 2024 and not 2019. Sure, there are probably companies who require you to do more than write an Html skeleton, echo a word into with , make a button next to it blue and then make the text change via JS, but learning the basics to do that is... a matter of two weeks? Even without knowing anything before that. People just need to be serious about it. Sure, some struggle more than others, but the web basics are pretty accessible....
You can learn these things online. Check out the MDN. The tutorials and documentation there is very good
Viel Erfolg! 👍
I think you're talking about an ausbildung. I'm tired of all this going on and on...so many applications and still nothing. I am a university graduate with CS degree. I know German too. Can you tell me about any job that I can get into without going through these crazy leetcode type processes until the IT market improves? Anything in the hotel industry etc is fine .... If you know of a "shortage job" personally then it's even better.
@@crazydrifter13 Lots of smaller companies in Germany don't do this
Try applying to tech companies in Sachsen (where I'm located), I haven't come across these shenanigans here; maybe you'll have success
Good luck
I laughed, I cried, I banged my head against a wall repeatedly. The IoB video experience lol.
Thank you for the content 👏👏🙏
I recently went through a couple of job interviews. Every company had a different type of interview for the technical part. At one company I had to do the whiteboard algorithm alongside a small live-programming session for a simple problem. Another company told me I would have to implement a small program using X library. This was actually quite interesting because it was a bit more real-world. Another company gave me a take-home task, which can be very problematic for people with lives. The last company just sent me some sample code and during the interview we discussed how we would extend/restructure if we wanted to add X feature. So maybe this is more normal in Europe but I was surprised that I only got one "leetcode-style" interview.
Great video! Thank you!
I can really hear and see the burnout and frustration, the sheer amount of struggle you must have dealt with in your career up until now. Everytime you touch your face and get flashbacks to the situations you are talking about i can feel your pain...
Very true. Tech interviews has became more about mugging up different patterns and practising them than problem solving. Specially big tech companies. Even if you get some panel where they value problem solving, your way of thinking, but one round will be there were they judge you based on memorization. A decade back scene was different, nowadays its all about preparation.
I am still early into my career and have been I suppose lucky to not go through an interview process like this so I've never experienced it. But it sounds to me that this leetcode stuff is similar to how in school (for me at least) it seemed more like teaching you how to pass an exam instead of actually knowing the subject. If the companies doing this only want to hire people that know how to pass an interview but not necessarily how to do their job, well I'll be glad not to go there anyway.
High paying and recognized companies like Microsoft and Google started these difficult tests because they got so many applicants and wanted only the ones with strong CS fundamentals. That actually made a lot of sense for these companies because they operate at scale, hire straight out of university, and set new hires in vastly different kinds of work, which are all proprietary and require substantial onboarding.
However, when every startup and non-tech company started copying them, while not offering the same salary, it just devalued everyone’s time and experience. Now we’re in a situation where everyone has to prepare for multiple rounds of difficult leetcode interviews even for average pay and straightforward work. In the past, these same companies would be lucky if anyone acknowledged them and even chatted about what they’re building. It’s made for a perpetual employer’s market and devalued employees as interchangeable and disposable.
I hope to have a depth of experience and knowledge like yours some day!
you deserve more views, keep up the good work
I worked for a financial fortune 50, years ago and the interview was for an IT position. My final interview was with the VP, and at the end I must have impressed him because he asked me if I wanted to be on his dev team. I told him no, I don't want to be a dev, and I don't really like the toolset they were using at the time. I got the IT job and enjoyed the work I originally interviewed for. Don't be afraid to say no to something that is not a good fit for you or them.
As someone searching right now this is both encouraging and disheartening. It’s nice to know I’m not crazy but it also is one of the obstacles to getting a new job.
I'm from Canada. I did the interview thing 3 months ago. It's as bad as in the USA, with 90-95% of companies using leetcode-style coding interview tests. I hated them. Eventually I got 2 offers in the same week. I went with the one that didn't make me do a test (the other offer also went on to make me do some weird IQ tests as well).
I have to say, I am very happy I chose the company that didn't yank me around. They've been super nice, always ask how I'm doing, and don't place undue pressure on me. In general, they just respect my expertise and leave me to my work. It's nice :)
Really, thanks for this video!
I recently moved to canada, i have 5 years of experience at IBM, spent nearly 2 months applying, but none of the applications got me interviews. The only way is recruiters reaching out to me.
I passed about 4 interviews in the last 2 weeks for the same position and no interview is like the other , also you prepare and not sure what to expect, whether it is a coding data structures, deep learning questions , or etc. also I had to work on 4 assessments for a position that took me 4 days and still have no answer after 2 weeks. its so exhausting, uncertain, and chaotic....
not to mention the audacity of some influencers asking for $700 for a resume review.
Thank you for the taking the time in making these videos! If you can, could you please mention your experiences (if any) with game development jobs/companies?
None at all. I've never worked in games.
If you want this kind of content for the game industry, go watch @CainOnGames [ www.youtube.com/@CainOnGames ] - his stuff is great
@@InternetOfBugs thanks for the suggestion! Though game dev is a hobby for me, I’m a mid/senior eng so your videos have been both eye-opening and educational. Looking forward for more!!
The video was wonderful. Would you make more videos talking about what you think should be to spend our time to hone our craft of software engineering? And how could we go about getting actually better jobs at good companies, especially remote jobs?
I'm in my university, and have 2 years to graduate, and how the industry is going is pretty daunting.
29:30 that’s the only hammer that they know and so everything should be a nail. Nailed it
Can you also discuss on how startup’s promote individual contributors to leadership roles and cause micro managers.
If I start in on the mechanics of life in startups, it'll probably turn into its own series.
I'll put it on the list.
I attempted an Amazon interview, and I failed. I am from one of these Eastern European countries. We didn't have this emphasis on algorithms back in the day. The interviews there were mostly about understanding HTTP, whether you could write SQL, how to optimize things, and, most importantly, verifying your skills in technologies, which you voluntarily put on your resume. It was more important that you got it right with the things you claim to know. I am in US right now, and participating in interviews with my "old school" approach.
11:30 I'm fascinated to know why you thought this approach was useful. I'm not a developer, I work on the business side of tech consulting. When I hire seniors or even managers, I do like to challenge their ability to handle client interactions they're not prepared for, but I explicitly lay that out as a roleplay situation. The interview context is stressful enough to emulate reality, and I've ended up only hiring one low performer in 15 years.
I'm willing to test and learn, however, so would love to know what you think this helps add to the selection process
German software engineer here. To me it's very interesting to hear how thing are going in the USA. Interviewing is generally much better here. What people mostly want is seeing that you're motivated and that you can talk to people. A lot of companies don't even do coding tests as part of their interviews, and yes, those companies are still very successful. I work at a very successful company here and my interview was a relaxed, long, talk with the CTO, CEO and head of HR. That's it.
I would never apply to a company which follows abitrary practices like asking leetcode questions... What does that actually tell about my ability as software engineer? I think the answer should be about zero. What it does tell is that I wasted a lot of time which I instead could have put into private or open source projects which would build skills that actually help me at my job..
Just finishing my schooling this year.
been coding for years but never really tried to break the scene.
Thank you for your honesty and integrity when presenting this material.
Its not often we get to see someone who has been through it all before we step into the pond.
Totally invaluable (and very scary to be honest).
The fact your not allowing advertising nor trying to monerterize this in anyway is a massive statement.
Please keep this up and lets hope some of the big guns out there listen too.
A lot of leetcode FAANG employees leave the company within one year. They can't cut it or its not what they expected.
The luck of the questions on the day point is a very good one to remember.
Very good video thanks
Honestly, to me the idea of a probation period or, as you say, "if you're not working out we'll just let you go" sounds far better to me than any of the alternatives. I don't want to work in a role I'm not qualified for, but I also don't want to sit through 50 hours of testing to check that, not least because the process of interviewing is often an entirely different skill to the one I actually use in the job.
My second favourite would be a take home test as it means I can at least work semi-naturally, though as you pointed out that comes with its own problems, I've recently had an interview where I was given around an hour or so to write a simple web app to fit a spec with documentation and was rejected because of lack of polish.
They often can't do this due to "employee rights" preventing companies from firing people without "cause", and that cause cant just simply be "performance". The reason interviews have so much bull in them is because they want to hire someone they would have no reason to fire except for unforseen circumstances.
@@Sammysapphira I thought the same initially but probation periods are a thing here in the UK and I think much of Europe, and I'm fairly sure you can let someone go for nearly any reason in the US even without a probation period
I assume there just must be some additional complexity to running a probation period or maybe not every company is allowed to do it
EDIT: Actually thinking about it, yeh there probably is, though in Europe and the UK you can let someone go on probation, you probably have to prove their performance isn't up to scratch which I imagine isn't an easy process to prove
@@bigbodge Firing someone out of probation is far from trivial apart from any legal factors. You've set them up as an employee. They've gone to days or sometimes several weeks of induction. You've done background checks, set them up on payroll, created accounts. Spent time with them letting them ramp up... it can be a month investment in time before it turns out they're a dud hire. Then you have to fire them. And now you have to explain to the rest of the team. And then they get nervous and there are rumours. Then you have to reassign their work. Then you have to restart interviewing from scratch. It's now three months or so and you're still a person down so now you have to replan deliveries... and let's not think about some companies don't let you backfill a probation failure -- they make you wait a year for a new budget cycle before you can recruit again.
@@katielucas3178 There are certainly complications, but your mad if you think 3 months is over the odds for the alternative. In extreme cases it can take that long to interview a single candidate
Also you're assuming they will be a "dud hire" but you only find out after a month+. Sure, in the worst case scenario that can happen, but optimising for the worst case scenario you can make any form of recruiting a nightmare, at least this way if the worst case doesn't end up happening you get something out of it
Funnily enough, I just made a similar video. Especially for front end, they got you jumping thru hoops for basic ui/react jobs and want you to to leetcode algorithms on a job where you'll be making react components, getting data from apis, and displaying said data.
There was some interview of a Microsoft bigwig that said the only trait that seemed to matter was openness for new experiences (besides fundamental coding skills).
Yes, because the majority of tasks people end up working on are not fun and glamorous. It's mostly dealing with legacy systems that some leetcode super hero probably over engineered and when things got too hard they bailed on it.
Do you have the link to the interview?
@@jamessullenriot Unfortunately for most time work of software engineer is boring. A remember, that I had a four stage interview related to multiple tasks in c++ for Microsoft. After I was hired my first task was... integration some services in Bing with a Facebook. After that I got choice: work as a Python or C# developer, because related c++ projects were shut down.
Several last jobs interviews after I was hired were pretty quick: what are my financial expectations and do I like proposed project. Because I was recommended by a manager I was previously worked with.
I also spent some time leading technical interviews (a lots of them): in most cases I just ask a fairly simple questions related to required technologies. After that I asked about proposed solution for a real-life problem - I didn't expected final answer: I watched how a candidate tries to solve this problem (and I also expected a question from a candidate side to clarify requirements): if I got an answer "I don't want to try" that was definitely a red light: as you wrote - developer's work usually is not fun and glamorous.
Breath of fresh air, my man
Very informative. Thank you for this video! I am so tired of the leetcode, hackerrank, competitive programming style application gauntlet. Can you suggest job pages for companies that do take home assignment style interviews? Thanks for your insights!
I have another two (or maybe three) videos on interviewing coming up in the next week or two. Once those are done, let me know what questions you still have about resources.
This is specific to software. So glad I'm a hardware electronics designer in this regard. I mostly just talk about the stuff I've worked on and the technical questions tend to be pretty basic.
Hey @InternetOfBugs, I really liked your opinion on choosing the correct tool for the jobs. Is there any other video that you talked about this topic?
Thanks for sharing.
Getting an opportunity at FANNG seems like a good experience to see the corpo world along with what technologies they tend to focus more towards. All in all, people should try for banks, hospitals, etc.
Wow what color is your parachute. I am being referred to this book in 2024. I remember my first copy was in 1990 when I was strategizing to look for work after completing college and years later I found the old book when I was moving and doing clean up and I felt nostalgic of the days when I was in that situation and at that moment I was a 'full fledged profesional ' Now, I kind of am in that same 1990 situation since I got laid off late last year and the looking for work process is brutal. Can't put any rose petals to how it feels. So, how nostalgia changes into realization is something I won't put lightly. Thanks for the reminder.
This is true for non coders too. As a designer, I have completed countless number of IQ tests, HTML and JS puzzles, I call them puzzles because they test your knowledge in trivial things that never came up in my 12+ years of experience building and shipping websites and webapps.
Add to that: filling your work experience in their website, record a video of yourself, the list goes on.
When you get hired? the prize is a toxic work environment where everyone is trying to outperform the other to not be laid off.
Most of my friends are saving up to leave this market for a trade or small business
Getting interviews right is very hard. I’m interested to hear what you think the right approach is
I totally agree the interview process is terrible these days, I recently did a coding thing and was told I did very well but they passed I spent 2 hours on this thing and what a waste of my time. I did recently get hired with another company and there was no coding test required. I remember in 2014 I did an interview and there was a white board question and the manager ended up hiring me because he said I did ok and he saw potential in me, I was there for 7 years and promoted twice.
These corporate practices are despicable. Make your own companies brothers.
Have you tried that? 'Cause it's a very special (though different) kind of miserable and terrifying...
Maybe I should add that topic to the video list.
@@InternetOfBugs Please do, definitely curious to hear your take.
I mean at this point i have a higher chance of creating my own company and hiring myself than i do getting a job in tech. @InternetOfBugs
@@vectoralphaAI I mean, you have a 99+% chance of creating your own company (not 100, 'cause something might always happen), and once you have that company you're pretty much guaranteed to be able to hire yourself. So that statement is true.
Doesn't really help, though. Because then you are an employee of a company with no money to pay you with.
The next process is getting revenue. You can either do consulting, which is pretty much the same kind of thing as looking for a job-there are differences, but the majority of the work you'd need to do is the same. [Which is mainly identifying companies that are using and/or hiring people with your skillset, ideally one that has a reasonable interview process (which you can probably find out more about on GlassDoor), and then finding people who work at that company (probably via LinkedIn, hopefully someone in your extended network), and reaching out to them and seeing if they can help you figure out how to short-cut around the giant resume pile].
Or, you can make a product and hope you can sell it. It will take a while, so you might need to get investors to keep you fed until it's ready to sell. That's a whole other nightmare, and not my specialty.
I'd say getting a "real job" in early career is easier than the new company thing. Wait to strike out on your own until you have some savings, a reputation, and a list of people you know that might be your first clients (or might refer you to clients).
@@InternetOfBugs I think this is invaluable.....striking out on your own is rough and it requires a lot of patience, grit, fortitude, tenacity, problem-solving and market analysis skills, wearing several hats as your own boss, and unyielding passion to drive forward. Having the financial backing to take more risks, along with solid skills and contacts in the industry all make things easier.
YES; I was just thinking about WCIYP the other day.
This civilization is broken. Thanks for the video, very informative, kudos sir
Confessions of a middle manager... Thanks for sharing.
I feel it’s definitely better to have technical interviews that digs deep into the thought process of an individual.
Especially those with past experiences, and on how to approach a problem.
Designing architectures and systems and talking about that also helps.
Leetcode is a drag, and I feel it’s only good for brushing up on fundamentals like data structures and algorithms.
Another thing is it’s better to build in public than to grind leetcode imo. Writing about stuff, doing open-source, doing videos and networking builds your public brand, and shows what you’re capable of instead of some random problems that doesn’t translate to real world capabilities.
You nailed it @8:18 true at all tech companies.
I have never as many issues getting hired then I have as a developer. I do think you are exactly correct that hiring managers, even if they are technical, are just not great at interviewing and rely on these arbitrary methods. Interviewing is hard, but having a team of people who are able to work together and click is far more important then crossing your fingers that you get one or two start performers.
100% that's how it works here in Europe as well. I've reached the point where I'm politely closing the call if they ask about tech test. The last 5 jobs I got were by having a direct one to one chat with the tech lead. These are the best encounters were your software development seniority can shine. Each time I talk with a tech lead I get in the next 1 or 2 days with no further questions asked. Whenever I get stuck in "the grinder" I know it's a dud. I had some success trough the grinder but it eats so much time that I find it extremely unpleasent to even consider that route. I'm so anti-grinder that I had recruitors bend/bypass the process just to get me in.
I have gotten to fix an async function that did not return task and properly await stuff
in the end i didint get hired because i forgot to dispose a httpclient
In the other interview i was asked to make a simple calculator basically a function that takes a string
calculator.Calculate("1 + 3 - 5 + 8 - 4");
and i nailed it then got hired, starting 29th, the key is to be persistent :D
The second company actually wanted to see how i write code and approach a problem
rather than caring about a solution, I really appreciated it
I think the opposite. Tech tests should be the norm and the standard. I have seen so much shitty code written by the so-called senior developers that if I was hiring I would never consider hiring the person without seeing their code. It also says something about your attitude as a developer when you can't be bothered to write tech tests.
Another way that the current interview process (disproportionately) favors employers is by lowering attrition. If employees absolutely dread the interview process and understand how unpredictable, unfair, and time consuming it is, they're much less likely to even attempt to jump ship, let alone actually get an offer elsewhere.
What is a reasonable amount of ramp-up time (from being hired to becoming productive and understanding the particulars of the work and what it entails)?
The most important thing said in this video is that luck plays a role. Its totally true. You have to prepare to get to a certain skill level... but no matter how good you are someone can come in and ask something you dont know about.
Yep. And One of the things that irritates me the most with most of the "How to be a Developer" advice is the refusal to admit that all of those people (including me) were fortunate, and what worked for us won't work for everyone. (And what's worse is when they're refusing to admit luck plays a part at the same time they're selling multi-thousand dollar interview bootcamp services).
I actually have that book "What Color Is Your Parachute" 2007 but I sort of wrote it off. Back in like 2019 or so I came across a bag of cs books not long after I decided to learn to code it was pretty awesome and lucky actually and that book was in there. Do you think 2007 is still worth the read or should I just get an updated copy?
There’s a 2024 edition. You probably would want the latest version, as it’d be more relevant to the current time in how the job market functions.
@@stocksift true I noticed there has been many updated versions. Just wondering if older versions have much value still. Def will read the most recent version too.
I've interviewed only for a few places, but I noticed that some interviewers ask these questions that I don't know how I should answer. It immediately makes me feel like they're testing something, but I don't know what, and it makes me uncomfortable. I don't like that. I feel like those interviewers are holding the bat too tightly. They're trying way too much. All it requires is asking: How does this work? What kind of problems did you have doing this project? Have you any experience of X? What would you like to do in future? I notice that if the interviewer asks something that doesn't make sense to me, and I find myself spending time thinking about WHY they ask this instead of answering, I'll immediately start looking for a natural exit from the whole conversation and interview process and go to some place where there are people interviewing me, instead of corporate machines.
Thanks!
You're welcome! That is very kind of you.
the last three jobs i've had I was hired based on one or two conversations about coding and processes. Launched projects with all three companies and was either leading or a main contributor. Coding interviews are dumb and a waste of time. I also don't have a CS degree.
Interesting. Back in the day, I would tell them what I worked on, show them on an internet site some workups of stuff I did, or playing around with, and that was good enough. Only one place wanted to test me and I left the interview. It's a waste of time for me, cause I don't do well on those things.
Any more than two interviews means that the company doesn't trust itself to make good decisions, and it won't trust the people that work for them.
Ultimately you aren't selling your skills. You are selling them on a decision to hire you. Most interviewers struggle to decide if you are good enough or not and still make the wrong decision after many interviews and a lot of thought. You just have to make them feel good about the decision to hire you. Nothing more.
Amazon reached out to me, I politely refused I am not interested if they have leetcode type of interview. Recruiter was polite, and appreciated my feedback.
You just called out r/cscareerquestions with the whole "leetcode is pointless", and in the end you're correct on how dubious it's value is at the job. Over at that subreddit for years it's all they tell CS majors and self-taughts that leetcoding = development and some "hiring managers" on the sub refuse to think otherwise.
I've been looking for a job for 6 months now, 6 years of xp, I just gave up on interviews. I'm trying to go for networking and dragging attention to my projects.
The whole tech hiring process is fucked all over. At this point i hope AI really does automate everything away so i dont have to think about going through any of this anymore just to support myself. If AI takes over programming jobs i think that will be great.
Th reflection on deciding the language depending on what you actually have to do is something a recruiter would never understand.
28:50
I've been working on a lot of Next.js lately.
Non of the projects required server side rendering or seo and all api's are external.
it seems a lot of lead devs just want to use the shiny new thing regardless of the requirements.
Frontend Dev feels like a cult and grift of the latest shiny thing.
Seriously thinking of going to backend.
thank you !!!
I could understand leetcode interviews if that was what your job was. But for the vast majority of us, we will be adding some feature to a mature code base. It’s not and even if you do end up with the opportunity to add a leetcode-style function I wouldn’t consider it a best practice unless it’s a performance critical path since it’s less clear what’s going on. Developer time usually matters more than computer time.
I'm not from the US, but many of the things discussed here is why I haven't really switched jobs in the past 6 years. I know I will probably not pass any programming interviews in my country.
With a customer I work with we've created 2 step tech interview process.
Guys receive a specification for a simple app that should take them up to a few hours to code, nothing fancy.
Then it takes me up to 3-4min to review their code and decide if they pass to the second round or not. I do not even check if the app works or not. It's all about data structures and architecture of the app.
In the second round they need to do a few small enhancements in the app they've made in the first step. Again, nothing fancy. That app I review but also I deploy it on the customer's server to see if the app does work.
We did, I don't know, a thousand+ reviews in the last few years, and even though that guys do this in their own time, without any pressure from our side, they just need to send us the final code, less than 0.1% pass the first step.
Also, because I remember code quite well, I've found that in India are companies that write such 'interview apps' and sell them in many copies to a wanna-be developers, and then those guys send it to us as their own :D
Would be great to hear how good were the developers that were actually hired this way
🎶Clowns the left of me, jokers to the right here I am. Stuck in a tech interview 🎶
@nicksophinos4611 👏👏👏👏
I have no idea what I am supposed to do anymore as international student. I was previously studying medicine in my home country but political unrest made me come here and pursue a major I was initially interested in (something related to computers , so computer science since I grew up playing only Bomberman on my windows XP). I have already spent 6 and half years for my medical degree just 6 months short of graduation and starting fresh here again in the US. I am in my freshman year I love what I am learning in college so far but I don't love it enough that I wanna do leetcode to get a job here in the industry.
3 yrs of data engineering experience. Getting real work into production leading to real-impact. Expect subquery & CTE problems that I prepped for but u get an easier problem so u make small mistake. Or u miss one algorithm bc you need to cram study other topics as u spend most time networking vs practicing LeetCode all the time.
It is what it is.