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Comment by user5994461 | Hacker News Reader

> and seem to have followed the type of curated success-seeking golden path that used to be reserved for finance.

Finance cares that you have past proven experiences in finance and they'll hire you for it.

Breaking into finance is the hardest thing to do, once you're in, you're good and you can have a great career.

Tech companies don't care what you've done and they rarely, if ever, ask about it.

Breaking into tech companies is only about rehearsing Cracking the code interviews, and once you're in, you have no guarantee to make any sort of career. You'll probably be out soon because things move too fast and the turnover is insane. Your next job is gonna be difficult to find because the next tech company won't care about experience and will try to pay you with free food.

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> Breaking into tech companies is only about rehearsing Cracking the code interviews, and once you're in, you have no guarantee to make any sort of career. You'll probably be out soon because things move too fast and the turnover is insane. Your next job is gonna be difficult to find because the next tech company won't care about experience

As someone who's worked as a software engineer in the bay area in tech companies this is 100% not my experience at all. Though tech interview definitely matters, experience also matters and the turnover is not insane. All of my coworkers who I have made friends with are still in this business and I've worked at a few different places. I just don't think you have any idea of what you're talking about.

> you have no guarantee to make any sort of career.

I have quite a good career. Others do too.

I'm not sure where you've interviewed but everywhere I've worked we always ask what you've done, and at my current company we have no whiteboard interviews. Tech is learning, slowly, how to give proper interviews.

True. Half the time there is 1 guy (out of the 3-6) who will ask about what you've actually done.

10 minutes out of 4 hours, that's like less than 5% devoted to real world experience.

As someone at a major tech company that is routinely involved in interview loops, I spend at a minimum 25-30 of the 55 minutes I have asking about specific items on the candidate's CV. When white-boarding, I'm interested in two things: a) can they actually write code, and b) how well do they ask questions and collaborate with me when working through the problem.

That said, having gone through loops from the other side, I know this isn't always the case and that your mileage may vary.

Well, shit. I had a whiteboard interview earlier and I was silent while working through the problems. I had a lot things going on in my mind but hadn't taken the time to verbalize them at all.

If the only thing the interviewer has to judge your skill on is what you wrote on the board, that's what will be used. When I'm interviewing, I'm trying to gauge how they approach a problem, how well they can reason through a solution, whether they see the assumptions they're making and the impact those have on the solution, what the limitations are of the algorithm they came up with, etc. It's really hard to see most of this if the candidate doesn't talk at all.

I suppose asking about the applicant's past experience isn't the kind of thing that "scales" in some organizations, because then you've gone from a double blind experimental procedure to a freewheeling conversation between individual humans.

> Breaking into tech companies is only about rehearsing Cracking the code interviews

Actually, all of the jobs I've had have cared very much about past experience and have asked about it in the interview. If I weren't actively contributing in certain open source projects, and hadn't worked with certain technologies, I wouldn't be where I am.

This is a difference between San Francisco startups and Silicon Valley companies.

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