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Comment by save_ferris | Hacker News Reader

A major force driving this is the employers who choose to conduct interviews in this way.

I'm a developer with about 6 years experience in full stack web app development (Rails & Django mostly), and I recently got my ass absolutely kicked during a couple of live coding challenges that were very heavy on theory (also worth mentioning that I'm a self-taught dev without a CS degree).

I started talking to some former coworkers about my experience, and I got 2 main responses: A) it's imperative to have a CS foundation regardless of your degree if you want to advance in your career, and B) employers only consider prior experience to certain degree.

The two interviews that I bombed involved heavily contrived coding challenges that tested CS fundamentals in ways that I've never encountered in a professional environment, so it doesn't surprise me at all to see services like this popping up.

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I don't have a CS degree either, and I have yet to pass so much as a FAANG phonescreen (I'm 0 for 3), but I'm both glad and grateful that the employers that pay the most also care the least about your education or past experience when it comes to the interview process.

Compare it to equivalent high-paying fields like finance or law, where you can hit a career ceiling based simply on what school you went to.

I hate studying for tech interviews. It feels like a sisyphean task, since I'll get really into prepping for a few days, then taper off until I've forgotten everything. At least it's easier to start up again the next time. This is now my third time attempting to prep.

I wish I was brave enough to just quit my job and spend 2 months studying. I'm in SF now, and all of my friends here make at least $300k when counting stocks and bonuses. I'm just barely short of half that (with no stocks or bonuses), and getting there is my next big career goal.

To be clear I think it’s good to test CS fundamentals even if you don’t use them every day. It’s a good screen for aptitude. I’m just concerned that taken to the extreme it mistakes excessive pattern recognition prep for true comprehension and aptitude. Especially if it’s “whoever puts the optimal solution on the board fastest wins.”

I do think it would do you some good to read up on core CS and algorithms though. I also did not get a CS degree and learned in the field, but now having studied up on it I feel much more in command of my craft. They do come into play now and then, it’s not just brain teasers. It does take weeks to months to really learn it though so I understand the resistance.

A strong CS foundation is hugely valuable and I don't think anyone will argue that but the fact that someone with over a decade of experience can go from a "no hire" to "hire" after a couple months of practice tells me that we aren't testing for the right skills.

Being exactly of those people (experienced but would have failed algo screen and had to brush up), I can confirm it would have false negatived me despite years of competent productivity... and yet I also feel I have filled in some significant gaps that I was lucky to avoid previously.

I think if you have a really strong “portfolio” of individual work that can be validated as being yours, like side projects, that can be a valid pathway into at least non senior roles. Maybe you’re weak on algos and other team members can help out at key points.

But I don’t know a better objective and direct measure of coding aptitude inside of 60 minutes. My issue is not with it in principle, at least for senior roles. It’s taking it to an extreme and misinterpreting the results. It gives this false sense of certainty about aptitude.

> I’m just concerned that taken to the extreme it mistakes excessive pattern recognition prep for true comprehension and aptitude. Especially if it’s “whoever puts the optimal solution on the board fastest wins.”

I agree with you on this. They do have taken this to the extreme because the questions are getting harder and harder.

This is hard tbh because if you're an employer whom used to be able to filter candidates by asking "easy" algorithms questions and woke up one day to only find out that everybody knows the answer, what will you do?

"It used to work so we just have to improve it, right?" => make a more challenging questions.

>what will you do?

You'll do the same thing most other professional industries do. List the requirements for the job: x to y years experience with technologies a,b and c. Grab a handful of the most polished resumes, interview them for personality, and hire the one you liked best.

Previous method works well,why change it?

Silicon Valley thrive in tricky algo questions. That's how they hired engineers since long time ago.

Improvement doesn't mean making it harder. SAT questions don't get harder every year (ideally). They're just different. It takes effort to come up with something different and novel though. Most places don't.

Maybe that's what the industry needs.. its own SAT. Heck man, that would make interviewing a lot better. You take one brutal test over a few hours, get your score, and then apply to multiple companies. You don't have to do dozens of whiteboard code interviews. Job postings specify score ranges. There's different score components (algos vs system design, like math vs verbal).

I guess there are startups like triplebyte trying to do that, but they're not as independent as the SAT. They make money off hires.

I would argue that we are going toward that direction with slightly different variation/format.

Faang and multiple SV companies will ask 3-5 LeetCodes with 1-2 System Design. Some started to incorporate behavior question (like Amazon with 14 LPs)

But CS is not only about algorithms and data structures. Even schools are missing the point mostly. Things like general PLT and formal methods, namely how to deal with abstractions in a large project, and how to know if your program is correct, are mostly ignored because they're not favored by the market.

Self-taught as well. It’s a game. All the big name software co’s and the startups founded by former big name software devs like to play it. Heck, I’m starting to enjoy the game (primarily because I have exceptional pattern recognition skills).

I was failing interviews too until I picked up an undergrad CS algorithms book and read through the first few chapters on data structures and theory. Then I signed up for LeetCode premium. After a couple months of reading and practicing, I was getting an offer from every place I interviewed at. Now I’m at one of those big name software companies, and if I’m ever asked to interview a candidate—well, I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe something with a binary search tree. I’ve literally never had to use that in 8 years of development. :)

Maybe you should start a coding interview prep course...

Do you think any of it made you a better programmer or architect?

As a DevOps guy who's been screened out of companies that care about such things, I'm a mix of horrified and skeptical.

I'm horrified because I'm seeing some gross incompetence in the realm of organization in thinking, clean infrastructure and security awareness. And some of this punishes the old(er).

I'm skeptical because I think many of these interviewers are themselves lousy systems people, are building environments that may need to be bailed out one day, and to boot are probably not people persons. A people person can sense better how to conduct an interview to feel out how to determine whether the candidate is clever and useful.

I took a managerial route so I'm mostly immune now, but boy do those cocky coding interviews stick in my craw when I think about them.

Having the same experience and background as you I took a different perspective: I use that system of interview to filter the companies _I_ don't want to work for.

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