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Comment by NoOneNew | Hacker News Reader

Except programming and engineering is about overcoming the unexpected. Adapt and improvise. Not everything is textbook and, at least this is my opinion, the better engineer is the one that can solve unexpected problems. You can really only judge that utilizing past experience. Canned, standardized questions similar to Mensa intelligence questions or any type of "brain-twister" puzzle are pretty crappy. Once you know the tricks they're applying to the question, they're easy to solve. But that's not the same as actually "figuring out" a real world problem.

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Ok, but why is that a bad thing for engineers that are interviewing?

If the interview process is largely memorizing 200 or so commonly asked algorithm questions and that is the gateway to a $200k+ job then it's a good thing for applicants, not "dystopian" at all.

Again, it would be much, much more painful and time consuming for the interviewee if they were asked to code up some fullstack project for every interview. That is far more time consuming, and in my opinion more "dystopian" to expect those interviewing to do dozens of hours of work specific to one interview for free.

I think you missed the entire point of these articles. The algorithms you're forced to memorize are, 99% of the time, useless. Instead of hiring someone by their track record, managers are choosing to hire those capable of memorizing trivia.

Part 2, paying someone on trivia instead of capabilities is not sustainable. The company ends up suffering in the long term. Other engineers that are actually capable have to pick up the slack. Longer hours, less family time, higher burn out risk. Then comes the firing period because the company is losing revenue due to rampant incompetence. Putting even more pressure on the capable engineers. There's plenty of articles where trendy startups have some brutal layoffs, even though 12-18 months earlier had massive funding rounds and went into "extreme" hiring phases. The chickens come home to roost, no matter the sparkling bling of big paychecks.

I think you missed the point of this interview style. This style of interview is scalable, predictable, efficient and effective. It is useful in that way.

It's scalable all right, but the other points- especially the latter two- are being debated in this thread.

Right, which misses the point of having this interview style in the first place.

> the gateway to a $200k+ job then it's a good thing for applicants,

For most of us outside the Bay Area and NYC, it's quite unlikely that we'll secure a $200k/year job unless we go into management.

What a misconception. I know plenty of people in Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles, and even Pittsburgh, pulling in $200k/year in tech.

Interesting factoid for perspective - if you take the US and exclude every metro area at least as big as the Austin* MSA...you still have a majority of Americans.

*I think Austin is the smallest mentioned.

Damn, you're right. I did the spreadsheet math quickly based on 2018 estimates on the top 314 cities by population in the USA. Apparently 100k minimum population is the marker of "city" according to this. Anyways, ~94m city dwellers compared to ~327m (2018) for the USA. "Big" cities are a minority.

At 284, Boulder, CO is considered a "city". Don't get me wrong, it's a nice town, but you can't compare it to Austin (11), Portland, OR (25) or NYC (1). Top 100 cities comes to ~64.5m (Spokane, WA coming in at 100 with 219k).

I just... wow... I don't know why, but I truly thought "city slicker" America made up like 50%+ of the population. At best it's 29%. Not insignificant. But... not a wide majority.

I think it's best to compare metro areas and not cities per se. I live in a metro area much smaller than Austin, but it's still maybe a million people. If a city proper of say 100,000 people was out in the middle of nowhere, that would be very different.

I don't think so, speaking out of my personal experience. Colorado Springs Metro, for example, can gobble up a town called Palmer Lake (59k population). The Springs alone is 464k. Even though the Springs is kind of country (meh, not really, lots of defense and tech moved in the past decade), Palmer Lake IS country. Even though they border each other, they don't really vote the same or have similar concerns. Let's put it this way, your stereotypical hipster can live a good life in the Springs. Not so in Palmer Lake... at all. Then take Manitou Springs on the west side of CS. It's a tourist town/trap. Not at odds, but not similar either. CS is very locked in with the needs of Fort Carson, the Air Academy and 2 other air bases, along with defense and a few major tech firms dropped big offices in CS even though Denver is ~65 miles away.

Then take Wilsonville, OR. It's oddly considered a metro area for Portland. It's a good 30min away and independent AF from Portland. Plus the people there are different. More old money or straight up white trash.

Metro is a really loose/gray term. To say surrounding towns are the exact same as a city is a bad idea. Let's take the purchasing decision of a home in those areas. The "value" of location compared to price and are at odds. One person is willing to pay a premium for location, the other is not. Those are two different mindsets as to what that person is willing to deal with in life.

I think it's important to include the general area because people commonly live and commute anywhere within a few miles. Most Americans live in what are technically suburbs.

And the overall lifestyle of a place depends on the population within a reasonable radius of travel, not what is within an arbitrary boundary.

I live in an area of NY currently that has towns similar in size to where I went to school in AZ, but the surrounding area, say a ten mile radius, has maybe three times the population. It's a very noticeable difference, both in general lifestyle and in employment opportunities, education and so on.

> Not insignificant. But... not a wide majority.

Yes. Maybe you can understand some of the frustration coming out of "middle America"? The new American economy is booming in large metro areas, while the rest of the country stagnates. I'm not a Trump voter, but I certainly understand the bitterness at being economically and culturally dominated by a segment of the country that is at the very most, 50% of the population.

The remainder of the country is still relatively blue and urban/suburban. Just because they live outside of the large metro areas doesn't mean they are rural. For instance, the Austin area was around 30th largest on a list I was looking at whereas I live in a MSA that is more like 60th+. But there are still lots of people here, universities, etc. - it's not the middle of Wyoming or Alaska. It's just that the actual cities and towns aren't that large. I don't live in New Jersey, but have you ever been there? You have like flat suburbs that go on and on - individually, I imagine that you can have a large area with a large population, but the towns aren't so big.

According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the median salary for software develors is $103,000. Top 10% earned $166,960 or higher. Take out the cities I mentioned and those numbers are even lower.

If you know plenty of people outside of the major tech big cities (and I should have included Austin and Seattle in that, for sure) making over $200,000 year, they you have a statistically unusual sample of friends.

All the data back up what I'm saying. Go look at the numbers. Look at salaries on monster.com or your favorite job site. Perhaps you and your friends don't realize how unusual it is (granted, you also have higher cost-of-living in those cities, sometimes by enough to eat up the additional salary).

Base salary is only one portion (usually less than half) of total compensation. Also, these engineers that I am referring to do not have the entry-level title -- they are often "senior software engineer" or "technical lead".

Maybe I should revise my claim to "top software engineers make over $200,000 in Austin, Pittsburgh, Seattle, etc.".

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