Also, you can find jobs without these stupid coding challenges and time consuming processes. I never worked in a company that asked me to write code before being hired.
My interpretation was he was willing to throw himself all in. The author was willing to play the game of interviews regardless of how good or bad it was. Coding challenge, social exchanges, etc etc.
I get it, there are a lot of bad interviews out there that we hate doing. But if you want the most options you have to fire as many bullets as you can while trying to maintain the quality jumping through all the hoops.
All I'm saying is, it is a choice. We're all trading one thing for another and that's perfectly okay - it's what's important to each own person.
You can love or hate interviews, but they are the way to get into a company. If you dream of getting into $BigCo, you better nail your interview.
If you don't care what company you work for as long as you get enough money at the end of the month, that's perfectly fine. No need to practice interviews then.
Personally, while I don't dream of getting into Google, Facebook, or another company with comically high hiring bar, I like self-improvement and if I know I'm bad at interviews, I want to improve just for the sake of it.
I'm sure interviewing skills translate well into other areas, such as public speaking, presentations, demos, sales, pre-sales, ...
Inevitably I end up taking the one that was just a short chat.
a couple interview lined up before an important one is less commitment and still effective.
not really happy about having to waste some HR guy time for a job I'd likely not take, but hr types have had no qualms about wasting my time either in the past so I see it as a return in kind
[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
Now I have to resign myself to being questioned if I can program not matter how many years of experience I accumulated.
But I couldn’t say that they didn’t know how to program. I’m talking about people with actual verified experience here.
I can’t help but feel like we spend way too much time trying to avoid these master charlatans who manage to have years of experience doing a job they can’t actually perform when America mostly has at will employment.
And if you did happen to hire one of those people, it should be pretty easy to figure out that they aren’t producing any actual output fairly quickly. Then you fire them.
If 1/100 people are (and in my experience and the person I was replying to it is significantly less than that) you’ve wasted less than a half hour per candidate.
You’re not wasting 40 hours on the 99% who aren’t frauds.
But yes, for senior candidates, I'm doing a lot less coding and a lot more design and architecture, because that should be what they can offer differentiated from their less experienced peers. And I'm also going to be looking for their interviewing skills and philosophy, because they will probably end up doing more of the interviewing and thus team-building, not to mention the culture they set by all the juniors looking up to them.
You can contact the previous company or previous co-workers if you don't know much about a candidate. I know some companies are very secrets but in practice it's often possible to get a "yes you can hire this person because..." or a "you don't want to hire this person because..." where I live.
Sadly, most big well know valley companies are doing the leetcode obstacle course, because there are many many applying for the highest salaries in the industry. I can't see it changing anytime soon.