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Comment by res0nat0r | Hacker News Reader

Most interviewing I've been involved with from large FAANG companies to smaller IT shops basically are just running around with their heads cut off when it comes to interviews. They get resumes from HR, skim them to see if the person is even in the right ballpark, cc: the team asking "yes/no?", then proceed to schedule an interview whenever everyone on the invite list has an open slot.

Everyone then proceeds to examine said resume closer ~10 mins prior to the meeting when their email pings them that they have an upcoming interview scheduled.

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This was one of the most fascinating things when I joined the workforce. Schoolteachers all seemed prepared, the world was all neatly scheduled, and they claimed that the real world was even more strict about things.

The most wrong thing I have been told about adulthood. Doing homework at the last minute is hardly just a kids thing.

I'm in my mid 30s. High school—in which I was not, notably, bullied or anything like that—was the most stressful, mentally-unhealthy, and busiest part of my life, to be sustained for more than a few weeks in a row. The only thing that's even come close is having multiple young kids at once, plus a job, and that's still not as bad. College was a vacation.

Meanwhile, adults were telling me it was the best time of my life, or that if I was stressed out and struggling now, just wait until I got to the "real world".

LOL, WTF? The real world is so much easier and less demanding. Even the couple times over Summers or early on when I worked low-wage unskilled jobs, it was easier and less stressful. All high school did was give me mental problems and a decade of nightmares.

Yep. I do so much less work now that I am out of high school. I work fewer hours. Deadlines are less strict. Protocol is less strict.

Granted, I went to a pressure filled high school, but nothing came close to being as demanding as that, even engineering school.

I think the main problem with high school is that it wastes an absolute shitload of time. About 8 hours of your day shot actually in school, most of which is extremely low value or idle, and then (in my case, at what I think was a pretty middle-of-the-road school) 60+ minutes of homework on top of that every single day, which you're to do after you're already mentally beat from the intense boredom and "pay attention at all times or get in trouble" atmosphere of the rest of the day, with no option to defer it until you don't feel quite as much like your brain is running out through your ears.

As a staunch advocate of teaching the humanities and someone who thinks the "what k-12 education needs is math education that looks more like what the 0.1% of people who are math nerds wish they'd been taught" folks are dead wrong, I still think high schools ought to re-consider having every class be the same length, and maybe cut some of their social studies and history entirely (because it's almost never well-taught enough to be worthwhile) so the homework portion of mid- and high-level math classes can be brought into the school day proper. It'd be a much better use of time, and I think having a teacher available for questions and guidance during "homework" time would do wonders for math comprehension and test scores.

Though how schools would justify giving their coaches full teacher salaries without as many history and social studies classes for them to teach, is an open question.

Since high school, no one has stopped me to check if I was wearing panties before going into a work-sanctioned party.

But at my high school, they did.

For me college was the most stressful. High school was a breeze then all the small anxieties I had in high school just got amplified in university. A lot of it was fear of failure. In highschool you get a bad grade it goes in your nebulous "permanent record"

I went to an expensive out of state school and it just felt like the stakes were so much higher. A bad exam could lead to a low GPA, loss of scholarship, being pushed out a program or major, academic probation, etc.

In the working world I met so many successful people who failed at some point, have a criminal record, poor credit scores, bad employment records, etc. and it never seems to go as bad as it's portrayed.

Even creditors don't scare me anymore. I just tell em to fuck off, verify the debt, and never contact me by phone ever again. A younger me would freak out about my credit score if a collector called. Because I thought that's what mature adults worry about.

For me College was High School but more. The big thing that killed me in college was multiple professor assigning a big collaborative out-of-class project each semester seemingly on the assumption that none of my other professors would do something like that. So I'm trying to coordinate three different big projects with three different sets of students and keeping them all straight, while also trying to learn the underlying concepts. Oh and there is regular homework on top of that.

In the real world I'm generally only working one project at a time with only one group of people. And crucially we can fire people from the project who don't contribute.

I'm curious, what sort of program were you in that had professors assigning "big collaborative out-of-class projects"?

Not OP, but engineering did a lot of it.

Mine was CS. Build an application that takes in topo data and produces a 3D plot of the output and allows the user to edit the data on the fly.

Remember this was in the late 90s so it was all OpenGL immediate mode and I didn't have a 3D accelerator so it had to run at a reasonable framerate on a 75Mhz CPU. Luckily we didn't have to texture anything, flat shaded polys were fine.

Another project was a web application with a database backend that was basically just IMDB. Of course this was the 90s so it was CGI.

Sadly there was no Git either. CVS was it, but since everybody was on dialup modem and there were not cloud services you could use it didn't work so well. One had to be good at compartmentalizing mostly. One guy would work on one part and someone else would work on a totally different part and integration was always fun.

Also, in my case, the projects that I found most interesting were those with less scoring value or on what people referred to "easy disciplines", those whose professors didn't bully/pressure us into delivering high quality work. Most of nightmares were doing boring projects which I thought and later confirmed to be majorly bullcrap.

You're just lucky that things in your life aligned in the right way and you ended up adapted to adult life. What would happen if you couldn't have this job, lower salary, bad management, bad work conditions?

I've worked low-wage jobs and stopped the gas pump before my tank is full because I can't afford more. It's still way lower-stress than high school. It's not even close.

You quickly end up not even looking at it 10 minutes before and reading the resume during the interview

"Tell me a little bit about yourself" is the phrase, isn't it?

Definitely have witnessed this many times

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