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Comment by likeabbas | Hacker News Reader

Once you grind once or twice, the next times you practice it comes back quicker. The first time I interviewed it took me 3 months of daily morning prep and one weekend day of studying. This time, it took me one month of only a few days a week practicing to get back into it. Granted I’m single and young and Hopefully will never have kids.

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> This time, it took me one month of only a few days a week practicing

Are you joking? I’m married with kids, and I’ll be lucky if I have a few hours of the week to myself.

I don’t mind that, but beyond my unwillingness to grind leetcode in general, I wouldn’t have any time to so effectively.

The selection bias for young, smart, single unattached people is incredible.

Of course, that’s exactly the kind of people that’ll happily stay and work overtime too, so I can see why a company would like the idea of that.

Not only you do not have much time for yourself but it is often not really "quality" time. It rarely comes in uninterrupted blocks of say 90' or 2h. It is going to be 20 minutes there, 40 minutes there, and maybe 30 minutes over there.

I strongly agree with your point about bias. When I was not a father, I spent a lot of time studying (and passing) AWS certs and reached the point I got all of them. Now? I am happy when I read few blog posts each week and, very often, it takes several attempts to be able to fully watch a single re:Invent session.

"Yes, but you are reading and replying to comments on HN!"

Indeed, with my baby in my arms haha!

The nature of the job is that there is always something new for you to keep up with. Even if you never change jobs it's hard to see how you avoid devoting any time to studying anything. Perhaps you could sneak some catch-up in, say, over lunch, or on the train, or something along those lines.

Because my current job is great, I study on the job. That does not extend to grinding leetcode though.

Or maybe it does, I haven’t tried.

I mean, if you don’t have time to look for another job then don’t. If you need another job then you need find time to make yourself hire-able. There are plenty of jobs that don’t require leet code but if you want the cushy FAANG jobs, then you need to put in the effort. If That means spending less time with your kids and hiring a nanny, then do it.

> If that means spending less time with your kids and hiring a nanny

For their sake, please don't. It's not worth it.

Don’t be hyperbolic. It’s just a month of prep. No one is advocating for child neglect.

This is for a job that pays 450k+. Do you really think you’re gonna be handed it with no effort?

If you want a mediocre job, then there’s plenty of companies you can get hired at with little effort and you’re welcome to work at those companies. Just don’t be surprised if you make 1/3 to 1/4th the comp.

> This is for a job that pays 450k+. Do you really think you’re gonna be handed it with no effort?

Because it’s a job that pays that amount, I kind of expect their hiring process to select for the best. But it doesn’t. It selects for those with an abundance of time on their hands.

Yes it does get easier, I've been through this process many many times. But what if you do end up having kids or suddenly find yourself having to care for a parent? You're really screwed then.

I'm slowly coming around to the view that the widely accepted process is ageist. Whether that's deliberate or an externality I'm still undecided.

A lot of people here need a reality check. This week, I volunteered as a security guard for the US open where we were working 12-15 hour days. Other people were getting $20/hour. We got there at 9am and didn’t leave until 2am most nights. Most of these guys had families and kids who they were not seeing for the entire month this event goes on. But they had to do this because they need to provide for their family.

You’re complaining about the process being ageist, but I think you need to wake up to reality that life is not fair and sometimes you have to make sacrifices. In our case, if you sacrifice your life for 1-2 months it can set you up at a nice job for the next 2+ years. That’s so much better than what most people have it like.

I think you hit the nail on the head. Most people with responsibilities simply don't have the time to do this. And as you get more senior, you realize how little knowing algorithms has with day to day work. They are filtering for young engineers that don't know any better and have the time to leetcode. These engineers are less likely to question management and they have already shown their time is cheap.

I also dont have much time. But I have big financial buffers as I assume most 30-40 year old developers do. We can afford to not work 3-4 months while learning and looking for a new job. And if thats not possible surely we can squeeze in 20 minutes daily doing leetcode on the job? Most of us don't actually put in 9 hours of actual work. Don't get me wrong I hate this process. I am just saying it can be done when you have kids.

Your assumptions are right. The people downvoting are mostly just salty.

So, having just had a kid, perhaps I can give some insight (from my perspective, at least).

Every minute I spend on take-homes (oh dear lord the take-homes) is a minute I'm dumping the childcare responsibilities on my wife. And she heads out to work, so I do a bunch of childcare in the mornings/evenings.

Then I also have a full-time job. Like, unless I want to stop sleeping I don't have a whole lot of time to do this stuff.

I just (mostly) finished one and it was because my wife took the baby out to meet other mums.

The worst part is that I have lots and lots of work online, plenty of GH repos and a bunch of really selective companies on my CV. And yet still every time I need to prove that I can in fact call read.csv and do a bunch of data manipulation/analysis.

And I love doing this work. I can only imagine what this is like for someone for whom it's just a career (which is totally fine, tbh).

Oh definitely, a kid under 1 is a different story. I would even say don't move jobs under 1 if you are an active parent. It is just brutal.

That being said, your child won't be a newborn forever. This is the most extreme part of the curve.

Definitely. She'll be one this Sunday, but the effort seems to be increasing for a while at least (I'm hoping when she can speak it'll get easier).

But the thing is, lots of the experienced people you want to hire will be in this position, so it's worth accounting for.

the point is you are still wasting your time and your life on stuff that has no practical value for 95% of developers. You are spending a huge chunk of time learning skills that have no use beyond the interview itself.

Yeah and then you get paid 350k at 24. I’m glad we’re in an industry where you can become incredibly well paid by spending a few months studying for a standardised, albeit unofficial, test. Much better than the CFA investment bankers, accountants, law school grads, etc.

Wow I wish I was paid anything near that. I don't know how many outside of the US get that well paid.

This. And there are plenty of high paying companies that will respect your time better than FAANG.

I disagree with this - here's my experience. I started training for competitive programming in college. One semester in particular I spent 20-30 hours a week training, and some of my grades suffered as a result. But I got a lot better at algorithms. Years later, what skills do I remember from college? Very little, but I definitely remember the algorithms. Further, converting specifications to code and general problem solving became noticeably easier after this period. As a result, the jobs I've had have centered on problem-solving and interesting technical challenges. I'm always surprised when an idea from that period suddenly proves itself useful.

Also, even if training for algorithms questions was purely a matter of signaling with no positive externalities - it's actually a much faster and easier process than getting another degree, which is a common alternative.

TL;DR If you put in the time, it can absolutely change your trajectory in ways that you might like a lot. If you don't, how will you know?

I've never had any very difficult technical questions at my interviews, just basic familiarity with the domain. The hard part seems to be getting the interview at all.

Out of college I sent out to hundreds of places and got one interview offering an abysmal 30k, then at some point got contacted out of the blue by a recruiter for a big company. The email was so badly written (different font faces/colors/sizes, bad English) I thought it was possibly a scam, but then that turned out to be an easy and very well-paying job for someone starting out. Then the next place said I was the best candidate they ever interviewed because I answered some basic language questions clearly.

My conclusion has been that hiring in this field is just confusing and nonsensical, and you never know what you're gonna get, but you probably don't need to touch anything like leetcode unless you're shooting for Google.

I don't think these cheesy interview questions like writing a circular linked list or implementing Conway's Game of Life should even take any "grinding" if you have good fundamentals.

I almost feel shorted that I never got a question like how I would measure the depth of the ocean with an apple, as the article parodies it, since I find that kind of thing fun and interesting.

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