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Comment by diehunde | Hacker News Reader

Many people say this. But the reality is that solving 100 LC questions and actually understand the solution enough to solve a variation of the problem is a lot of work. Especially if you are working full-time. I wouldn't call that "game it", just usual study and hard work.

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When gaming it is just passing by studying, a repeatable process that anyone (with a CS degree) can do, just means the interview process is quite well designed.

The interview process is a test of endurance, not intelligence. And it should be exactly that, since software engineering is mostly an exercise of endurance and focus.

Every time a friend of mine QQs about failing a FANG interview, I give them the study prescription that worked for me. The reaction is always the same: they don't do it. If you can't get past these interviews, you probably won't make it past a year in these high performance companies anyways. Because you actually have to exhibit the same work ethic that interview studying requires.

I don’t know if it’s as useful a signal as you imply. For me, it’s easy to be motivated studying leetcode: small, self-contained puzzles with just the right amount of challenge and immediate gratification. Actually doing a FAANG job can be a slog where it takes months to see results from your work.

I can get hired as a software engineer wherever, but I’m only mediocre at doing the job. I’m not the only person I know like this.

No matter what the filtering process is, the average person in [industry] will be mediocre by definition.

Sure. But I’m (by my own estimation) a mediocre software engineer who is very above-average at solving fun coding puzzles, and therefore at interviewing. Usually these threads are full of people complaining that they are good engineers who aren’t good at interviews; I’m suggesting that the opposite isn’t uncommon, even if it’s more rarely admitted.

Getting something working in the beginning feels very different from a coding puzzle. During the next phase of optimizing something is where it gets interesting. Understanding the hardware and figuring out the right way to make full use of it via memory tricks or specialized processor instructions always felt more like a puzzle. Unfortunately, I feel engineers are seldom given the opportunity to go deep down the optimization route once something is working reliably, since it's already getting the job done.

> I can get hired as a software engineer wherever, but I’m only mediocre at doing the job.

I feel exactly the same.

Mind if I ask how you deal with this?

I recently left software (not sure if temporary or permanent yet) and I'm pursuing tutoring in an unrelated field. So far I'm liking it more because I feel better than mediocre.

Haven’t really figured it out yet. Working on something I care about seems to help, although it’s not always easy to find. Having a strong, trusting relationship with my coworkers also helps. Easy to get detached otherwise.

Having other sources of meaning in life keeps me going during periods where my career isn’t going as well, gives me perspective and keeps me from getting depressed (I’m prone to it).

Working at top companies has helped me meet a lot of amazing people, including many of my closest friends, so I’m grateful for that at least.

Also, this gets thrown around a lot on HN, but if you’re brilliant at hard programming puzzles but not good at engineering jobs you might have ADHD. I do. Medication and/or ADHD-targeted treatments and accommodations could help. They’ve been modestly helpful for me.

I don't want to underestimate the skill of being good at LC. In the past couple of months, I have solved about 200+ LC and I have been interviewing vigorously too. Its a tough skill for sure but beyond a certain point, you start seeing patterns you have applied before and once you are in the flow, it becomes slightly easier.

I only wish the real Software Engineering job was as simple as being good at LC, because it clearly isn't.

you're not mediocre at the job. Trust me, you haven't seen mediocre

Software engineers that QQ about how unfair algorithm interviews are are clearly out of touch with how difficult and truly unfair interviews are for other high paying industries like law or medicine (in the US) where getting interviews is based on pedigree and getting one or two rejections can permanently deny you from top firms/positions.

There are always things that can be improved about interview processes, but many software engineers display great immaturity when it comes to trading a few weeks of time studying content that should already be partially familiar to them from school for six figure salaries/raises.

Not especially experienced with interviewing, but definitely agree with this.

Leetcode sucks, but I’ll take it over how finance jobs are where it’s all about connections and where you interned when you were 19.

(Not to mention that that internship might be gate-kept for reasons outside of expertise, to boot)

> but I’ll take it over how finance jobs are where it’s all about connections and where you interned when you were 19

Is this different than Big Tech really? If you do not go to the right schools, internships, whatever it can take years to have the right employers in your CV to be called for an interview.

Not true in my experience. I went a no-name state school, graduated with a mediocre GPA and an unremarkable local internship and I still got the same interview and job opportunities as my friends that went to Berkeley and other top schools. I know people at top tech companies that never finished their college degree.

I don't know of anyone at a top law/medicine/consulting/finance firm like this.

The average employment length at a faang is 2 years or less. A job in a single top law firm is an endurance battle that can span your career. Switching firms is looked at differently a lot of times negatively.

Once you land that job in finance or as a lawyer you are on track to be set for life. At a faang after a few years you'll get pushed into management or pushed out.

It's not the same.

This comment is incredibly out of touch with the world of big law. Not only do associates get cut, but many people stall out and can't make partner.

(also the whole concept of "Up or out" comes from Big Law/Consulting... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out)

You are just as "set for life" in big tech as big law. In fact, if you're looking at the last decade, big tech won hard considering tech stocks and how big law froze (and even slightly cut) salaries during the great recession.

> The average employment length at a faang is 2 years or less

Because if you're hiring 40% of your current headcount a year and some people leave that gets you to very short average tenure very quickly.

I don’t think anybody is complaining about the initial barrier to entry. These interviews would be more like asking a surgeon who’s worked for 10 years in one hospital to pass an anatomy multiple choice quiz when transferring to another hospital

While it's true that asking an experienced surgeon basics of anatomy is worthless, please take into account that all surgeons at least operate on humans. If you take 10 random developers, chances are most of them worked on completely different levels and domains throughout their careers (e.g. embedded dev, backend, frontend, devops will have vastly different skills).

What is the relevance of this whataboutism? Some other industries have bad or worse interview practices as well. That doesn't make this process good. What is the point you're trying to make?

Its immature to think we can do better because others have it worse? Rubbish.

That's pretty presuptuous. Do you truely believe that working at a FAANG company requires the same amount of 'edurance and focus' as working at a non FAANG company _and_ spending several hours every week practicing coding skills?

Seriously. Many people coast while collecting $. Acting like work at a FAANG is some ultra-endurance test is a joke.

I felt the same when I failed a leetcode interview. The reason behind my annoyance was that I had spent considerable amount of time over the past few years improving my skills in the areas I thought mattered (practicing TDD, design patterns,learning FP etc.,) I felt disappointed when none of these mattered compared to an artificial set of challenges setup in an unreal environment.

I can't say for sure that such challenges (array manipulation, backtracking etc.,) are not typical for a software job but I know that they aren't relevant for my line of work. Even if they are, the challenge of solving problems in a live coding session is not the same for all. Different people need different settings to perform or excel.

But now I am committing myself to leetcode and getting better at it, but it has become one among hundred other things I want to get good at. At some point of time, I will feel the burnout. But I sincerely hope the acquired skills are useful in my professional setting.

Skills such as design patterns etc do matter. There are separate rounds for testing just that, think Design rounds (LLD or HLD) but you usually have to pass the Algorithm rounds before to get to that stage.

Can you share your prescription

The major frustration is that its endurance in an mostly irrelevant task. If the problems were more relevant, active software engineers wouldn't need to study outside their day to day duties, no?

Whats your technique?

3 hours of leetcode every day for 1.5 months 6 hours of sys design over the weekend for 1.5 months

How did you practice system design? Did you work from problem sets or just study principles?

resources for sys design?

If somebody has been doing something for 20 years and an assessment test can yield dramatically different results with 20 minutes of preparation, then the assessment test is total bullshit. It's going to yield a false characterization and is fundamentally garbage input

I know that's pretty strongly stated and it matches the strength of my convictions here. I've tried many methods. Asking someone to figure out something is a sliding window is a garbage test

Problem is, there is not a lot of incentive for people looking for a job to use LC and similar to understand algorithms and data structures, and with good reason;

Many interviewers do not ask the questions to check for thought process or problem solving ability, they treat it like some TV quiz: Ask question, get answer, compare answer to note in hand, applaud if its the same answer, next question. Why? Because its a lot easier to sit there watching the candidate squirm at the whiteboard, while thinking about what's for lunch, than engaging the candidate and gasp talking to him/her.

This creates incentive for people taking these BS interviews to learn-for-the-test: Get a list of the current top50 questions asked regularly at interviews (there are resources for that) and memorize them.

Why? Two reasons:

1. It is alot easier than understanding the concepts and purpose of different algos and data structures.

2. Trying to solve them by applying actual understanding, runs the risk of getting stuck on an unfamiliar problem, or producing a slightly sub-par solution instead of the "correct" answer, and getting booted out despite demonstrating the exakt thing aka."problem solving ability" the interviewers allegedly look for

And, unsurprising, because there is money involved, an industry has sprung up around this: Pay-For-Tech-Interview-Training is a thing, including regular updates on popular questions.

The result of course: Companies running the risk of hiring people who are great at answering LC questions but fail when they actually have to solve a problem where they cannot copypaste the solution from SO.

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