Comment by tubby12345 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tubby12345 | Hacker News Reader

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I have said this before: it's group therapy for entitled devs that feel they're entitled to oversized salaries just because they have tenure. Young grads accept the process as is. People that are either happy with their comp or comfortable putting in the work do not lament the process - they just accept it and proceed. Only devs that have been doing it a while, whose salaries have plateaued, that either never learned data structures or can't muster the will to review, bemoan the LC grind.

The most utterly absurd instantiation is the dev that's 100% sure that FAANG is going to fail soon because they're passing on people like him/her that are just so talented that they don't need to prove it with any assessment. There's also the MGTOW-esque subgroup that eschews such interviews and will proclaim it proudly, along with their salary.

Personally I'd be embarrassed if I was making a less than obscene dev salary, which is still upper middle class anywhere in the world, and all the while complaining that I deserve more for no added effort.

What's funny is there are other professions where the same sort of multimodal distribution in compensation exists (big law vs everyone else, competitive specialties vs general practice in medicine, IB and PE vs everyone else in finance) and I have never seen members of those communities complain as much as developers do.

Edit:

I have a friend that's trying to break into FAANG (as a DS) who I've been coaching. He has a stats PhD and basically no software training whatsoever, outside of R. Since DS loops still have LC questions it's been very hard for him. I have never heard him once express feelings of resentment over the process - he fails an interview and just goes back to practicing. He's also a first gen immigrant from a very poor part of the middle east. Admittedly it's hard to assign/attribute his perseverance to any particular thing but naive intuition dictates that some of it must be his humility - something that software as an industry seriously lacks.

> Only devs that have been doing it a while, whose salaries have plateaued, that either never learned data structures or can't muster the will to review, bemoan the LC grind.

As someone who mostly agrees with you, I still bemoan the LC grind. This is mostly because I think the software market has grown to the point where there’s a distinct market for “plumbers” vs “engineers”. I consider myself a “plumber” who understands how to piece together various frameworks and languages in the most efficient matter, but “engineer are the one who actually invent the new frameworks and who need to actually understand DSA to accomplish their jobs. It feels like distinct skills since I’ve tackled what I consider engineering problems multiple times and failed but I keep getting rewarded with higher and higher salaries for doing what I consider plumbing.

Unfortunately there seems to be an ego component and no company will admit that they need software “plumbers” more than they need software “engineers” or it makes them/their employees look bad.

I just wish I could be ranked and rewarded off my “plumbing” skills and only ranked on my “engineering” skills if I was looking for a career change

From friends and acquaintances in other industries with similar income distributions, "knock out 4-to-6 programming problems in a short amount of time" is one of the least-arbitrary and most accessible ways to jump from one group to the more highly paid one. Not to mention that if you can knock out those problems, you may not even be required to have a degree or other formal credentials.

That's not even getting into how hilariously unrealistic "trial periods", for instance, are. Why am I going to leave a job for just a trial period without any more thorough attempt to check fit before hand? Why would I invest that much time in side work if I'm doing it before quitting, when I could get a FAANG offer instead for single-digit-days-amount of brushing up?

>least-arbitrary and most accessible ways to jump from one group to the more highly paid one.

exactly. i mean like try to apply to IB at a BB and see if anyone even skims your resume without an ivy+ on it. they can't fathom how good they have it because they've never done anything else (which is, of course, what breeds entitlement).

Do people get a FAANG interview with no recognizable credentials? Surely they have to sift the CVs somehow?

For the F in that list, at least, definitely. Though that was because they used a different metric to sift/choose me for an interview (and a decade of experience) despite my lack of tertiary education.

How did you get the interview? They must get a lot of junk applications, what did you write to make them actually look at you instead of direct to trash, and then decide to interview?

They contacted me directly, likely because of my (admittedly small) feedback on their beta github.

easiest way to shortcircuit the process is to reach out to someone through linked in and ask for a referral. if you're really who you claim to be in your profile here then you shouldn't have any trouble getting an interview.

Well I'm not looking for myself. Was wondering if it's the case that they'll interview any CS grad?

I mean, recruiters get paid sizable commissions for each hire they make, and they really dont care where you went to school as long as they can sell you to the company. If you can sell yourself to a recruiter (low bar) then you can get an interview.

of course they need credentials but undergrad at decent state school is much more widely available credential than ivy+. hell FB hires high school grads into their FBU program (for the gap summer between high school and uni).

like you don't get it: go here https://www.hudsonrivertrading.com/careers/job/?gh_jid=35621... and find the dropdown for school ("what university are you currently attending").

> I have never seen members of those communities complain as much as developers do.

Other professions have guilds (not called that, but effectively that) who qualify membership and enforce various rules and standards on their members.

Maybe one day we'll have a Guild of Software Developers that provides this service and we won't need to deal with shitty interview tests. But until that day, maybe we shouldn't be comparing ourselves to professions that do have this and therefore don't face the same problems.

I think you are referring to Professional Orders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_order) and, depending on where you live, there may actually be one. In my country, computer engineers have a professional order they can join after graduation, in the same exact way all the other kinds of engineers they've studied with do. Unlike some other engineering fields, the order does not enforce nor require active membership in any order to work.

There've been a few attempts to get this going. So far none of them have worked (see also: any kind of union specifically for tech workers).

The other professions have a "closed shop" - you cannot work in that profession without joining that association.

e.g. in the Anglosphere, you cannot practice as a lawyer without being a member of the relevant Bar Association, and to join that you must "pass the bar" which is an exam.

If we had this in Dev, then we wouldn't be able to write code for money until/unless we were a member of the Software Dev Association, and they wouldn't accept us until/unless we'd passed a rigorous exam (passing the bar is something that takes years of study) to prove that we could code. Then we wouldn't be facing ridiculous "but can you actually code?" tests during interviews.

But creating that closed shop has always failed (so far). Employers don't want it, and new coders don't want it. It's only us old hands who expect to be grandfathered into it that kinda like the idea.

When the status quo is objectively stupid, it is right and just to complain about it. In real life, the ones who will do so are mostly just the ones who it hurts. So what do you want to happen here, if it's not just for devs to shut up about the insanity that's making them miserable?

While we might be able to argue that alternative interview strategies could be better under some set of assumptions, the status quo is clearly not stupid. These companies are hiring thousands of people and pulling in stupid amounts of money. The system works. Could it be better? Maybe, maybe not. But it clearly does work.

Man, imperialism sure has worked. Doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. Jfc.

i have no clue what you're saying

>In real life, the ones who will do so are mostly just the ones who it hurts.

you think people grinding LC that make it through are hurt by the process?

>the insanity that's making them miserable

as far as i can tell, sloth, avarice, and greed are making devs miserable (not some bogeyman called LC).

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