Then just take your chances. Rinse and repeat.
> spend a reasonable time like a month
Spending a month on interview training is exactly what I would consider unreasonable effort.
Here's a scenario – I have worked at big tech company A for a decade writing backend code. Big tech company B has many openings for senior backend coders, and is desperate to fill them. B's recruiters are hounding me every day to consider a switch. The job looks interesting, and the salary and benefits are great.
Should be a perfect fit, you say? Except if I interview with B today I'll get rejected at the very first coding stage. The barrier to entry they have created for themselves is me taking time away from my current job to solve programming puzzles, solving them perfectly in an interview setting, then throwing away all of that knowledge. They are never going to make me go through this effort unless I am truly unhappy at my current role.
This is the exact reason companies are finding it so hard to hire engineers, and why they have to pay them so much to switch.
I'm not saying that some of my rejections can't do that. But I can't measure what I didn't observe.
I also get mountains of emails from recruiters about how deeply impressed they are with my skills, and how I should go work for their firms. I know that they are completely full of shit, because from looking at my LinkedIn, they have no idea whether or not I have any of those skills.
I've interviewed four digits worth of candidates, under different rubrics and different expected difficulty levels, and all the good I can say about the modern interview is that at least it tends to crib out the people that can't write code at all, at least if you are making sure nobody is feeding them answers. But can I say that interview performance with me, and how well I rated the person's work when they were hired and ended up working close enough to me, had much to do with each other? I don't think so.
That's why, when working at a small enough place I have some control over the interviewing process, I'll offer options to the candidate, and dedicate far more time to the process than I would in a large software firm. It's OK to just raise the technical bar enormously when you are offering the best salaries in the market, and you can expect to never run out of candidates. But when you are not competitive, you have to do something to find great candidates that don't look wonderful in a FAANG style interview format, but will be very good in practice anyway.
has worked out well so far tbh most of these interview processes are overengineered and geared towards nonsense
it's funny as a side-effect our teams are probably the most diverse and well balanced across skill level I've seen in my carrer too
If they become more desperate, things could change, but they don't and things stay the same.
More often than not, BigCo don't need A players, but average devs to keep the wheels spinning and that's where the struggle with hiring is.
1. interviews are black boxes - there's no feedback; getting feedback from a professional interviewer is the best way to understand one's weaknesses
2. dealing with pressure in simulated environment can help (a lot, for some) to handle pressure in a real one.
I had no idea, for example, why I didn't fare well in a certain type of interview, until I did a mock one.
I will throw out counter-experience that I did not succeed at technical interviews until I treated it like a fulltime job. In the past I just brushed up and failed Google's interview a handful of times before I decided enough was enough.
My takeaway ultimately is that how much time and effort one chooses to put in is entirely personal based on how much they want one of these jobs + what their gaps are in algorithms and data structures. Some people are going to need more effort than others.
Last time I interviewed, I did 7 of these interviews, targeting: startups, pre-ipo, mid public companies, 2 of the FAANG I would never work for ...
I did that while prepping for interviewing at the companies I was really interested in working for. And eventually it all worked out and got a few offers, of which two from FAANG of which one from one of the two FAANG I really wanted to join.
That's what I thought about the job I came to SF for 20 years ago. Then 6 years in they got bought out and I got laid off. They weren't even a tech company. My career has been somewhat downhill ever since. Best of luck to you.
what companies should do is ask you to walk them through a piece of code of your choice and discuss that and/or hire you for a month as a contractor and pay you a fair market rate.
I’ve encountered many who graduated from bachelor and even PhD programs without programming skills (even from European universities), so your statement is false.
It also seems pretty weird to assume that a degree or certificate is foolproof for demonstrating programming skills. That seems like a lack of critical thinking skills.
There are obviously candidates that struggle with performing under pressure - even those that have gone completely blank, but through some simple guiding have bounced back.
To be frank, at the schools I studied at, it would be impossible to fake your way through a whole degree, unless you either got someone to impersonate you and take your exams, or you cheated your way through every single exam...but even then, your grades would be a big red flag.
Sure, there are bad programmers out there - but not being able to punch out a line of valid code, after obtaining a whole degree in the subject...seems extremely unlikely - sans the extreme edge cases.
Even the straight E / D students I've worked with managed to cobble together working stuff, without the aid of search engines or stack exchange.
I’ve worked with programmers from Scandinavian university degrees and some sucked. Not sure how they passed, but the degree was 15 years old and this was the early 00s.
also: this is not just the case for scandinavian universities but also the case for universities in most of western europe especially if they are non-private.
besides, companies already ask what university you went to and could get your records and individual class grades and use that combined with number of people fired that had the same degree to figure out if they want to hire you or not. after all, we are in the era of data science?
and instead of paying recruiters lots of money for shuffling word documents around, they can use that money to pay prospective candidates for a month. it will be cheaper.
the real reason for coding interviews is to wear you out so they can pay you less. the problem is that people go along with this clown show instead of simply walking away and doing something else.
i interviewed a while ago at a FAANG where they had a long standing problem related to their OS. i knew the solution because i recently brought a product to market built on top of a similar OS and had to address the same problem.
but it was more important to them i passed their coding test within a few minutes, and that i choose the optimum solution, which can only be found if you can spend an hour thinking about it. i bombed the interview due to not being used to coding interviews and having to talk while i think, and having to do all this in a few minutes.
they are probably still wondering how to fix their problem.
I interviewed a lot of people and quite a few could not implement fizzbuzz.
Huge risk for anyone who currently has a job. I'd much rather the technical interview.
- read the whole website of the company I want to work for
- apply
That's it. If after N years of experience I'm not able to pass the tech interviews then I'm not a suitable candidate for them, and I simply accept that. To me, spending a month memorizing and refreshing concepts I learned when I was at uni, feels like cheating (because I'll forget what quickly studied in a few days).
I do "study" on my own constantly, though. I'm always reading tech books and trying new things. I do it at my own pace. Perhaps that's the reason why I don't prepare myself for interviews.
I wonder if you are thinking of the same tech interviews that anybody else here is talking about. Those tests are almost inversely correlated with N years of experience. Without specifically studying for those tests you would definitely score lower than an inferior (but well prepared) candidate.
When you're young it might be worth it but to me the cost/benefit isn't worth spending months over preparing.