Comment by AlwaysRock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlwaysRock | Hacker News Reader

Lots of folks are good at doing the job but bad at interviewing for jobs. Interview prep is a massive industry.

Like with any skill, practice helps. It sounds like you dont really care that you dont do exceptionally well at interview. But if you wanted to improve that skill you could focus some time on it.

Think of another skill you only use once every year or two. You are not going to be fantastic at it. I've played a lot of basketball in my life but only play in games ever year or two when I happen to be with folks who have a regular game. Now I'm in pretty decent shape so in general I do okay but the actual skills of playing basketball are rusty so I'm going to be a 5-7 out of 10. If I played basketball everyday I would probably be a 7-8 out of ten.

The same goes for interviewing. You are coding regularly so you have some of the prerequisites for doing well in interviews but without practicing typical interview type questions you will not excel at them. If you did 100 interviews over the next year I'm sure you would start to see patterns, improve on your weaknesses, and be closer to a 10 than a 5. It's a skill you have to work on outside of just coding if you want to be a great interviewee.

And therein lies the problem that's been re-hashed 100s of times here. This biasis against people with families or people who are higher up who don't have time outside their jobs. A lot of friends who were jrs pulled weekend and late nights just cramming leetcode. It worked. But as a sr, who have tons of other things going on, with work and otherwise, there's just not enough time to do it.

The problem I think is that although there's harm done to the company in losing out on good engineers, the cost isn't attributable to individuals in the hiring chain. That cost is difused over time to everyone else and there's no accoutability. The next best alternative, the ones who could jump through the hoops will tend to be just as any other on average.

I think I have a pretty good sense of who the legitimate good vs bad engineers are. I'm always checking up on people we've denied or people I thought were bad but was overruled on. I'm not perfect but I have a better record than the teams in general. But that's because I have a vested interest in making the team good. The hr people, they don't really care since their incentives are just to get people funelling into the roles, and they have so many applicants that they have to rely on ai to auto filter, which is shit at finding real quality.

Good football players train for games, do well in games, and are hireable as long as they do well in their primary activity: playing and winning games. Good engineers CANNOT be hired unless they do training in a totally tangential direction, unless their job is literally algorithms all day working on a kernel team or something.

> Lots of folks are good at doing the job but bad at interviewing for jobs. Interview prep is a massive industry.

Thanks to interview prep, lots of people are good at interviewing, and terrible at their jobs.

Someone who is good at interviewing should be a red flag then

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