Knowledge is cheap – Skills are all you need | Hacker News Reader

Knowledge is cheap – Skills are all you need

medium.com

17 pointsgo-native12 comments

    “Never memorise something you can look up in a book!” — Albert Einstein

I resonate so strong with that one. Unfortunately the interviewing processes for selecting software engineers do not reward that at all.

And I have to leave you now for the day guys, as I'm going for practicing for a coding challenge they specified to be prepared with Copilot/AIs turned off. Cheers

I am so frustrated with our current tech interview system that highly relies on Leetcode grinding. I work hard (50+ hours), have two small kids, and have a sick parent. I’m successful at my current job and have climbed from an entry-level employee to a principal software engineer.

It’s hard for me to just work, take care of family commitments, workout a few times a week, keep up with tech, and work on renewing some of my AWS certifications. I know I could make more and get into a higher-tier tech company if I did Leetcode grind prep more. However, it’s unmotivating to do so because spending time on this won’t make me a better engineer or help me learn skills I can apply at work. Our interview system is broken.

And the time you take out of your kids doesn't get back ever again.

The transient nature of it is frustrating.

Wonder if some kind of trial period of 30 or 60 days wouldn't work better and be fair for both sides? Any company tested something like that?

Any company I've worked for has a 60 - 90 day trial period as part of employment. Most that I've seen, never use it due to fear of being sued or it not really being a long enough period to assess how someone will work out.

Unfortunately, our interview system is working exactly as designed for the people with control over it.

Can you elaborate on what "as designed" means in that case? You mean outcome wise?

Isn't this just a helpful tell though? If the interviewer isn't creative enough to speak off script in their field or the company doesn't allow a bit of flexibility in interviews what makes you think they would do interesting work?

Interviews where people just ask these filtering type questions signals to me that this is just another job. If you already have a job its not worth switching as it will just be more of the same. If I can't get into a some what interesting conversation with the interviewer and this is what the company has put forward as their representative, oh well. If my second call isn't with someone I would be working with or knowledgable in the field then whats the point of even talking to them. I interview quite a bit and the amount of phone calls some start-ups and companies want to have as part of the interview is insane. Most of the time the people doing the interviews would rather be doing something else.

People asking to turn AI and Copilot off for interviews were the same people who were asking to do coding tasks on the whiteboard before.

I disagree on that. I find that the people that usually use AI to code don’t actually know what they’re doing. Of course there are exceptions but you really shouldn’t use AI for anything other than autocomplete

Don't you use Google to "show me an example of doing X with Y" so you can rely on not having to remember spurious technicalities and stay focused on the structure of what you're building? Using AI should be more or less an improved version of that and forcing to not use it at all is like asking an architect to be the building worker actually building every bit.

The solution at the top of Google tends to be correct. I would need to verify on Google whether that GPT-4 was giving me is correct or not at least 50% of the time.

The stuff I usually tinker with are perhaps too niched to have GPT-4 reliably respond so I still fall back to documentation or just the library source code if documentation doesn’t exist.

I remember my sister was given a task for the final phase of the recruitment process. Before that everything went very well. She got rejected with the reason being that she used ChatGPT. How unserious and unthoughful approach is that? Everybody out there is using it , its the embodiment of the collective knowledge of humans. Would have it been better if she used Google, youtube etc ? People are still trying to fight the progress, but its a lost fight.

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