Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

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> Unlike airline pilots (or I'm certain many other professions), every company in the valley insists on re-interviewing a candidate in their own custom and unique way, instead of trusting some sort of an industry-wide certificate only achievable through a standardized test. Wonder if this will ever be solved.

The airplane pilot interview process on top of the standardized government certifications includes:

- On-line application (resume and cover letter)

- On-line Psychometric/Aptitude testing (sometimes this is hands-on, on site for some airlines)

- Video Interview, SKYPE or Telephone interview

- Assessment Day (includes: Technical Questions / Panel Behavioral Interview / Scenario Based Questions / Flight Planning Exercise and sometimes a Clinical Assessment)

- Sim Test

- Referee Check

- Medical Check

The exact details differ by airline and I'm assuming the risk profile of the cargo (ie: passengers or not).

Gosh, not so different from software engineers, is it? Except you also need to do a bunch of bureaucratic certifications on top of that.

Not to mention all of the licensing, regulations, and formalized training hours that you have to put in just to reach that point. It’s all substantially harder than studying LeetCode for a short slice of your life.

It’s amazing how often I hear about how easy interviews are in other professions, according to engineers who dislike coding interviews.

Then you look into those other professions and it turns out changing jobs is actually a lot harder than the internet comments would lead you to think.

It's completely different from software engineering interviews. The process you described for airline pilots gets to the actual qualifications for the job. Whereas for software engineers, literally no one needs to reverse a binary tree yet they base the decision on in large part on this sort of question. Ideally, the BS would be encapsulated in a certification so that interviews can focus on the real useful stuff.

So needing to get yearly re-certifications in Leetcode questions is viewed as preferably by you than having to only study them for interviews? And spending 10+ hours on coding exercises, un-paid, per job is also seen as preferably by you to the current status on top of the yearly Leetcode certification? On top of a full panel of behavioral interviews? Plus needing to take an IQ style assessment online before each job (see the second item on my list)?

I'll take having to study Leetcode every few years over all of that any day of the week.

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