Hacker News Reader

Comment by InkCanon | Hacker News Reader

If one takes a step back, it's quite ridiculous and apparent the system is really irrational. Why would you ask a new grad about system design? How many new grads have actually had to deal with millions of users?

View on HN

fwiw from my experience, the really strong new grads have either done relevant projects back at college or can come up with reasonably good answers on the spot (my team does a lot of pure algorithm/modeling/distributed system work so those are actually practical questions).

I do agree leetcode makes those questions significantly less useful

This is where the signaling comes in. Those grads almost certainly didn't have a real need to solve it, but knew that this was a signal companies were looking for, so they trained for it. So there was some correlation with effort and grit. The is a reasonably strong argument for leetcode/system design etc that what you're looking for in grads is grit/effort/energy, because they have very little experience.

I wonder though, if this is also why we see these cyclical rounds of massive layoffs. From personal experience, I know multiple individuals who took this route and most were good but not exceptional engineers in real life. None of them recent grads. All of them not particularly excited at the prospect of actually working at Big Tech, but getting paid and almost all mentioned "rest and vest" at some point in the conversation..........

Reply on news.ycombinator.com