1,236 karma · joined September 29, 2012
if you are concerned about $200 for a replacement kit you should probably sell them to someone else
then charge them a fraction of that
in other words it benefits cultures heavily into all kinds of olympiads from age 5 on… i will not elaborate further as you know what i mean.
companies need to educate you on the job. that will never change and it is unreasonable to demand you already have all skills ready to go. but that is where we are in the US….
it is also crazy that you need to copy paste job requirements into your CV role per role. a resume or CV is something you make ONCE. but i guess HR drones are too dumb to read so that is where we are.
this limits people’s mobility as they are then glued to a set of company specific skills
this was supposed to be how it works but then some indian dude came along and made a platform and then some woman wrote a book and got in a HR decision making position in a FAANG and destroyed the value of everyone’s degrees by introducing coding interviews you can only pass if you grind them
You probably already know this but there are really advanced Lego Technics sets you can buy. The older used stuff probably is more interesting as the newer sets have probably been dumbed down since I started building Technics 35 years ago.
the reasoning is that it's ok to pass on excellent candidates. as a business owner I find that a real problem. I would prefer the best, not just people who had time to grind leetcode and rapidly crank out solutions to standard problems you can find online. i think it would be better if interviews erred on the side of caution and preferred to let people through especially if they have experience. you can always fire them if they don't perform. there is no job security in the US anyway.
I don't know where you've been doing coding interviews. I'm pretty confident there are leetcode type problems you will have a hard time with and won't be able to complete in the allotted time. I'll share one of my experiences with a FAANG.
My interviewer first spent a lot of time "getting to know me" and asking trick questions, and stressing he also previously founded a startup, then handed me a problem and demanded I find the optimal solution in ~10 minutes and also wanted me to talk while working on the problem. I could not remember the arguments to a function and couldn't concentrate. It bombed.
A few days later I was sent prep material for an interview at a different FAANG. One of the videos was the author of cracking the coding interview solving this exact problem on a whiteboard. It took her more than an hour to arrive at the optimal solution.
So in short: 1) interviewer had unrealistic expectations
2) interviewer wasted time with introductions given his expectations
3) interviewer asked trick questions to determine whether I am a liar even though it was pretty clear from the introductory conversations that was highly unlikely
4) interviewer created an awkward interviewing environment and triggered my anxiety
5) interviewer thought I should be able to code while talking
6) interviewer probably forgot how long it took him to solve the problem originally and probably never timed that