656 karma · joined January 31, 2020
Perhaps it isn’t an issue for you, but in case it’s not obvious, calendar entry titles and descriptions can (and have) contained confidential information that would present various forms of business risk if leaked. BigCo corporate IT policy often forbids placing such information on untrusted third-party hardware/software/services.
> The premise of Space: 1999 centres on the plight of the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, a scientific research centre on the Moon. Humanity had been storing its nuclear waste in vast disposal sites on the far side of the Moon, but when an unknown form of electromagnetic radiation is detected, the accumulated waste reaches critical mass and causes a massive thermonuclear explosion on 13 September 1999. The force of the blast propels the Moon like an enormous booster rocket, hurling it out of Earth orbit and into deep space at colossal speed, thus stranding the 311 personnel stationed on Alpha.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unity-lays-off-hundreds-more-c...
No info on which offices might be at risk.
"Huh, that's an original and oddly specific metaphor, I guess"
My first reaction is that I like this idea, but maybe I’m biased because I feel I’d “pass the test” myself (and thus have one additional small way to differentiate myself from pure Leetcoders :)
In most of the environments I’ve worked (except maybe the games companies) I feel this would not have been widely considered an acceptable thing to ask in a generalist interview.
It’s proving hard to sell generalist-ness to recruiters this round. They often lock on to the most recent specific domain I worked in. If anything, they seem to be filtering for people with very specific experience in a specific layer of a specific stacks - because they are getting so many applications, they can be very choosy.
Thanks for the hint anyway - perhaps someone else will benefit.
~15 YOE, FAANG experience, usually only applying to roles I feel I’m at least a halfway good fit for (i.e. not a complete scattergun approach).
I’m (financially) fine for now, which is very fortunate. I wasn’t even laid off - I quit voluntarily and took a sabbatical while the good times were rollin’. But since I started looking seriously again, it’s been hard to shake the sense of time disappearing with nothing to show for it. I’m better at Leetcode (ugh) than I’ve ever been, but so is everyone else, and with the slow drip of actual interviews, I only get to demonstrate it once or twice a month :)
ETA: A few of the recruiters I have talked with have mentioned that they’re getting hundreds of applications within hours of a posting going live. So there is likely a “lost in volume” effect as another commenter mentioned. In fact, for some of the roles where I thought I was a great fit but got a generic rejection without a recruiter call, I’ve had some eventual success simply reapplying for the same role, at least when the recruiting platform allows it (some don’t). For reasons of culture and upbringing, it took me a while to get comfortable not taking that initial, faceless “no” for an answer, but it has worked at least twice so far.
The very idea of "making sense" is a human construct. The universe doesn't care about making sense - to us or otherwise, except to the extent that we are part of it, and some of us care. There's no magical rule that says "the world" should, will, or even can "make sense".
(IMO :)
Unfortunately I can’t find anything on ConsumerLab about my go-to unflavored whey protein powder (Natural Factors). I guess no news is better than bad news.
Did a full loop with a company notorious for asking Leetcode "hard" coding questions. I've been practicing "medium" questions for months, but I practiced about 10 "hards" specifically for this loop and was feeling unusually good - or at least more nervous about the behavioral interviews than the coding.
After 2 behavioral & system design interviews that went OK-ish, there was a coding interview. The first part of the question was to check if a binary tree is a valid binary search tree. I solved that part easily using the first familiar pattern that came to mind, with tests. However, the interviewer seemed confused by/skeptical of my solution, which spiked my anxiety that I had overlooked something horribly obvious or had even solved the wrong problem entirely.
For the second part, he asked me to come up with a plain text representation of a binary search tree and write code to build a tree from its text representation. This isn't even an objectively difficult problem - perhaps "Leetcode medium" at most, and it's the kind of problem I could solve alone in a quiet environment, but I have always struggled to think about recursive problems under time pressure and while "talking through my approach". I have to think hard when I tackle a recursive problem that is new to me (or even a familiar one I haven't seen in a while) - once the pattern clicks, it's dead obvious, but I definitely don't have the kind of brain that finds these problems easy. And in an interview situation, it's as if the talking part of the brain suppresses whatever other part is somewhat capable of grokking recursive problems. Particularly when there is a coding interview immediately following several very "talky" design & behavioral interviews.
Anyway, I flopped around for a while trying to get it right, but quickly ran out of time. The interviewer tried to offer guidance a few times, but this mostly just broke my train of thought, unfortunately.
The interviewer was a soft-spoken guy with an Architect job title, and my anxious, stereotyping brain, insecure about its own algorithmic ability, decided that this is the kind of engineer who can solve Leetcode hards in his sleep, so he's going to consider me extra dumb and incompetent for messing up this pretty "easy" problem. A talker who can't actually code, even. Of course, it's possible he sucks at solving algorithm problems under pressure almost as much as I do :-)
Waiting for the result.
The only not-really-an-exception exception in the article would be the 32-bit Acorn Archimedes; it was generations ahead of the other (8-bit) machines listed, and "microcomputer" is really associated more with the 8-bit machines in my mind, but I think that's because by the time I encountered 16/32-bit machines (Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, 386-based PCs, the Archimedes) in the early 90s, the term "microcomputer" was falling rapidly out of fashion. Those more powerful (and expensive) machines actually launched in the mid-80s and were absolutely still microcomputers in the parlance of the day.
Edit: I find myself wryly weighing this against the ongoing unleashing of LLMs upon the world. Both have shades of clever people prioritizing being and demonstrating clever at the cost of... other stuff. On the bright side, it is distracting me from facepalming at the underlying Pixel bug.
One who has enough experience to see flaws in an existing (or "legacy") system and feel they could do better if they just rewrote it all from scratch, but not enough experience (or too much hubris) to know how well that does or does not go in practice.
He may be right, of course. I'm just pattern matching on what he sounds like...
Also beware of neglecting to fulfil the responsibilities and expectations of the lane you are ultimately being evaluated in, especially earlier in your career. I've given the (common) advice to junior engineers to become the team expert in one thing relevant to the team (something akin to this was even in the SDE1-2 promotion rubric at Amazon), but occasionally that advice needs tempered by subsequent advice on not tunnel-visioning on that one thing (and/or choosing a more relevant thing).
Broadly agree with the article and the general advice here though!
I also had a Voodoo 3 with that box design back then, but different colors (Voodoo 3 3000 model). Actually still have the card...
That's the comparison sirsinsalot was making.
If they really mean US FAANG total compensation, my guess is quant trading firms.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sealioning-int....
Edit: Just realized you said "even with garbage collection", so you weren't talking about Rust. Never mind.
I also remember circa 2012-2014 being required to conduct what are now considered typical modern system design interviews (i.e. as an interviewer) while employed at Amazon, and 90% of (even senior) candidates had no idea how to even begin to approach the "design a system to do X"-type questions. I think this is partly because far fewer people in typical software jobs were building distributed systems back then anyway, and partly because all the YouTube videos and guides like yours didn't exist yet, so nobody was doing the kind of dedicated prep and rote-learning that seems increasingly expected nowadays.
Back then, when the problem was too far from the candidate's real work experience, and they weren't willing to make educated guesses and ask clarifying questions in order to move forward, it was often a struggle (for both of us) to pivot the interview towards something the candidate could tackle and demonstrate their design experience. ("Tell me about a system you designed", i.e. the "reverse" approach, wasn't an acceptable alternative in our rubric.)
Now, just like what happened with coding interviews vs. Leetcode, it seems that a more common challenge for the interviewer is telling the difference between a candidate who is applying real experience and understanding vs. regurgitating/performing what they read in a system design interview prep guide. But that's assuming one is actually more valuable than the other, and I don't have proof of that.
In this case, the collective noun "savings" is used with the singular article "a". This one shows up in both spoken and written American English.
Obviously, I can point intellectually to how and why it's correct, but it still sounds somehow weird and a bit folksy to this immigrant :)
Deploy time: 2022-11-17 17:00
Deploy point: 47.548° N , 121.537° W
Floats all the way around the world before passing within a few hundred feet of the start point. I was quite surprised when the second launch I tried turned up an (almost) eigenfloater of the matrix.
(That word breaks my brain, too - the above is a coping mechanism.)
In the past I recall reading/hearing "trie-tree" (pronounced "try tree") as an ambiguity reducer, but I don't know how common that is now, or ever was.