Yeah, I'm 40+ but takes the time to prepare well for interviews and that has been the key for me. Gotten job offers from all the FAANG's without being very smart. Just go on leetcode and practice for a few months when needed.

This does very unfairly skew towards people like me without kids that can take the time to do this.

Being good at LC requires being smart. Most people won't be able to do "justify text" in 20 minutes without looking up an implementation (and potentially memorizing it).

Not really, most questions have answers and discussion threads - during an interview you can see people just writing up solutions flawlessly - they just memorised them. I have interviewed 100+ people.

I don't think regular coding questions, LC tell you anything meaningful in an interview.

I'm more experienced now, so refuse doing it and recruiters and interviewers get all funny about it. But please, please interview. I know I'm pretty privileged compared to others but I won't ever do a LC question anymore and tell that upfront to Google and the likes. I have canceled loops because of the inflexibilty of some companies in that regard.

Sometimes they tried sneaking it in last minute - also tells you much.

Can I ask why you refuse? For me it is more of a formality at this point. I know it won't tell a lot about me, except I cared enough to put in the hours to get this job, but still you have to do what you have to do. I'm pretty senior as well but don't really see why I should not do this when everyone else has to.

In general though the tech industry has a really hard time hiring senior people, perhaps for this reason. I was at Google for 10+ years and did 100+ interviews, HC etc and once you talked to the people in charge of the process they admitted that the process is really weak for hiring senior (L5+ in Google speak) candidates. They in many ways perform worse than new grads in coding interviews which is not really surprising.

So Google hardly hires anyone experience before you get to the director levels (hardly as a percentage of course).

The other well know secret is that if all of us would try to do an interview unprepared we would probably fail.

As someone who refuse myself I simply think it is a waste of my time. It isn't fun, it doesn't teach me anything I find interesting and it isn't a good way of filtering someone.

I would rather be with my girlfriend, play videogames after work hours, watch netflix, go see some friends.

I lost a team member to Amazon recently, he spent 6 months total (two 3 months stints) preparing for the interview. He bombed in the 1st try and passed in the second.

That's 6 months of your life studying after hours to get a job ... I really have better things to do!

He is there now and he says how his work is not as challenging as the one we were doing from a technical PoV and also how the culture is very toxic compared to ours.

Anyways... he is optimizing to retire early so props to him I guess.

I don't do whiteboard coding. When I thought it was meaningful, or might be meaningful, I did it even though I'm uniformly terrible at it. If I was great at it, I might do it even though I no longer think it's meaningful.

But I'm terrible at it, and I don't think it's meaningful, so I don't do it. Admittedly, it costs me some opportunities, but mainly at companies I'm not sure I want to work for, anyway.

At this stage I'm an old fart with a long resume, and more often than not I get hired by people who already know my work. I guess if I was as bad as my whiteboarding performance makes me look then people who know my work wouldn't want to hire me.

So I think this is partially why these questions actually have value. They cannot completely be faked, you need some level of competence even after months of leetcode.

I witnessed someone who couldn't code fizzbuzz end up at our company (OK it could have been an acquihire or something) then get fired, and then immediately hired at Amazon at a pretty good office. I always had a nagging doubt this person paid someone to stand in for the interviews. Thinking back, who actually cross checks this kind of stuff? Unless they know each other personally or take DNA/fingerprints it wouldn't be very hard to pull it off.

for me atleast that also came with experience. ie that would have been impossible in my first job search. But repeating the process of searching for jobs a few times over a decade, each time i’m preparing for interviews i’m able to build somewhat on previous times to where problems like that are manageable.

Luck is likely not far off from preparation in terms of effect though. Luck could be divided up into separate parts like: chance you get an interviewer who asks easy problems, chance you get a hostile interviewer, chance your interviewer is racist/sexist/tabs-ist/hates-your-face, chance your interviewer loves you for no apparent reason, chance your interview is going through a divorce, etc..

I've seen some of the best interviewers I know still fail at various companies. Including ones they were given offers to before. Luck might not be the #1 component but it sure feels like it's not a distant second.

There are some components to the interview you can directly affect, and some you can't.

By grinding leetcode, you raise the odds that you'll get a problem you've seen before, or at least similar enough that you recognize the way to solve it without having to waste time by starting from absolute scratch. I guess that's still luck, but this is one area you can increase the odds in your favor.

You can't change whether you get a hostile interviewer, etc. of course.

i agree but regarding your example about failing companies that you’ve previously had offers from: ive seen this as well. but it was a case of hubris where the person didn’t put in the work to prepare as hard the second time because of their previous results.

the shitty thing about interviewing is you have to prepare hard every time you approach it

While that might be the case for people you've known - I've seen it with people who prepared even more than the last time.

I've also seen the opposite - right? People don't prepare anywhere near as much as the last time and still get offers. I've seen folks get offers at Google and spent maybe a few hours preparing. Luck is just a very wild component.

Even when you prepare for months, your preparation needs to be related to what you'll actually see in the interview to pay off. Because few companies actually tell people what to expect in the interview, even preparation involves luck.