My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable

Re:My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable by ryandrake on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @01:58PM (#26796415)

Not just FAANG jobs. In almost every job I've ever had, the interview was by far the hardest part. There's such an enormous stream of candidates, and no baseline "bar exam" to qualify people, so companies have to make the interview bar extremely high in order to be able to manage the candidate flow and sufficiently minimize false positives.

I'd guess 99% of engineers never have to do CS trivia as part of their day-to-day job.

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Re:My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable by decafninja on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @04:01PM (#26798332)

I've been on interviews at some companies that have no brand name recognition/prestige, and probably do not have legions of candidates trying to get in. But they've thrown me harder leetcode questions than FAANG.

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Re:My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable by sanderjd on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @04:19PM (#26798645)

It's a bit perverse but the problem is that hiring people who can't do the job well is much worse for a company like that than it is for a big company with lots of slack in the system. Not only do they have to pay a person that isn't contributing enough, but the more senior folks on the team have to spend more time mentoring, so it's a double drain. This drives the process toward a higher bar after getting burned a few times.

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Re:My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable by decafninja on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @05:04PM (#26799298)

I can understand that - but if I (or my company) were in that situation, I would not even use leetcode interviews.

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Re:My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable by wdb on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @06:50PM (#26800485)

I like to ask simple questions, and then dig further into once they answered it correctly. You would be surprised how many ex-employees from FAANG like companies fail it.

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Re:My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable by decafninja on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @09:09AM (#26806543)

Simple questions, as in simple leetcode questions?

FWIW, most FAANG employees seem to admit that if they had to redo their interview, odds are they're more likely to fail than pass. Goes to show how much luck is involved in the process.

I think it's gotten harder too. Maybe in the past it really was about trying to see how the candidate thinks and solve problems. But now it seems like all all of that is secondary to getting the optimal solution. Two of my friends in Google who got in ~10 years ago say that it's definitely gotten harder from what they see.

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Re:My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable by vlod on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @05:05PM (#26813076)

> Simple questions, as in simple leetcode questions?

I believe they mean e.g. "tell me what happens when you type https://example.com" in a browser.

You can go deep into tcp/ip, dns, how ssl encryption works, how urls on a server get mapped to specific ports, load balancing/round-robin etc.

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Re:My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable by sanderjd on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @06:44PM (#26800416)

I have been in that situation and I still have no idea what I'd do.

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Re:My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable by toyg on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @04:08PM (#26798464)

> There's such an enormous stream of candidates, and no baseline "bar exam" to qualify people

That could be trivially fixed tomorrow, either by universities or (better) by an accredited certification body.

I mean, I'm sure there weren't bar exams for lawyers and professionals either, at some point in history. What prevents us from creating one for sw developers? As long as it didn't require additional attainments just to sit for it (i.e. you should not need a university degree), it would make the whole process more efficient for literally thousands of companies.

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Re:My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable by hackinthebochs on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @05:27PM (#26799550)

There's a significant number of employed, productive engineers that are apprehensive about passing such a test. They will fight tooth-and-nail to prevent any gatekeeping to the field. Personally, I would be happy to have my salary double overnight.

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Re:My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable by thu2111 on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @03:20AM (#26803999)

What do you think a cs degree is? We don't use them as automatic proof of competence because lots of people get good degrees but cannot program, or enter the field in other ways but can.

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Re:My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable by toyg on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @04:56AM (#26804592)

As you state yourself, cs degrees fail at being proof of competence. They are too long, expensive, and unfocused. Hence why we really could use something else, simpler and more accessible.

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Re:My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable by thu2111 on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @09:21AM (#26806687)

Yeah, but which institutions would design such exams? CS degrees aren't ideal but at least they're designed by people who have CS training and are programmers. If a government decided to set such an exam it'd probably end up requiring some sort of certification in enterprise .NET development.

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Re:My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable by toyg on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @11:33AM (#26808499)

Accountants and lawyers manage to set their own standards, surely developers can do that too.

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Re:My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable by thu2111 on Thursday April 15, 2021 @04:22AM (#26817603)

Maybe. I agree that's a strong argument, but I think for both accountancy and law the standards are in both cases defined by governments, as the professions are largely about ensuring compliance with what governments require. The professional certifications can thus be just checking your knowledge of what the rules say, without getting into the question of whether the rules are correct.

In software it's not like that. There are very few laws on the book about how to write software, so there's no single authority that defines the right answer or the scope of reasonable questions. It's far more open. Even just picking a set of programming concepts would immediately cause controversy. Like, should monads and type-classes be a part of the professional qualifications? Most programmer would say no, because Haskell isn't widely used in industry. But CS degrees do sometimes test people on that sort of thing!

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Re:My startup failed, then I found out I was unemployable by sanderjd on Thursday April 15, 2021 @09:21AM (#26820126)

This seems like a decent point for accounting but not really for law. Certifying a lawyer is not just about a finite set of things they have to know, it's about fundamentals and the ability to ingest facts and form an argument. Similar to your Haskell point, there are parts of the law that not all lawyers need to know, but are expected to be able to figure out as needed and the certification aims to check for that ability.

(Also, in both cases, the government hires members of the profession to define the standards.)

I'm convinced we could have a bar exam for software engineering, but I'm not at all convinced that we should. It would make my life easier personally, but it would keep a bunch of people who followed less traditional paths out of the industry and I think that would be bad.

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