Caltech's CS interview prep course

Re:Caltech's CS interview prep course by Apocryphon on Sunday February 27, 2022 @04:46PM (#30492882)

You're completely right, and this actually is another layer to the whiteboarding technical interviews are broken narrative: there are no objective standards, even if there is huge overlap in the content being interviewed from company to company (or even team to team). A very discouraging aspect about these interviews is that the rubric is completely hidden away from candidates and feedback is almost never provided. At least a licensure or certification test would be more transparent.

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Re:Caltech's CS interview prep course by majormajor on Sunday February 27, 2022 @05:23PM (#30493327)

There are no objective standards for the output of the software development process. It's a unique mishmash of building the blueprints and the final artifact at the same time. Not because we want to be a bunch of cowboys, but because the unique ability of it to be that flexible, and to be patched over time, means speed is possible in a way it just isn't in other fields, and the market has rewarded companies that move fast.

So until that's changed, I find it hard to see how we could standardize developer hiring. My coworkers and I all wear a different amount of hats with varying competence. The number and variation of certs required would be rough! "I'm level 4 backend engineer with level 3 data design [streaming level 1, traditional ETL level 7], level 1 hacky frontend dev, and level 2 devops" - sheesh, now I'm spending my whole time keeping those up to date.

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Re:Caltech's CS interview prep course by Apocryphon on Sunday February 27, 2022 @05:26PM (#30493360)

You are talking about the nitty-gritty aspects of actual software engineering. I’m talking about doing away with the redundancy of having to retake the industry-wide Leetcode fizzbuzz portion instead of passing it once.

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Re:Caltech's CS interview prep course by majormajor on Sunday February 27, 2022 @05:40PM (#30493497)

I'm asking that since the job itself is wildly unstandardized, how on earth are we supposed to standardize a single "industry-wide" credential for interviews?

There's no "industry-wide Leetcode fizzbuzz portion" - Leetcode and fizzbuzz are famously on complete opposite sides of the whiteboard spectrum! I've only been asked actual fizzbuzz once, and can't immediately think of any other duplicate whiteboard problems I've seen either. Many of them aren't ones I've seen on Leetcode, and would probably be on the "easy" scale there if they were there.

I couldn't pick out any single problem that would make everyone at all my last few jobs happy, let alone the whole rest of the industry.

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Re:Caltech's CS interview prep course by Apocryphon on Sunday February 27, 2022 @06:13PM (#30493831)

Leetcode is the new fizzbuzz, I meant.

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