I don't think Dan Luu is struggling for work.
So the question is do you want to hire someone like Dan Luu or not? If the answer is yes, then you might want to consider how your interview process might interact with such a person. If you are thinking from the perspective of someone doing the hiring (as those articles seem to be), it is nonsensical to simply respond by saying "well, the candidates just need to be more submissive and compliant to whatever our process is."
Perhaps Dan Luu is a unique snowflake and/or nobody needs to hire someone like that. Or it could be that there are quite a large number of developers with attitudes and experience that lead to similarly unproductive or inefficient interactions with tech interview processes because those processes may be fixating on having the candidate do a specific performance rather than trying to understand what individuals can offer and whether that would be useful when added to the existing team. It could be that such developers would be as good or better fit, in a lot of cases, than people who can do oscar-winning interview performances.
This is the problematic logic I was trying to highlight: It's written as though he's infallible. He knows the correct answers to the interview questions, but he also deduces what his interviewers are thinking and why they're wrong.
The other possibility is that maybe the interviewers know what they're doing when they decline him, even when he answers the questions correctly. Interviews are about more than just reciting the correct answers to the questions, but he only discusses them as a sort of pass/fail quiz where the candidate is supposed to guess what the interviewer wants to hear.
My perspective is likely quite different as a hiring manager. The part where he talks about Palantir walking him out the door despite correctly answering the questions as fast as they can deliver is the kind of thing that happens when the interviewers agree that someone is smart, but isn't a good fit for the team. If you do enough interviews, you eventually come across people far more brilliant and successful than yourself whom you would nevertheless not really see fitting into your company's work culture. Someone who openly boasts about dodging interview questions and debating interviewers because they think they can read the interviewer's mind (and they are wrong) fits this description. You know they'll do fantastic things somewhere, but they're not the kind of person you're looking for to fill the open position on your team.
> I don't think Dan Luu is struggling for work.
Neither do I! I never meant to imply as much. Dan posted the long Twitter thread over a period of several weeks, so it appeared in my timeline frequently. I only brought it up as an example of his writing style, not his career.
In one interview where I would have gotten it but didn't the reason was basically I wasn't submissive, the tech lead was in my opinion rude and so when he made some technical mistakes I pointed them out. Why did I do that? Because I did not need the job. If I had needed the job I would have been submissive.
Perhaps a lot of interviews fail to hire Dan because the interview process is geared towards hiring someone who needs the job. Why is this? No idea, especially as lots of interviews take place with someone who already has a job and the new place wants to attract. But for some reason companies want to attract flies with vinegar and not honey, contra the old adage.
on edit: regarding on why I did that, well I also did it because the lead was rude. Otherwise I wouldn't have pointed out when they were wrong.
Im asking as someone who does not generally read his blog.
When I started at a company, I listened to stand-ups of 'yeah 4 weeks' and whined I could do it -today-. And I could. I was a rockstar, everyone else was an old lump.
FF to today and I realize how much I didn't know. Mostly business relations, relations with product, proper testing and pipeline integration, and honestly...just thinking. I used to be prolific and just write and write. Today I think way more than I write, and accomplish more.
Some people value extreme speed.
Others are impressed by somebody who will dive down a rabbit hole and follow however deep it leads, discovering the linker bug or kernel driver interaction that causes a failure, and patching it.
Or maybe you are impressed that they go away for a month, talking to nobody, and come back with a complete system all ready to ship.
Or they write libraries that everybody uses because they are so exactly what people need.
Or they are always available to explain things to junior people and get them going in the right direction.
Each of those would be unusually valuable, at some places, and would have trouble getting any recognition, at others.
I think describing what he's doing as "bragging" is fundamentally misreading him. He's just very honest, regardless of how people will perceive it. And he needs to work in environments where that trait will be perceived positively, because he feels it's not an option to turn it off.
I'm sure that, for people who put up a social front as easily as they breathe, Dan's style can be viewed as simply a more elaborate social front, a form of peacocking that he feels he can get away with because of his technical skill.
It's a weird world we live in, where being honest is viewed as the strangest, most exotic and elaborate conceit.
> he seems incapable of accepting that maybe he's doing something wrong or that he's simply not a good fit for the jobs he applied for. Instead, his implied analysis is that the interviewers are simply wrong, and that they're making a mistake to ask him those questions and eventually decline him.
In the thread you linked, he links another thread (https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1447268693075841024) where his interviewer was wrong. And what's fun about Dan Luu is, he actually cares about answering a question correctly more than he cares about the intense pressure to "play the game" - that is, to conform, be agreeable, and affirm the viewpoint of whoever has power in a situation so that they like him. He wants to work in a position where that tendency is valued. Sadly, it usually isn't.
Personally I don't take it to the extreme he does, but I admire him for doing so. Sometimes there is nothing wrong with you; it is the world that's wrong.
You can adapt to survive in that wrong world, sure, but that doesn't make the observation incorrect.
Dan Luu is one of my favorite currently-active bloggers. He's obviously a smart person with a good amount of experience in specific areas.
However, I have to agree with your assessment. He has a tendency to present his personal anecdotes and perspective as the infallible ground truth and build elaborate essays and logic around it. I hesitate to talk about it because I think his blog is valuable, albeit if the reader can take it as one person's perspective rather than the absolute truth.
The biggest example of this effect is his Twitter thread about his tendency to fail interviews ( https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1470890494775361538 ). He spends a lot of time bragging about arguing with interviewers, dodging questions instead of trying to provide answers, and how he's never written production code that talks to a DB, performs an RPC call, or connects to an API. It's not at all surprising that anyone would be struggle to pass interviews like this, but he seems incapable of accepting that maybe he's doing something wrong or that he's simply not a good fit for the jobs he applied for. Instead, his implied analysis is that the interviewers are simply wrong, and that they're making a mistake to ask him those questions and eventually decline him.
The interview topic is especially challenging because blaming the interviewer is so very appealing to his audience of developers (who all abhor interviews and hate rejection even more). I think my disappointment comes from the fact that he's well-positioned to display some humility and teach some lessons about how someone can learn from their shortcomings, yet instead he uses his platform to further demonize his interviewers and make some worst-case assumptions about why he didn't get these jobs.
I think the best way to read this blog, like any, is to remember that the author is just another person with another set of perspectives and opinions. There's a lot of value there, as long as you take it with a grain of salt and remain open to other lines of reasoning.