Everyone is bad at everything they haven't tried to do. You can be good at anything. I can't ride a bicycle but if I wanted, I could be good. Just gotta go and do it. Unfortunately doing things is work. Solving abstract problems is the main thing engineers do, if you're not doing that then you're not really engineering you're just copy pasting text.
I had a 3 and 2 year old when I prepared for interviews and I did alright enough to get a job at a FAANG (and it's not Amazon). I took about 2 months and blocked some time every single day. I still managed to cook meals for 4 and put two kids to bed, and wake up at 1am and 3am for night time milk feedings... yes that's not delegated to a housewife it's done by me.
Glad that worked out for you. After a day of watching my now 1.5 year old the brain fog sets in. I tried grinding Leetcode for a while but the pace of progress was glacial and nowhere near the recommended pace for BigCo interviews. I'm glad I went back to doing my own thing even though nothing has come of it yet. Doing Leetcode felt like memorizing party tricks that wouldn't even guarantee a job at the end.
Honestly, do you want a BigCo job? Would it make you happy? The experience of being a tiny cog in an unthinkingly vast machine is more alienating than you might think, even if you like the money.
I think lots of those who stay on long-term in that environment, say >3-4 years, effectively become institutionalised, condemned to spend the rest of their life philosophising about whether they can ever be L8 material. These are people who are, by and large, smart but not wise. Yes, the money is good, for an employee, but it barely equals what even a small business owner could make - and these are people whose smarts would allow them to thrive in the software niche, at least with a minimal amount of commercial nous.
The truth is that FAANG (or FAAG, considering what's going on at Netflix?) keeps these people there by creating a value system. If you've ever read the internet-classic 'Five Geek Social Fallacies' post (https://plausiblydeniable.com/five-geek-social-fallacies/), you'll know that people like us - frankly - are suckers for taxonomy. If you tell them that they are the best because they work for you, and the only thing that can make them any better as an engineer is creating maximum returns for the Borg, and surround them with others who mirror and validate that behaviour, they will fall for it for the rest of their lives.
Don't fall for it. There are a fuck ton of smart people at FAANG companies – that's one of the few marketing points which is unvitiated in its merit, they do scoop up very many of the smartest (again, smart-not-wise) people in the world – but that doesn't mean the only way to be smart is to join. It doesn't mean you - as a unique human being - will be happy there. Carve your own path, be suspicious of people selling you axiologies and hierarchies, find a middle road between excessive cynicism and excessive credulity.
It's something I consider every couple of years. But unfortunately I see a lot of similarities in the hiring process for much smaller interesting companies hiring remotely that seem to be cargo culting BigCo hiring practices. BigCo from my example were just the only ones to be open enough about what will occur during interviews. Is it something fulfilling? Probably not, but I have 5 years of practically unpaid work to get caught up on.
What exactly did you do during that block of time? As someone in a similar situation to you I'd like to begin getting some practice, but I'm not sure where to start. Are there any resources or websites that stood out as being particularly helpful?
Not quite but almost: Leetcode doesn't evaluate programming proficiency but ability to solve complex and abstract problems using programming. Doing so doesn't require being good at programming but being good at solving problems, and doing so using a programming language. It doesn't require knowing a language well, but only well enough to solve the problem.
This is fine, except when the candidate knows substantially more than the interviewer about how to solve the problem. I was once asked to implement a spsc circular buffer, and I used C++11 atomics rather than a mutex. I wrote up a working solution, but most of the interviewer's followup questions fundamentally didn't map to my wait-free solution. I spent most of the time explaining to the interviewer how atomics and non-blocking algorithms work. The FAANG rejection email came a few days later.
So I don't think these interviews evaluate the candidate's ability to solve complex and abstract problems. They seem to evaluate the candidate's ability to grind contrived sophomore-level computer science homework. Experience solving the real-life version of the problem rather than the academic one is unwanted.
this illustrates the problem very well. your lock free solution is superior yet the interviewer had no clue and you only know about this solution due to experience which is not what leetcode optimizes for.
String problems are rare, though may come up more in search engine companies.
But manipulating sequences comes up a lot in many contexts. Usually it's sequences of more complex things: instructions, packets, files, polygons. It's hard to assign tests directly on those, because you have to explain the objects themselves first. So it's a reasonable shortcut to test ability to manipulate sequences of characters.
I am on the interview team for the company I work for and I wrote what some consider to be our canonical python solution (fastest and simplest) for one of the problems we use. I had to look up the syntax for a "for loop" because I hadn't written python since my first year at university. To me, being able to stitch together simple concepts present in almost all mainstream programming languages doesn't mean I know python, it means I know how dynamic programming works. I don't know the python ecosystem (history, present, or future), know the standard library, know what idiomatic code looks like, deeply understand what makes the language unique, have the mindset of a python programmer, etc. Maybe I just have a high threshold for feeling like I "know" a language.
i did a leetcode interview in c++ and didn’t remember some syntactic details of lambdas and that was the end of it. please stop with this nonsense that interviewers are understanding and that you can look things up or that you will be able to take your time to produce the optimal solution to a problem.
Well I can't speak for other interviewers especially at other organizations, but I try very hard to make it a positive experience. In fact I'll give as much help as necessary to get to a working solution, within reason. I would much rather fix the lambda syntax myself or help the candidate find an example on stackoverflow so we can go back to the interesting part. If the interview ends with a working solution but needed a ton of help, the candidate probably did not pass but maybe they learned something. And maybe they'll tell their peers that it seemed like a place where they could fail without embarrassment, collaborate, and learn.
This doesn't seem right at all. I can kludge together a solution to an arbitrarily complex problem in any language, but that doesn't mean I'm writing it in a way that can be extended and developed upon by other people. The latter is also what takes up the majority of development time.
Airline pilots are professionals, car drivers are just trying to get somewhere... paying attention isn't their full-time job. Also building autopilot software for a near empty 3-dimensional space is much easier than for complex roads of varying shapes, moving obstacles, country regulations and different road markings...
It's not because we achieve more with less code that we write less code. Instead we want more. Doing speech recognition would have been unthinkable with punch cards... plenty of things are still unthinkable today, but maybe not tomorrow.
I think your inability to find a developer position has nothing to do with your ability to develop. I recruit for my company and the most important is how you sell yourself. Every company looks for a very specific profile that fits.
If you feel uncomfortable about your skills, you need to build a portfolio of projects you've worked on / created / designed... Then you can talk about those, how you designed them and why, and that can fix a poor technical interview. Those also help convey your passion.
10 rejections is insignificant, I think nobody has faced fewer rejections than that for anything, whether it's finding a job or finding funding for a startup or even finding a date.
I would need more information to know what's going wrong, but 10 rejections isn't even an indication that anything is wrong. If the technical interviews are not going well then it "could" mean:
- you're not applying for the right position
- you're looking for something you don't have experience in
- you don't show passion or a good attitude
- you seem desperate and mostly care for the money
- you show a lack of interest in the company and their products
Maybe you are missing out on a lot of opportunities:
- You can do freelancing
- You can find a non-tech company to work for, you'd be surprised by how many need developers: hospitals, government, transportation companies, airlines, insurances, banks... Have you sent your resume to Bank of America?
- You can find a startup that's in a field you kinda know and offer your help
- You can talk to a staffing company, they make money by finding you a job
- Go to events (eg. PHP event, Ruby on Rails, startups events, conferences...) and do networking. It's the easiest way to find a job, though you need to be good at talking to people.
- Look for jobs on angel.co, monster.com, dice.com
