Nobody likes being judged in an interview, but on the other hand it has been fascinating to watch how the current style of tech interviews has opened doors for a lot of smart, motivated people who aren’t necessarily born into situations that usher them straight into prestigious tech jobs.<p>Yes, there is an entire industry around interview prep. Yet it’s also possible to do all of your interview prep without ever giving a dollar to anyone. LeetCode basic is free. There are numerous free websites that will walk you through the solutions to LeetCode problems. There are countless YouTube videos helping build interview skills.<p>Tech interviews aren’t necessarily fun, but I actually think it’s great that they’ve allowed us to move past the situations where people were trying to coast in on the reputation of their university or by getting an “internship” from their dad’s friend’s company. Letting people compete on a level playing field of technical interviews, albeit imperfect, is one of the things I’ve come to appreciate about the tech industry.
What few people put to words is that prepping for tech interviews can be the single most significant financial decision of a person's life. Working at BigCo. vs Normal Tech vs Traditional Company can have 1.5x to 2x impact on compensation in a <i>single</i> year - let alone an entire career.<p>When you consider the work you do to earn money/whatever else you value at a job the step increase by passing tech interviews at a big company is almost always worth way more time and/or money than many people put towards it. I think students in particular need to realize the importance of these kinds of interviews relative to their schoolwork if they're forced to make the tradeoff.<p>I am a small participant in the Interview Prep industry since I purchased Cracking the Coding Interview - but it's no surprise people are willing to pay for interview prep (assuming it's both quality material and the individual needs that particular kind of help) when the ROI is so high
The Product interview has also become a fascinating game. You need to be able to apply specific case frameworks that you would never use in real life, at breakneck speeds that you would never work at in real life.<p>Stumbling into one of these without prep is like showing up for a tryout on a football team and finding out that you'll actually be playing Tecmo Super Bowl with a controller you've never held before. And slowly realizing that all the people interviewing you are fantastic video game players who have never been in the weight room, and they spend all day LARPing.
Something I found interesting after going through a few interview processes is the amount of prep material that the in-house recruiters provide. At both a FAANG and a multi-billion-but-not-FAANG company, I was provided hours worth of prep material for the tech screen, followed up by more hours of prep material for the more in-depth marathon-style interviews. Ten page PDFs with links to hackerrank and tech talks!<p>I get that recruiters are incentivised to get new hires, but the whole "here's this tedious interview process, and here's everything you need to study to be able to pass it" makes me feel like they're optimizing for people who are tolerant of dealing with a lot of bullshit.
It's been interesting to watch the sort of "transformation" the industry goes through, even just since I started college back in 2011.<p>For 5-7 years "Cracking the Coding Interview" was all the rage, practically everyone said to review it, do the practice problems, etc. In the past 3-4 years it's become "make sure you practice your Leetcode an hour a day! Even some hards!", and then from what I've seen while interviewing and practicing the past 2 months, there are websites dedicated to providing study plans, additional review, recommended problems to practice to review specific patterns, etc. Youtube channels, even.<p>Those last few are also pretty heavily monetized. Leetcode has some limits in place to nudge people to pay for Premium plans. Some websites require a membership. Youtube videos and blogs usually have a plethora of ads.<p>Of course you don't _need_ to pay anything, but it tends to help more people.
I'm a tech lead in my team. Honestly, I am terrible at whiteboard questions. I've long forgotten a lot of details that I've studied so hard in my CS degree. If I go to interviews right now without adequate preparation I am very likely to bomb pretty hard! But that doesn't mean I'm a bad developer or that I neglect my duties as a tech lead. It means that interviews are testing something pretty far removed from what we're doing at work.<p>It's even worse in some companies that just give you a bunch of CS questions to solve, because a lot of the time it's possible for candidates to just memorize a bunch of interview questions and rely on that, regardless of their actual problem solving skills.<p>There might a better way.<p>When I interview candidates I've started putting less emphasis on O-notation algorithms and how to optimize them, which is pretty much the norm in most tech interviews (make this faster, do this in-place, etc), and started putting more emphasis on the candidate's understanding of IO, specifically when working with databases, congestion, rate limiting, queues, the stuff you actually encounter when working on real projects in my domain. Asking open ended questions and basically building a tiny project together.<p>The experience has been enlightening. You can immediately tell the person's analytical thinking because most of what they learn in "interview prep" isn't directly helpful in this situation. You can see some people frantically trying to match the problem with something they've seen in a video or a book instead of stopping for a moment and giving it some actual thought.<p>At the present I'm pretty certain that asking a person to build something is the best approach to understand their skill level. But this requires more time from both parties.
To me, the rationale behind interviewing by programming puzzles seems to be: the candidates who pass are either truly smart to be able to solve the problems on the spot without preparing or diligent enough to have prepared for them.<p>As such, puzzle-based interviews are optimised to reject candidates who are not smart enough and have either not bothered to play the interview game or those who don't have what it takes to learn to play the game.
This industry dug its own grave with the whole "hazing-as-interview" paradigm. As a senior dev I have zero interest in ever bothering with process again. I'll never leave my current company at this point. The possibility of making 10-20% more money simply isn't worth it.
I'm curious if there is any actual advantage to this leetcode style of interview. It is nice that it helps people without degrees get a fair shake, but does it actually correlate with success in the job? I have always favored the assignment style of interview since it gives me a chance to show that I can actually build a fully functioning piece of software that we can discuss, as opposed to solving a little brainteaser problem.
I can't stand how this tech test stuff developed. What other industries do this?<p>I applied for a job recently and their first response was a blanket reply with a codility test. Which I ignore and moved on to other opportunities. They contacted after a week asking about it and I had to inform them I would look at other opportunities without a test barrier.<p>Best jobs and places I worked came because of informal conversations during the interview.
If you care about making more money put your head down and grind those leetcode problems. The investment is just a few months and the return is quite impressive. Others are either happy where they are or read about how interviews suck. As Bjarne Stroustroup said "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses".
me: Hi, I know how to fix the problems I see in your software and increase the performance. I have years of experience with this and successful products.<p>interviewer: um, ok, I'm not interested in that, we will spend the next 20 minutes talking about linked lists and arrays followed by random leet code live coding. Also, be sure to spend a large amount of the limited time talking about various solutions to random questions and come up with the optimal solution. I will make sure there is no time at the end for your questions.
There's one very significant difference between standardized tests and tech interviews.<p>Standardized tests are designed such that preparing for the test isn't helpful.<p>Current tech interviews aren't like that at all.
1. Technical interview prep companies give structured learning and practice to people that aren't good with structure.<p>2. Algorithm technical interviews provide a structure for companies to compare skill levels of different candidates against each other<p>3. Neither is the best scenario for either party but in a chaotic world without structure, each one is trying the best they can towards filling a job role by meeting with someone in a span of 45 minutes.<p>Personally as a founder of an interview prep company for data scientist (<a href="https://www.interviewquery.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.interviewquery.com/</a>), I find that we try to just teach candidates concepts through bite-sized problems and repetition. Some people might hate it, but we're essentially playing the game that the companies are holding up. So you might as well learn to get good at it.