OP here. Yeah... throwaway interviews are a way to do it. The nice thing about interviewing.io is that you don't have to deal with all the recruiter stuff and scheduling and getting in their process in the first place. You just book practice whenever you want it. AND you actually get interview feedback (with specific actionable things you need to work on... way beyond just pass/fail).
I have a friend who does this with companies that he finds morally repugnant, except he takes it a step further and gets free vacations out of it by having them fly him in for the onsite in New York and put him up in a nice hotel the day before and the day after. He usually walks out after a couple of hours and spends the day visiting tourist stuff.
I found this to be inefficient use of my time personally. 30 minute interview to go over what's already written on the job description. A 30 minute to 60 minute interview with the manager or some higher up to see if you're the right cultural fit. Only after can you go through the on-site process.
If you view every minute an interviewer is doing actual work as harmful to the world, then wasting said interviewers time would be even more of an ethical good would it not?
Heck I've done it with companies that are (probably) not doing anything wrong ethically, simply because it was their recruiters who hounded me in the first place. If you are that desperate for me to interview despite me telling you I'm not interested, don't then blame me for wasting your time by doing mock interviews with your engineers.
Anecdotal but the secret to success from my personal experience is to:
1) Never stop looking around (okay, may be not when you have less than one year tenure in the current company)
2) Interview when you really can afford to fail the interview and still not care (for example when things are going well in your current company)
3) Treat it like a collaborative session than a actual interview.
4) Don't reject offers for petty reasons like not agreeing with a companies ethics/tools they use/what work they do. It's work and that is why they pay people to do it. So consider all these factors and ask for a higher package and if you really like to work on something else, aim for good work life balance and use that time to do what you want.
5) Shamelessly sell yourself. The 5 mins intro that you provide in each round in a lot of cases can decide how the rest of the round goes.
I would do this, except even an interview for a position I didn't want would make me dreadfully nervous. There's something about paying for someone to help that reduces the anxiety. That said, I'm not an engineer so this particular service isn't for me.
I signed up for a dedicated coaching program with interviewing.io and ended up getting a refund because I didnt think they were actually very good at coaching.
The platform seems like its mostly useful for people who are already good at technical interviews, or at least good at solving technical problems, and just need practice writing code in front of other people or in a live setting.
Has anyone used interviewing.io with good/great results?
at least good at solving technical problems, and just need practice writing code in front of other people or in a live setting.
I think you mean this as a minor criticism, but this seems to be exactly the point of the service. To figure out a way to find people that are actually competent at the work itself, but not in the somewhat uncorrelated skill of public speaking & live coding w/ an audience.
Also a good way of identifying people that haven't gone to top tier elite schools but are just as good or better as those graduates: Recruiters at a FAANG might disregard a graduate from Generic State University w/ 2-3 years of experience under normal conditions, but if you get one that is willing to place a $1024 bet on themselves and then passes the tech interview with flying colors, it's a much easier sell.
Now, with all that said, after 6 years I'd still really like to know what their long-term outcomes are. What's their typical tenure at that job, where do they land for $job +1, +2, etc.?
I should have been more specific. Has anyone had a good experience with the dedicated coaching program? I know the value of a mock interview. The coaching program didnt see to provide the value that they advertised for me. I wanted to know if I'm unique or if other have had the same experience.
I did a 10 session package (got it on sale) that focused on (distributed) system design and ML system design. I felt confident in the coding piece, but I didn't have the opportunity to work on large scale systems in my previous role. I believed that I could obtain a sufficient level of knowledge by self-study and practice, but I also have a toddler that takes up a lot of time and energy, so I wanted to be more efficient. I think it was valuable to absorb knowledge from a mentor that has real experience working in my target role. It turned out that was very successful in my real interviews. I think that I would have still done OK had I not done the interviewing.io, but, by my estimate, the return on investment was high, since I received multiple offers and negotiated up.
e: I wanted to add that my mentor and I decided that we would do 4 pure teaching sessions, and then the remainder would be partial mock interviews that would transition over sessions from them doing most of the talking to me doing most of the talking. I found this format to be good for building my own confidence.
That is interesting. Glad to hear it worked well for you.
Having the coach be upfront about some being teaching and some being mock interviews is helpful. The FAQ doesnt really address HOW they are going to coach or help you get better and in my experience it was, "Do a lot of leetcode".
I guess saying, "We will help you with the last 20% of interview prep" or polishing doesnt sounds as good.
I don't see the word "coaching" anywhere on interviewing.io. Mock interviews are usually done at the last stage when you have already done the rest of the prep work. I haven't used this platform but did get friends to help me with them and they were immensely helpful. You can have all the technical knowledge in the world but end up crumbling under the pressure of a live interview setting. If you are unfamiliar with the material in the first place then mock interviews are pointless.
They have a dedicated coaching program (https://start.interviewing.io/dashboard/interviewee/dedicate... - not sure if that link works unless you are logged in) which is what my critique was of. The FAQ says if you can write a loop that returns some data then it's worth signing up for dedicated coaching for FAANG companies. I found that claim not to be true.
i did one session of the system design interview, it was a good way to check my interviewing skills and what i needed to improve on. The most effective way to use this service is for yourself to study your ass of first then just use one or two sessions to validate that.
I don't understand this. Why wouldn't you just practice by interviewing with random companies? If you are hired, just counteroffer with an absurd salary requirement. And if they accept, then congrats you don't need to practice interviewing anymore.
I did about session a day for maybe two or three weeks. I'll compare it to trying to practice by doing real interviews. I got much more detailed and honest feedback from my practice interviews than any real one I've had. I got to practice just the interview type I wanted, algorithms, without doing other things that would come up in a series of interviews (culture, system design, etc). I also didn't have to contact and coordinate with >= 10 companies to get 10 sessions. I just booked 10 sessions.
I used to do interviews for interviewing.io, and it's a bit different. For my work, I'm not going to give any feedback, and will try leave early if it's not going well. When I was being paid for it via interviewing.io, I would give people fairly detailed feedback on what went well and what went wrong, and also answer any questions the mock candidate had.
For me, I'd use a platform like interviewing.io where you'll GET actionable feedback -- most companies won't give you feedback at all, other then "here's your offer" or "nah, thanks anyway"
I actually made some friends over discord who ran mocks with me. Being a person who spent most of university partying rather than hanging out with the studious people, I didn't have much friends who had the same programming skill as I was.
Just look around, I'm sure you can find people with similar skill to run mocks with you (without having to go through some paid service that most likely employs desperate people ergo less qualified people). Plus, running the interviews yourself could be more valuable than going through one.
OP here. Our interviewers are all senior engineers from FAANG and FAANG-adjacent companies. Average is 8 years of experience. They've also all conducted at least 20 interviews on behalf of their employer.
They're not desperate... they're doing this because they 1) get paid and 2) enjoy helping people get better at this stuff.
Happy to set you up with an account so you can get a feel for the quality.
I'm senior at a large bay area tech co. I used this service a few years ago and actually got great feedback and tips (11 offers during that search, almost 100% offer rate for onsite). I'm also on the recorded interviews list
One of my interviewer (from ms) actually had too high a bar and was good to see an upper bound for coding interviews
Given the widespread (and not unreasonable) belief that FAANG-style interview processes function as more of a quantity filter (quite arbitrarily reduce the candidate pool down to a size that human hiring teams can deal with) rather than a quality filter (find ideal workers), it's quite humorous to see the same people running those ineffective interviews profiting off of making them a worse quantity filter. If you squint at it, you can see this is graft/corruption but legalized through layers of indirection (a classic practice in the US).
Have you tried to flip the script and allow people training for interviewing to interview master interviewees? So they can see what success looks like?
Coding interviews are the easiest interviews. There’s very little difference between the problems, and they usually don’t need a trick. Just discuss your solution before you start writing the code, and assuming you don’t get a jerk or completely blank, you’ll be fine. It’s the most objective of all the rounds. It’s literally just practice. The fact that it’s so paint by numbers, is probably one of the reasons why interview coaching focuses on it. Manufacture some demand, and you have a low effort company.
Technical design is a bit harder to prepare for, because it’s more about trying pattern match systems you know against the problem presented. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of high level case studies or design discussions.
The ones that are hardest to prepare for, and no doubt has sunk many a candidate are the softer interviews, particularly management interviews and cultural fit interviews. Those are a complete crapshoot. There’s probably stock answers to prepare, but the questions are pretty random. If you can figure out how to coach the those in 202X (as opposed to recycling 1965’s advice), then you’ve got something.
I find that for more problems you do need a trick. Once you memorize some of the main algorithms asked, usually the questions are a twist on common algorithms + some trick that is not obvious.
Sure you it can become easy if you "Practice" but everything gets easier the more you do it.
People who pass these either have have IQ or have grit, thats why companies use this to judge canidates, either you spent 500 hours on learning it or DS/A just sticks to your head like glue.
Make sure you know the recursive versions of the algorithms, and that’s pretty much everything you ever need for a generic coding interview, and you might not even get asked a dynamic programming or a producer-consumer question.
Maybe you need some more specialized data structures for a more specialized role (eg tries[0] and inverted indices, for a search job), but you probably already knew those if you were already doing that job.
the main problem is that you can get caught in an interviewing pet project, so it seems obvious for them, but not for you. Properly done, a code interview could not require clever tricks, but the problem is that it's just too easy to slip into that realm...
For you. I am a bit over a year into my eng career and coding interviews are far harder than any other type of interview for me. I have a handful of stock behavioral question answers that I can adjust for most non technical interviews. I do minimal prep before hand looking up who I am interviewing with to have a few questions for them and try to find a way to relate to them during the interview.
That is much easier than someone asking me anything from fizz buzz to red black trees.
Absolutely agree. I’ve found that behavioral interviews are harder than technical interviews at this point. If you don’t have the set of experiences they’re looking for then it’s game over.
This can be ameliorated slightly if the interviewer is willing to accept a hypothetical, but this has rarely been the case for me recently.
Or if your management philosophy doesn’t mesh with theirs.
“Tell me about the last time you had make your team work late for a deadline.”
“I don’t. It’s been my experience as both an IC and a a manager that crunches just burn people out, and you end up getting less quality work out of them. It’s much better to communicate early and either adjust deadlines or deliverables.”
“What if you can’t?”
“Unless there is an external forcing function on the company, everything should be negotiable. Does this happen a lot here?”
“One or twice a year.”
“Huh. It’s only happened to me once in ten years, and that was due to a multimillion dollar contract deadline. If it happens regularly here, then the company should fire the directors of engineering for gross incompetence. They can’t project manage.”
Needless to say, I didn’t get the job, but at that point, why would I have wanted it?
I’ve interviewed at four of the five FAANGs, and got offers from three of them, including one of them twice. I’ve interviewed at I don’t know how many startups and midsized companies as well. All the technical interviews are the same. You might get some better interviewers at the bigger companies, but that’s more due to practice on their part. They just have interviewed more people overall, and have asked this question enough times they know the common mistakes.
There’s this belief that FAANG interviews are somehow harder, and you need to study for months to prepare, and it’s not really true. It’s the same MO as the test prep business, but with less obvious metrics for success. (You don’t get standardized test scores to compare, you just get an offer… eventually. Did the interview prep business help? Who knows?)
The interview prep businesses push the specious idea that FAANGs are tougher, and people believe it. (eg Less than 1% of FAANG applicants get an offer! Well, yeah. Do you know how many people apply? A lot. Do you know how many are nowhere near qualified for the job they’re applying for? Probably more than half.) They keep repeating these claims, they end up scaring people into paying for something that’s not needed. That’s the manufacturing demand part.
The low effort part is that technical interview questions and programming puzzles are a penny for two dozen. You give the question and the solution in maybe three different languages (say, JavaScript, Python, and Java) and you’re done. Charge $500 for ten questions, give them a HackerRank link, and you’re done. You’ll spend more on advertising and paid testimonials than anything else.
The interview prep companies don’t focus on the noncoding interviews, because they’re harder to find questions for, and harder to grade. When it comes to personal interviews, you have work with each student one on one to help them talk about their experiences most effectively. That’s high touch. If you’re trying to maximize volume, you don’t do that.
One thing I wish people leeny (who work with hiring managers) tell companies is that as people start hitting 35-40, they dont' have same motivation to solve a trick coding question in 40 min interview. I can demonstrate that I have all the knowledge to do the problem, but if you want me to write compilable (throwaway) code with absolutely no mistakes, you have to loose some candidates. As you age, solving one off puzzles is a nuisance.
For me it's experience in the industry. If you can see my work history, that I have >25 years in the industry, working for mid and large size companies, and lots and lots of startups, why do I need to do something like a 2-pointer / heap / etc kind of problem to prove I can code?
One of my favorite job offers was literally a conversation that played out like:
Manager: Cool, come to our office and meet the team
Me: Want me to prep for a tech challenge or something?
Manager: Nah, you were employed by ____ for __ years -- if you were incompetent, they would have fired you years ago.
That's a cool story. However, I would say there are good reasons to test whether I can actually implement something. Mostly it tells the hiring manager about my quality of my work rather than a simple yes (s)he can do or no (s)he can't.
However, as with anything else, there are exceptions one should be cognizant of.
You're saying you can demonstrate that you have the knowledge to do the problem, but you can't actually do the problem? I'm 43 myself, it's not something I do for fun but I can certainly code up a DFS/BFS implementation or something similar in 40 minutes. With a modern IDE it's not unreasonable for me to expect it to work correctly on the first try.
Try doing it with coderpad IDE with no autcommplete. On top of that, for Java, make sure you declare everything as static, because top level class has static on it.
A reasonable middle ground is that I demonstrate I know all the concepts in the interview and I can send a fully compilable version after the interview.
>>I'm 43 myself, it's not something I do for fun but I can certainly code up a DFS/BFS implementation or something similar in 40 minutes.
Do you think you can do or have you done this? There is a difference between the two.
I don't get why everyone seems so hung up on the interview.
Relax, talk about yourself, talk about what you've done.
I think doing things like this and from the thousands of Reddit posts about "the dreaded interview problem" only leads people to over think it and have worse anxiety and performance, not better.
The interview to my first job was just listening to my then-boss talk about the company for 30 minutes, the second was stonewalling while my boss grilled me to make sure I know what I said I know.
You're not going to be able to "train" for that just like you can't "train" for getting rejected for dating, you just have to learn social interactions and go do it a couple of times.
----
I did just remember my worst interview experience, where, after being jobless for a number of years (early on, mind. I'm still young) I applied for phone IT support. - the interviewers asked me to:
"describe the best vacation you had"
"I haven't really been on a vacation" (I haven't been working, poor family, etc)
"Ok describe the vacation you would like to have"
"... I literally don't want a vacation.. I am looking to find work." (Jobless.for.years. every day has been a mediocre vacation up until this point.)
"..... Ok just tell us a story about a vacation"
"....... Ok I suppose I'll go to Rome then? And uh... " Draws blanks
You can't be prepared for interviews where the interviewers are shit, nor if they blindside you with questions like that.
You also might lose your ability to detect bullshit if you try.
If the company you're interviewing for is just some boss rambling about his wife, then sure, don't bother training for it or doing everything you can to increase your chances of success.
If the company you're interviewing for is among the highest paying companies in the world, where you can literally change the quality of your life and your family's life by making enough money to comfortably retire as a multimillionaire by the time you're 35-40... then investing months doing the dreaded leetcode grind, mock interviews, and doing everything in your power to prepare for it is absolutely worth it.
In fact, seeing just how few people are willing to actually invest time and effort into excelling at an interview process that can tangibly improve ones life in ways very few other professional careers can is even more of a reason to do it. Every time I see people who are dismissive of technical questions, rant about how it's unfair that interviewers expect them to understand fundamental data structures, algorithms, time complexity, and think that all they should need to know to be a developer is how to glue a few APIs together, it makes me both sad to see how low of a standard we hold ourselves to, but also in a selfish way it makes me happy knowing that the competition for competent developers is so low.
No offense, but the difficult in a job interview for IT Support and a SWE position at a FAANG+ company could not be wider.
I had a career in recruiting before moving into eng and I loved interviewing. I'd bullshit with the interviewer, we'd talk about shared interests, and we'd talk about recruiting techniques for a little while. I passed the vast majority of interviews with absolutely minimal prep.
I'm a year into an eng career and I've already failed more technical interviews than I failed in my entire recruiting career.
> I don't get why everyone seems so hung up on the interview.
Because if you need a job, the wild asymmetry between you and the interviewers.
You have to be ON for that short time and ready to deal with questions like what you got about "best vacation" or in the next question code a red-green tree implementation, followed seconds later by describing a full scale cloud architecture.
All of that in an hour.
And if you falter anywhere along the line, they reject you and you worry about how you will feed and clothe yourself and your family.
Readit News
Yes, it's legal to do, but isn't it a shade hypocritical?
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The platform seems like its mostly useful for people who are already good at technical interviews, or at least good at solving technical problems, and just need practice writing code in front of other people or in a live setting.
Has anyone used interviewing.io with good/great results?
I think you mean this as a minor criticism, but this seems to be exactly the point of the service. To figure out a way to find people that are actually competent at the work itself, but not in the somewhat uncorrelated skill of public speaking & live coding w/ an audience.
Also a good way of identifying people that haven't gone to top tier elite schools but are just as good or better as those graduates: Recruiters at a FAANG might disregard a graduate from Generic State University w/ 2-3 years of experience under normal conditions, but if you get one that is willing to place a $1024 bet on themselves and then passes the tech interview with flying colors, it's a much easier sell.
Now, with all that said, after 6 years I'd still really like to know what their long-term outcomes are. What's their typical tenure at that job, where do they land for $job +1, +2, etc.?
e: I wanted to add that my mentor and I decided that we would do 4 pure teaching sessions, and then the remainder would be partial mock interviews that would transition over sessions from them doing most of the talking to me doing most of the talking. I found this format to be good for building my own confidence.
Having the coach be upfront about some being teaching and some being mock interviews is helpful. The FAQ doesnt really address HOW they are going to coach or help you get better and in my experience it was, "Do a lot of leetcode".
I guess saying, "We will help you with the last 20% of interview prep" or polishing doesnt sounds as good.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d7mJDPkEykKzSYjj-Wmza-UX...
I did about session a day for maybe two or three weeks. I'll compare it to trying to practice by doing real interviews. I got much more detailed and honest feedback from my practice interviews than any real one I've had. I got to practice just the interview type I wanted, algorithms, without doing other things that would come up in a series of interviews (culture, system design, etc). I also didn't have to contact and coordinate with >= 10 companies to get 10 sessions. I just booked 10 sessions.
Just look around, I'm sure you can find people with similar skill to run mocks with you (without having to go through some paid service that most likely employs desperate people ergo less qualified people). Plus, running the interviews yourself could be more valuable than going through one.
They're not desperate... they're doing this because they 1) get paid and 2) enjoy helping people get better at this stuff.
Happy to set you up with an account so you can get a feel for the quality.
One of my interviewer (from ms) actually had too high a bar and was good to see an upper bound for coding interviews
Highly recommend this service
Technical design is a bit harder to prepare for, because it’s more about trying pattern match systems you know against the problem presented. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of high level case studies or design discussions.
The ones that are hardest to prepare for, and no doubt has sunk many a candidate are the softer interviews, particularly management interviews and cultural fit interviews. Those are a complete crapshoot. There’s probably stock answers to prepare, but the questions are pretty random. If you can figure out how to coach the those in 202X (as opposed to recycling 1965’s advice), then you’ve got something.
Sure you it can become easy if you "Practice" but everything gets easier the more you do it.
People who pass these either have have IQ or have grit, thats why companies use this to judge canidates, either you spent 500 hours on learning it or DS/A just sticks to your head like glue.
Quicksort
Mergesort
Dijkstra’s algorthim
Depth first search
Breadth first search
Doubly linked list
Semaphores and mutexes
Make sure you know the recursive versions of the algorithms, and that’s pretty much everything you ever need for a generic coding interview, and you might not even get asked a dynamic programming or a producer-consumer question.
Maybe you need some more specialized data structures for a more specialized role (eg tries[0] and inverted indices, for a search job), but you probably already knew those if you were already doing that job.
There’s just not that much to know.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie
For you. I am a bit over a year into my eng career and coding interviews are far harder than any other type of interview for me. I have a handful of stock behavioral question answers that I can adjust for most non technical interviews. I do minimal prep before hand looking up who I am interviewing with to have a few questions for them and try to find a way to relate to them during the interview.
That is much easier than someone asking me anything from fizz buzz to red black trees.
Fizz buzz is a hello world problem. That’s why it exists.
This can be ameliorated slightly if the interviewer is willing to accept a hypothetical, but this has rarely been the case for me recently.
“Tell me about the last time you had make your team work late for a deadline.”
“I don’t. It’s been my experience as both an IC and a a manager that crunches just burn people out, and you end up getting less quality work out of them. It’s much better to communicate early and either adjust deadlines or deliverables.”
“What if you can’t?”
“Unless there is an external forcing function on the company, everything should be negotiable. Does this happen a lot here?”
“One or twice a year.”
“Huh. It’s only happened to me once in ten years, and that was due to a multimillion dollar contract deadline. If it happens regularly here, then the company should fire the directors of engineering for gross incompetence. They can’t project manage.”
Needless to say, I didn’t get the job, but at that point, why would I have wanted it?
What do you mean by that?
There’s this belief that FAANG interviews are somehow harder, and you need to study for months to prepare, and it’s not really true. It’s the same MO as the test prep business, but with less obvious metrics for success. (You don’t get standardized test scores to compare, you just get an offer… eventually. Did the interview prep business help? Who knows?)
The interview prep businesses push the specious idea that FAANGs are tougher, and people believe it. (eg Less than 1% of FAANG applicants get an offer! Well, yeah. Do you know how many people apply? A lot. Do you know how many are nowhere near qualified for the job they’re applying for? Probably more than half.) They keep repeating these claims, they end up scaring people into paying for something that’s not needed. That’s the manufacturing demand part.
The low effort part is that technical interview questions and programming puzzles are a penny for two dozen. You give the question and the solution in maybe three different languages (say, JavaScript, Python, and Java) and you’re done. Charge $500 for ten questions, give them a HackerRank link, and you’re done. You’ll spend more on advertising and paid testimonials than anything else.
The interview prep companies don’t focus on the noncoding interviews, because they’re harder to find questions for, and harder to grade. When it comes to personal interviews, you have work with each student one on one to help them talk about their experiences most effectively. That’s high touch. If you’re trying to maximize volume, you don’t do that.
One of my favorite job offers was literally a conversation that played out like: Manager: Cool, come to our office and meet the team Me: Want me to prep for a tech challenge or something? Manager: Nah, you were employed by ____ for __ years -- if you were incompetent, they would have fired you years ago.
However, as with anything else, there are exceptions one should be cognizant of.
A reasonable middle ground is that I demonstrate I know all the concepts in the interview and I can send a fully compilable version after the interview.
>>I'm 43 myself, it's not something I do for fun but I can certainly code up a DFS/BFS implementation or something similar in 40 minutes.
Do you think you can do or have you done this? There is a difference between the two.
Relax, talk about yourself, talk about what you've done.
I think doing things like this and from the thousands of Reddit posts about "the dreaded interview problem" only leads people to over think it and have worse anxiety and performance, not better.
The interview to my first job was just listening to my then-boss talk about the company for 30 minutes, the second was stonewalling while my boss grilled me to make sure I know what I said I know.
You're not going to be able to "train" for that just like you can't "train" for getting rejected for dating, you just have to learn social interactions and go do it a couple of times.
----
I did just remember my worst interview experience, where, after being jobless for a number of years (early on, mind. I'm still young) I applied for phone IT support. - the interviewers asked me to:
"describe the best vacation you had"
"I haven't really been on a vacation" (I haven't been working, poor family, etc)
"Ok describe the vacation you would like to have"
"... I literally don't want a vacation.. I am looking to find work." (Jobless.for.years. every day has been a mediocre vacation up until this point.)
"..... Ok just tell us a story about a vacation"
"....... Ok I suppose I'll go to Rome then? And uh... " Draws blanks
You can't be prepared for interviews where the interviewers are shit, nor if they blindside you with questions like that.
You also might lose your ability to detect bullshit if you try.
If the company you're interviewing for is among the highest paying companies in the world, where you can literally change the quality of your life and your family's life by making enough money to comfortably retire as a multimillionaire by the time you're 35-40... then investing months doing the dreaded leetcode grind, mock interviews, and doing everything in your power to prepare for it is absolutely worth it.
In fact, seeing just how few people are willing to actually invest time and effort into excelling at an interview process that can tangibly improve ones life in ways very few other professional careers can is even more of a reason to do it. Every time I see people who are dismissive of technical questions, rant about how it's unfair that interviewers expect them to understand fundamental data structures, algorithms, time complexity, and think that all they should need to know to be a developer is how to glue a few APIs together, it makes me both sad to see how low of a standard we hold ourselves to, but also in a selfish way it makes me happy knowing that the competition for competent developers is so low.
I had a career in recruiting before moving into eng and I loved interviewing. I'd bullshit with the interviewer, we'd talk about shared interests, and we'd talk about recruiting techniques for a little while. I passed the vast majority of interviews with absolutely minimal prep.
I'm a year into an eng career and I've already failed more technical interviews than I failed in my entire recruiting career.
Apples to oranges.
Because if you need a job, the wild asymmetry between you and the interviewers.
You have to be ON for that short time and ready to deal with questions like what you got about "best vacation" or in the next question code a red-green tree implementation, followed seconds later by describing a full scale cloud architecture.
All of that in an hour.
And if you falter anywhere along the line, they reject you and you worry about how you will feed and clothe yourself and your family.