formulathree (u/formulathree)

formulathree commented on Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting? · Posted by u/imadkhan

evantbyrne · 2 years ago

That is fascinating. I wouldn't even show up for an interview if they told me to prepare for that kind of exam. What kinds of companies are these and where are they located? Sounds like an interview designed by an omega nerd nightmare boss.

formulathree · 2 years ago

Have you been interviewing recently? The qualitative interviews that test design are actually the ones that are unreasonably challenging now. You have to cater to the interviewers design philosophy.

For example I tend not to prefer putting data into a class if it's not needed, but we had one interviewer who wanted all my logic as methods on a class even though it's fine to have functions operating on a data structure. Not a big deal either way right? But there it is... With the influx of candidates they measure this bs.

formulathree commented on Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting? · Posted by u/imadkhan

jimbokun · 2 years ago

This would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

When people started asking these questions, the whole point was to see how people reason about a new problem they haven't solved before. There are almost no work problems that require you to regurgitate something verbatim you saw on leetcode before.

It's seriously making me question the intelligence of these interviewers. Although at the same time I realize it's mainly just to arbitrarily whittle down the applicant pool to a smaller number you can interview in person.

formulathree · 2 years ago

There are so many leetcode problems most people can't fully memorize them all and many people just don't.

I actually think interview questions that are more qualitative are worse. I have to freaking guess the "design philosophy" of the interviewer and cater to his viewpoint which is often pointless or just flat out wrong.

formulathree commented on Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting? · Posted by u/imadkhan

adriand · 2 years ago

> I would imagine the most important qualities to have in an interview are going to be charisma and an ability to reason through technical problems.

As someone who has interviewed many software developers, I can assure you that charisma is not something that experienced hiring managers in tech are expecting in the candidate pool. For sales positions, sure. For coding, though, competence is often inversely correlated with charisma.

Reasoning through technical problems is a different story.

I think your first observation about grinding leetcode is interesting. I suspect that this is the approach people take when they're trying to get picked up by big companies (FAANG or whatever). Programming problems become a quick way of winnowing the field for companies that have a highly process-oriented approach to hiring. My own experience has been in small companies, where being able to get in the door and make progress through the interview process is often dependent on one's personal connections/network, creativity and so on.

So my advice to the OP would be to leverage your network and try to get inside companies connected to people you know. Maybe look at smaller companies that aren't necessarily tech companies, but have a strong need for tech?

formulathree · 2 years ago

Charisma is one of those factors that bypass conscious mechanisms.

Experienced managers think they aren't screening for charisma but I would say 99 percent of managers who say this actually are, but they just don't know it. It's subconscious.

I can somewhat prove this to you because there's science on this. Charisma isn't very measurable or quantifiable but a physical attribute similar to charisma is, and that is physical beauty and height.

The more attractive you are and the more taller you are the more likely you are to be hired. It's absolutely true. There's so much studies around this it hurts. Just Google it.

There's even been a news segment in 60 minutes where they literally sent in a ugly dude with a shitload of Ivy league credentials and a handsome tall dude with nothing. And it was incredible. Ugly dude was grilled like a mofo and not hired. Handsome dude was a shoe in, didn't even get asked any hard questions.

The interesting thing is, the hiring manager wasn't even aware he was being biased. When asked in a subsequent interview on how he chose each candidate he stated credentials, but was completely unaware he wasn't even looking at credentials.

Now you yourself may be the exception just like how everyone thinks they're the exception and I'm sure you have examples to prove it too. But humans are inconsistent, I'm positive that at some point during your experience you mis-judged a person with rizz as being more technical.

Its human nature. We are wired to be biased this way. Nothing consciously immoral here. Just note that the first human bias being triggered by any reader reading this post is that they think they themselves are clearly above this bias. That should be the first thing the reader is thinking, and if I guessed correctly on that... Likely I guessed correctly on everything else.

formulathree commented on Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting? · Posted by u/imadkhan

formulathree · 2 years ago

I've been applying too. I've landed tons of interviews about 40 total. Did them all.

All failed but one. It's definitely harder than before. Much harder.

I got failed for the most trivial reasons. There were interviews where I passed and did all the tasks required and the interviewer gave me positive signals like "good job", "talk to you soon" and boom the recruiter told me I was rejected the next day.

There was one where I made it to the final round onsite. Everyone liked me in the onsite. Schooled the technicals with code that worked first run and they canned me because behavioral. One guy (the director who I wouldn't even be reporting too) didn't like my reasoning for wanting to work at the company because I focused on my interest in the technology rather then the mission.

Like literally I just didn't talk about the mission... a specific thing and that was it. Besides that 4 out of 5 people during the final interview told me "talk to you soon" and one told me "I hope we see more of you in the future".

So yeah it's harder, brutally harder not just on the screening but even up the pipeline. I would say my resume is impressive enough that recruiters still contact me and I can make it to a first technical.

I think the people who are getting hired the most right now are people with connections. Who knows who.

formulathree commented on · Posted by u/BhattMayurJ

Jeff_Brown · 2 years ago

If it was tethered to the floor, I would trust a good LLM in 2023 with folding laundry, but very little else. No dishes. No letting kids or pets bear it. No plumbing. I wouldn't even let it wander around cleaning stuff, because I'd expect it to knock over things.

formulathree · 2 years ago

True. Occasionally the thing builds an entire cathedral out of nowhere and you're just shocked.

formulathree commented on · Posted by u/BhattMayurJ

formulathree · 2 years ago

Leave it to Google to do absolutely nothing with this like they did with LLMs.

formulathree commented on Rethinking Window Management blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/... · Posted by u/ayoisaiah

formulathree · 2 years ago

Buy ultrawide. Then tiling works without screwing over aspect ratio. It's a real estate issue. (5120 x 1440))

formulathree commented on How too much daydreaming affected me sunghoyahng.substack.com/... · Posted by u/SunghoYahng

zer0tonin · 2 years ago

I actually experienced this during my late childhood and teenage years. I would say between age 8-16.

I think the main cause was actually under-stimulation: I was both very socially reclusive, and bored to death by schoolwork. I would guess that my brain was trying to compensate for the lack of social life and things to do by making up people and scenarios were stuff actually happens.

This tendency to constantly daydream faded away as I gained independance and entered adulthood. Since I had more stuff to do and more people to talk to. It kinda re-appeared during the 2020-2021 lockdowns, since boredom came back. I think I had almost forgot how it felt to intensely daydream at that point.

formulathree · 2 years ago

The author is describing something different. He breaks into day dreaming in the middle of changing clothes. Or in the middle of eating medicine.

It's a neurological condition. I find it hard to believe this is learned.

Daydreaming when you're bored is normal.

formulathree commented on Interfaces all the way down jjain.substack.com/p/inte... · Posted by u/jinay

syntheweave · 2 years ago

On some level, all of them do. Programming lives in a grey area between human language and discrete, symbolic logic.

The way in which we get to an "application" is in designing interfaces that look more like the domain, and less like the implementation. If you can define the math you're using symbolically, you can apply it directly to express ideas from, e.g. linear algebra, set theory, graph theory. And libraries exist for all of those things - you can make the interface more convenient with additional syntax and compiler assistance, and you can frame the program in terms of theorem-proving logic(which is the realm of stuff like Coq) which provides an extra degree of assurance that the program does the thing you defined it to do by adding more detail to that definition, but often the problem requirements fit in the realm of "just tell the computer to do things" - and so imperative code is the default, everywhere.

But we can also take concepts like "name", "job", "age", "ethnicity", "gender", and enter them into a computer. And all of those are human ideas, socially constructed and philosophical in some degree. Mathematics doesn't help us express the essence of those ideas, it just tells us of ways to symbolize the tokens involved, which can be made relatively general and flexible but all of which ultimately stem from a predesigned enumeration of options like the codepoints available in UTF-8 or the range of values in a 32-bit integer.

And a lot of the mathematical stuff is subsumed by the social/philosophical in practical application: we agree that the data has some kind of truth to inform us, because it's compatible with our framework for understanding it. And if you have a setup that fits the model of computing, something like taking a sensor that emits numeric values at a regular frequency and processing the output into some kind of signal - then you can program mathematically all throughout. But if you're mostly dealing with human language, you're constantly hammered with interface problems for other reasons.

formulathree · 2 years ago

Human concepts can be placed under mathematical interfaces.

Inversion for gender

   ~male = female

Ordinality for human hierarchies:

   CEO > manager > worker

Commutativity for human action:

   Punch human + kick human = damaged human
   Kick human + punch human = damaged human

Mathematical interfaces are different from mathematical primitives which I believe you have mistakenly combined into a singular concept in your response.

By fitting human concepts into mathematical interfaces you develop a sort of algebra dsl for the language allowing you to apply all mathematical theorems of the equivalent algebra to the domain. Those theorems are the generalities that improve design by improving modularity.

Suddenly for ordinal concepts I can use a general min or max function across all domains. By using mathematical interfaces I am in the realm of the ultimate generality. Normally people would be writing some form of equivalent logic to derive the lowest ranking human in a hierarchy when really the concept of min covers it.

These basic mathematical interfaces that apply to basic numerical logic are found to be expandable across domains. There's no proof or logic as to why these interfaces happen to be more universal. It's just a gut feeling after using this interfaces more that they happen to be extremely universal. Thus there's no way I can prove to you what I'm saying is correct, you ultimately have to try it.