I think it's ridiculous and dumb that otherwise smart people take months out of their busy lives to train these bullshit skills they'll never use outside these "interviews". FWIW, I never prepare for more than a couple of days, and my batting average is pretty good, albeit not perfect. And I'm not a genius by any means. I just line up the interviews from least to most desirable (so I get some "interview training" in), and go with the flow.
When companies that offer these interviews are often offering 2x or more compensation, taking the time to study seems to really work out.
Doing leetcodes once or twice a week for the rest of my career (if these tests persist) seems like a really cheap price to pay to make over 400k a year.
> I think it's ridiculous and dumb that otherwise smart people take months out of their busy lives to train these bullshit skills they'll never use outside these "interviews".
Just wait until you hear about people wasting 16 years learning mostly useless things they will never need again in their life... I'm not sure why spending a few months more is such a big deal, you only need to learn these things once if you do it properly. If you don't do it properly then you deserve to waste your time, not sure why you'd take that route though. I guess it shows you don't know how to learn things properly, that is also a filter.
If you mean school, the first 10 years of grade school are basically glorified daycare. The remaining 2 (hopefully) teach you how to think and prepare you for college. That's why in countries which actually do care about their high-IQ kids (US is not one of them) they remove kids who aren't pulling their weight and send them to vocational schools.
College (at least for me) was darn near useless - 95% of the skills I use daily were self-taught. I could just take calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations and call it a day. Most people don't even need that much.
I _really_ wish college wasn't a requirement in our field. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that for a sufficiently motivated, moderately smart person looking to learn how to code, college is a horrible waste of time and money, unless they're looking to learn something highly specialized, and/or are looking for an advanced degree. They'd be much better off pair programming with someone experienced, as an apprentice, and they'd be making money and acquiring real experience while learning. The same is true for quite a few other professions as well.
It is ridiculous, but at this point with the dumb money that is sloshing around in the industry, and is now actually being sent to engineer compensation packages (a lot of money that has gone into the public markets and thus into RSU offerings, it would seem), there definitely seems to be incentive to jump through these hoops for a piece of the pie.
I think it's fine - everyone gets to interview as they please.
What's unfortunate is there being a handful of companies that pay 2-3x what everyone else pays.
The very existence of such companies should ring 'ding ding ding anti-trust' but seeing how Microsoft is still kicking, better than ever with its disastrous operating system plaguing humanity, I don't have much faith in future legislators.
Usually 3-4. It's tough to line them up, so the ordering is not always complete, but I do get a couple of "doesn't matter" interviews done before I go for a "meaningful" one. Sorry for wasting your time, companies that don't matter. You wrote the rules, I merely play the game.
Thanks, I dont interview much and now that I'm looking I realize it really hurts me. I'd love to know if its best to apply for do a few jobs a year or dozens. I haven't seen many stats on this, you just see people getting new roles without saying how many times they got rejected.
If you are otherwise competent, as you progress through your career, you will realize that most of the time (if not _all_ of the time) you get rejections not because there's something wrong with you, but because _their_ interview process failed. You know what you know. They don't. If they failed to ask you about things you know - that's their loss. I know it's hard to view it like that after a rejection, but believe me, you'll agree with me on this over time.
I don't want to doxx myself, but more than once I have been rejected by companies that were looking to do X, while I was demonstrably one of the world's foremost experts on X. Once I was rejected because I didn't know a tiny detail about CPU cache coherence protocols, for example. Something that I learned on my way back to my car in the parking lot. Makes zero sense to reject people with deep domain expertise over the trivia questions like that.
Another thing you'll see is that not every rejection is a downside. When we look forward to something we tend to paint an overly idealized picture in our minds for how it's going to be. But it rarely turns out quite like that, and you sometimes find out much later how much of a bullet you've dodged, thanks to a rejection you were super bummed about at the time. It's just work. It doesn't matter _that_ much.
