Tech Interviewing is Broken (Part 1 of n), How we got

I worked for a financial fortune 50 years ago and the interview was for an IT position. My final interview was with the VP, and at the end I must have impressed him because he asked me if I wanted to be on his dev team. I told him no, I don't want to be a dev, and I don't really like the toolset they were using at the time. I got the IT job and enjoyed the work I originally interviewed for. Don't be afraid to say no to something that is not a good fit for you or them.

Dude be like: no product placement will be here. There is no agenda pushed.

Also the dude: wears Amazon t-shirt 😂

3 yrs of data engineering experience. Getting real work into production leading to real-impact. Expect subquery & CTE problems that I prepped for but u get an easier problem so u make small mistake. Or u miss one algorithm bc you need to cram study other topics as u spend most time networking vs practicing LeetCode all the time.

It is what it is.

I have 17 years of experience writing software and 7 years of experience leading successful teams. I have never needed to haze a candidate, scare a candidate, or tell a candidate that they would be fired if it "didn't work out." You are exactly the kind of engineering manager that I despise. Your interviewing technique is bullying, hazing, and ego-driven, no matter how you justify it. It's ableist and discriminatory by nature of the approach. People that "can't hack it" are very rare. I've encountered 2 people in my entire career who genuinely were not cut out for software development. TWO. How many people have you fired because they "couldn't hack it"? That is your failure as a manager, and as a leader and as a mentor. Not them. And you fire them? And warn them you're going to fire them? You are part of the problem with tech interviews. I would never, ever, ever consider working for you, or under you, or even alongside you as a pairing partner. Never.

Folks, be very wary of listening to this guy. I get he exposed Devin for what it is, but this Youtuber's profound lack of empathy towards his juniors and candidates shows how terrible of a technology leader he really is. Please consider any advice he gives you about interviewing others with a heafty helping of salt, and please don't follow in his footsteps as a manager or technology leader. His approach is shameful and embarrassing.

I remember doing an interview once where they had me program on a windows laptop with no internet and only notepad. So I immediately pressed Ctrl+V to see what was in the clipboard 🙂 I told them that their previous candidate had gotten their recursive vs iterative question mixed up and asked if this is the type of dev environment I should expect if I ever started working there, because if so count me out. They laughed and made a note to get their "recruiter of the week" to clear the clipboard next time – my gosh are most of these "recruiters" useless.

Here's some of my favorite questions to ask candidates:
1) what is the hardest thing you've had to debug?
2) tell me something you've programmed that you are proud of.
3) tell me about the dirtiest hack you've ever had to make.
4) tell me about your dev environment, what makes you happy?

At the end of those, I have a pretty good idea of what type of programmer and experience I'm dealing with.

the tech interview is broken everywhere in the world. i had an interview with a big company in asia, in 1 day i had 2 rounds of interviews, a leetcode followed by live coding, followed by another 3 rounds of interviews none of which were related to the job description. i just find it puzzling. the system is broken

I'm here as someone who will be meeting with a job candidate in two days. I was looking for advice.
I tried the "have a low bar and fire them if they don't work out technique" – since it's how I'd like to be treated, but getting rid of people is hard. (Last hire took 8 months to remove. I can't afford to do that again, and it's not fair to the person who's also investing time to try to work on my team.)
I redid our take home coding exam to have one easy, one medium, and one hard question. Because the previous exam: 2 easy and one hard didn't show whether the problems were from incompetence or simple mistakes. The only must-pass is the easy one. The rest are there to decide who to talk to first and to let me ask questions like "why did you make this decision?" To gauge how the person reacts to a code review.
I have a 10-minute in interview coding question since people sometimes cheat on the take home. (I've caught cheaters, so there are probably people I didn't catch.) The question has lots of ways to answer it. One is literally converting the problem statement to code. (Exponential time) Most people will see the linear solution. And a few will see the constant time solution. All of those pass.

I could understand leetcode interviews if that was what your job was. But for the vast majority of us, we will be adding some feature to a mature code base. It’s not and even if you do end up with the opportunity to add a leetcode-style function I wouldn’t consider it a best practice unless it’s a performance critical path since it’s less clear what’s going on. Developer time usually matters more than computer time.

It's reasurring to find this video as an engineer with 6 YoE that recently started looking for a new role. The imposter syndrome I felt after creating a leetcode account and trying to solve a bunch of the easy questions was incredibly overwhelming and frankly, very depressing. I've decided against grinding DS&A and focussed instead on sharpening up my knowledge on the fundamentals of my tech stack and general area of expertise. I guess there was a time where the grind seemed to be worth the money but in a time of mass layoffs, surely the attitude is changing.

I agree strongly with the point you made about the type of person this interview style is in favour of. These big companies aren't just looking to test programming ability, they want to assess a candidate's desperation and willingness to sacrifice. I see posts on reddit from young engineers that have spent months practicing and memorising leetcode questions, missing social events, missing family occasions and avoiding looking after themselves in any sort of healthy way to ultimately not get selected for FAANG. It's a very sad precedent being set for the younger generation of aspiring engineers.

i know you guys may have a great fear of inaction, but i think the best way to get a job now is to wait for someone to ask you to do something. No need to send your CV out, just wait!

i assume you're speeding up the dead air which makes perfect sense, but the flashbacks at 14:17 being sped up is something out of a horror movie lmao

Your video is great. I’m still early in my career but i have had many interviews, on both sides of the table. I think a coding problem can still give some insight into a candidate ability. However, some interviews use unreasonably hard questions, which are never seen again in the actual job. I usually prefer easier coding problems, and focus more on how the candidate approaches it, communicates with me, explains his/her solution and prepares some tests.

11:10 No one gonna say how fucked up this is? Like a hazing ritual before you even join the company

Guess what problem solving as a skill faking known solutions to demo the thinking can only be fueled by share holder funds not a company being innovative