It's interesting to see how "whiteboard interview" prep mirrors standardized test prep.
What is frustrating is that the prep month (?! a month is an eternity) could have been used to contribute to an personal project of choice, which would have said a lot more about the author's ability to program.
>which would have said a lot more about the author's ability to program
It's my understanding that such a portfolio would increase your chances of entering an interview pipeline (just as work sample tests are sometimes used as further prerequisites to get into the pipeline), but a company's actual determination of how good you are is always based on the whiteboard, with few if any exceptions.
Oh, absolutely. I'm not questioning the author's decision to study rather than build something. The author's goal was to get a job, and he did the thing you do if you want a job. I've worked as an SDE at Amazon; it was a good experience and I wish the author the best. I just don't believe that the whiteboarding the author did to get the job was a good predictor of engineering ability. I think the wrong actions are being perversely incentivized, and I think that makes us weaker and worse-off as a community of engineers.
Contribute to a personal project, socialize, learn a new language or framework, read books, etc. Amazing how many things you can miss out on with a month of "code" prep. And yeah, this definitely reminds me of high school a bit too much.
I used to believe this. As a masters student who is going to graduate soon, I have to put in months of preparation for the interviews. Nobody believes in your ability to write code even after having close to 100+ commits to a popular open source project. People expect you to come to the correct solution after 5 minutes of them asking the question.
IME the interview you have depends a lot on org size and how close the interviewer is to the money. A technical founder will tend to interview with an eye towards product and marketing and sitting down in a real environment to do sample code. As you go down the line and interview at bigger orgs with more departments, it becomes more specialized, the culture overwhelms the business, and you get more of the "idealized CS graduate" syndrome.
Meh, I never prepared for any interviews and I'm gainfully employed. Granted, I don't apply to companies who are known to give whiteboard challenges I have to prep for.
Yeah the world is full of idiots in charge. If someone is "in charge" then they are most likely idiots. It's the statistical truth. Look at the world today? Who can claim thag over population and a melting planet is progress? The world is run by idiots. Did I stress that enough? :)
The very idea of trying to control quality of anything complex (work, life, relationships, economy, etc) via some extremely shallow and arbitrary test is the most idiotic idea ever yet it is practiced on such a wide scale. The world is run by idiots.
This theory is called the Peter Principle [1], which posits that "in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties" and "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence".
There's good arguments for their point. For instance:
"When something goes wrong in a restaurant kitchen, and the boss appears to size things up, he is unlikely to pay much attention to a collection of workers all scrambling to explain their version of the story. Likely as not he’ll tell them all to shut up and just arbitrarily decide what he thinks is likely to have happened: “you’re the new guy, you must have messed up — if you do it again, you’re fired.” It’s those who do not have the power to fire arbitrarily who have to do the work of figuring out what actually happened. ..."
"True, bureaucratic procedure operates as if it were a form of stupidity, in that it invariably means ignoring all the subtleties of real human existence and reducing everything to simple pre-established mechanical or statistical formulae. Whether it’s a matter of forms, rules, statistics, or questionnaires, bureaucracy is always about simplification. Ultimately the effect is not so different than the boss who walks in to make an arbitrary snap decision as to what went wrong: it’s a matter of applying very simple schemas to complex, ambiguous situations." (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-revolu...)
However downvoted the parent post is, it's nevertheless one of the saner observations coming from a species destroying itself.
So... be the change you wish to see? :) (Sure the world sucks, so there's constructive ways of tackling it and...)
Personally, I've found that a lot of stupid things are there because of downside protection or effort-minimization aka laziness from the primary stakeholders...
What is frustrating is that the prep month (?! a month is an eternity) could have been used to contribute to an personal project of choice, which would have said a lot more about the author's ability to program.