an_asker wrote: ↑Thu Apr 22, 2021 7:46 am
Reading this - and other threads I have participated in - I am aware of a schism in the responses where I don't understand what the reality is and where the personal biases of the respondents is taking over.
Elsewhere in this very thread, someone (who is biased in favour of top tanking $$ schools) has very clearly stated that:
- the other low end (i.e., off his/her chart) schools don't even teach the basics of CS
- the FAANG or equivalent company, where the respondent is either a hiring manager or worker, wouldn't even consider hiring from those low end schools
Maybe the difference is only with respect to the first job out of undergrad university, after which all bets are off. Is this something everyone can agree on?
Hmm, I don't know about the first part. There definitely are schools that don't teach rigorous theoretical CS.
But I assume that is not the case for most reputable schools. And quite honestly, most of CS is 'useless' for everyday purposes.
Something something co-NP-complete or NP-hard, etc. I don't think these knowledge help in typing print("Hello World") on a screen.
As for the second part, really depends on the FAANG.
Amazon seems pretty egalitarian (also has a reputation for PIP [mass hire and mass fire]).
Facebook on other hand is known to hire disproportionately from top schools.
Netflix don't really hire new grads.
The first job out of undergrad I think will be the biggest difference [for those who attend more reputable schools]. After that, experience starts to matter more.
The first job comes from internships which is generally given to students who attend more reputable schools.
(tbh, it's like a chain. School name -> 'good' internship -> gets 'good' first job -> gets 'good' experience -> gets 'good' second job, etc.
There's always going to be an advantage to being 'ahead' at the start.)
The goal is to do anything to get the online coding challenge followed by the initial phone screen.
Once those two are 'passed', then the rest is purely Leetcode (and hand wave 'object/system design').
The online coding challenge though is weird cause you could get a perfect score with well written code and it wouldn't matter if your resume isn't "up to par" afterwards. And since students at this stage don't have real world experience, college name is the biggest booster to getting the phone screen afterwards.
Like I said, the entire interview system is supposed to look 'merit based' but it really isn't. I (including my peers) was on the other side of the fence back a few years ago and there's a lot of luck involved to even getting the online challenge. Another issue is because a lot of people score so well on the online challenge, the online challenge might not even mean much (especially when answers to these challenges are found online). I believe Twitter was famous for this. Twitter sent the online challenge to many people during my senior year. All my friends (including me) believe we sent 'perfect' code: some of those friends currently work at Google, Jane Street, Bloomberg, Twitch, etc. . None of my friends (including me) got any responses back from Twitter after the challenge. And apparently according to reddit, some people who never did the coding challenge got the phone screen instead. So....
I will say though that as more people join this field, there will be more and more competition.
That might affect the pipeline for experienced entry developers down the line too.
As for pre-covid (no idea currently), if one got a software development job out of college, then one should be able to have a much better chance to these large firms 1~3 years down the road.
As for post-covid world, I have no idea (and I have no idea in the current market either).
Truth is, the basics of Leetcode can be grinded quite quick.
HashMap, DFS, BFS, Topological Sort, Quick Select, PriorityQueue, Dynamic Programming, Tree, Trie, Union Find
After that, it's really just prayers that you get lucky with getting the 'right' interviewer (and a coding question that you remember the answer to).
I have a hard time accepting that such system is 'merit based' especially when not even everyone gets the online coding challenge.
Plus, once the candidate has spent the time to understand the basics, there's nothing the candidate can really do except hope he/she don't get some ridiculous problem during the screening.
Maybe the whiteboard coding made sense in the past. But with enough people 'figuring out' the system, some interviewers now give some absurd problems that can only really be solved by having seen the answer before. A lot of people in Blind are frustrated about this too as the level of questions have increased over time. Facebook for instance can have (very unfortunate case) 2 Leetcode Hard in a phone screen. Meanwhile, some other candidate can get 1 Leetcode Easy and Medium. It's ... ya.