JesseAldridge

I remember once I worked at a company that was being acquired by another. As part of the screening we all had to go over to the other company to do an algorithms interview. Everyone - including my boss. Our company had a pretty softball interview process and most of our engineers hadn't been through a real gauntlet before.

I knew what to expect, had practiced these things, and made it through. I tried to warn my colleagues that they were in for something a lot more difficult than what they were expecting. But yeah, as you might expect, almost everyone failed.

I remember my boss talking about it, shaking his head slightly, his mouth screwing up into that familiar chagrined smirk so many people get after performing poorly at these things. I told him that these technical interviews are purposely difficult, that most people fail. That it's much better for them to miss a good candidate than hire a bad one. That failing is normal. I could see some of the tension in him subside after I said that. I repeated, "It's normal." He calmed down some more. The word "normal" seemed to help a lot.

I wonder if bringing in elements from psychotherapy might help a surprising amount here. I've found that software engineers highly value rational thought - to a point that they neglect the emotional side of things. A little development of their softer side can go a long way.

Like having a pre and post interview counseling session with a therapist would maybe be a little absurd. But maybe something along those lines would work. Maybe GPT4 could do it.

I do not have an alternative and agree that this type of screening is necessary.

I just think the fundamental problem here is not procedural as the post seems to suggest - but rather social-psychological. Making the experience less painful to the losers is the key problem to solve.

That would fix the candidate pipeline problem because people would be less terrified of failure.

I don't know how to solve it.

To quote Leonard Cohen:

  It's coming from the sorrow in the street
  The holy places where the races meet
  From the homicidal bitchin'
  That goes down in every kitchen
  To determine who will serve and who will eat

I do not envy anyone in the position of making this determination!

I always find it strange that people who talk about tech interviewing inexplicably overlook what seems to me to be a core defining characteristic: they are highly traumatic. You take some poor bastard and have him struggle at coding puzzles in front of someone he very much wants to impress and then watch as he fails miserably. They are left feeling like they are biologically inadequate to their job. It's a direct assault on egalitarian sentiment - a load bearing pillar of civilization - even if it is more or less a noble lie.

By definition, they only take the top 1%, and 99% of people get to eat shit. Inspiring existential resentment in the vast majority of people who interact with you is obviously not a recipe for good karma.

Buying a simple Brita filter is probably a good idea, right?

And where does legal authority come from? Social consensus - it's the same thing.

The legal edifice maintaining property rights also requires maintenance.

There is value in able to send and receive money more easily.

> boy do I have some fun stories from that experience

Not gonna lie, I'm kind of dying to hear them.

Hey guys. I wanted to see if I could invest my money in a better way than just sticking it in a Vanguard account. I decided to just try buying a bunch of stocks following a bunch of different investment ideas.

I then made a spreadsheet, dumped all my stock purchases into it, tagged each purchase with a strategy, and then averaged together the return on investment for each purchase within each strategy.

The tool helps you see what's working and what's not, and verify that your stock picking ideas are actually playing out well in the real world.

> they haven't transitioned from SVN to git solely because of the logistical challenge of migrating 30 years of commits

lol, I don't think that's the reason. At the only place I worked that used SVN the real reason was that the old guys didn't want to learn something new.

> Why did founders tie themselves in knots doing the wrong things when the answer was right in front of them? Because that was what they'd been trained to do.

Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I see another possibility: They want to create the appearance of running a hot startup without actually having to do the work. Why make something people want when you can just dazzle some investors and get them to dump a million dollars in your lap, no strings attached?

I wonder if that also might explain why such a tiny fraction of startups generate essentially all the wealth -- most of them aren't really trying.

It should be stated that the flip side of not giving up is incurring the massive opportunity cost of years of lost compensation. That can easily be over a million dollars for a good software engineer.

If you're a genius, then sure, not giving up makes a lot of sense. But if you're just pretty smart, you better think two, three, or four times before committing to do a startup. It's really easy to end up over thirty and broke.

> add each number in a list x to each number in the corresponding row of a two-dimensional array y

I mean, I could write a function `add(x, y)` that does that in any language. You could even inspect the data or type to make it polymorphic. I believe NumPy does this, for example.

Skimming the rest of the article, I don't get how this is different from any other language. The primary difference seems to be the function names are all one or two characters long for some reason. I must be missing something...