Couldn’t agree more… for a senior architect role I was asked to write a code to add two large numbers of size N and a java code to sort an array .. I have 70+ patents
@@xendu-d9v How does that matter? The point he's trying to make is that he is good at solving real-world problems. Nowhere in the world do senior architects add two large numbers of size N.
As a senior java developer who worked on core java with occasional spring core and hibernate projects, it is extremely disappointing and annoying when the interviewer 5 years younger than you rejects you on the basis of useless DSA and system design questions that he copied from somewhere. I'm like bro why don't you ask me what problems I faced and solved in my previous projects. They would also ask you to be well versed with front-end, kafka, cloud, nosql and devops tools like dockers etc. None of these would be relevant mostly in the actual project because companies have dedicated teams for such components.
I think , as a senior developer, you are trying to say problem solving and design skills are not at all required. Interviewer will ask only what you wanted to ask , not other things.
@@ravikiranreddy2867 you may have slightly misunderstood me. All I am saying is that when you work for service based companies and give interviews for other service based companies, you are most probably never going to use advanced DSA or system design, especially if you are not an architect. Some may get stuck in their legacy or production support projects for years and may not have been exposed to architect level discussion initially. And not everyone is working/ going to work in a product development. Problem solving should not be considered synonymous with DSA or SD, many people are continuing to survive long enough without being a CS major due to their problem solving and adaptability. Nowhere did I mention that interviewer should ask only what I want to ask. I just want him to consider my knowledge of previous projects on which I spent so many hours daily. One can easily find out whether you were a good developer from how well versed you are with your past projects, how some challenges were solved on the way and how you adapted to new technologies that were required in those. Also, not at all denying that self-upgrade is required on technologies that are outside the scope of your project, but it should not be the sole reason to get selected. Rewind few years back, good developers were identified, not selected based on few questionnaires. It has become like an IIT-JEE preparation now. People spending months on preparations alone. Platforms like Scaler etc. charging hefty amount for your coaching. Many of my acquaintances having done this, were not so good developers, depending on their peers for their day to day task. So they faked in interviews, got hefty increment with no hands-on and then struggled with their job thereafter.
Absolutely correct, the senior engineers have experience in scaling big apps, handling large data etc, but for preparation they still have to go to school, college level to forget scaling and their expertise, just move back to basic DSA which is rarely used nowadays.
@@IndianCoders as a senior developer you should be weighed on both types of question patterns. But yeah DSA type of question should be focused on majorly to test if you are able to formulate a logic to solve the problem. Thats it. Focus should not be to test whether you know linked lists or trees.
Very opt topic. I have 15 years of experience in coding. If a guy 8 years younger to me, who has done a lot of leetcode rejects me for not solving a medium level question in leetcode, it makes no sense to me. I have fought battles in production, been on call when things are breaking down all around me. I have a family. Full time job. I dont have time to spend hours and hours solving leetcode. My experience, my ability to deliver high quality code was not even tested. I get drive a team towards achieving a solution in an optimum way. Reducing my experience to my capacity to spend solve leetcode questions is quite narrow thinking. I am forced to apply for non-technical roles like Manager because apparently I'm not good enough as per the interview process for a tech role. I find it really ridiculous.
Why did not you spend time to prepare for coding interviews ? If some company is willing to pay good money, don't you think it's reasonable to have those many rounds ? There are people who have done same thing as you and are good at lc type problems as well. If you've 15 yoe without any network connections, then I really doubt your skills.
I am a senior engineer. I just had a round of interview for one startup. Interviewer asked me to code entire module with at least 5 requirements. Basically, multiple sprints tasks in a single sitting. That too without errors. He wanted me to do runnable code, debugging, testing all of them in just 45 mins. I did complete 1 requirement. At the end, he said you are not good enough. What happened to these people????
i agree with you. I attended an interview recently where there were two rounds. 1) Scenario based: They would provide a private repository and asked us to review the code and provide comments ( tech stack : react,express,postgresql) . This is done to test your hands-on experience. 2) Coding problem. (typescript) . Even this was a real-time scenario problem. Best part was, you can refer internet for any libraries ,syntaxes, etc (AI tools aren't allowed which is fair). I hate when they don't allow to see syntaxes (how do they expect to remember everything :( ..... ) . You just need to give credit to the site. It was amazing experience!!!
I couldn't agree more. Absolutely bang on. Questions need to be more on the task you expect the candidate to perform rather than asking how to invert a binary tree.
Finally someone is speaking the truth. I have 18 years of software development experience, currently working in a big tech company, adding great value to my company and drawing a 8 figure salary. However I know there is no way I can crack any DSA interview without 3-6 months of dedicated preparation. Every time I change company I need to do that.
It's even worse here in the Philippines if you're a Filipino. Even after graduating 20 years ago and with about 20 years of work experience, I have been asked so many times with 1st year college level stuff; useless stuff that I'd never really used in my 20 years of working. Then they ask for your college transcript of records as well as contact details of your college teachers/professors. Like seriously? It's been 20 years since I graduated from college and you still want me to find the contact details of my teachers?! Heck, some of them might even be already dead by now. And then you find out how low the offer is.
Valid point. DSA has become standard to gauge aptitude. But many aspects of software don't need it. Most excellent UI/web developers I have seen are not great DSA coders. There is a lot more in application development than DSA.
I totally agree with your thoughts being a senior engineer preparation feels like a upsc exam where 4 to 5 months of preparation goes towards DSA along with full time job its over whelming. Difficult to keep yourself motivated for such long preparation time
I agree with what you say. But, the companies you mention (FAANG type), don't really want engineers like Linus, cause they'll never fall in line with their predefined churn and burn factory. They want people who would willingly and mindlessly give up their life for months just to get an opportunity to work with them. So I think the current interview process works fine for them. Although the actual innovative companies should steer clear from these practices to ensure they are able to onboard truly disruptive minds.
@@kaushikb9272 research publications doesn't show innovation culture btw most of the research pub are from their research division not from production teams
Couldn't agree more. Senior level interviews should focus more on past experiences and challenges encountered and how they solved those rather than the usual DS/Algo questions which are not relevant for majority of the positions out there.
Couldn’t agree more! I have 6 years of experience and I’m not at all interested in doing 100+ leetcode problems. Obviously this has costed me failing in many interviews. But i have got offer letter from company who do not bother much on dsa but focuses on Systems design and problem solving. I recently had 5-6 rounds (and DSA was very basic, and very good design + project round). I obviously cleared all rounds and now has the offer letter. I feel sorry for companies whose main criteria to filter out is DSA round.
I had a talk with my CEO (who also interviewed and hired me) and he told that he doesn't even look at resumes as the niche we are working on is too narrow and all of us are learning as we go along. Not a single damn DSA question, all the questions were relevant to the codebase and basic theoretical CS fundamentals and it's applications. I just wish that all interviews had a similar approach.
You are absolutely right Gaurav!! I have 7+ years of experience and still DSA questions are being asked in the interview. I know someone very close who has 13+ of experience and same questions are being asked to him as well!! This is bizarre!
Totally Agree, i'm a SDE with 4+ year experience. The obession with DSA (Basically math problems) in the interviews is so so real. It's as good as discarding eveything else which i was capable to do to actually complete the project.
Hey there, strongly agree with what you say. One point you are missing imo is that: companies do not want people thinking outside the box, they want people that will study many months/years to pass DSA and will be so haply to join that they will just fit the company’s mold. Big companies do not want waves, they will buy startups so no need for a new joiner to question right and left what product A or B does. Who ever implemented a binary tree in a production app? I have implemented an N-ary tree to represent a full aircraft’s configuration (all the parts installed)
Totally agree with you. Senior Engineers and Entry level engineers are asked pretty much same DSA questions.Senior engineers are better at design, debugging a problem, fixing bottlenecks, and their experience in integrating with other large scale systems etc... These are not asked in the interview. Senior engineers are asked DSA problems. These days chat GPT or third party libraries have solutions for these. For ex: Find Right view of Binary tree. I never used this in last 15 years and Apache string Utils and CollectionUtils packages provide many util methods, we do not need to write anything from scratch. So the DSA questions are not much relevant in day to day coding. Moreover, Entry level or junior engineers who just learned DSA have more time to practice and get job. Most of the senior engineers with family to take care and doing part time education find it difficult to allocate time to go back and learn what they learned 15 years ago. World is not perfect, we got to live the way it is. But this interview process is very discouraging to Senior Engineers. They loose confidence when they get rejected on an irrelevant DSA problem while they are successful at their current job.
The problem for me is when I apply for a job and to clear the interview I need to prepare myself for at least a month Like to revisit all algorithms, OOPS, DS & architecture concepts. That is the actually problem in Senior Engineers.
Well said, I have 12 years of experience with a strong track record in solving production issues, addressing complex system design problems, and implementing effective system design patterns. However, I find that interview questions today often focus more on solving LeetCode hard algorithm problems rather than assessing real technical skills. It seems there isn't a tool or proper process that adequately evaluates a candidate true skillset of 10+ year experience.
For a data scientist interviews, they are asking leetcode problems which have no huge role to do with data. I understand logic is important, but whole interview seems irrelevant when you are not asked a single question related to database, statistics, machine learning and MLops.
This is exactly what I was telling the other day, like how “freshers” level interviews are still used to judge experienced employees, how even after having different libraries to implement thread, they still ask the basic Java multithreading.
That's the problem with interview process. Another problem is debriefs after all discussions, where any interviewer or any hiring manager give wrong feedback and which can manipulate others judgement. I feel interview should be milestone based and should be given a fair chance of opportunity. And I strongly oppose some policies of 6 months cooling period. If someone is looking for a job at your organization and is desperate to get, would wait for another two quarter :D ?
true , I have 15 years of experience. In one of the interviews , interviewer did google search (vdo call) and started asking fresher level question list that came up. MOreoever, I was told that being a senior , you should know the basic. I told i think same applies to you as well, you should also ask qn without searching in google.
I agree and I feel this is not only with senior devs , but also those who are at the helm of mid level experience (in a no man's land kind of area) where we're not only preparing for trying something different, say coming from 2 years of doing not much but dealing with legacy code, looking it up on unix machines, and trying to mavenise (modernise) the same legacy code.. we want to take onto some modern tech, say move into data engineering field.. we're not only trying to skill up with our python scripting, using libraries which are handy in playing around with data, learning and practicing cloud concepts along with some big data tools.. basically building a portfolio to vouch for our said skills (I like this approach), and on top of it trying to cover the lengths and breadths of DSA in the language we would be coding in. I agree using DSA does give an idea about how efficient can a candidate tune his code, but I would have to have an extra task up my get-ready-for-interview list, and obviously the fixed leetcode/MacDowell questions.. and in data engineering or any other type of tech interview, where we do not really face DSA specific problems, we can get more focussed and real world problems related to handling large amounts of data, maybe have discussions about our portfolio, try out an approach that would fit that role and not a standard approach that fits them all.. DSA is dreadful I get it, but it was easier when I was a fresher (having not much to guage for, the interviewers can get a fair idea) but now for various niches we can have varying forms of interview methodologies. Here we are, all still having to go back to the DSA regardless of all the experience or despite cloud computing bejng the bread and butter of companies (not saying that DSA is yesterday's thing, but now there are other things to focus on, other that an O(1) or O(n) way of dealing with real world problems)
I somewhat agree with you, but remember that you’ve already started your career and even created a course on data structures. I’ve noticed that many developers, even experienced ones, often just use List for everything, even when other data structures might work better. It’s important for developers to understand and choose the right data structures for each task. Doing so can make our code more efficient and shows a better grasp of the tools we have.
This is why I sometimes being a decent engineer who is passionate about technology and solving problems, I absolutely hate being in the industry. The interview process is just bizarre. It is just not aligned with how things work in real life. And companies have absolutely ridiculous standards. It is major source of frustration for a lot of people and is absolutely downright stupid.
@@sandipbhaumik absolutely I know for a fact that I can be successful in a role but the gatekeepers won’t let me in. Why? Because I didn’t give them a signal in a stupid interview which has no relation with the actual job. I have been in the industry for 15 years and have worked in all sorts of companies ranging from consulting to small niche agencies to a high growth SaaS platform but all that is trash because we trust coding puzzles more. It is borderline insulting for all the work I have put in for 15 years which has no value. Tell me one more field where experience doesn’t matter. What matters is how much you have grinded for the interview. Pathetic.
color me stupid but if an interview starts off with leetcode questions while the job itself is completely different (ex: web development) i'm running out of there asap.
100% agree, I went through the interview process with a few companies last year and because I didn’t have undergrad level algorithms and data structure down pat along with an in depth knowledge of kubernetes, o didn’t get the job. I think company should check for interest in solving a problem with all resources at hand. In addition to the candidate takes their part in continuing to grow the product seriously.
Being a senior myself, most of the work done in software companies is the work which can be done by anyone, that is why people with no CS degree are also able to do it. That is why these companies just tend to gather people with good IQ and analytical skills as the work can anyways be done. I know the interview process of DSA is kinda flawed now as people are just testing one's ability to cram rather than solving an unseen problem and approach. But the logic of false positives work for these companies due to the huge number of applicants, so they know their requirement is anyways going to get filled and which is also working for them because at the end of the day they are able to ship the best software. Also its very hard to come up with a generic interview process which tests the quality work that people in software engineering has done due to the vastness of domain.
Good analysis. I think true positives should form the bench mark of selection and true negatives can filter it out. True positives can be a set of questions (practical real world) which can be asked upfront before the interview process in writing... so that the candidates can work it out and answer. For ex: the recent Microsoft problem with Counterstrike update which mis-fired. The ability of the candidate to understand the issues and articulate it and also the ability to prevent repetition of it could be a basis of shortlisting. This candidate can even get assistance from his friends and relatives to answer this written question beforehand. During the interview we can focus on a) Understanding how much he has understood the written answer, how much he can digest and assimilate and also the quality of solution he offers. This would be a real in depth analysis by the inteviewer. b) Identify true negatives, which will decide the winner among multiple true positives.
Totally agree. I came back to the industry after more than a decade - I was one of the better programmers when I left the industry in 2008. Interviewing process was more conceptual then (at least when I used to interview) along bit of problem solving and puzzles to gauge IQ and some coding exercise to understand the interviewee thought process. Right now, it has become similar to clearing CAT or IITJEE - the deep thought that comes from solving real world problems is missing.
I had discussions with many people, and they all said the only way they know to judge a person's problem-solving and design skills is through traditional methods. I explained to them that there are plenty of real-world problems that can be asked in interviews, which can be domain-driven but implemented using DSA approaches. I bet candidates would bring insights to an interview that the interviewer might not have considered. I understand that those with just a couple of years of experience might not grasp these nuances fully. Ask questions with a domain focus, and you're likely to get meaningful answers. For example, if a candidate works in security, ask them about real-world problems related to data or transport security. Similarly, for a networking position, focus on problems like data compression. My mantra is simple: if I interview someone more experienced than me, I would refer them to a recruiter to find a more senior interviewer. The biggest problem I see is that only a few companies focus on domain-specific questions. Instead, they emphasize on generic DSA questions, even when they know the candidate comes from a competing company.
Well there are certain companies that still conduct online general aptitude test to determine a candidates problem solving abilities well in my opinion those type of candidates are more likely to have an experience at system design level and few problem solving question should actually do the job I mean you may conduct any number of rounds assessing system design skills and some problem solving skills should be fine. One such example is Nagarro conducting online aptitude tests.
A mix of both should be a part of the interview process. Medium - little hard DSA , system design / architectural questions along with real world issues/problems subjective questions related to the framework/tech, which the candidate has the skills on. This will get you engineers who have analytical skills as well as have good in depth knowledge of their domain. Also, senior engineers should have a good functional base along with business scope of their previous projects.
that's good i just have to do DSA to eventually get into FAANG later since i could'nt in college due to not formatting my resume properly during internships and then going for a lesser company instead of waiting for amazon which may have landed me a faang fte
Excellent video Gaurav. Personal I believe, the interview should test the job readiness instead of technical IQ. Because for senior positions experience matters more than tech IQ. For seniors it’s the wisdom that matters.
Absolutely agree. Senior folks should know the DSAs but not at implementation levels. The bigger focus should be to know what it takes to build a 0 to 1 and then 1 to 1000 or more.
Exactly. I have been saying this for so long but I get the response that as a senior if you can't answer basic questions, you shouldn't be senior. Bruh, I have forgotten more than any junior even knows currently.
I think one solution could be starting the hiring process with a role/domain based take home project and discussing it in the interview. The project could include problems that would be somewhat related to the role at the company. This would give the candidate an idea of whether the role is a good fit for them and a chance to showcase their skills better. Similarly the company would be able to filter on a much better talent pool. Further rounds could be carried out to reduce bias but I think this can be a good starting point. Being a senior engineer myself I dread preparing for DSA and find it very irrelevant and tiresome.
Interviewing is a completely different skill than the job. You should probably continue interviewing at all points wherever you go, JUST so that your career isn't disrupted
Bang on. i have 15 years of experience and recently for an investment bank interview i have been asked almost 80% of spring annotations. And the person interviewing me around 6-7 years of experience asked me to go home and check the annotations and asked me they are interested in a leader who is better than them. Though interested in getting job, it didn't interest me a bit reading those annotations.
I also experienced this, i got asked coding challanges with are totally not relevant to the job, initially i felt bad and started learning those questions, there is something very wrong with interview process, the interview should actually look like an average day compressed in 30 minutes or 1 hour where candidate is asked questions on real life challenges that come during job
Honestly what I think is that the objectivity that you are talking about does not really harm the company. The false negatives do not harm the company. But the hypothetical approach on the basis of which you want the companies to hire senior engineers may cause more harm than good by resulting in a lot of false positives
There is one more thing which I have noticed, since the focus is shifted too much on DSA based interviews, the candidates who have spent like half or a complete full year practicing dsa bases questions, develops a mindset where he/she thinks that okay so dsa is something I need to clear the interviews and I am pretty good at it, so now I dont need to dive deep into the core engineering topics and I just need to do the bare minimum. Whenever I want to switch I can easily switch with my DSA skills. IMO this in the long run will be harmful for the companies.
We should align the interview process with the work that we do on day to day basis like writing clean code with test cases adhering to solid principles for senior software engineer so in such case we can discuss one of the solid principles in interview and ask the candidate to write a piece of code demonstrating the same. For architect position we can go into system design and performance, scalability concepts as per job requirements. So very important who is taking or designing the interview process it should be the team where the position is open.
As a self-taught programmer, I like cookie-cutter technical questions. There are many books and videos that discuss the topics at length and they're effectively logic puzzles, which I fancy. But I understand the frustration veteran programmers must feel when being asked the same questions they were asked on their first job interview.
Completely agreed. In many cases, the company and the team truly cares about finding the right engineers to get the job done, to build a product and so on. For those cases, they will figure out a better way of understanding the true abilities of a candidate. But in many cases, especially in the recruiters market like now, the focus is more on “how do I eliminate a huge number of candidates so that I only talk to some of them and start figuring out if they are a match or not later”. What I mean is that, in some cases, companies just don’t care and it’s more like: yeah it sucks, but it is the process, suck it and do it anyway or I’ll find someone else to do so. If they have the upper hand, they can afford such bad practices. Unfortunately, thanks to their reputation, FAANG can still get candidates anyway regardless of whatever practice they put in place...
Exactly.Being a senior developer I have given interviews where the main focus is DSA. But in real life mostly the challenges faced are system designing and optimization/performance which the senior engineers do not get a chance to explain.So basically its the companies loss
Sharing my experience, I felt clearing Amazon interview was easy than clearing Intuit interview as they asked to create an application with specific requirements on my system (asked to carry my system), and a team of 4-5 members asked detailed questions on each part of that application. It really liked it. FAANG or MAANGA companies asked mostly ds and design questions.
I usually reject companies who ask algo related question and that too when its not relevant for the role and for the company itself. DS is something which every developer should know.
Finally some one said the facts straight. In India, smartness no longer matters. Its all about your acting skills in the interviews. Interviewers come prepared with a solution (Ratta batch), and if you give a different solution, you are out. It doesn't matter if your design is effecient. Its basically like a dance choreography (dandiya dance to be specific), you need to make the moves in sync with the interviewer, else his/her ego gets hurt and you are out. One legend who is supposedly "senior architect" from Servicenow once said, CDN is a magic, hence we cannot use it in our project 🤮 When did software engineers start using black magics in code. Why are there solutions available in market in that case, lets use legacy technology and re-invent the wheel? Sick of these now.
You nailed the problem in the head when you said companies are looking for objectivity when they really shouldn't. Big corps like Google and Microsoft could look for objectively good hires and then later allocate those hires to teams based on subjective tests. Startups on the other hand are built with small teams that jel together. In most cases, by unproven founders themselves. Such teams need to look for personality hires more than anything else so that these teams can work efficiently and build the product. Remember how people don't leave companies, they leave managers? It's this excessive objectivity that is leading to it. But then again, there's always this danger of discrimination creeping in (like too many Telugu guys in the same team)
Even a fresher can practice, and write a code for these LEET code problem. But, it would take immense experience and real world exposure, to make sure the code they are writing are scalable, secured, maintainable and what not!
A lot of JD's mention "thrive under pressure" ,maybe they try to judge us if we are able to thrive the pressure during the interview of solving an analytical problem that we are seeing for the first time.One more essential skill which they are not able to judge us is our troubleshooting skills which go a long way during our day to day functioning as a developer.
it makes 10000 percent sense, there is no fit all..mostly some of the interview ai platforms like barraiser are highly inefficemt when it comes to evaluating candidate overall!
I agree with much of it, but I believe this is why the system design interviews are more open ended and a change to showcase practical, experiential knowledge. This is also why the system design interview is what determines your level at Facebook for example. That all said, there is still a lot of academic data in the process that may trip up good senior candidates who don’t have time to LC all day because they’re working on actual software development
let us recall why all this happens coz we as Sr. Engineers have created such an environment within the company to deliver things. I don't want to blame Jr. Engineer for taking such interviews and rejecting us. We have to clear their expectation make them feel good that we are still Sr. Engineers let them overwhelmed by our skill sets. Also, we have been doing a lot of great system design and other stuff for many years we should start thinking of creating our own ecosystem.
The fundamental problem with recruitments is "who is taking your interview and his qualifications". I've seen a lot of people, who sit on the managerial positions for the department, with no core expertise. These people don't know what to expect from an employee.
I have 14 years of exp. The syllabus is huge for me. I am getting rejected, becz I am not able to,solve live coding problems. I should have solved those, but once you are stuck in the interview, then one can't think much. I was able to solve after the interview, becz with silent mind I found out where I was doing mistake and in both the cases, I was very close in solving the problem.
Exactly!! Why are companies behind this DS & Algo? If you dont clear, then you are out. No one asks real world scenarios. Atleast the simple scenarios , for ex : lets say our server has a webhook to capture payments and our server went down for an hour. How do you reconcile the missed payments. Something like this. Instead companies are behind tree traversal and leetcode problems.
@gkcs_ In my opinion, for SDM, PSDE or Architect or Sr Architect, we can have a top down approach, where we test system design first and then drill down low level design and coding in consecutive process. Here we can easily segregate talents who are eligible for complex system design and talents who can code . If we want to have a trade off between these two we can have as well. Just a thought, lmk, what's your opinion on this.
I have 9+ YOE in automation testing. Interviewer asks me to write code on comparator. In my workflow I never needed this algorithm for anything. How the heck is type of question even relevant for me??
Just of curiosity, if companies focus on project related questions for senior engineers (5+ years of experience) , then there is a possibility that some projects in their resume maybe the most recent one was either legacy/proprietary or the tech stack is kind of irrelevant in the industry and there were no major technical challenges like in startup based environments- i mean thats the reason someone can be looking for a job change: to work on good projects. How to prepare for interviews in such a case? Would like opinions/points. Honestly just reading designs concepts or having theoretical knowledge rarely helps. Even if we try to work on some side/mini projects they will not have the scalability,security or other issues enterprise level applications face.
Let's understand it like this. At senior level, someone has go through lets say 5 rounds. Now im assuming 1st round is on DSA. People who are not good at DSA will be eliminated for this round itself. Those who clear the first round will appear in next 4 rounds and here the candidates will be grilled on the actual problems. So basically, a company looks for a candidate who is an overall good fit. So, please don't blame DSA for that. It is not the only round that happens at any senior role.
Lol this is one of a flaw in interview process. Now imagine somebody who's good at providing actual solution to the problem existing in a domain and getting eliminated just because of not clearing DSA, you see now this results in a flaw in the selection. Overall interview process needs a change.
@@fdg-rt2rk okay. So what do you think, a company will select a candidate only because he/she is good at DSA. Come on, as I said, DSA is just one component of the interview process, which I think should remain in the process. Understand it like this...there are two Candidates 1) Good at designing system 2) Good at DSA as well as designing system Of course the second will be given priority. Also, each one of us must understand, all this is a business. When you are doing a business related to a certain skill set, you will try to influence the market. If you understood this, Great !
@uditkaushik don't know if your live under a rock, but all faang except netflix have 3-4 rounds of coding and one SD. This basically means DSA is the most important criteria. It is business related when Google asks dsa as they build core products and some times open source them and this require to write the code at basic level. Now in the market, every damn company is asking DSA just copying faang.
Hear hear - please say it loud and proud, spread this far and wide! My question to Gaurav is: How do you do it? What do you do to prepare for an interview? Or is this part of your life firmly behind you because you will never ever in your life ever need to do an interview loop at a tech company?
Deserve is a very loaded term , look up the study on unconscious bias. The modern tech interview is not built to find folks who deserve to be in the company it was coined to reject candidates and to keep the crowd of folks wanting to join and work for the company when companies were using it developer salaries to write of taxes
The problem with me specifically is that I'm from an open university so regardless of my skills people don't want to hire me, so its a messed up situation
yeah, I'm rejected by junior devs who asked me about tricky javascript questions copied from internet and least cared about the open source projects worked on and the libraries we created. Some interviewers asked me about tree diff algorithms which even they have no knowledge about it.
Kinda agree, kinda disagree. Agree cos anyone can use the efficient most sorting on a list for eg; for open-source libraries, but they should know such things exist, so knowing is important rather than the exact how's of it, the why's are most important here--as that's what a senior/high level tech person would aim at, why should I use a tool, an algo, a data-structure in a specific context.. Also slightly disagree cos say Seniors should know a bit of everything including those extra skills that make them "seniors"? For eg: you can't have a senior cardiologist, or a surgeon say well I used to be able to suture and now I don't want to know how to do it? While many seniors professionals can rely on juniors to get the measly tasks done, they should still know the quality of that outcome isn't jeopardised. The analogy is from a different field but applies in the purview of expertise in your field.
how could the interview prep companies live, software industry unknowingly created a world of interview prep institutes. i am not sure, how many times you will be writing an algorithms from scratch, i have written out of my 15 year career only thrice. most of us relay on the predefined functions in the SDK. I have to give you instance, where i attended the interview twice for the same company with a different interviewers , i can say the position and job duties are almost same 1st interview, i was asked to design a system and create a presentation, and quickly right a code for what i designed and discuss about the implementation and selection of few code components with why logic, i enjoyed the interview much. i was told clearly that the interview is all about testing my coding knowledge not on the output and i should be able to discuss reason for what i have designed and code written. 2nd interview: this time in states, and this is the time where the leet code interview scenarios or in its peek is in its peek. the question was asked from one pf the leet code sites in the interview that was reserved for an hour, it looks like a mathematical problem, i used to solve in my engineering aptitude tests, so to arrive on writing code, first i have to derive the mathematical equation and then need to write code, thanks to the online code editors, which uses java or.net frameworks that doesn't have any predefined functions, now i have to write data structures Algorithms and solve it, some how i tried but could not get to the end in first 30 mins, so i said directly to the interviewer that i can not in 1 hr, then he asked technical question, covering all architecture and system design, with all the modern cloud tech and frontend . but i was rejected stating that i could not solve the math problem in the interview.
When I came from school it took 2 years to get into a software position. It took 2 years to realize that the reason why they did not take me was I understand both hardware and software. HR did not know how to classify me so they put it in the garbage can.
The problem is about the number, if a company goes beyond 121 people, which it usually do, they loose the track of what they want to hire, the compartmentalisation kicks in and thus the HR hire as per their KPI which has nothing to do with real value addition, hence we see a huge gap in what the candidate has to do vs what is needed to be done, Soo, to overcome this, a process is designed which is very general in nature, this has nothing to do directly with product /value addition but everything to do with resource KPI. There is only one solution to overcome it and that is to solve supply and demand, companies should be very clear with demand matrix, like what they really want to hire.
i agree i just given a interview they are asking me to write some simple synetx level codes now all syntex I don't remember I was expecting that they will at least ask me some coding questions but they did not ask
The problem is with interviewing skills as well. People mostly come up with standard interview questions. How well you are prepared for these standard questions is more important than the real skill needed for work. Interviewers hardly put in the effort to understand the candidate's skills. It's more like academic exams, all are judged based on the same question set.
As a senior with 20+ years of experience I do not want to go through this again and again. People see your resume, they see that you are experienced and after that you should go through some exercises which are absolutely the same like people with 1 years of experience do. It basically gives you the feeling that your experience cost 0 and company doesn’t value it at all. Why would I personally need this company which treats you like s student and sends you through endless interviews? And the funniest thing that even if you go through- it doesn’t guarantee you end up working on something interesting, you can easily end up editing some configs 🤨 Any software engineer could recall how to be a student and spend some time to prepare for interview and get through, The question is “Do i want to spend my lifetime on this? May be it is better to find company which shows at least some level of respect and trust and have an enjoyable working place there and pay back for trust and warm welcome with all your experience.
i guess adding more subjective questions will solve the problem, i see DSA is being thrown around companies who are trying so hard to do a FAANG model but there are smaller startups who just want a senior react or django developer, they just focus on real world problems in these ecosystem, i know this is not perfect solution either but i still feel more comfortable around these interviews than DSA ones
The major reason is that interviewing has become mechanical and robotic and it could be easily automated today with no human. However the placement of humans for a bot style interview is no good. The other point is not all Tom dick and Harry can interview. Interviewing is an art and requires focused intuition as well to extract signals from a senior candidate. But in today’s interview process any engineer can conduct an interview after going through an online training which is not going to be of help in anyway identifying the right senior candidates. 🚀🚀🚀
Couldn’t agree more… for a senior architect role I was asked to write a code to add two large numbers of size N and a java code to sort an array .. I have 70+ patents
patents for what?
@@xendu-d9v How does that matter? The point he's trying to make is that he is good at solving real-world problems. Nowhere in the world do senior architects add two large numbers of size N.
If you can't code , then you aren't fit at all - it has always been this way due to large influx of candidates, companies will always be picky.
@@TheGauravmakkar If you can't add simple numbers, then that's the dumbest or shittiest excuse ever.
@@liquidmetal718 How many architects do you know who regularly use LeetCode? Your reply simply explains how well you know the industry. Good luck
Being at senior level I totally agree. Interview Pattern is the same for Jr and sr level and not what you bring with your experience.
As a senior java developer who worked on core java with occasional spring core and hibernate projects, it is extremely disappointing and annoying when the interviewer 5 years younger than you rejects you on the basis of useless DSA and system design questions that he copied from somewhere. I'm like bro why don't you ask me what problems I faced and solved in my previous projects. They would also ask you to be well versed with front-end, kafka, cloud, nosql and devops tools like dockers etc. None of these would be relevant mostly in the actual project because companies have dedicated teams for such components.
That's pathetic
I think , as a senior developer, you are trying to say problem solving and design skills are not at all required.
Interviewer will ask only what you wanted to ask , not other things.
@@ravikiranreddy2867 😂😂well said
@@ravikiranreddy2867 you may have slightly misunderstood me. All I am saying is that when you work for service based companies and give interviews for other service based companies, you are most probably never going to use advanced DSA or system design, especially if you are not an architect. Some may get stuck in their legacy or production support projects for years and may not have been exposed to architect level discussion initially. And not everyone is working/ going to work in a product development.
Problem solving should not be considered synonymous with DSA or SD, many people are continuing to survive long enough without being a CS major due to their problem solving and adaptability.
Nowhere did I mention that interviewer should ask only what I want to ask. I just want him to consider my knowledge of previous projects on which I spent so many hours daily. One can easily find out whether you were a good developer from how well versed you are with your past projects, how some challenges were solved on the way and how you adapted to new technologies that were required in those.
Also, not at all denying that self-upgrade is required on technologies that are outside the scope of your project, but it should not be the sole reason to get selected.
Rewind few years back, good developers were identified, not selected based on few questionnaires. It has become like an IIT-JEE preparation now. People spending months on preparations alone. Platforms like Scaler etc. charging hefty amount for your coaching. Many of my acquaintances having done this, were not so good developers, depending on their peers for their day to day task. So they faked in interviews, got hefty increment with no hands-on and then struggled with their job thereafter.
@@ravikiranreddy2867 On a side-note why dont we connect for a mock interview. We might a exchange some knowledge and perspective. Mail should be safe.
The industry has come to a point where monekys are being asked to swim and fish are being asked to fly and elephants are being asked to climb trees 🥲
well said :D
thomas has never seen such bullshit before
@@jayeshjadhav5575😂😂😂
Well said!
Absolutely correct, the senior engineers have experience in scaling big apps, handling large data etc, but for preparation they still have to go to school, college level to forget scaling and their expertise, just move back to basic DSA which is rarely used nowadays.
@@IndianCoders as a senior developer you should be weighed on both types of question patterns. But yeah DSA type of question should be focused on majorly to test if you are able to formulate a logic to solve the problem. Thats it. Focus should not be to test whether you know linked lists or trees.
Very opt topic. I have 15 years of experience in coding. If a guy 8 years younger to me, who has done a lot of leetcode rejects me for not solving a medium level question in leetcode, it makes no sense to me.
I have fought battles in production, been on call when things are breaking down all around me. I have a family. Full time job. I dont have time to spend hours and hours solving leetcode.
My experience, my ability to deliver high quality code was not even tested. I get drive a team towards achieving a solution in an optimum way. Reducing my experience to my capacity to spend solve leetcode questions is quite narrow thinking.
I am forced to apply for non-technical roles like Manager because apparently I'm not good enough as per the interview process for a tech role. I find it really ridiculous.
Sad reality. I have even stopped applying for roles which has strong DSA in their JD.
@@sathwicksv Senior engineers should never change jobs. Its very hard now.
Why did not you spend time to prepare for coding interviews ? If some company is willing to pay good money, don't you think it's reasonable to have those many rounds ? There are people who have done same thing as you and are good at lc type problems as well.
If you've 15 yoe without any network connections, then I really doubt your skills.
@@liquidmetal718 I got multiple promotions in my job without any skills?
Your arrogance will come back to bite you one day.
@@liquidmetal718 Judgement without much substance
I am a senior engineer. I just had a round of interview for one startup. Interviewer asked me to code entire module with at least 5 requirements. Basically, multiple sprints tasks in a single sitting. That too without errors. He wanted me to do runnable code, debugging, testing all of them in just 45 mins. I did complete 1 requirement. At the end, he said you are not good enough. What happened to these people????
They thought they were interviewing chatgpt😂 not human.
You should have asked them if we can copy from Open Source projects 😂
wo interview lene wala pure absolute zandu hoga
Why not walk out of that nonsense?
@@gauravaws20 I wanted to. But in life there will be a lot of people like him. I took it as a chance to learn, How to deal with these kind of people
i agree with you. I attended an interview recently where there were two rounds.
1) Scenario based: They would provide a private repository and asked us to review the code and provide comments ( tech stack : react,express,postgresql) . This is done to test your hands-on experience.
2) Coding problem. (typescript) . Even this was a real-time scenario problem.
Best part was, you can refer internet for any libraries ,syntaxes, etc (AI tools aren't allowed which is fair). I hate when they don't allow to see syntaxes (how do they expect to remember everything :( ..... ) . You just need to give credit to the site. It was amazing experience!!!
That sounds amazing, thanks for sharing this experience :D
EE ?
I had an interview doing exactly that just yesterday. The more awesome part is that the recruiter provided an extremely in-depth feedback. Pure gold.
what companies are these ?
what ? who tf uses mern apart from react in serious tech companies. mern is for genz startups
Absolutely! I am glad someone said it out loud!
I couldn't agree more.
Absolutely bang on.
Questions need to be more on the task you expect the candidate to perform rather than asking how to invert a binary tree.
Finally someone is speaking the truth. I have 18 years of software development experience, currently working in a big tech company, adding great value to my company and drawing a 8 figure salary. However I know there is no way I can crack any DSA interview without 3-6 months of dedicated preparation. Every time I change company I need to do that.
@@sumit4yt7 sir.... which country you work?
@@X0007Greenlife Bangalore, India
It's even worse here in the Philippines if you're a Filipino. Even after graduating 20 years ago and with about 20 years of work experience, I have been asked so many times with 1st year college level stuff; useless stuff that I'd never really used in my 20 years of working.
Then they ask for your college transcript of records as well as contact details of your college teachers/professors. Like seriously? It's been 20 years since I graduated from college and you still want me to find the contact details of my teachers?! Heck, some of them might even be already dead by now.
And then you find out how low the offer is.
Valid point. DSA has become standard to gauge aptitude. But many aspects of software don't need it. Most excellent UI/web developers I have seen are not great DSA coders. There is a lot more in application development than DSA.
I totally agree with your thoughts being a senior engineer preparation feels like a upsc exam where 4 to 5 months of preparation goes towards DSA along with full time job its over whelming. Difficult to keep yourself motivated for such long preparation time
I agree with what you say. But, the companies you mention (FAANG type), don't really want engineers like Linus, cause they'll never fall in line with their predefined churn and burn factory. They want people who would willingly and mindlessly give up their life for months just to get an opportunity to work with them. So I think the current interview process works fine for them.
Although the actual innovative companies should steer clear from these practices to ensure they are able to onboard truly disruptive minds.
Would you please name some of those "actual" innovative companies ? Still FANG type companies have good amount of research publications.
@@kaushikb9272 No
@kaushikb9272 Those papers come from very different set of candidates. Generally from DeepMind or Google Brain.
Good points 👍
@@kaushikb9272 research publications doesn't show innovation culture btw most of the research pub are from their research division not from production teams
Couldn't agree more. Senior level interviews should focus more on past experiences and challenges encountered and how they solved those rather than the usual DS/Algo questions which are not relevant for majority of the positions out there.
I like the hypotheticals where you are given business requirements and walk through your approach to designing a solution.
I totally agree with you Gaurav... Mostly entry-level questions are being asked even for architect / managerial roles.
Couldn’t agree more! I have 6 years of experience and I’m not at all interested in doing 100+ leetcode problems. Obviously this has costed me failing in many interviews. But i have got offer letter from company who do not bother much on dsa but focuses on Systems design and problem solving. I recently had 5-6 rounds (and DSA was very basic, and very good design + project round). I obviously cleared all rounds and now has the offer letter. I feel sorry for companies whose main criteria to filter out is DSA round.
I had a talk with my CEO (who also interviewed and hired me) and he told that he doesn't even look at resumes as the niche we are working on is too narrow and all of us are learning as we go along. Not a single damn DSA question, all the questions were relevant to the codebase and basic theoretical CS fundamentals and it's applications. I just wish that all interviews had a similar approach.
could you please say the company name?or could you please refer me
You are absolutely right Gaurav!! I have 7+ years of experience and still DSA questions are being asked in the interview. I know someone very close who has 13+ of experience and same questions are being asked to him as well!! This is bizarre!
Totally Agree, i'm a SDE with 4+ year experience. The obession with DSA (Basically math problems) in the interviews is so so real. It's as good as discarding eveything else which i was capable to do to actually complete the project.
Hey there, strongly agree with what you say.
One point you are missing imo is that: companies do not want people thinking outside the box, they want people that will study many months/years to pass DSA and will be so haply to join that they will just fit the company’s mold. Big companies do not want waves, they will buy startups so no need for a new joiner to question right and left what product A or B does.
Who ever implemented a binary tree in a production app? I have implemented an N-ary tree to represent a full aircraft’s configuration (all the parts installed)
Totally agree with you. Senior Engineers and Entry level engineers are asked pretty much same DSA questions.Senior engineers are better at design, debugging a problem, fixing bottlenecks, and their experience in integrating with other large scale systems etc... These are not asked in the interview. Senior engineers are asked DSA problems. These days chat GPT or third party libraries have solutions for these. For ex: Find Right view of Binary tree. I never used this in last 15 years and Apache string Utils and CollectionUtils packages provide many util methods, we do not need to write anything from scratch. So the DSA questions are not much relevant in day to day coding.
Moreover, Entry level or junior engineers who just learned DSA have more time to practice and get job. Most of the senior engineers with family to take care and doing part time education find it difficult to allocate time to go back and learn what they learned 15 years ago.
World is not perfect, we got to live the way it is. But this interview process is very discouraging to Senior Engineers. They loose confidence when they get rejected on an irrelevant DSA problem while they are successful at their current job.
The problem for me is when I apply for a job and to clear the interview I need to prepare myself for at least a month Like to revisit all algorithms, OOPS, DS & architecture concepts. That is the actually problem in Senior Engineers.
Such a great topic! I 100% agree. Let’s talk more about this so that it reaches to the right people to bring the right change in this system.
Well said, I have 12 years of experience with a strong track record in solving production issues, addressing complex system design problems, and implementing effective system design patterns. However, I find that interview questions today often focus more on solving LeetCode hard algorithm problems rather than assessing real technical skills.
It seems there isn't a tool or proper process that adequately evaluates a candidate true skillset of 10+ year experience.
I completely agree with this! Education is needed again for the people who come up with these types of interview processes.
For a data scientist interviews, they are asking leetcode problems which have no huge role to do with data. I understand logic is important, but whole interview seems irrelevant when you are not asked a single question related to database, statistics, machine learning and MLops.
This is absolutely true 💯..just leetcode nothing else and to top on that they hardly give feedback..the process is slow and random.
This is exactly what I was telling the other day, like how “freshers” level interviews are still used to judge experienced employees, how even after having different libraries to implement thread, they still ask the basic Java multithreading.
That's the problem with interview process. Another problem is debriefs after all discussions, where any interviewer or any hiring manager give wrong feedback and which can manipulate others judgement. I feel interview should be milestone based and should be given a fair chance of opportunity. And I strongly oppose some policies of 6 months cooling period. If someone is looking for a job at your organization and is desperate to get, would wait for another two quarter :D ?
true , I have 15 years of experience. In one of the interviews , interviewer did google search (vdo call) and started asking fresher level question list that came up. MOreoever, I was told that being a senior , you should know the basic. I told i think same applies to you as well, you should also ask qn without searching in google.
If you don't understand basics or internals of it, then you are just a script kiddie. 1 year experience repeated for 10 years.
I agree and I feel this is not only with senior devs , but also those who are at the helm of mid level experience (in a no man's land kind of area) where we're not only preparing for trying something different, say coming from 2 years of doing not much but dealing with legacy code, looking it up on unix machines, and trying to mavenise (modernise) the same legacy code.. we want to take onto some modern tech, say move into data engineering field.. we're not only trying to skill up with our python scripting, using libraries which are handy in playing around with data, learning and practicing cloud concepts along with some big data tools.. basically building a portfolio to vouch for our said skills (I like this approach), and on top of it trying to cover the lengths and breadths of DSA in the language we would be coding in. I agree using DSA does give an idea about how efficient can a candidate tune his code, but I would have to have an extra task up my get-ready-for-interview list, and obviously the fixed leetcode/MacDowell questions.. and in data engineering or any other type of tech interview, where we do not really face DSA specific problems, we can get more focussed and real world problems related to handling large amounts of data, maybe have discussions about our portfolio, try out an approach that would fit that role and not a standard approach that fits them all..
DSA is dreadful I get it, but it was easier when I was a fresher (having not much to guage for, the interviewers can get a fair idea) but now for various niches we can have varying forms of interview methodologies. Here we are, all still having to go back to the DSA regardless of all the experience or despite cloud computing bejng the bread and butter of companies (not saying that DSA is yesterday's thing, but now there are other things to focus on, other that an O(1) or O(n) way of dealing with real world problems)
Agreed with you and simply it’s very frustrating to prepare for a new job.
I somewhat agree with you, but remember that you’ve already started your career and even created a course on data structures. I’ve noticed that many developers, even experienced ones, often just use List for everything, even when other data structures might work better. It’s important for developers to understand and choose the right data structures for each task. Doing so can make our code more efficient and shows a better grasp of the tools we have.
This is why I sometimes being a decent engineer who is passionate about technology and solving problems, I absolutely hate being in the industry.
The interview process is just bizarre. It is just not aligned with how things work in real life. And companies have absolutely ridiculous standards. It is major source of frustration for a lot of people and is absolutely downright stupid.
One thing I have observed in interview process, it's more of negative test what you don't know than being positive about what you know.
@@sandipbhaumik absolutely I know for a fact that I can be successful in a role but the gatekeepers won’t let me in. Why?
Because I didn’t give them a signal in a stupid interview which has no relation with the actual job.
I have been in the industry for 15 years and have worked in all sorts of companies ranging from consulting to small niche agencies to a high growth SaaS platform but all that is trash because we trust coding puzzles more.
It is borderline insulting for all the work I have put in for 15 years which has no value.
Tell me one more field where experience doesn’t matter. What matters is how much you have grinded for the interview. Pathetic.
@@gauravaws20 agreed, I have 16 years of exp and feel ashamed when a 4/5 years of experience coder judging my coding skills.
@@gauravaws20 I feel like leaving this field.
color me stupid but if an interview starts off with leetcode questions while the job itself is completely different (ex: web development) i'm running out of there asap.
Bang on.
Absolutely true.
Perfect tooling might be the solution as you mentioned . ( Startup opportunity ) its truly a gap in the Industry.
100% agree, I went through the interview process with a few companies last year and because I didn’t have undergrad level algorithms and data structure down pat along with an in depth knowledge of kubernetes, o didn’t get the job. I think company should check for interest in solving a problem with all resources at hand. In addition to the candidate takes their part in continuing to grow the product seriously.
Being a senior myself, most of the work done in software companies is the work which can be done by anyone, that is why people with no CS degree are also able to do it. That is why these companies just tend to gather people with good IQ and analytical skills as the work can anyways be done.
I know the interview process of DSA is kinda flawed now as people are just testing one's ability to cram rather than solving an unseen problem and approach.
But the logic of false positives work for these companies due to the huge number of applicants, so they know their requirement is anyways going to get filled and which is also working for them because at the end of the day they are able to ship the best software.
Also its very hard to come up with a generic interview process which tests the quality work that people in software engineering has done due to the vastness of domain.
Absolutely 💯 agreed 👍...all points you mentioned, I'm experiencing same since last few months even having 8+ years of experience. This is sad 😥
Much relatable brother.. i am preparing for interviews and most of the questions they ask are no where relevant to the job we will be doing
Good analysis. I think true positives should form the bench mark of selection and true negatives can filter it out. True positives can be a set of questions (practical real world) which can be asked upfront before the interview process in writing... so that the candidates can work it out and answer. For ex: the recent Microsoft problem with Counterstrike update which mis-fired. The ability of the candidate to understand the issues and articulate it and also the ability to prevent repetition of it could be a basis of shortlisting. This candidate can even get assistance from his friends and relatives to answer this written question beforehand.
During the interview we can focus on
a) Understanding how much he has understood the written answer, how much he can digest and assimilate and also the quality of solution he offers. This would be a real in depth analysis by the inteviewer.
b) Identify true negatives, which will decide the winner among multiple true positives.
Totally agree. I came back to the industry after more than a decade - I was one of the better programmers when I left the industry in 2008. Interviewing process was more conceptual then (at least when I used to interview) along bit of problem solving and puzzles to gauge IQ and some coding exercise to understand the interviewee thought process. Right now, it has become similar to clearing CAT or IITJEE - the deep thought that comes from solving real world problems is missing.
Very true Gaurav and you are spot on!
Couldn’t agree more…
It’s time the process evolved…
I had discussions with many people, and they all said the only way they know to judge a person's problem-solving and design skills is through traditional methods. I explained to them that there are plenty of real-world problems that can be asked in interviews, which can be domain-driven but implemented using DSA approaches. I bet candidates would bring insights to an interview that the interviewer might not have considered. I understand that those with just a couple of years of experience might not grasp these nuances fully.
Ask questions with a domain focus, and you're likely to get meaningful answers. For example, if a candidate works in security, ask them about real-world problems related to data or transport security. Similarly, for a networking position, focus on problems like data compression.
My mantra is simple: if I interview someone more experienced than me, I would refer them to a recruiter to find a more senior interviewer.
The biggest problem I see is that only a few companies focus on domain-specific questions. Instead, they emphasize on generic DSA questions, even when they know the candidate comes from a competing company.
Well there are certain companies that still conduct online general aptitude test to determine a candidates problem solving abilities well in my opinion those type of candidates are more likely to have an experience at system design level and few problem solving question should actually do the job I mean you may conduct any number of rounds assessing system design skills and some problem solving skills should be fine.
One such example is Nagarro conducting online aptitude tests.
A mix of both should be a part of the interview process. Medium - little hard DSA , system design / architectural questions along with real world issues/problems subjective questions related to the framework/tech, which the candidate has the skills on. This will get you engineers who have analytical skills as well as have good in depth knowledge of their domain.
Also, senior engineers should have a good functional base along with business scope of their previous projects.
that's good
i just have to do DSA to eventually get into FAANG later since i could'nt in college due to not formatting my resume properly during internships and then going for a lesser company instead of waiting for amazon which may have landed me a faang fte
Excellent video Gaurav. Personal I believe, the interview should test the job readiness instead of technical IQ. Because for senior positions experience matters more than tech IQ. For seniors it’s the wisdom that matters.
Absolutely agree. Senior folks should know the DSAs but not at implementation levels. The bigger focus should be to know what it takes to build a 0 to 1 and then 1 to 1000 or more.
Exactly. I have been saying this for so long but I get the response that as a senior if you can't answer basic questions, you shouldn't be senior. Bruh, I have forgotten more than any junior even knows currently.
Kudos to your maturity
I think one solution could be starting the hiring process with a role/domain based take home project and discussing it in the interview. The project could include problems that would be somewhat related to the role at the company. This would give the candidate an idea of whether the role is a good fit for them and a chance to showcase their skills better. Similarly the company would be able to filter on a much better talent pool. Further rounds could be carried out to reduce bias but I think this can be a good starting point.
Being a senior engineer myself I dread preparing for DSA and find it very irrelevant and tiresome.
Interviewing is a completely different skill than the job. You should probably continue interviewing at all points wherever you go, JUST so that your career isn't disrupted
Bang on. i have 15 years of experience and recently for an investment bank interview i have been asked almost 80% of spring annotations. And the person interviewing me around 6-7 years of experience asked me to go home and check the annotations and asked me they are interested in a leader who is better than them. Though interested in getting job, it didn't interest me a bit reading those annotations.
the interviewer would be replaced by AI soon or later by just memorising annotations usage
I also experienced this, i got asked coding challanges with are totally not relevant to the job, initially i felt bad and started learning those questions, there is something very wrong with interview process, the interview should actually look like an average day compressed in 30 minutes or 1 hour where candidate is asked questions on real life challenges that come during job
Honestly what I think is that the objectivity that you are talking about does not really harm the company. The false negatives do not harm the company. But the hypothetical approach on the basis of which you want the companies to hire senior engineers may cause more harm than good by resulting in a lot of false positives
There is one more thing which I have noticed, since the focus is shifted too much on DSA based interviews, the candidates who have spent like half or a complete full year practicing dsa bases questions, develops a mindset where he/she thinks that okay so dsa is something I need to clear the interviews and I am pretty good at it, so now I dont need to dive deep into the core engineering topics and I just need to do the bare minimum. Whenever I want to switch I can easily switch with my DSA skills.
IMO this in the long run will be harmful for the companies.
We should align the interview process with the work that we do on day to day basis like writing clean code with test cases adhering to solid principles for senior software engineer so in such case we can discuss one of the solid principles in interview and ask the candidate to write a piece of code demonstrating the same. For architect position we can go into system design and performance, scalability concepts as per job requirements. So very important who is taking or designing the interview process it should be the team where the position is open.
As a self-taught programmer, I like cookie-cutter technical questions. There are many books and videos that discuss the topics at length and they're effectively logic puzzles, which I fancy.
But I understand the frustration veteran programmers must feel when being asked the same questions they were asked on their first job interview.
Completely agreed.
In many cases, the company and the team truly cares about finding the right engineers to get the job done, to build a product and so on. For those cases, they will figure out a better way of understanding the true abilities of a candidate.
But in many cases, especially in the recruiters market like now, the focus is more on “how do I eliminate a huge number of candidates so that I only talk to some of them and start figuring out if they are a match or not later”.
What I mean is that, in some cases, companies just don’t care and it’s more like: yeah it sucks, but it is the process, suck it and do it anyway or I’ll find someone else to do so. If they have the upper hand, they can afford such bad practices. Unfortunately, thanks to their reputation, FAANG can still get candidates anyway regardless of whatever practice they put in place...
Exactly.Being a senior developer I have given interviews where the main focus is DSA. But in real life mostly the challenges faced are system designing and optimization/performance which the senior engineers do not get a chance to explain.So basically its the companies loss
Sharing my experience, I felt clearing Amazon interview was easy than clearing Intuit interview as they asked to create an application with specific requirements on my system (asked to carry my system), and a team of 4-5 members asked detailed questions on each part of that application.
It really liked it.
FAANG or MAANGA companies asked mostly ds and design questions.
I usually reject companies who ask algo related question and that too when its not relevant for the role and for the company itself. DS is something which every developer should know.
Finally someone talking about my problem, thanks,🎉
Finally some one said the facts straight. In India, smartness no longer matters. Its all about your acting skills in the interviews. Interviewers come prepared with a solution (Ratta batch), and if you give a different solution, you are out. It doesn't matter if your design is effecient. Its basically like a dance choreography (dandiya dance to be specific), you need to make the moves in sync with the interviewer, else his/her ego gets hurt and you are out.
One legend who is supposedly "senior architect" from Servicenow once said, CDN is a magic, hence we cannot use it in our project 🤮 When did software engineers start using black magics in code. Why are there solutions available in market in that case, lets use legacy technology and re-invent the wheel? Sick of these now.
You nailed the problem in the head when you said companies are looking for objectivity when they really shouldn't. Big corps like Google and Microsoft could look for objectively good hires and then later allocate those hires to teams based on subjective tests.
Startups on the other hand are built with small teams that jel together. In most cases, by unproven founders themselves. Such teams need to look for personality hires more than anything else so that these teams can work efficiently and build the product.
Remember how people don't leave companies, they leave managers? It's this excessive objectivity that is leading to it.
But then again, there's always this danger of discrimination creeping in (like too many Telugu guys in the same team)
Even a fresher can practice, and write a code for these LEET code problem. But, it would take immense experience and real world exposure, to make sure the code they are writing are scalable, secured, maintainable and what not!
A lot of JD's mention "thrive under pressure" ,maybe they try to judge us if we are able to thrive the pressure during the interview of solving an analytical problem that we are seeing for the first time.One more essential skill which they are not able to judge us is our troubleshooting skills which go a long way during our day to day functioning as a developer.
it makes 10000 percent sense, there is no fit all..mostly some of the interview ai platforms like barraiser are highly inefficemt when it comes to evaluating candidate overall!
I agree with much of it, but I believe this is why the system design interviews are more open ended and a change to showcase practical, experiential knowledge. This is also why the system design interview is what determines your level at Facebook for example. That all said, there is still a lot of academic data in the process that may trip up good senior candidates who don’t have time to LC all day because they’re working on actual software development
let us recall why all this happens coz we as Sr. Engineers have created such an environment within the company to deliver things. I don't want to blame Jr. Engineer for taking such interviews and rejecting us. We have to clear their expectation make them feel good that we are still Sr. Engineers let them overwhelmed by our skill sets. Also, we have been doing a lot of great system design and other stuff for many years we should start thinking of creating our own ecosystem.
The fundamental problem with recruitments is "who is taking your interview and his qualifications". I've seen a lot of people, who sit on the managerial positions for the department, with no core expertise. These people don't know what to expect from an employee.
Absolutely true. Nowadays I feel interview process are so lazy
I have 14 years of exp. The syllabus is huge for me. I am getting rejected, becz I am not able to,solve live coding problems. I should have solved those, but once you are stuck in the interview, then one can't think much. I was able to solve after the interview, becz with silent mind I found out where I was doing mistake and in both the cases, I was very close in solving the problem.
Exactly!! Why are companies behind this DS & Algo?
If you dont clear, then you are out. No one asks real world scenarios. Atleast the simple scenarios , for ex : lets say our server has a webhook to capture payments and our server went down for an hour. How do you reconcile the missed payments.
Something like this.
Instead companies are behind tree traversal and leetcode problems.
@gkcs_ In my opinion, for SDM, PSDE or Architect or Sr Architect, we can have a top down approach, where we test system design first and then drill down low level design and coding in consecutive process. Here we can easily segregate talents who are eligible for complex system design and talents who can code . If we want to have a trade off between these two we can have as well. Just a thought, lmk, what's your opinion on this.
I have 9+ YOE in automation testing. Interviewer asks me to write code on comparator. In my workflow I never needed this algorithm for anything. How the heck is type of question even relevant for me??
Just of curiosity, if companies focus on project related questions for senior engineers (5+ years of experience) , then there is a possibility that some projects in their resume maybe the most recent one was either legacy/proprietary or the tech stack is kind of irrelevant in the industry and there were no major technical challenges like in startup based environments- i mean thats the reason someone can be looking for a job change: to work on good projects. How to prepare for interviews in such a case? Would like opinions/points. Honestly just reading designs concepts or having theoretical knowledge rarely helps. Even if we try to work on some side/mini projects they will not have the scalability,security or other issues enterprise level applications face.
have same doubt
Let's understand it like this. At senior level, someone has go through lets say 5 rounds. Now im assuming 1st round is on DSA. People who are not good at DSA will be eliminated for this round itself. Those who clear the first round will appear in next 4 rounds and here the candidates will be grilled on the actual problems. So basically, a company looks for a candidate who is an overall good fit. So, please don't blame DSA for that. It is not the only round that happens at any senior role.
this was the comment i was looking for
He is talking about false negatives
Lol this is one of a flaw in interview process.
Now imagine somebody who's good at providing actual solution to the problem existing in a domain and getting eliminated just because of not clearing DSA, you see now this results in a flaw in the selection.
Overall interview process needs a change.
@@fdg-rt2rk okay. So what do you think, a company will select a candidate only because he/she is good at DSA. Come on, as I said, DSA is just one component of the interview process, which I think should remain in the process.
Understand it like this...there are two Candidates
1) Good at designing system
2) Good at DSA as well as designing system
Of course the second will be given priority.
Also, each one of us must understand, all this is a business. When you are doing a business related to a certain skill set, you will try to influence the market.
If you understood this, Great !
@uditkaushik don't know if your live under a rock, but all faang except netflix have 3-4 rounds of coding and one SD. This basically means DSA is the most important criteria.
It is business related when Google asks dsa as they build core products and some times open source them and this require to write the code at basic level.
Now in the market, every damn company is asking DSA just copying faang.
Hear hear - please say it loud and proud, spread this far and wide!
My question to Gaurav is: How do you do it? What do you do to prepare for an interview? Or is this part of your life firmly behind you because you will never ever in your life ever need to do an interview loop at a tech company?
I think (and pray) that it's firmly behind me.
I don't think I have the strength to slog through toy problems on Leetcode anymore.
Deserve is a very loaded term , look up the study on unconscious bias. The modern tech interview is not built to find folks who deserve to be in the company it was coined to reject candidates and to keep the crowd of folks wanting to join and work for the company when companies were using it developer salaries to write of taxes
The problem with me specifically is that I'm from an open university so regardless of my skills people don't want to hire me, so its a messed up situation
this is just backward mentality.
When I was junior, I was great at interviewing but was a crappy SWE.
After 10 years of work experience, I now suck at interviewing.
yeah, I'm rejected by junior devs who asked me about tricky javascript questions copied from internet and least cared about the open source projects worked on and the libraries we created.
Some interviewers asked me about tree diff algorithms which even they have no knowledge about it.
Kinda agree, kinda disagree. Agree cos anyone can use the efficient most sorting on a list for eg; for open-source libraries, but they should know such things exist, so knowing is important rather than the exact how's of it, the why's are most important here--as that's what a senior/high level tech person would aim at, why should I use a tool, an algo, a data-structure in a specific context..
Also slightly disagree cos say Seniors should know a bit of everything including those extra skills that make them "seniors"? For eg: you can't have a senior cardiologist, or a surgeon say well I used to be able to suture and now I don't want to know how to do it? While many seniors professionals can rely on juniors to get the measly tasks done, they should still know the quality of that outcome isn't jeopardised. The analogy is from a different field but applies in the purview of expertise in your field.
how could the interview prep companies live, software industry unknowingly created a world of interview prep institutes. i am not sure, how many times you will be writing an algorithms from scratch, i have written out of my 15 year career only thrice. most of us relay on the predefined functions in the SDK.
I have to give you instance, where i attended the interview twice for the same company with a different interviewers , i can say the position and job duties are almost same
1st interview, i was asked to design a system and create a presentation, and quickly right a code for what i designed and discuss about the implementation and selection of few code components with why logic, i enjoyed the interview much. i was told clearly that the interview is all about testing my coding knowledge not on the output and i should be able to discuss reason for what i have designed and code written.
2nd interview: this time in states, and this is the time where the leet code interview scenarios or in its peek is in its peek. the question was asked from one pf the leet code sites in the interview that was reserved for an hour, it looks like a mathematical problem, i used to solve in my engineering aptitude tests, so to arrive on writing code, first i have to derive the mathematical equation and then need to write code, thanks to the online code editors, which uses java or.net frameworks that doesn't have any predefined functions, now i have to write data structures Algorithms and solve it, some how i tried but could not get to the end in first 30 mins, so i said directly to the interviewer that i can not in 1 hr, then he asked technical question, covering all architecture and system design, with all the modern cloud tech and frontend . but i was rejected stating that i could not solve the math problem in the interview.
Superb you have told the truth
When I came from school it took 2 years to get into a software position.
It took 2 years to realize that the reason why they did not take me was I understand both hardware and software.
HR did not know how to classify me so they put it in the garbage can.
The problem is about the number, if a company goes beyond 121 people, which it usually do, they loose the track of what they want to hire, the compartmentalisation kicks in and thus the HR hire as per their KPI which has nothing to do with real value addition, hence we see a huge gap in what the candidate has to do vs what is needed to be done, Soo, to overcome this, a process is designed which is very general in nature, this has nothing to do directly with product /value addition but everything to do with resource KPI.
There is only one solution to overcome it and that is to solve supply and demand, companies should be very clear with demand matrix, like what they really want to hire.
i agree i just given a interview they are asking me to write some simple synetx level codes now all syntex I don't remember I was expecting that they will at least ask me some coding questions but they did not ask
The problem is with interviewing skills as well. People mostly come up with standard interview questions. How well you are prepared for these standard questions is more important than the real skill needed for work. Interviewers hardly put in the effort to understand the candidate's skills. It's more like academic exams, all are judged based on the same question set.
As a senior with 20+ years of experience I do not want to go through this again and again. People see your resume, they see that you are experienced and after that you should go through some exercises which are absolutely the same like people with 1 years of experience do. It basically gives you the feeling that your experience cost 0 and company doesn’t value it at all. Why would I personally need this company which treats you like s student and sends you through endless interviews? And the funniest thing that even if you go through- it doesn’t guarantee you end up working on something interesting, you can easily end up editing some configs 🤨 Any software engineer could recall how to be a student and spend some time to prepare for interview and get through, The question is “Do i want to spend my lifetime on this? May be it is better to find company which shows at least some level of respect and trust and have an enjoyable working place there and pay back for trust and warm welcome with all your experience.
i guess adding more subjective questions will solve the problem, i see DSA is being thrown around companies who are trying so hard to do a FAANG model but there are smaller startups who just want a senior react or django developer, they just focus on real world problems in these ecosystem, i know this is not perfect solution either but i still feel more comfortable around these interviews than DSA ones
I got asked about threads & DSA - havnt used both of them in a long run.
We already know that asking DSA questions to a senior engineer is pointless. We just use it filter out candidates. Not to determine merit.
I agree. In my generation this may not be solved.
Very very well said ! With 16 yrs experience, I am studying basic algorithms again 😂😂
Ya nice topic. I think 💭 the interviews need to more flexible and customisable as we try to do with our software product and software systems.
The major reason is that interviewing has become mechanical and robotic and it could be easily automated today with no human. However the placement of humans for a bot style interview is no good. The other point is not all Tom dick and Harry can interview. Interviewing is an art and requires focused intuition as well to extract signals from a senior candidate. But in today’s interview process any engineer can conduct an interview after going through an online training which is not going to be of help in anyway identifying the right senior candidates. 🚀🚀🚀