Comment by alienfluid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alienfluid | Hacker News Reader

I haven't had an interview in over 6 years, but I have been approached by multiple recruiters in the same time span.

I actually dread the day I choose to switch jobs and have to face another technical interview - considering that my knowledge of college-level CS has declined over time. It's not because I am less skilled now than I was before, it's because you don't have to constantly create fantastically fast algorithms on a daily basis (at least in my job!).

The skills that I have developed over the past 6 years - designing complex components that interact with other complex components in a hugely complex product, making improvements in the design of a 20 year old codebase, deciding between fixing a bug and compatibility etc., intuition about design choices and how they fit in the product, and yes, debugging (!) - none of these are covered in technical interviews these days.

Sure, I could explain how a b-tree works - but that's not going to help me resolve my next bug.

Same here. I would have to study up for the interview and that seems pretty silly considering I spend every day writing code and have for years. There's a lot of irony in that too considering that when I need a b-tree, I Google it.

It would be funny to bring an Android phone to a Google interview and then proceed to Google answers for questions they ask like this to point out how outdated the question is.

If it's anything like interviews at my company, we just aren't really trained on how to interview, so these questions come up because the interviewer may not know what to ask aside from things like this, and their last interview experience may have been when looking for a job straight out of college when this was all they really knew about, so this is what interviewers asked them about. In a way those questions may just be "what you're supposed to ask someone in a CS related interview".

I'm sure you would do fine based on your experience and boyishly good looks.

Um ... thanks!?

FYI, my comment has 4 upvotes.

EDIT: now 8 upvotes...??

this is how HN should work - reddit your post to keep people updated on your upvote count.

You could always get a "back door" hire -- build a product that Google acquires and simply become part of the staff that way. Oddly, that kind of hiring selects for people who see the entire product and can build something that works and is successful vs. somebody who keeps flash cards with complexity stats for oddball algorithms in their back pocket.

I went back into tech interviews recently after a 4 year break. It only took two weekends of skimming my old books to get enough up to speed to pass some whiteboard tech interviews, although I don't think I was quite ready for Google level challenges, I'd have probably wanted another week of brushing up for that. If you don't have a few weekends, the quick course is give yourself a graph problem and code it in 30 minutes, critique yourself for 30 minutes, repeat 4 times, go interview. You won't find anything harder on a whiteboard than a graph search, and the practice will be good for you on easier problems.

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