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Comment by yellow_lead | Hacker News Reader

I dunno. It may take 1-2 months to prepare for Leetcode style interviews, and this can be pretty mentally exhausting. Every time you fail to solve a leetcode question, it feeds your imposter syndrome, which is probably even worse due to getting fired.

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If leetcode wasn't hard enough to make a good programmer fail now and then, there would be no point to it.

If Leetcode didn't provide discrimination defense and neg the candidate shortly before offer, there would be no point to it.

If companies just accepted good programmers and were frank with themselves that they are not going to find rockstar 100x programmers for half the market rate, Leetcode would be acceptable.

With all due respect, that sounds like a personal shortcoming to me. One can (and should) not take interviews personally. One also can (and should) be able to acquit oneself well at an interview even without prep time.

> One also can (and should) be able to acquit oneself well at an interview even without prep time.

I don't agree. If you don't prepare at all for an interview, it shows. Aside from leetcode, it's also important to research the company.

My point is mainly that I might be upset if I were in that group that's laid off today. I don't want to prep leetcode for several weeks. It feels like a waste of time.

I've never prepared for an interview in my life, and I've never had any difficulty. Anecdotal of course, but I think prep for interviews is vastly overrated.

You're telling me you maintain the ability to pass the various interviews that the modern FAANG SWE gauntlet requires year-round? Good for you if so, but this doesn't match the experience of any of the folks that I've worked with across my career.

Who said anything about FAANG? I don't work in that world and in fact you literally could not pay me to do so. It seems miserable as hell. But Dropbox isn't in that world either. And in any case, I've never ever had to prepare for a job interview at all, let alone for multiple months. They aren't that hard in most cases.

Dropbox is (or at least was) renowned for having one of the hardest software developer interview loops.

16 weeks + 1 week / year severance works out to 3-5 months.

Looks like enough time to prepare, take a vacation, ect.

Wow, that's horrible. And you might even have to stay at a 4 star instead of a 5 star resort in Bali when you take a vacation during your severance, job market is tough.

Even worse, you might have to miss one contribution to your FATfire investment account to deal with the extra risk. Compounded, that missed contribution might mean you'll have to retire at 46 instead of 45.

How dare these companies treat these people this way. They took the massive risk of working for an already-successful company at $250K/yr with a $200K stock package, and now fat cat Drew Houston dares to leave them with just an abnormally large severance after they are no longer needed.

I don't think your tone aligns with the community guidelines[1]. Please consider not being snarky and sarcastic but actually responding to the merit of what people say here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As a fellow tech worker, I genuinely believe all the things I mentioned are upsetting. It's happened to me before!

I realized though that I was probably going to be okay, and what I actually needed was some perspective.

Sometimes the contrast of "sarcasm" is the only way to shake you out of your bubble and give you that perspective.

Sarcasm is bad. It would have been fine to say "I think there is a social contract of it being acceptable to lay off workers making 400k".

>I realized though that I was probably going to be okay

I thought so too... that was 13 months ago.

I still am okay, but only by pure blind luck. And okay in a "rice and beans diet" way. The actual interview gauntlets are worse than my first job search.

And yes, luck = preparation x opportunity. But I was literally cold called by a founder. My experience spoke for itself, but it only helped me tread water instead of sink into the abyss. Sure didn't work the other hundreds of times I kept searching.

>Sometimes the contrast of "sarcasm" is the only way to shake you out of your bubble and give you that perspective.

Again, the guidelines

>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Assumptions are horrible on the internet because it only enrages those who do not fit your strawman. I did everything "right" and I end up laid off twice, draining all my savings and a bit of my stock, and being gaslighted for over a year when I could grab multiple offers in 3-4 months the last few job hunts.

I work in games, I'm not making 500k salaries and was well prepared for layoffs. but I was doing very well for myself. So it's tiring hearing people deride my decade of experience with "well maybe you weren't actually a good worker". I'm definitely not a 10x-er, never have been. But it's backwards hat I have more experience now and am desired less for my experience.

It's just bad times. The sooner we can accept that, the easier it'll be to come together and weather the storm. But with layoffs it seems like all the elitism comes out instead.

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