nowherebeen

They are probably intimidated by you. It will be an uphill battle because you are the only senior on the team. It's clearly a bad fit for anyone with your years of experience. No sane manager would build a team of 1-3 yoe and one 15+ yoe. That's a recipe for failure. I would start looking for better roles elsewhere.

I think yes and no. After working for 7 years+, you will hit a plateau. To break through, you will need to study on your own free time. That's because most individual work doesn't get harder after a certain level. It is the scale of it that makes the work difficult.

> I wouldn't be so patronizing to others if I were you.

Perhaps you are seeing it through the wrong lens. I am simply stating that coding is much more just DSA.

> How old are you really

If you don't know how rude you are, then I don't think we should continue this conversation. It seems like you do not know how to respond to someone you disagree with using manners. You are entitled to your own opinion as I am. Being confrontational and asking someone's age outright doesn't make your case and tells me you lack basic social skills.

At the end of the day, it's a job. If the employer wants you to grind LeetCode to get the job, then yes, you are going to have to do it. It still doesn't make it right though. I have no problem having to jump through hoops, but it does grind my gear when programmers use LeetCode as a badge of honour to show they are superior than others. Elitism within the LeetCode community is very strong.

I use a low-dose of melatonin 1mg and I break it in half. I also have been trying melatonin skin cream which seems to do the trick also.

Oh you are right. I definitely mis-read your comment. Apologies.

Have you forgetton the whole Google lawsuit against Uber? Anthony Levandowski. Uber’s self driving project is still no where near production ready.

> why they ask questions to assess your ability on the actual job

You already said LC isn't an ideal proxy to the job. So I am not sure what point you are making.

If I work at Stripe for 5 years as a software engineer, are you saying I am lying about my experience? How about Google? How about Coinbase? How did these people survive for so long?

It seems like you default to the candidate being liers. Maybe you are young, but it will happen to you one day, once you learn the full-stack and then realize no-one cares because you need to pass LC to even get a job. Something you don't need because software engineering encompasses much much more than some DSA algorithm.

> The questions I see don’t use any tricky DS/algo that needs memorising.

That's kind of anecdotal. If it was that easy, everyone would pass. My experience has been entirely on the interviewer. The younger the interviewer, the more they have to prove by giving dynamic programming or direct acyclic graph questions. I am not denying your experience, but it just isn't universally true.

> these tests are not an ideal proxy for job performance > Past experience is unfortunately also a weak indicator

If past experience of doing the actual job is bad indicator and these test are not a good proxy, then according to your logic, experience is worthless and we should all optimize for these tests.

And this is exactly what is happening in the industry. Younger professionals spent hours memorizing Leetcode because they just graduate to pass the test. Older professionals having years of experience and family obligations don't.

> Writing readable code, explaining your thought process and decisions and communicating well with the interviewer are also vital points of the assessment.

Maybe to you, but I have seen many candidates get an automatic fail if they can't solve 2 questions in 50 minutes. The key metric being 2.

> Especially Google should have quite some data on their various approaches and correlation to job performance and seems to use it.

Source?

> Every approach comes with its own unique set of problems and as long as the position is sought after people will prepare and try to game the system.

Agree

If they are paying 30% less then they will be competing against late stage startups. They have a cash cow to help tilt the lever to their advantage. However that 30% is unlikely to make older workers works more because they have other family obligations. Priorities change in your 30s.

It’s a way to filter out more experienced candidates because they want cheap and young. Even a Meta recruiter admits to me that Leetcode has nothing to do with the job, it’s just a company requirement that no one questions.

You hit the nail on the head. News for news sake; drama for drama sake. At some point we need to realize this and give up on it.

It does nothing to help us in life other than give us misery. There are enough problems in life to handle. I don’t need to know about the drama of another stranger.

I recently download the Facebook app to sell something in the marketplace. It has become so bloated and un-user friendly, I question why anyone would use it on a daily basis. The new feeds is a bunch of irrelevant posts I don’t care about. I guess it was bound to happen when you hire thousands of workers to work on one app. It’s been optimized into a deformed monster.

I have met tons of business people that never got their business off the ground because they couldn’t build the product. For every failed technical founder, there are 10x more failed business founders. It’s not all just one or the other. You need a bit of both and tons of luck. Starting a business isn’t just all skills.

Absolutely, once you find the market, but at the ideation stage it’s more about spotting it in the first place. That’s much harder than it seems.

I am in the same boat as you. I realized I have all the technical chops needed to build my business, but have failed a few times now. I am now looking for a job. Who knows if the opportunity will ever arise, but I need to move on with my life. I can't be sitting waiting for an opportunity that might never come. It's been emotionally difficult for me to acknowledge this, but I take it one day at a time.

I don’t. But I used to run a Yoga platform and used Stripe. None of my customers (Yoga instructors) knew about Stripe. They always requested PayPal or Square to the point, I realized using Stripe only made my life easier, but my customers didn’t care. It was a huge hassle to convince them a) to use my platform and b) to use Stripe. So it became 2x more difficult to onboard them. Same thing for their customers. Since I was a new platform, they ask their instructors why it wasn’t PayPal or Square. They trusted those brands to hand over their card.

Yeah and also lots of new competitors will join making it even more difficult for Stripe to compete. Lots of banks already have their own credit card payment processors. They simply aren’t dealing with small clients at the moment because it’s more hassle than it’s worth. Consumer fintech is due for a huge disruption and there are already a lot of startups waiting on the sideline to compete with Stripe.

I would define Stripe as B2B2C. It’s not simply a B2B because they help business charge customers. Their value is convincing business to use their platform. Most businesses will choose payment gateways that their customers use. And by far the number 1 request from customers is usually PayPal. They might be invisible to the customer, but business will alway prefer to integrate with payment gateways that will get customers to say yes faster. It’s nuanced, but that has just been my experience. Logically you are correct though, on the surface, brand recognition should not matter.

That’s a good question. People in tech all know Stripe, but outside this circle, PayPal and even Square have far superior brand recognition. If you ask my family members what Stripe is, they would shrug.

Recessions are a lagging indicator. You won’t know until a year after it starts. What we are seeing right now is nothing compared to 2008. This is a slowdown, not yet, a recession.

So many startups never IPO, and their stock options are effectively $0. When they leave they have a small window to exercise them and pay capital gains tax (with inflate valuation, this could be $100k or more).

Anyone thinking of making money off stock options at pre-IPO startup are taking a get a) valuations are realistic b) startup will IPO. In this current environment, both are false.

That’s about 74 billion valuation. FYI.

Oh the irony. These startups have been growth hacked!

Yes, I forgot the website, but it said hiring freeze till end of August.

Aren’t you guys on a hiring freeze?

Elitism is a real thing in certain tech companies.

"Bad: Technical" are basically managers with less than 3 yoe of experience as IC.

"Bad: Non technical" are basically micro-managers

Finding Good: Technical will always be easier to come by than Good: Non technical, since understanding what you are managing gives you a leg up.

Good: Non technical works if you already have a strong team of ICs. It will quickly fall apart if not.

Then it becomes a question who has more money because they will do everything in their power to drag this on. I think you know the answer to this.