Ask HN: Software Engineer hitting 40: what's next?
I’m 50 in Silicon Valley and going through dozens of interviews right now. I decided to quit during COVID and now am trying to renter the workforce. I have 24 years experience and worked at companies you’ve all heard of and I honestly have great experience. I’m still a coder and code in my spare time because I enjoy it. I still maintain friendships with people I worked with over 20 years ago, we recently had a reunion lunch and it was nice to reminisce over the dot com days.<p>I’m so far 0&#x2F;10 on interviews. The bar is so high now and the expectations of perfection in a 45-60 min interview are so ludicrous that I can’t find a job yet. I’m LeetCoding about 3-4 hours a day, focusing on medium and hard questions. I went to sleep last night at 1am after struggling to understand a hard-level LC question that took me about 2 hours to work through.<p>I know the drill, I’m not shirking away from studying. I’ve conducted hundreds of interviews myself. I’m old enough to have been through every single interview style that coders have had to endure since the Microsoft interviews of the 90s.  But the sheer breadth of knowledge you need to know, plus the expectations of making perfect decisions in a limited amount of time is utterly ludicrous. It’s like people have forgotten that you can’t design Twitter in 45 mins or think about every single possibility. or that some of these coding questions that are being asked are PhD level problems, so if you’ve never seen it before, it’s going to be pretty hard to solve. Or that people can make honest mistakes and get on the wrong track for 10 mins out of a 4 hour interview, and then you get rejected. Or people also seem to forget that the interviewers themselves are so inexperienced at interviewing that they confuse their candidates with poor instructions, or they expect the candidates to guess what they themselves think the right answers are.<p>The most frustrating part is when you’re given a relatively “easy” question but you go down the wrong path, figure out your mistake, and then correct it and solve the coding question in the allotted time , and then be told that I “didn’t perform as strongly as they hoped”.<p>If I were told “study X,Y and Z. We will test you at LC hard only on this.” I could bang it out of the park. But I literally have to know every single topic in CS and every level. LC literally has thousands of questions. My brain can’t remember all of these solutions. I’ve been studying for 2 months solid and finished only 200 LC questions because some questions take me all night to understand and I’m exhausted.<p>The biggest insult is that a company I worked at before needs me to go through a full interview loop even though I have great performance reviews only a few years prior and my code is still running there. Not that I would return, because I left that place for a reason, but the idea that an interview is a better judge of my abilities than the years of performance reviews is completely mind blowing to me.<p>Everyone knows that interviewing is broken but it’s not broken. It’s mentally ill. It’s crazy. Interviews don’t test “how good of a performer will this candidate be?” It’s “how well will this person do on these random questions that we don’t know if it actually correlates to work performance.”<p>I was on an interview loop for my company where someone had a GitHub. When we suggested that we could check out their GitHub to see their coding, someone objected saying that we don’t know if that person actually wrote the code. The confidence people have that on-site interviews produce the best example of how smart people is a reflection of how insane things are.<p>Expectations are far too wide and as a candidate you need to know literally everything otherwise you won’t “perform strongly”. But it’s really just random chance.  Coding interviews should be longer and less random. Give time for the person to mess up and get back on the right track. Isn’t that what you want in a co-worker? Systems design questions should be a long conversation about building systems, not just “what points did the candidate mention that I was expecting them to.”<p>Coding interviews are more of a hazing than indicator of future performance. And as more people study, the bar gets higher and higher until it will reach absurd levels. I have staff or senior staff level experience but I’m applying for E5 level positions because I would rather get into a company and work my way up than try to come in at a level where the expectations are mentally ill.