The advise in the article is great for beginners or people willing to work as beginners. For people who are senior developers or who have previously been in corporate management these tips won’t work.
If you are a senior developer you shouldn’t be spending any time on practice interview whiteboards. You should already know how to code with confidence and be ready to honestly disclose where your experience ends. A good senior developer provides solutions to problems, which is more than pressing buttons on a keyboard.
The problem a senior is more likely to encounter is navigating the stylistic code biases of a controlling interviewer, such that if you aren’t writing code their way you are wrong. This is absurd. You either must have the confidence and soft skills to talk though those biases, if are adept enough to identify them, or be willing to work exactly their way like a beginner even after they hire you.
A huge red flag when interviewing are places that cannot differentiate junior developers from senior developers. For example if a junior developer is reliant on some tool for important basic requirements then a senior must be an expert at that tool completely ignoring the idea that such a tool is likely completely unnecessary.
Some people need interview prep. It could be that some candidates lack the soft skills. If the interview conversation capabilities don’t come naturally then you are projecting a false persona to be hired, a fraudulent first impression that evaporates once hired.
I do empathize with people trying to play up their capabilities just to be hired. There are tons of developers that are drastically under qualified for the seats they occupy.
As much as I love this advice, reality is stark different from this. End of the day, you're judged by how accurately could you solve some random leetcode problem.
Not true at all. Senior developers are routinely subject to the same algorithmic questions in their coding interviews, especially at FAANG (I successfully interviewed and got offers for senior positions at multiple FAANGs two years ago).
Even worse, the actual coding one does on the job is a completely different skill set than being able to dish out Dynamic Programming recurrences and tree traversals under tight time pressure, so by being farther removed from undergrad where these algorithms are taught, senior engineers generally have to prep even harder than junior engineers for these types of questions. I don't think I've ever actually used Dynamic Programming to solve a real problem on the job before.
The one case where this actually applies is during the System Design interview.
> Even worse, the actual coding one does on the job is a completely different
When I encounter this during an interview, which I have, I don't accept the offer. Why would I want to go through an interview process that is completely unrelated to the job I will be performing? There is no expectation of success in that and its completely open to disappointment. Again, if you are a beginner you do what you must. Senior developers are fewer and in greater demand so they can afford to be a bit more selective.
Why aren't more senior engineers "selective" against these interviews?
Easy: Because FAANG and the companies that do these interviews pay senior engineers THAT much more ($100's of k) than the companies that don't.
Swallowing my pride and grinding through Leetcode for a month or two in preparation for tech interviewing was easily worth the extra boost in compensation.
If you are a senior developer you shouldn’t be spending any time on practice interview whiteboards. You should already know how to code with confidence and be ready to honestly disclose where your experience ends. A good senior developer provides solutions to problems, which is more than pressing buttons on a keyboard.
The problem a senior is more likely to encounter is navigating the stylistic code biases of a controlling interviewer, such that if you aren’t writing code their way you are wrong. This is absurd. You either must have the confidence and soft skills to talk though those biases, if are adept enough to identify them, or be willing to work exactly their way like a beginner even after they hire you.
A huge red flag when interviewing are places that cannot differentiate junior developers from senior developers. For example if a junior developer is reliant on some tool for important basic requirements then a senior must be an expert at that tool completely ignoring the idea that such a tool is likely completely unnecessary.
Some people need interview prep. It could be that some candidates lack the soft skills. If the interview conversation capabilities don’t come naturally then you are projecting a false persona to be hired, a fraudulent first impression that evaporates once hired.
I do empathize with people trying to play up their capabilities just to be hired. There are tons of developers that are drastically under qualified for the seats they occupy.