Be me

>Be me
>Grad student at best CS program in the world
>Destroying all of the hardest classes
>Systems and optimization expert
>Can't pass a tech interview to save my life

I swear these things are fucking rigged. I'll feel like I breezed through all of their questions with no problem, but I'll still get a smile and a thanks but no thanks.

Also, why do most companies not ask real, relevant questions in these interviews? How does my knowing how to solve DP problems have anything to do with how well I'd be able to write a kernel module?

>fuck

Other urls found in this thread:

quantstart.com/articles/Best-Undergraduate-Degree-Course-For-Becoming-A-Quant
sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11246917
sobit.me/2016/07/08/amazon-software-engineer-interview/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Learn to poo in the loo.

industry is retarded, they don't know what they want and they're gonna hire H1B poos to do your rote programming job and write shitty code that they will be paid to maintain for the next 10 years

the whole thing is fucked, just lie because fuck them they have no loyalty to american graduates

You don't get it. The point is that they're not going to hire you - if they can't find anyone to fill the position (anyone means you, the qualified person who wants the position) then they can declare that they need to import an H1B worker.

>mfw seeing a classmate of mine's facebook update
>started Grad school - Computer Science
>mfw I've been unemployed for 1+ year now, but I definitely won't do that shit again

School is a meme. What is the actual point? All you need to do is be good at social interaction. Why did no one fucking tell you this and why the fuck did my mother turn me into an anti-social recluse?

Fuck Pajeet and his fellow scabs.

OP here. I went to grad school because I did math in undergrad and I wanted to learn CS fundamentals, do research, and get a good degree in one go.

Honestly, fuck me for wasting my time. I think I would've been better off just doing code academy and reading cracking the coding interview.

By the way, I've worked in industry before and I have passed these stupid fucking tech interviews before. It just seems completely 100% random. Also, I often feel smarter than the people interviewing me. I used to think that was me being pretentious until I worked at a FLAG (yes I hate myself for saying that) company and realized that half the people working there don't know shit either.

OP again. I think I've become disillusioned with industry work in general. Building apps is fucking boring, and that's basically 99% of the work that's out there. If you're at a big name company it's closer to 99.99% of the work.

Anybody else feel this way or should I count my blessings and fuck off?

Not a CS major but I got a STEM PhD two years ago and had the same problem.
Two on-sites (one biotech, one oil) but no offer.
Took an academic postdoc at a really good school and ended up doing numerical work (not my first choice) that has no real application.
Another on-site (software company) and no offer. This time the interviewer was an Indian and he jumped out of his chair at one of my responses to some non-technical question like it was an automatic DQ.
Now I'm six months unemployed, waiting for my advisors to publish shit I did fucking years ago.

The worst part is I really have no idea what I could have done differently.

Just write some android apps and make some easy cash, OP.

Or, if you can find yourself an artist, sex games always sell.

Damn user, sorry to hear you wasted your time on a PhD. I was very sad to learn that academia has just as much horse shit as industry, if not more. Best of luck to you, sir.

This is the biggest lie. Social interaction and ability is more important than anything else.

Keep fighting. The only way this will change is if you get into a company and do well enough to be the one conducting the interviews. I believe in you man.

I don't give a fuck what I'm doing in front of a computer inside an air conditioned office if in 5 years I'll have enough money to do whatever I want for the rest of my life.

Thanks man, I appreciate that. I know it's only a matter of time, but today was especially brutal. A company I interned at over the summer wants me to come in for more interviews before they decide to give me an offer...and that was after they placed me on a total shit team doing all frontend work. I just can't figure out what else they could possibly learn from an extra couple of interviews that they didn't get from an entire summer internship.

Anyways, best of luck to you too. It's just a numbers game with these interviews at the end of the day.

>in 5 years I'll have enough money to do whatever I want for the rest of my life

Just how much money are you making? Most of the companies I've seen don't pay more than ~110-120 starting. After tax that's no more than 70-80.

I have a BS in CS and am in the second-to-last semester of an MS. I only did it because I finished undergrad a year early, didn't want to work fulltime yet, and they offered me an assistantship. I wouldn't have done it otherwise. At this point I don't even care about having a programming job. I'll do fucking tech support for a company if it means I'll be happy.

Spend 15k a year and after 5 years that's already 300k saved even without any raises. At a 4% withdrawal rate you can easily live off of 12k a year in a low cost of living area.

Not op. But hypothetically, how would I go about selling sex games?

My best friend told me his secret, and apparently he draws what is essentially hentai. He's actually good at it and has some fans.

I myself am a programmer who has created an android app (it's somewhat shitty, but for my first attempt I say it's pretty neat). It'll be posted on the app store soon enough.

>I'll do fucking tech support for a company if it means I'll be happy.
I don't know about you user, but I would be pretty fucking depressed doing tech support if I had a grad degree in CS.

>Anyways, best of luck to you too. It's just a numbers game with these interviews at the end of the day.

I know it feels like shit, but yeah its heavily luck based. I got a referral for an interview and it ended up being 2-3 hours of informal discussion with the team about what I had done and what they were doing and some general CS questions asked in a very casual way. No whiteboarding, just asked me stuff like "whats the complexity of X, why is it good or bad, would you use complexity to optimize, when and when not, what are the alternatives" etc.

It was good and everyone was friendly and I got an offer (sort of) but yeah. There's hope just keep fighting and you'll find a good team.

But just to be clear I never would have gotten my foot in the door without the strong reference I had... who I met randomly. Its so luck based man

I don't think I'd be able to live off of 12k in any universe, but I get your point. Speaking for myself I'll probably work for about 10 years and then retire.

How easy is this to do for someone with stem background but not CS?
I know Fortran, Matlab and some Java, what should I look into?

Thanks m8

Just be glad you are still young

It's from a lower tier school, though. It's not impressive, I promise you.

But yeah, I know. I just lost a lot of ambition. Sysadmin work sounds more fun than programming as a career, sometimes.

Judging by your posts in this thread it's likely that interviewers are picking up on how much of a smug fedora tier douchenozzle you are and are rejecting you because of this.

Smarter than the interviewers? Who is the one on their knees for a job, kid? It certainty isn't the smart one.

Here we see the kind of bait that inevitably shows up in these threads.

>Fortran
Good lord user. The only fortran opportunities are probably going to be on dinosaur systems either in the public sector or that are supported for legacy reasons at Intel, IBM, Oracle. I personally wouldn't look into Android apps. That shit is very difficult to market and you probably won't make that much money from it.

Honestly your best bet is to just learn web development and look for work at an agency.

Fortran is used for things like fluid dynamics because it is fast.

Sometimes I wonder. I think it might be fun to get back at these niggers for rejecting me.

I mean, if worse comes to worst and you can no longer be a neet and are now homeless. You might as well just go out with a bang, you know? Take some of these arrogant corporate fucks with you.

I'm very polite in interviews. What I meant was that I often end up having to explain approaches I'm taking because an interviewer has never heard of them. For example, it seems like ~1/2 of interviews I do in Java, I end up having to explain how the synchronized keyword works in Java.

"I'm smarter than them" wasn't the right phrasing, but in general I would say that my background knowledge is comparable if not deeper on many concepts other than "solve that dynamic programming problem."

Most people at this point are just using DSLs or C++ to do any kind of simulation unless they're using some ancient libraries. Anything you can do fast in fortran you can do equally fast in C/C++.

Hiring manager here. This is accurate. I'd literally lose my job if I hired Americans instead of stonewalling for H1B waivers.

The system is really really fucked. I don't know how to fix it but every last one of the elites who cheer this shit hate Trump so I guess I'll vote for him.

fuck academia.

4 years wasted for a mechanical engineering bachelors. no job afterwards despite 3.9 gpa. in 4th year of phd program now. no publications. i've had about a month to work on my project this summer before we had to shift back to another project. it's experimental work so no access to equipment = no progress on my thesis project.

if i could get a half decent job offer i'd just drop out, because i'm well aware that if i graduate i won't be able to get a job just like after the bachelors.

So you're a graduate student from the best CS program in the world and you're going for Java job interviews?

Something isn't adding up here mate.

I have hired both IT and non-IT staff, and in the middle of hiring another IT staff. Ask your question, and perhaps I can help?

What's wrong with interviewing in Java? It's easier than using a MYOM language, and most companies dgaf what language you interview in when it comes to matching you to a team.

If the company says I have to interview in a systems language to get matched with a systems team then I do C/C++, but typically that's not the case.

1- Did you sperg during the interview?
2- Did you show that you are not a sociopath?
3- Did you prove that you had the skillset that they needed?
4- Are you 100% sure that no one else with better skills/more experience also went for that interview?

Sounds like someone has the 'tism.

I don't know if this applies to your company or not, so I'll make this broad:

Why, in general, do companies hiring software engineers, test them on random esoteric algorithms rather than on relevant knowledge? For example, say I was interviewing for a job and purported to be an expert in parallel computer programming and architecture, and wanted to do optimization work. Why do most companies say, "OK great, could you invert this binary tree for me?" Why not say something like, "OK great. Here's a program, optimize it."

What is everyone's opinion/experience with CS majors being hired by investment banks?
I knew a girl from Columbia who got hired by Goldman Sachs, and I see job postings for stem PhDs at other banks.

1. No
2. Yes
3. No, because the questions they asked me were rando algorithms questions rather than relevant systems questions. Mind you I don't think I did poorly on the questions, I just think I could have done a bit better, and I *know* that I would have done better if I was being tested on the shit I was claiming to be good at.
4. If it's systems / optimization, I am 99.99% sure that nobody else interviewing for a normal entry level role had my skills or experience.

>wants me to come in for more interviews before they decide to give me an offer.
>I just can't figure out what else they could possibly learn from an extra couple of interviews
I can personally hire undergrads for interns, because they are very cheap. I do not need to involve anyone else, because the financial impact of someone who works in a company for ~3 months is insignificant.

Hiring a long term employee means a different legal contract, different financials, and involves more people.

Also: Being called for more interviews means that they had a large pool that got winnowed into a shortlist, and you made the shortlist.

People from top tier CS programs don't work in programming jobs

I've heard it's a total nightmare. You are not the bread and butter of the organization like you would be at a company like Google/Facebook, and for every investment bank I've ever heard of you basically end up getting treated like the guys from The IT Crowd.

Obvious b8 is obvious. If you're not baiting you have no idea what you're talking about.

If hiring a programmer, I will need to test a few things:

1- Experience. A project portfolio is fine.
2- Skills. Seeing "Java - Proficient" on a resume is not enough. I need to give the candidate some programming questions that can only be answered if they know programming. Anyone can google "how to do a for loop in javascript"; I need to know that you can do it without googling.

That Vice President salary though.

>rigged
You're probably gonna be a pain in the ass to work with compared to your "normie" peers. That is, if you're anything like the majority of Sup Forums (toxic).

>real, relevant questions
They do. It's more just to gauge your thinking process, raw skill, and cultural fit. (P.S the last one is the most important. You can be average at best in ability, but being able to network yourself out of a cardboard box puts you above the rest of the autists who apply, i.e, people like you).

>Why was I lied to
Probability, the average person is pretty average. That means they don't know about networking and how the real world works. Sucks, but get over it.

Let this be a lesson to lurkers, do your due diligence and research your field, fucking retards. Though I understand it a bit, no one told you how the world works so you're way behind on it. Blogs are your friends, find some good ones concerning your industry.

This . I remember being 14, in the back of the class, "getting by on raw talent without doing any work," thinking the world was beneath me.

Likely you're being interviewed by HR instead of someone from the team if you're applying for a large (and stupid) company or they're looking for a codemonkey instead of a creative one.

>top tier program
>settles for easy shit

I don't know, OP. If I heard this shit in an interview I would drop you for being unambitious. But what do I know, I exclusively buy Apple products and only know how to program in HTML ( :^) ).

When I do interviews I don't give them something they've practiced before a hundred times. I'm looking for if you can do something off the top of your head in the moment.

You're back office and you're scum. I'd get recruited by a prop firm (if your mental math is decent) or an algo firm (if you can network well).

They don't. Programming is outsourced. Do you think the best electrical engineers actually do the wiring schematics? You've been fooled if you think either.

You're not getting past analyst, Dominic.

t. Dropped out of college and now a portfolio manager for a 5bn AUM firm.

>secure tripcodes disabled

AMA. I'm involved in the hiring process (late stage interviews).

>masters in CS
>no jobs
>get an apprenticeship in manufacturing toilets
>now at $120k

Dank.

Here's a good article for you faggots to debunk those lies all the middle class adults in your life spouted.

quantstart.com/articles/Best-Undergraduate-Degree-Course-For-Becoming-A-Quant

what do you do?

Fuckin A, man

>Fortran

literally triggered my PTSD

I'll take the bait, interviewers and people up the corporate hierarchy are selected because they aren't too bright and won't question authority so they will do exactly what they are told. It's your asskissers who follow the "corporate agenda".

>I have a degree why can't I get a job
the entitlement of you millenials is sickening

Pretty sure Trump has explicitly called out the H1B bullshit. None of the other politicians involved in any level of the current election have pretended to give a shit about American STEM jobs.

>trying to get help getting a job
>entitled millennial

How's this bait? Unless you have experience working in the industry all your accomplishments are fucking useless. God this generation of graduates are idiots. I am with millennials in my graduate classes and I would never hire these jokers

excuses for retarded employers, they are the only sociopaths

All you guys that can't get a job as a programmer, where do you live?

>I need to know that you can do it without googling.
scum of the earth, kys

Australia

The #1 priority for employers is not employee skill: It is that the company runs smoothly. Employers WILL hire a less skilled person who is better at communicating, and better at getting along. Why? Because getting the job done in 5 days is better than getting the job done in 3 days+starting a fight.

This is true to a point - people will put up with a lot of autism with a really good programmer, because desu, it's actually quite hard to find great programmers. Anyone can string some shitty code together, but actually designing good apps and systems is more than a lot of people seem to be able to do.

Michaelangelo here, everyone

>it's actually quite hard to find great programmers
Tell me about it. You will find 1 genuinely good programmer for every 49 starbucks-drinking HTML-selfie master.

>starbucks-drinking HTML-selfie master.
Not screening them out first is your mistake

I don't even do development, but I work with devs, and there are workaday ones who are useful for slamming out code, and ones who are able to actually design. Watching our head of dev pull out his hair while trying to find good developers is almost enough to make me feel bad for him. Not quite, but almost.

Probably not in the US. Even the biggest retards here somehow manage to get 80k programming jobs. It's also why I noticed a bunch of Canadians coming here and stealing our programming jobs

>Systems and optimization "expert"
>Has difficulty solving problems that use dynamic programming

user, I'm calling bullshit.

>I don't even do development
Oh, that's nice, sweetie, run along now.

Literally under Seattle. But everyone either wants an internship or "experience" (which has a different definition for each company).

You're one of those workaday devs, aren't you? :3

You interviewers are the most arrogant autistic douches, and you squeal and get off on your psycopathic glee of crushing people's hopes and dreams. Keep up the asskissing and cocksucking, I'm sure you will make it to senior management one day so you can order people standard deviations above your IQ.

baby boomers never had to deal with spics and poos with their cheap labor

Do not lump everyone into one category. Sure there are sadist interviewers, but most of them just want to hire the right candidate.

One thing I don't get about this thread - everywhere I've worked it's people who do the job on a day to day basis who do the interviewing. HR people interview HR, security interview security, developers interview developers. That's how it is here in the UK - do you guys have some other system people tend to use in the USA?

>Grad student
Why?

I'm an undergrad who interned with grad students on campus, worked with researches at Intel, and was literally given a job as a senior researcher when I only have a 4yr degree (but spent those 4 years with grad students on one specific domain, and they cited me in their papers).

You suck at this OP.

Google stockfighter.io if you claim you are a systems expert then you'll have no problem acing that CTF. They will arrange a well paying role for you if you want them to and bypass interviews. They designed stockfighter because they hate interviews too: sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

Over here (SEA) you typically get interviewed by 2 people:

1- Supervisor/senior, to check on your work-related skills
2- HR, to check on your non-work related skills (can answer a question, does not behave like a sociopath, etc)

Or, employers don't want to hire entitled fuckwits.

Interviewers have no clue who the right candidate is, they're your corporate cocksuckers and conformists. It's rare you find real developers instead of incompetence sucking cock up the corporate ladder who did monkey see monkey do.

employers are entitled fuckwits, have you seen their job "requirements"?

Hi, i work in hr for a small family business. They had to hire somewhat who knew how to make websites, someone who could code, someone who could maintain the work stations. I went in some of the interviews. The fact that you're ranting and say, i feel smarter than the person interviewing me sounds like you get frustrated easily. If you are congrats, but most interviews are about social skills. They look at your resume and get an idea of what you should have. They need t know you're a teamplayer, and can actually listen. Some of the people we got had the right things listed on the resume but some were so awkward it was hard to be in the room

>Interviewers have no clue who the right candidate is
Don't be daft. The world is still running.

Competence and an ability to interact with others without making screeching noises or throwing things?

The standard 'tech' interview for any software dev job in the US is first you get a phone screen.

It's a pajeet (who's a senior dev) who can barely speak english, who's driving or eating or at a loud theatre, and he's literally asking you to write code over the phone, by voice.

After you pass the phone screen then you get a few skype interviews where the same pajeet asks you to implement something ridiculous that has nothing to do with what you'll be doing.

If you pass that then you're flown out for a series of in person interviews that take anywhere from 2 days to 2 weeks. "We want to see if you fit our corporate culture". It's nothing but non stop cringe.

They put you in a room with a senior dev who doesn't want to be there, and he will try to trick you with the stupidest shit possible. "Ok, implement a red black tree that doesn't balance on this whiteboard in ... Java" (if your'e applying for a C/C++ role).

There's entire websites set up that just feature google interview questions and they are all inane bullshit trite nonsense. Problem with this process is there are people out there who ace these interviews, and can't code themselves out of a wet paper bag. I worked with one of these people, had no idea how he got hired, he flew under the radar saying all the lingo during meetings and just managed to make himself continually scarce or cut+paste code. He's still working there too, I long since quit after having to debug his cut and paste shit for over a year.

>The world is still running.
Ahahaha do you even understand that most nations use a central bank? Do you understand that we live in a socialist oligarchy?

Of course the world is still running like it did before the industrial revolution or even in communist USSR with mass famine, whatever your standards of 'running' are.

Yeah you want your chad that can speak at your low IQ level, incompetent manager, and I don't acknowledge your quints, ape

Are you visibly shaken that someone isn't literally sucking your cock trying to get a job?

You are confusing recruiters with real job offers.

You go on Hacker News, or you network with people and find real jobs. Recruiters will write those insane ads where you need 10-15 years exp in literally everything to be considered for hire. "Must have exp in (insert a thousand obscure libraries)".

You avoid the recruiters, they are just bait + switch anyway.

Jesus Christ this sounds awful, and nothing like the places where I've worked. I've heard that Google and Microsoft interviews are steaming piles of shit - didn't know it extended to other firms in the US.

>Are you visibly shaken that someone isn't literally sucking your cock trying to get a job?
You must have me confused with someone else - I'm in security, so the situation is generally the reverse of that.

>Interviewers have no clue who the right candidate is

>But the world is still running

>socialist oligarchy
>communist USSR
>mass famine

I see.

Phone screen is pretty typical, so is the bulslhit whiteboard with some guy trying to trick you with corner cases.

That's not the worse case scenario though. The absolute worse scenario is when they want you to work, for free, on a major project and give them all the rights. Often they will give you a major project that takes 2-3 weeks, keep it, and tell you to fuck off then use it in production.

Doing massive unpaid work for weeks at a time is pretty common unfortunately, so many cheapskate bosses out there even at BigTechCorp. You should absolutely do a work sample test to get hired, but it shouldn't be a week's worth of unpaid work and if it must be, allow it to be remote instead of flying all the way out to SF to spend $500/night for a hotel while you work for nothing .

>You are confusing recruiters with real job offers.
They are interchangeable nowadays. That's the irony. Unless you're lucky and have connections because you're some extroverted pseudo-programmer, interviews are painful because they are finding some excuse to hire that poo for 10k less.

Huh? Was that supposed to be an argument? I know it's tough to actually be wrong when hundreds of yesmen are literally getting down on their knees to get into your corporate dictatorship.

Yeah, I'm used to phone screening as a basic sort of 'can you speak in coherent sentences and not scream obsceneties' tool. That said, anyone who can't be bothered to find someplace quiet to run a decent call is an asshole.

>hundreds of yesmen are literally getting down on their knees to get into your corporate dictatorship
Is that what happened to make you so bitter, user? You were qualified, but another candidate grovelled and begged and got the job instead?

Do not worry about it. Keep your pride up, and apply elsewhere. If you are qualified, you will get the job sooner or later!

>hundreds of yesmen
Would you even want to work somewhere where this is the case? Try finding work in smaller firms - in my experience they're better places to work. Still some politics, but less general bullshit.

>tfw I have to go back to my corporate bullshit job on Monday after two weeks off
Shit sucks

HN is full of these stories of nightmare hiring processes news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11246917

Here is the insane amazon hiring process
sobit.me/2016/07/08/amazon-software-engineer-interview/

>created an android app
what does your app do?