Personally I'm more willing to go along with leetcode for FAANG-type giants, simply because in that situation it's more of a filtering mechanism than anything. I still dislike it but I understand why it's there.
For startups and small-to-midsize companies however which typically aren't awash in candidates for technical roles leetcode makes little sense and I generally won't entertain it.
I've been developing professionally for almost 30 years. I still love making software and I'm good at it.
When I started in this industry, being able to do it at all was the barrier to entry. The processes were light; "here's what we need it to do, go figure it out."
Responsibility (and impact) were both high.
Somewhere along the line that changed. Teams blew up to be dozens of people. Process fads weighed things down with tons of meetings, silly ceremonies and other things that actively slow down productive developers.
Add to the mix the hell that is tech interviewing now. If you're interviewing for anyone that will pay well, you're going to be subjected to "leetcode" style puzzles under pressure and stress scrutiny. If that's not how you best think and solve problems, tough!
So yeah...I can absolutely relate. I still love building software and I hate the industry.
The only escape is entrepreneurship or possibly consulting, both of which I am actively looking to do.
Yeah, I entered the industry a decade after you but I share the same views. Back then teams were so much smaller and management actually took care of the bureaucracy.
I remember at one time I ended up as the sole developer at a university, serving about 30k students and >500 faculty. We needed to migrate to another software due to end of support in the previous, which would go down in a matter of weeks. I had to code an interim replacement by myself in the meantime. It ended up being simple looking, but it did only what was needed, and I was able to finish. Teachers added grades, students could see them and enroll on courses. No social features, notifications, no gamification, no material design, looked as simple as it could. Worked fine for 2 years until the permanent system was installed (and students had to suffer because the multi-million system that costed thousands of billable hours to setup was riddled with bugs).
Contrast with today: at my previous company we had 500 devs to make an e commerce website whose homepage “couldn’t” be changed for two years. With scrum we supposedly have “self managed teams” but there was so much micromanagement. Sometimes I felt as if I had 20 different bosses, controlling my time and my tasks: POs, PMs, designers, management, upper management, support. There was no time to dogfood the app, to do maintenance, to study, to have ideas.
Unlike most people I don’t really blame Scrum or Agile. The people making it suck are the ones not following it: designers have a “dual track” where they plan months ahead of work (aka waterfall). POs and PMs absolutely hate iterative work, so we gotta refine during PR reviews. Management is too worried about catering to them to listen to us. At least we make money to make terrible software.
Like a lot of people recommended above I also joined a smaller company where things are saner than anything else.
> They want to protect that recurring service bay revenue. Oil changes, plugs, belts, etc.
In the past decade we've had one new ICE car and two new EV cars.
The ICE car has been in the dealer once for a couple hours to replace rear hatch support struts (nothing to do with the engine, so could happen to any EV that has a hatch).
The EV cars have spent many weeks in the dealer for repairs and waiting for parts. Also issues unrelated to the engine, this was for door lock problems and window regulator problems.
In theory the EV motor is simpler than the ICE engine. But in practice, the ICE engines are bulletproof and almost never have problems. In 36 years of owning cars, I've never had a car in a shop (or dealer) for engine issues. It's always electrical system, electronics, seats, windows, shocks, etc. Components that both ICE and EV cars share.
I am not saying this isn't true, but EV's have a set of maintenance requirements too - there are still a lot of mechanical parts - tires, suspensions, doors, etc. Not to mention electronic maintenance but I guess dealerships would have to re-train, re-certify, and re-tool technicians for that
Edit: I think I relied to the wrong comment on this sub-thread, but this still contributes, I think.
My spouse and I recently purchased an extremely difficult to find plug-in hybrid EV. We had placed a hold on a specific vehicle destined for delivery to the dealership a few months later. We paid a deposit and signed a receipt that made reference to that vehicle and was given the final price sheet for that specific vehicle at deposit time.
Two days before we were scheduled to pick it up (more than two months after we put the deposit down) the sales guy called and said that the dealership had instituted a new policy on the first of the month that no sales of that specific model and trim level would be authorized by the deal desk without an interior and exterior water resistant coating, and that the lowest price he could offer was an additional $2,500.
As you can imagine that did not stand up to scrutiny and we walked out of there with the vehicle at the total price recorded in the initial paperwork. They signed on the dotted line and never said a word about any new policies until we were ready to pick it up. They did this in a U.S. state where that practice is not legal.
You bet we told Toyota about that when they sent the survey.
If they weren’t making enough to meet their needs then they should have known that when they were negotiating.
Just for reference, I've had a Honda Fit for 13 years, and the only maintainance I've had done over what you no doubt had to do on your TM3 (tires, wiper blades) has been oil changes. The car has 164k miles on it.
I'm not saying the EV's are not theoretically more durable and (much) less maintainance-intensive. I am saying that the best of the best ICE vehicles are not as different as your observation about your own TM3 tries to suggest.
You're supposed to do more maintenance than that on your Honda Fit, such as spark plugs every 30k. Granted, it isn't much compared to other ICE cars, but you're downplaying the difference. Your car also has parts that frequently break on all ICE cars, such as a water pump, which simply don't exist on BEV cars.
> Your car also has parts that frequently break on all ICE cars,
Well, theoretically yes. The point is that saying "my TM3 has 25k miles and zero maintainance" is worse than anecdata. It's no better than saying "My Fit has had almost zero maintainance at 164k miles". Far better to list the parts and systems not found in an EV, possibly along with likely maintanance schedules.
The spark plugs on the Fit are likely failing right now, btw.
I’ve only had my Y for four months now, but I’ve had this very unexpected feeling towards the car (and any EV). I can only describe it as an amalgamation of clean, elegant, and freeing.
While driving there is no engine noise, no unpredictable or delayed acceleration, no need to visit a gas station and have gas drip down the side of the car, and the knowledge that the drivetrain is simple and reliable and isn’t saturated with petroleum products.
I’ve owned some very nice BMWs before the Y, and while I greatly miss the suspension performance I can’t imagine going back to ICE.
Exactly. Tires, wipers, and I’m guessing alignment are the only things the average Tesla owner will ever need to worry about from what I’ve read before I took the leap.
The best description of my experience switching to an EV is that it’s been like going from a VCR straight to streaming. It’s fast, convenient, modern, and doesn’t really degrade.
How far back did you look? It wasn't that long ago that Telsa had problems with the drive units failing early, there've been a number of recalls for assembly problems, overly verbose logging and eMMC failures, touchscreen failures, etc.
I've been severely disappointed with the psyche of man - we've discovered a large chunk of humanity doesn't believe in science and cares only about themselves.
That doesn't feel like a recipe for long-term success.
Have you not even considered the possibility that it might be humanity's embracing of science (however half-heartedly) that has brought about the degradation of man's psyche?
Humanity flourished in the pre-scientific era, but as it abandoned all other belief systems, it found itself more and more able to destroy civilization, while less and less able to answer transcendent questions on the nature of truth, ethics, man, and purpose.
Prometheus (Lucifer) stole the fire of the Gods (Elohim) to give to primitive man. Now as we are mesmerized by our glowing black rectangles (e.g. iphones) there is Hell to pay. Mephistopheles is always a master of the art of the deal and like Prometheus we will get our due. He his liver devoured in the lonely Caucuses crags only to regenerate each day, us our hearts torn asunder by the alienation of modernity. In 1990 at CERN the
capstone was laid atop the pyramid of the ages. The internet became a world wide web. In 2001, with 9/11 the spider started his work in earnest. The capstone was gilded. An Odessy in cyberspace, with ever greater HALs (Human Abstraction Levers).
The world's a stage. Laugh and ridicule if you want but even the audience are players.
> I think companies that break out of the leetcode habit are going to do well.
> There's a lot of great talent out there that's being passed over by these tests.
Agreed. And there's a lot of great talent that doesn't even want to try with some of these companies solely due to the hostile interview process.
I recently took a year off, and started interviewing in March. I spent a fair amount of time in fear of interviewing, doing LeetCode pushups and feeling miserable about my performance, and wondering if I could swing retirement rather than go through another fucking hazing ritual. Excuse my language.
I resolved up front not to submit to any kind of take-home test, proctoring software, or algorithmic nonsense unrelated to the actual job of shipping software. A polite "No thank you" was what I planned. But the plan was thwarted!
I was pleasantly surprised by the technical interviews I actually got. They were mostly nicely constrained problems that were real-world and not algorithmically nasty. One was a little unintended "collaboration" in the form of helping a senior dev debug their own "what is wrong with this code?" exercise (it probably went smoother for the next candidate they interviewed). In short, it was actually kind of fun.
I started a new dream job this week. At 61 this is no longer easy, but the company is enlightened enough to support me while I get up to speed, and it's fun to help mentor the folks just getting into the industry.
There are decent companies out there. Hopefully the terrible ones will start getting a clue.
Anyone able to confirm/disconfirm that?