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This week I am writing to you from my adopted home country of Spain. People who are not from Europe might not realize this, but Spain is the Florida of Europe, in the sense that many older Europeans of some means spend some or all of their retired life on the sunny Mediterranean coasts of this lovely country. My parents did so too and that’s how I ended up here. The family property needs some work and this week I am here to talk to architects and builders, and look at kitchens. While I was at it, I also visited the cat shelter I used to volunteer at and had dinner at my favorite restaurant in the world. Highly recommended and worth the trip in itself (the restaurant, though the cat shelter is lovely too). All of this takes time, so I am indulging myself with a somewhat shorter Wednesday Wisdom on the topic of why senior engineers also need to prepare for interviews.
But, before we get there: One of the things that is always apparent to me when I am in Spain is the nature of the hamster wheel I am in back home. Sure, it is an incredibly luxurious hamster wheel, with free sushi and unlimited gummi bears, but it is a hamster wheel nonetheless and the nature of a hamster wheel is that if you stop running while the weel is spinning, things might go badly for you.
Two years ago I got laid off from the startup I was working at and I was naturally quite anxious about the immediate future. Since my biggest fear is to be poor, I was actively job hunting and interviewing for my next role. But, because I also had some time on my hands, I made a trip to Spain. I flew into Valencia, rented a car, drove to Denia, parked the car, and then sat down with a beer. The weather was gorgeous, the sun was shining, the beer was cold… It took only five minutes for my mind to go: “Why do I need to work anyway?” Spain does that to me.
The answer is of course obvious: I work so that I can afford many more afternoons sitting in Spain, drinking beer, and planning visits to Quique Dacosta, which is very very good, but also requires some financial liquidity, especially if you want to go for the premium wine pairing. That said, my financial advisor is telling me that I can retire today in some comfort, so why the hell am I still running around in that hamster wheel?
The answer, of course, is “fear”. There is a lot of that around and I feel it. And if LinkedIn is any good as a thermometer of the global business elite (yes, that’s you), everyone feels it. There is war, there is widespread political instability, and the economy is reorienting itself as everyone seems to have concluded that software engineers are not as rare and not as necessary as we all once thought, driving down opportunities, wages and benefits.
Talking about war and grim economic forecasts, the rapture index strangely enough stands only at 180 right now. This is not as high as it has been, but that seems to be mostly because of the lack of overt Satanic activity and of floods. The absence of floods is easy to believe, but with respect to Satanic activity I am not so sure: The maintainers of the index must be reading different newspapers than I do.
Of course there is also the threat to job security presented by AI. We can all have a great big discussion on how good ChatGPT really is and to what extent it is going to upset everyone’s lives, but, right or wrong, it gives many people the heebie jeebies.
By the way, I have a very definitive opinion about AI and its potential impact, but because I work at OpenAI I refrain from sharing that opinion in public because a) I don’t want to cross my employer’s communication strategy and b) half of you would think me to be a badly disguised corporate shill if I did share it.
We continue to live in a world where it is not unthinkable that you can lose all of your assets overnight. There are potential but unforeseen medical bills which, even in the richest country in the world’s history, could financially cripple you. On top of that, Trump’s latest realization that nobody likes or respects him might cause him to do something crazy which could swing the markets down some more (until such time as his billionaire buddies tell him to knock it off because it impacts their kids’ trust funds). Additionally, inflation continues to eat away at your investment portfolio. To top it all off, you might get laid off any day but continue to have to pay for your kids' schools because, clearly, your generous tax contributions do not pay for that (and everybody in the world wonders why).
Clearly, neoliberalism has gone too far, but we’re all in now so we keep running and the hamster wheel keeps spinning. Life would obviously be much better for everyone if everyone would take a break. But if capitalism is anything, it is a system of unbridled competition which means that nobody can stop running unless everyone stops running. And if everyone does, the profits for the person who keeps spinning the wheel are enormous, so really it’s a sort of economic prisoner’s dilemma.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I have recently come across a few instances where senior engineers who I know to be good failed interviews because they didn’t prepare. I really don’t understand why: It’s a test that you need to pass to get the job and you know upfront what the test entails. I am pretty certain you can pass the test but you do have to prepare. Why not prepare?
In the debriefs I did with some people on this topic, they pointed out that tech interviews are mostly terrible and that coding interviews specifically take the cake. I totally agree with that and I have written about it before (see here and here). But that doesn’t really matter does it? I think the CA driver’s license knowledge test is totally ridiculous and I also think that anyone who passed a driving test in the Netherlands should not have to retake it in the US because, believe me, nobody in the US would pass a Dutch driving test without an additional 32-48 hours of remedial driving instruction. But it doesn’t really matter what I think. What matters is that without taking the test, I will not get my CA driver’s license, which I totally need because I want to buy beer every now and then and my greying beard plus the fact that my kids are clearly old enough to drink does not count for much.
Once, in an airport bar, me and a lady I was having a drink with were carded, upon which she cried out: “I am a great-grandmother!” The road to hell is surely paved by people mindlessly following stupid rules.
It’s the same with jobs. Because of my anxiety I need a paycheck and hence I need to pass the test. Yes, the interviewer has probably less than a third of my experience. Yes, I am being asked to write some code that I would never have to write in production. Yes, the question is bad and the interviewer is bad. But this is the test. I either know that not wearing your seat belts might cost you $20 or I might not get the driver’s license. I either know how to parse a glob expression or I don’t (and it’s not that fnmatch(3) hasn’t existed for forty years or something).
By the way I now also know that leaving a child alone in a parked car is illegal and that you are fined a whopping $100 if you do. I think that the law also says that if the car is a Tesla you get a discount, but don’t quote me on that.
Look at it this way: I am the world’s worst athlete but I do triathlons every now and then (nothing too exciting though just the olympic distance). But, guess what, every time I sign up for one, I have to train! The fact that I have done half a dozen already really doesn’t help me a lot. It’s the same with coding interviews, system design interviews, and even with behavioral interviews. You have to prepare and train or you might not pass the test, which would be sad because, again, paycheck.
I recently ran into a LinkedIn post that stated that many senior engineers simply refuse coding tests these days. I am not really sure if we can believe this post, because it seems to have been written by a person from Toilet Duck, but still, this might be a signal that many of us get really fed up having to sit through bad interviews.
Explainer: Toilet Duck is a brand of toilet cleaner. In the Netherlands, they used the slogan: “We, the people from Toilet Duck, recommend Toilet Duck”. It was almost thirty years ago, but the slogan survived as a saying to dispute the independence of “expert" statements when they clearly align with self-interest. In 2007, Dutch shock-blog geenstijl.nl (“geenstijl” means having a total lack of style) manipulated an online poll and the Toilet Duck slogan won the election for best marketing slogan ever. Ducks are cool though, so nobody minded much.
I want you to pass the interviews, so for the love of all that is holy, please prepare! Do it for me! There are few things more harrowing for me than interviewing someone who is clearly experienced but who is totally bombing an interview because they didn’t prepare. If you are interviewing, consider buying one of the excellent books on the subject, sit down and leetcode your way all the way to the job offer.
We, the people from Toilet Duck, recommend “Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview”, which I reviewed some chapters of. I am also proud to report that I am quoted in the book.
So, there you go. Unless you are truly done keeping the hamster wheel spinning, you should prepare for interviews. Even if you are very senior. Even if you think the interviews are terrible. The next best thing is a total interviewing strike, but I think the economic conditions currently do not favor one. We the people from Toilet Duck, recommend you prepare for interviews!
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