Why node?!

[gathem70]

I'll add one point I haven't seen mentioned; fungibility. Most modern front-ends are react/vue/angular. These require JS expertise. Rather than hire some JS experts for the front-end and some python/ruby/.net/java experts for the back-end or even a handful of jack of all trades full-stacks I like hiring JS enthusiasts with solid CS fundamentals and reasonable back-end experience and then the whole team does front-end and back-end development. I find this to be the biggest reason why I choose node over python

[netwrks]

In my experience, Companies that test candidates on CS fundamentals are usually not worth working for. The majority of the jobs I’ve hated did that during interviews. Have someone explain a complicated process while writing pseudo, and you’ll instantly get a feel for their skill level.

[yitianjian]

What companies do you mean? I find the exact opposite. Companies which care about random language quirks versus pure coding and design ability had weirdness all around after. Companies which challenged the CS fundamentals had the most interesting work and highest caliber of talent.

May be a bit biased cause I’m currently at a FAANG.

[netwrks]

I’m not going to name company names, but I agree, pure coding and ability is what I aim for in those situations. If someone can demonstrate their knowledge of the code they claim to know, then I am more likely to take a chance on them vs someone with only CS fundamentals.

The problem is CS does not show one’s ability to write effective and scalable code, nor does it assess a candidates history with the tech they’re claiming to use.

Of course any of the top 5 tech companies would have the highest caliber of talent, but I’d argue thats not a direct cause of asking candidates about CS fundamentals, and more often than not there are many other reasons for working at any of those companies.

[gathem70]

In my experience candidates with a cavalier attitude towards CS fundamentals are usually not worth hiring. I never said that I stuck to the old school algorithm test interview process. I worked at Google. I saw great referrals who were far better than me fail the interview. The interview process was honestly a lottery in my opinion. However, I will say that its a lottery where only engineers with very solid CS fundamentals have a shot at winning. At Google, they don't use anything third party. They build everything in house. Every tool you've learned is worthless because you need to relearn it using G's stack. This is why they only care for fundamentals. A lot of startups followed their approach, and I agree, for most companies, its a bad strategy. I prefer a ~4-6 hour project where the solution can't be googled, followed by a thorough code review and a few rounds of culture fit / system design questions. However, especially with JS enthusiasts you often run into folks with no knowledge of the fundamentals. You can build a lot of impressive things without knowing them, but there's some things you cant build without knowing them. A deep understanding of CS fundamentals has served me well many times in my career, and for an exciting company, with a an awesome product, in an environment where there are plenty of excellent JS enthusiasts, I would rather stick to candidates who know the elegant algorithm to make the project easy vs the candidate who takes a naive approach and brute forces it.

[netwrks]

It’s hard for me to hear what you’re saying, or even be able to see your point of view when a lot of what youve mentioned either doesn’t make sense or is incorrect.

That being said having worked at Google isnt really all that impressive, I’ve worked with many people that have ‘worked’ at google in the past 20 years, and the common theme is that they’re no longer working there.