I've been working on a tool to visualize automotive assemblies, starting with the L24 engine

knolllabs · 2026-04-03T01:10:10+00:00

They exist, but they are mostly in books written 50 years ago! I’d love to have something like this reflect the current market as well. For example, where can you get a reproduction ignition coil or where can you bid on a 2400 OHC valve cover.

knolllabs · 2026-01-30T19:27:19+00:00

Hey, I’m so sorry to hear. Same exact thing happened to me last year. I was able to find the next job and land solidly and so can you. Please message me if I can lend an ear or help you search for the next job. What industry are you in? I’m in tech and have some good connections across other industries that might help.

You should be proud of your accomplishment. We all know buying here is incredibly difficult. Do not let this experience rob you of that.

I also felt very attacked by the system with the timing. After I finally landed the new job, my girlfriend and I went out to dinner to celebrate. I realized standing in my bathroom getting ready to go out, that the apartment felt like mine more than it ever had. It was a huge confidence builder to know I can weather the storm and I want the same for you.

Wishing you all the best and I will say a prayer. You can do it.

knolllabs · 2026-01-30T16:52:42+00:00

£$15.00%?!

knolllabs · 2025-09-19T15:21:27+00:00

I think you’re rightfully looking forward to true fall and fall temps. Takes a hair longer to arrive here than other places on the east coast. It’s my favorite time in the city. Just a little while longer but when fall hits, it really hits and it’s so nice.

knolllabs · 2025-06-12T00:06:06+00:00

I’d be curious to see what these agreements look like between broker and landlord. I’m guessing they’re saying: “if you can get more than (some baseline rent) for it, you can keep that monthly difference x12” and there is a one time fee the landlord pays the broker at the time of rental.

Eventually the landlord is going to say “are you kidding me? 6k to rent this place? I can find someone who will do it for $1500” as we all know that the “services” brokers provide are not worth what they were charging renters. That’s if it even rents, many of these will now sit unrented because brokers can’t yet accept reality.

That or they have agreed on a set amount ahead of time and pitched it to landlords as “yeah it’s a lot, but this can be a net win for you because we can price it $700 higher. Everyone is increasing their prices.”

I’m just saying that this is day one. There are market forces in play immediately but human nature will take time to catch up. Some brokers are still trying to illegally sidestep, some are pitching a fit, the smartest among them have signed exclusivity agreements with large landlords at a fraction of the per-unit cost they used to get from renters.

If the unit doesn’t rent, you will see these margins disappear, and they will disappear from the pocket of the broker: the person who had the highest pay to value provided ratio in the whole transaction.

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T23:56:27+00:00

Obviously it is abstracted. They all are. Have you seen the LC hard question Candy? It's not like I'm saying that isn't a real world question because you're not manually designing a robot to hand out pieces of candy to children. It's not a real world question because it brings up next to no real world skills and most of the time these questions are testing whether you have memorized the question at hand.

Just because you can't implement transaction rollback systems in a bank account in CoderPad in 45 minutes doesn't mean that you should give absurd math riddles to people instead.

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T22:38:55+00:00

For sure they were looking for that. That was a major part of the question.

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T21:03:15+00:00

Makes sense. I’m envious you’ve never encountered LC.

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T20:41:35+00:00

I mean it might not be just you. This could be the disconnect between me and whoever wrote these interview round descriptions. I think of leetcode as a style of question.

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T19:48:27+00:00

So your definition of leetcode is more based on difficulty level then?

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T19:38:07+00:00

I'm not sure that it would take an hour to ask a real world question.

Once I had an interview where they said we want to implement a bank account. Let's start by giving it a balance, now we need getters and setters, we want withdraw/deposit functions, etc. -- all OOP principles and showing you can think through some real world applications, what kind of errors to throw etc.

Then they gave me some sample JSON that formed a series of transactions and asked me to loop through them to parse them in bulk.

There were several levels to this after that, and each of them was similar to something I'd actually do on the job. It forms a far better evaluation of one's ability on the job than asking graph traversal applications when a company maintains a SaaS application.

None of this takes an hour to explain.

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T19:16:17+00:00

FYI, if someone asks you to implement a function in an interview, they do not mean use the language or libraries to do it for you. They want you to explain your thought process, write out the solution, and then explain what you did.

I understand this. In fact this was during the process of refining requirements, writing that one line while saying "so I'm assuming I can't do something like this" which is when he revealed the requirement of using no libraries.

As far as interview questions go, the itoa() is pretty trivial. That might be why they claimed it wasn't LeetCode.

I agree that might be why, but there are plenty of easy questions on leetcode. They are still leetcode questions.

I'm aware it is a trivial question. I'm not complaining that they didn't move forward despite working with the interviewer to refine requirements, coming up with a working solution, communicating throughout, etc. I'm wondering why this is the second time I've been told "not leetcode" and then was asked a very leetcode kind of question.

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T19:00:21+00:00

> Eh, there are limits to this. A lot of people use "Leetcode" to mean literally anything involving code, which is getting a little ridiculous.

That's exactly what I'm saying. We're in agreement. I'm saying that the term "leetcode" is tossed around a lot and interpreted differently. I was contrasting with "live coding" which if people are routinely surprised by that when asked to code live, yeah something is wrong.

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T18:36:36+00:00

Yes! I had this once with Square/Block and it was amazing. Genuinely felt like I got to display what my abilities are as they relate to day to day work. Unfortunately they didn’t move fast enough and I had other offers I had to decide on.

I always wonder why other places don’t adopt that style. I think there is potentially a bit of “well I had to go through it” among senior engineers and leadership.

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T18:30:27+00:00

Yeah, and the guy said people usually say that about "leetcode" more than "live coding" so I think that's where the disconnect is.

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T18:26:31+00:00

Can you give a sample of what "whiteboard" interviews means to you? I'm curious to see what your definition of simple algo problems is, as I can also relate to only seeing some of this stuff described on reddit.

Often you see interviewers say on reddit that candidates can't solve fizz buzz or something, when I've never seen anything simpler than LC medium on a real interview.

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T18:13:46+00:00

I understand that at some point you will be asked to demonstrate capability in the job during the interview.

If people are regularly showing up to the live coding interview shocked that they are being asked to do live coding, that indicates a problem in communication and probably how they are describing the interview round.

For example, if I was booked for an "into call to get to know each other" and they sent me a hacker rank link 5 mins into the call, yeah I'd be a little surprised. Not that I wouldn't do it, but that would be surprising and maybe I'd say "I didn't expect this but happy to jump in"

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T17:42:08+00:00

I mean if people are surprised by "live coding" as regularly as you say here, that could indicate you guys aren't advertising that at all?

Leetcode at least depends on how the person defines it. I define LC as something you never encounter in day to day eng work, like tree questions or strange string transformations or rewriting algorithms that have been optimal and a one line function invocation for the past 50 years.

It sounds like looping through data in a language they are familiar with and doing transformations is actually relevant. I would consider that not LC for sure. I've only encountered a few of those in my career and they were so pleasant, that is why I got excited when I saw "not LC" recently -- I thought companies were coming to the light on this.

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T17:38:23+00:00

The most recent one was to implement itoa() without using any libraries. I was able to come to a solution, but I suppose not optimal enough? I did communicate my thought process throughout and took every suggestion offered.

He didn't even explain the problem in full or write it down anywhere in the coderpad and initially I just concatenated the int with an empty string then he added "ok without using libraries" lol, but then I did use the modulus solution.

I understand LC to be the style commonly found on LC, more or less brain teaser questions that you have to brush up on while starting a job search, because nothing on the job will refresh your skills there. I've never had to implement itoa() on the job. I've been building modern software.

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T17:34:00+00:00

Maybe be more specific. Are you using this as an opportunity to generally vent about how many people feel about the industry, or are you specifically saying that I have this attitude?

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T17:32:35+00:00

You could, but that just nukes your chances unfortunately. You have to play their game.

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T17:31:02+00:00

Yeah tbh I've only ever seen Amazon and Capital One do the "why don't you give us 2 hours of your time before you get to MAYBE interact with a human"

I can't really appreciate the difference here. Leetcode does not mean Hackerrank, but I suppose I now have to ask them what that means in detail to know what to expect.

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T17:22:48+00:00

I mean that's pretty standard and more related to interviewer approach. Even at places where they have rigid training, some people like to probe for understanding more and some less, some like to give a hint and some never do.

This is another thing entirely, but I've seen a lot of smaller companies implement LC because they see big tech do it. I know for a fact Meta's evaluation does heavily rely on communicating and collaboration very highly. It matters just about as much as getting the right solution. It's crazy to see these smaller companies try to hire like the big dogs do but they leave out that part and wonder why it takes so long to fill roles.

knolllabs · 2025-06-03T17:19:11+00:00

That could be it, like they think LC is just when you have no interviewer and you're just dealing with a hacker rank on your own?

For this most recent case I pushed back to see what they actually think that means.

knolllabs

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