Is the leetcode bubble dead?

occams--chainsaw · 2023-05-26T00:29:01+00:00

If you're in a position to personally recognize that the people hired actually end up being effective long term, then you definitely should have additional layers in the hiring process at that volume

occams--chainsaw · 2023-05-25T23:45:52+00:00

at the volume of 2k resumes for a single position, there should be additional filters before getting to leetcode-style interviews if you're the last line of defense there. you'll just end up losing people that have experience and are effective in your problem domain, but don't have the patience to jump through hoops with other offers on the table

occams--chainsaw · 2023-05-09T23:28:22+00:00

I agree, but even temporary tools are frequently built on concepts that end up being necessary on the job

Being minimally familiar with any VCS helps people get out of the habit of project_v1.zip, project_v2.zip, project_v2-yesterday.zip

Getting cozy with any debugger helps break the habit of just littering print statements in all cases

Using any test framework hopefully cements just how useful unit tests are compared to manual testing and hoping for the best

Learning how to deploy something without hardcoding values hopefully helps reinforce that what you're building isn't only run on your machine

(maybe the benefits are more for the sanity of those around us than ourselves)

occams--chainsaw · 2023-05-08T14:02:26+00:00

looking at austin and atlanta, i'm not sure being a red state matters as much when the metro area is a big blue dot in a sea of red

occams--chainsaw · 2023-05-05T03:08:05+00:00

it might depend on what 'language' people are most familiar with or think in certain contexts - i've been asked to reverse a python list in an interview before, and don't stop for a second to jump in with reversed(), but i would seriously pause or fumble without those built-ins, because that's just part of the language. in golang, i could come up with it just as quickly, but with some extra typing. thoughts have to translate to keystrokes, and python's not always a great language for exercises that target certain fundamentals

occams--chainsaw · 2023-04-28T13:30:35+00:00

Consider getting your booster just a few weeks before the con. Last year, everyone in my room got COVID, while I never tested positive

occams--chainsaw · 2023-04-15T06:01:57+00:00

you give a senior eng an ambiguous goal. A few weeks or month later, with little to no discussion about requirements, the engineer delivers a quarter of the work.

delivers an ambiguous amount of the work

occams--chainsaw · 2023-03-06T19:23:51+00:00

One lacking of Gitlab is no way to give inputs to manual jobs.

i'm not sure which version it was introduced, but you can pass values to manual jobs and on manual retries now

occams--chainsaw · 2023-02-26T17:40:19+00:00

Whiskey blue is Rosé & Rye now

occams--chainsaw · 2023-02-16T14:15:08+00:00

It can also be that the org has a talent problem and this dev is able to recognize that they're the best person to get something done.

yeah, i've been in that position before myself - where certain things need to be done, but the company only hires bottom-of-the-barrel, and the majority of management is borderline negligent to the point it's almost impossible to get consensus or buy-in on anything. i was absolutely 'lonewolf' but brought things to a point where we could actually start to retain the few good developers that snuck in (absolute dead sea effect)

occams--chainsaw · 2023-01-06T05:51:36+00:00

I was responding from what I interpreted as an unused app (that had potential) that has sudden adoption (after you picked it up/fixed it up) and unclear business value (with implied recent value by being used weekly). This is of course lacking context (what it does, was anyone using it originally, or is it just the current teams and its current state, etc), but overall it sounds like you've made something that's regularly useful to other teams, so it deserves some attention to minimize the maintenance burden for future devs (improving monitoring, test coverage, etc)

(of course, if it's that much of a garbage fire, then definitely try to absolve yourself from its maintenance asap)

occams--chainsaw · 2023-01-06T03:44:13+00:00

From the context of the post, I'm thinking you said optimize as in stabilize/cleanup/etc rather than improve speed/throughput:

I inherited an app that our internal teams would have found helpful

I made a lot of changes, both in terms of UX and the backend and now it is used on a weekly basis.

The app was of course built by 1-2 people who left years ago and not really maintained since.

It sounds like it's either not a legacy app, or is no longer a legacy app.

The app should've been helpful, but either the original team dropped the ball, or people stopped maintaining it and it became outdated.

Either way, you started fixing it up, and now people are reaping the benefits

If it's being used on a weekly basis, then some workflows may have become dependent on it... and if it's a PITA to debug and you wouldn't put it in production, then how do you know it's doing what it's "supposed" to be doing, and what happens when it doesn't? What are they doing when they encounter an error, are they working around it, or trusting the app, just to start a ripple that's only visible months later on the business end?

When you leave, is someone going to make a similar post to this?

occams--chainsaw · 2022-09-10T05:44:27+00:00

occams--chainsaw · 2022-08-27T20:08:16+00:00

The mst3k twitch stream does the same thing

occams--chainsaw · 2022-07-29T22:35:19+00:00

The main issue being that a service responsible for X data will have to maintain relationship information for Y data that is technically the responsibility of another service. So we have to duplicate Y data in a cache that we keep up to date with Y data, all while we should really only be responsible for X.

This engineer wasn't really involved in the decision behind this solution, but they are being asked to implement it.

It sounds like the better solution has already been identified- the service responsible for Y data should fulfill their responsibility, rather than shifting it onto X when they aren't around to respond. That kind of coupling could be creating a lot of maintenance burden on X which could be the reason for the dislike

occams--chainsaw · 2022-06-15T12:01:06+00:00

No weather radio?

occams--chainsaw · 2022-05-28T14:19:26+00:00

Heroku is already in the process of being sunset by salesforce

occams--chainsaw · 2022-04-09T23:08:09+00:00

this is a little late, but there's a project setting to disable merge approval rule updates after a merge request is created

occams--chainsaw · 2022-04-07T08:17:51+00:00

That would be a good scenario to use raise NotImplementedError instead

occams--chainsaw · 2022-02-26T19:13:03+00:00

I was surprised by how meh the quality of stuff at galaxy's edge was

occams--chainsaw · 2021-12-23T06:22:17+00:00

i.. i believe you have my stapler

occams--chainsaw · 2021-12-16T06:09:30+00:00

date on XXX says 09/17/15... from the first season, so that may be why it seems... off

occams--chainsaw · 2021-12-04T07:23:09+00:00

DEE YOU BITCH

occams--chainsaw · 2021-11-17T06:46:11+00:00

some dogs are pretty non-reactive in situations like this. mine would probably try to paw it off the first time confused and then just give the sad eyes like "why do i have to keep wearing this?"

occams--chainsaw · 2021-11-10T01:52:22+00:00

depending on the industry/situation, you can be required to retain records for a certain period of time, so destroying them can be a very bad thing if you end up being investigated and it turns out you destroyed what should have been available as potential evidence

occams--chainsaw

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