The last time I was looking for a job at age 48, I interviewed at a bunch of startups and only got a second interview from one. It was clear that most of them were never going with someone my age unless I'd written a book or had patents or something (or was ex-FAANG), even if they didn't consciously realize that.

Of course, that's its own problem, but particularly in places where it's hard to get headcount, the management structures get wider and wider...

Only if the following conditions are true:

1. You spent your entire career in the US, ideally on the West Coast

2. You entered the industry early, ideally right after (or in!) university

3. You did not spend significant time in low-paying segments of the industry, such as in academia, hardware, games, idealistic open source, or the public sector

4. You did not need a significant career break, such as for major medical issues, being a SAHP, or caring for sick family members

Even if all of the above applied, certain wealth-destroying events such as an expensive illness, legal trouble, or bad divorce, might have made FIRE infeasible.

As I understand it, tech employees are typically paid a small fraction of the revenue that they bring into the company.

Outside of tech, employees are underpaid, and wages haven't tracked productivity growth since the 1970s. Profit growth has greatly exceeded wage growth since the early 2000s, with the exception of the 2008 recession.

Tech employees don't "bring in" the company's revenue. That makes the mistake of attributing the products and services of a business to its workers.

>wages haven't tracked productivity growth since the 1970s.

Propaganda. Productivity growth literally is just wage growth, by definition. It is impossible for them not to track each other.

No, it is the opposite, whether you are measuring Units Per Worker Hour or especially Units Per Worker Dollar.

You have a dozen $25/hr workers in a factory producing 50 widgets/hour, and you now introduce new tools, techniques, and/or materials and they now produce 80 widgets per hour, productivity per hour and per dollar has risen, but worker pay is exactly the same.

If you instead cut their pay to $22/hr their productivity in Units/WorkerHour is unchanged but productivity in Units/Labor$ has risen.

It is ONLY in the limited case where you are paying 100% by piecework that productivity tracks wages, e.g., if those workers are paid $6/Widget produced and they manage to make 50%more widgets/hr, then their pay rises with productivity. But that is uncommon and labor cost is rarely the only input.

Edit: typos

That is precisely how it is measured: by measuring wages.

>You have a dozen $25/hr workers in a factory producing 50 widgets/hour, and you now introduce new tools, techniques, and/or materials and they now produce 80 widgets per hour, productivity per hour and per dollar has risen, but worker pay is exactly the same.

As is unlikely to surprise you, productivity as a macroeconomic indicator is not measured by lookikg at factories and the tools and techniques they use.

96% of the gap can be explained by the fact that these figures compare productivity growth of the whole economy with wage growth of some workers (the lowest 80% of them - leaving out... the most productive workers), count the productivity growth of the self employed but not their wages, dont take into account overtime, bonuses, or health insurance benefits, and intentionally use different means of measuring inflation across the two figures in an attempt to inflate the numbers.

At the end of the day they track very closely because they are both measures of wages. Productivity is just net output by hour worked and wages is just net output by hour worked. If you use different methods for calculating each you can make either look higher but it is pure methodology.

Again, NO.

Just go to the Bureau Of Labor Statistics and their description of how productivity is measured [0]:

>>"For a single business producing only one good, output would simply be the number of units of that good produced in each time period, such as a month or a year."

Notice not a single mention of wages

It then goes on describing how they measure aggregate output in sectors of the economy. Wages is only mentioned ONCE, for charities and government organizations (since their output is not sold).

>>Government services and the output of nonprofits are not sold in the marketplace, so these types of output can be difficult to measure. For example, what is the output of a charity? Often these outputs are measured by the wages and benefits - compensation - paid to workers producing these outputs.

and then they point out:

>>

Since productivity compares output to input, if the output is measured by the input, any time the input grows, the output grows by the same amount.

>>Measuring output by labor input is similar to including the same amount in the numerator as in the denominator of the labor productivity ratio.

>>This implies no productivity growth for that group of workers, dampening productivity change for the industry and sector. For this reason, BLS productivity measures exclude government, nonprofits, and private household production.

So the ONLY mention of wages is specifically EXCLUDED from measures of productivity.

Then the summary: Output is measured primarily as an index of product revenues, adjusted for price changes. Adjustments are made to ensure that output that is sold to another business within the same measuring unit (industry or sector) is excluded to prevent counting it more than once.

Again, no mention of wages.

I have no idea where you get your misconceptions, but you really need to study some actual economics before posting pages of obviously wrong nonsense.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/k12/productivity-101/content/how-is-prod...

I don't understand what you mean by this. If i own a business, and employee productivity increases but i don't increase wages doesn't that disprove your statement?

The graph on this page disagrees, can you explain please? I haven't heard anyone say the two concepts are the same before.

As I have heard it "productivity" is roughly gdp/hour, which can be different from wages/hour (but you generally expect the two to be related / correlated).

Sure they do. Every employee contributes to the revenue a company brings in. If they don't, then they should be fired.

> Productivity growth literally is just wage growth, by definition.

Completely false. You accuse a commenter in a sibling thread of not having a good grasp of economics, but that feels like the pot calling the kettle black, here.

By your logic, "cost centres" (like IT, HR, and office management) within a business are bad because they don't bring in any revenue. Except of course in reality they are the same: they provide a service to the business that the business makes use of in providing goods and services to its customers.

I am being pedantic but for good reason: there is no a priori reason why your pay should go up just because your employer has become more profitable, except that it is in the interests of employers to make use of resources efficiently. If they are profitable then hiring more people so they can make more money is good. But it isn't a matter of "deserving" to be paid more or something. Pay isn't based on what you deserve for many reasons, including that you can't attribute the business's profits to its workers and ignore, for example, the investment in capital resources (including IP) required to enable the workers to work effectively. Mainly though because of supply and demand.

If an improvement in productivity makes you more efficient then there should be higher demand for you and you should be paid more. And indeed that is exactly what happens: people in industries that have productivity improvements are paid more afterwards than before.

You can't go off mcdonalds sandwiches, and you can't use the economic indicators that ignore food and fuel.

I've heard wild numbers from "the dollar is worth 50¢ compared to 20 years ago" to "the dollar has lost 98% of its value in the last N years."

I'm not an economist, but I do know my electric bill has been thr exact same dollar amount for 12 years, and I've halved my usage twice in those years. That puts the dollar purchasing power for power at 25% of 2013.

Gasoline changes prices so much I can't really say, it's about twice as expensive for 87 here as 12 years ago, but 93 is 2.5+ times higher.

Food? Don't get me started.

I live in the rural south. I don't really care about price fixing in Los Angeles or silicon Valley.

There are many people who do jobs worth much less than $32/hour. That min wage would just make them illegal to employ.

>You can't go off mcdonalds sandwiches, and you can't use the economic indicators that ignore food and fuel.

You can't use economic indicators that track volatile commodities either. We use baskets of consumer goods and the inflation tracking is very accurate in short time frames but it becomes harder to compare the further out you get. A TV today is much better than a TV even 10 years ago but it is hardly even the same product as one from 1970.

>I've heard wild numbers from "the dollar is worth 50¢ compared to 20 years ago" to "the dollar has lost 98% of its value in the last N years."

What is wild about that? If you had 50c then and you had invested it in even relatively poorly performing investments it would be worth much more than $1 now.

>I'm not an economist, but I do know my electric bill has been thr exact same dollar amount for 12 years, and I've halved my usage twice in those years. That puts the dollar purchasing power for power at 25% of 2013.

That you are not an economist is obvious.

You are aware that dollars buy more things than energy from your energy provider according to your energy plan, yeah?

Sure there is. It's the amount you have to pay someone such that they can work a reasonable amount of hours (40/week), such that they can afford all of life's essentials while having a little extra to save for a rainy day, as well as have a little fun.

But certainly some people's poilitics ignore the human aspects of the world we live in, and think that the "free market" (something that doesn't actually exist) will sort it out.

The minimum wage doesn't make anyone be paid more. It only causes anyone paid less than it to instead be paid $0, and instead be paid an unemployment benefit. How is that reasonable?

When Seattle raised the minimum wage to $15/hour, everyone screamed it would lead to mass unemployment. That never happen. Suddenly the lower class had more money to spend, which boosted the economy as much or more than higher wages hurt bottom lines.

>which helps the working class so that they aren't working and on medicare, section 8, food stamps etc. - as many Wal-mart workers currently are. That saves us money in the long run.

A higher minimum wage leads to lower employment not higher employment.

>When Seattle raised the minimum wage to $15/hour, everyone screamed it would lead to mass unemployment. That never happen.

It has been shown many times that a higher minimum wage causes less employment. It is also obvious from first principles and basic logic. Price controls are a very bad idea, and wages are no exception.

A livable wage in the geographic jurisdiction they are in. Including stuff like transportation, healthcare, food, heat, housing, and insurance.

Glad you asked.

oh, the company can't compete without exploiting workers?

oh well.

This is called the Iron Law of Wages. As its name implies, it's neither prescriptive nor pleasant - but it is guaranteed to be liveable.

> Including stuff like transportation, healthcare, food, heat, housing, and insurance.

The thing that trips people up is that the word "liveable" is a synonym for "subsistence," not "fullfilling." A wage that's only liveable would feel quite exploitative to most people.

The "iron law of wages" is instead an economic principle that wages tend to trend downwards until people are paid the minimum possible for subsistence. It's not meant to be a goal.

0: http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/odnirast.html

Regardless of what FDR said, a living wage is guaranteed because people will not accept anything lower.

The problem with a "decent" living is that reasonable people can disagree about what that looks like. Roommates? Children? An unemployed spouse? Vacations and retirement?

It's not the government's job to guarantee all of that stuff and I would rather we focus on stopping wage and tip theft and protecting the rights of workers (banning noncompetes, decoupling health insurance, etc.) instead of increasing the minimum wage towards some poorly-defined goal.

There's also the other side of the minimum wage debate, which is that most of the specific numbers people list as "liveable" do actually result in some folks losing their jobs and becoming unemployable. There was even a recent BERKELEY study that showed this!

Nonsense.

There most definitely IS a definition of a fair minimum wage -- it is the definition used when it was originally introduced into law:

The wage necessary for a full-time (40hr/week) worker head-of-household to support a family of four above the poverty line -- spouse & kids in a house/apartment, food, medical, education, etc..

We have Walmart workers collecting $6 Billion in benefits per year to stay above the poverty line while the Waltons sit on a $250Billion fortune, it is clear we are subsidizing the rich by failing to set an above-poverty minimum wage.

EDIT: typos, add referenced line

Food of what quality? That available in the 1930s?

Medical of what quality? 1930s medical care?

Education to primary level as most had in the 1930s or more than that?

You don't have a natural right to receive the fruits of the labour of others.

>We have Walmart workers collecting $6 Billion in benefits per year to stay above the poverty line while the Waltons sit on a $250Billion fortune, it is clear we are subsidizing the rich by failing to set an above-poverty minimum wage.

Then stop giving benefits to people that have jobs.

There are standards for virtually everything. Meet the current basic standards. For food, a basket of FDA/USDA-approved for distribution food to make a basic but nutritious diet for the family of 4. For housing, you could go with minimums for HUD housing. For education, through public high school. These are not hard to figure out (but may be a bit tedious). These are also minimums required to maintain a functional workforce in a modern society.

>>You don't have a natural right to receive the fruits of the labour of others.

>>Then stop giving benefits to people that have jobs.

Right. So what you want is a Dickensian crabs-in-a-bucket labor market where the wage level is set by the most desperate person, who will work for hours to get a crust of bread for his/her next meal. A market where employers can abuse workers at will because there really are 500 others outside the gate who will take his job if he isn't willing to take the beating?

We are no longer living in a frontier society where 97%+ of the workers are producing food.

That insanely over-simplistic model has been tried, and it is a resounding failure, both for every society, every country, and every individual living in it. Those societies inevitably collapse or grow out of it with minimum standards for everyone. And while it is obviously awful for the workers, it is no day at the beach for the oligarchs either, who must live in secured closed-off areas, always frightened of everyone in the public as well as their rivals in power. Unproductive misery for everyone is what you want?

So, NO, the solution is not to just make the people at the bottom more poor, more hungry, and more desperate.

The solution is to stop giving benefits by ensuring that their employer pays the workers sufficiently that they do NOT NEED benefits to survive.

If an employer cannot pay their workers a living wage they do NOT have a business model.

They have an exploitation model.

The exploitation model specifically violates your above principle saying that the employers have a natural right to the fruits of the workers' labor to whatever degree they can exploit the worker by their desperation.

You aren't saying the no one has a right to the fruits of anyone else's labor, you are only saying that no other worker has such a right, but the employers do.

You are saying that if someone has power or deception, whatever they can take is their right.

I say, NO, that is the most dishonorable and amoral of societies.

> If an employer cannot pay their workers a living wage they do NOT have a business model.

> They have an exploitation model.

as i replied to someone else who asked "what does livable wage mean [to you]?":

A livable wage in the geographic jurisdiction they are in. Including stuff like transportation, healthcare, food, heat, housing, and insurance.

Glad you asked.

oh, the company can't compete without exploiting workers?

oh well.

this isn't really as difficult as everyone makes it. "Minimum wage is a company's way of telling you that if it was legal to pay you less, they would."

If a company can't afford to pay cashiers at different rates based on their tenure and skill, then i guess the company will have to deploy self-checkout, and some people don't like that, so they'll take their business elsewhere. If that means that all grocery stores go "self checkout" then i suppose farmer's markets will become a lot bigger.

This is all about grocery cashiers, please do not try to extrapolate my words to anything else, i am speaking to this very narrow thing.

I did not talk about paying cashiers at different rates. I addressed the single minimum rate from the earlier comment, where a household's single income can "support a family of four above the poverty line -- spouse & kids in a house/apartment, food, medical, education, etc [without relying on assistance programs]". According to the back of this envelope, that would be $70,000/yr = $33/hr. In some areas or with other decisions, maybe only $50,000/yr = $24/hr.

A grocery store would be rare indeed that could afford to pay their lowest-skilled, lowest-tenured cashier at $24/hr. Surely society can come up with a better answer than telling so many grocery stores that self-checkout is the only practical way to stay in business.

for years^, i've been saying this, since 2018 or 2019. $33 an hour. So if you re-read what i actually said, i explain that i don't really care if a supermarket can't afford to pay cashiers at a livable wage. they can suffer from lack of staff, or go full self checkout and robots, or go out of business. I don't care, like, at all. "But genewitch, what about the families of the shareholders and CEO and board?" uh huh, luckily they can go get a job and make a livable wage somewhere else.

^i've only been posting on HN since 2020, but my point stands

> A grocery store would be rare indeed that could afford to pay their lowest-skilled, lowest-tenured cashier at $24/hr. Surely society can come up with a better answer than telling so many grocery stores that self-checkout is the only practical way to stay in business.

I'll take you at your word that you don't care to come up with a better answer, and that means I'll gain nothing further from discussing this with you. I'll bow out. Take care!

Of course there would need to be provisions that it not be abused and just used for all positions. E.g., it cannot be used for workers 21 years old or older, etc. And the rules against abuse need to be solid, as we can guarantee that whatever rules are made, employers will work hard to abuse and game the system to their advantage and at the employee's cost.

I really want to like what you're saying, but I see too many problems. I don't have answers.

Exactly that sort of scenario is why I included those phrases.

ANY large system will have imperfections, inadvertent waste, and openings for abuse. Of course these should be minimized, but that shouldn't stop us from making a system. Better a few people benefit undeservedly than many who deserve and need the benefits go hungry.

> Better a few people benefit undeservedly than many who deserve and need the benefits go hungry.

Agreed. Now consider that regulations exclude people, not include them, overall, by far. (I say this with a job that sees that daily, and where a frequent criticism is that implementing those regulations is government waste.)

What I'm taking away from this is, contrasting with an option I generally dislike, that option actually looks much better than I have previously thought, and it looks definitely better than raising the minimum wage. That is raising the corporate tax rate, which is at historic lows from what I understand, and increasing public benefits. You mentioned Walmart's profits being subsidized by benefit programs, but that valid and important complaint seems to be taken care of this way. This also starts to sound a lot like UBI, which I may have never really understood and have never supported. Maybe I should support it.

That could be a good solution to increase the corp tax rate and provide more benefits and more broadly. The problem is corporations, especially large corps, have historically bought favors from congress, with the result that the tax burden falls on the middle class.

UBI is an astoundingly good concept, especially when people get automated out of their jobs — tax every producing entity at a level required to distribute funds and services (e.g., healthcare) to everyone just above poverty level.

The cool thing is that with UBI, there is basically no need for a minimum wage. First, potential workers are already being supported above poverty, and second, corporations will need to offer a wage and working conditions that together are worth it for workers to bother getting up and going to work. UBI would essentially give everybody "F.U. money", i.e., the option to get up and walk out anytime without endangering their family's ability to live. Studies testing UBI also repeatedly show people consistently spend the money well and do not squander it. The principle once advocated by some conservatives that the people themselves know best how to spend their money is really true (not absolutely, but at a very high level).

So

https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-statistics

https://research.com/education/average-time-to-repay-student...

https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college

Even at a relatively average college, debt repayment is often measured in decades.

If you're single and have no responsibilities, sure. The second you have a mortgage, medical conditions that need health insurance, or need money because you had a family emergency and had to dip into savings, it's not "funemployment" at all.

During dot-bomb I was relatively lucky if not necessarily super-well compensated but I knew a lot of people who basically dropped out of the professional labor market.

Access to cheap labor is what really drives economies. Market forces are what drive labor salaries. More people cheaper labor.

It used to be in the 60s, 70s, and to some extent the 80's a single wage earner was enough in a family. By the end of the 80's it became clear that 2 wage earners was how people got ahead in life.

A significant portion of the world population works themselves to the bone while barely scraping by. This is not the mark of a successful civilization. It's gross.

Maybe as a start, we put limits on the ratio of executive compensation to the lowest paid jobs in a company. And require that a significant percentage of profits be distributed to employees rather than shareholders.

Yes, that will slow economic growth. But even as someone reasonably well off, who depends on investments for his future, that seems much more fair than what we're doing now.

Oh, and not doing 2 trillion in tax cuts for the rich would help.

Tech "layoffs" are something of a euphemism for terminating (rather than pausing) employment for business reasons.

Some businesses are seasonal, so it might make sense there as well.

"Originally, layoff referred exclusively to a temporary interruption in work, or employment"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layoff

I have been thinking about this a lot recently. A former boss and good friend who is incredibly smart and effective in the work place asked why the two of us had never gone the PE route and been more successful. While he is very successful by most standards, he sees people flying private jets all the time who do not appear more skillful, yet have been more successful. As I think on this, I feel I simply was never willing to go all in on the risk required to achieve that level of financial success. I tried co-founding a company once when I was 28 while engaged and importantly, before children. I felt I could take the risk and if I failed, could bounce back. I did fail - company did ok but my I ended up disliking working with my senior partner - and I did bounce back, ending up at GE.

After that, I did not feel comfortable taking that level of risk until my children were off to college and no longer dependent on me an I had enough money saved that my wife and I would be ok for a long time. The people I know who have been jet-money financially successful took huge risks. They were all in on their venture(s). Frequently this cost them their marriage and/or relationships with the children. This was their choice. Their cost/benefit analysis to optimize their success criteria. Some regret the decisions - they underestimated the effort and impact on those they cared about. However, most have not. They are happy with how things have turned out.

Different strokes for different folks.

Many people do not fall on the good side of that random chance.

Dealing with poverty in my youth, homeless at 16, no parents to help me, debilitating ADHD, tourettic OCD, bipolar type II, CPTSD from 10 years of intense childhood physical/emotional abuse, my full-ride college scholarships illegally stolen from me by a high school who knew I was homeless and had no recourse and allowed a teacher to illegally modify my grades out of pure spite, malnourished, intense, crippling sciatica, fused lumbar discs, possible fibromyalgia, and then developing excruciating daily pains and physical disability which greatly impacted my life and sometimes made me suicidal, which turned out to be an autoimmune disorder that took 10 years for doctors to figure out... an extremely intense case of gout developing since my teens...

I just keep pushing on but every day I see people who take so much for granted, and who are so ready to pass judgement without appreciating the basic privilege of good health.

I've had to deal with so much struggle that the average person wouldn't even want to take the time to hear all of it much less believe it, once someone momentarily realizes that they'd have it comparatively easy compared to others, they often get defensive as they begin to realize that their life doesn't have nearly as many barriers as they've convinced themselves, and they have to come to terms with not applying themselves harder. It's easier for them to be dismissive and tell me, "all your problems would go away if you worked out more" or tell me to get on a keto diet, or whatever have you, as if I haven't tried every single thing I can think of.

And the insane thing is I am still quite privileged compared to some people in war-torn countries, even if they are able to move around without swallowing a truckload of ibuprofen. Reminding myself of that is a source of strength and determination to keep moving forward.

The generous interpretation would be that you have sufficiently good health that you do not have to structure your life around it, and therefore lack understanding of the challenges faced by those who do.

The alternate interpretation, that you do understand and choose to ignore and dismiss, would be rather less generous to you.

As for bringing up children, I did make the leap that that is generally a big difference between younger employees and older employees.

It sounds like what you think you wrote, is not in fact the words of yours that everybody has been reading.

In my follow up comment I attempted to clarify my comment in response to giantg2's reply. "I do not have a disability (my wife may disagree) and I agree it makes life more challenging (wouldn’t be called a disability otherwise)." I completely agree a disability makes life more difficult. I simply added that it is not the only thing that makes life more difficult. All of these things need to be considered when making career/job decisions.

> In my initial comment I said "I do disagree with your assertion that “Life is much harder for some of us.” I still maintain that comment.

> I completely agree a disability makes life more difficult.

Do you not see how it's hard to square the first statement, with the second? You do not agree that life is much harder for some people, but you do agree that a disability makes life more difficult?

It sounds like you have very little experience with people outside your socioeconomic class. (Or you do have that experience, but have drawn the wrong conclusions from it.) It is an obvious, proven fact that life is much harder for some people than for others.

A double negative is risky without typos, though.

I think their quibble was with a different item being used as evidence there (i.e., having a family), not necessarily with all that was said.

I think helping one another to build empathy is a good thing, and even if the person I replied to is unable to do so, it's possible that observing them tell a disabled person that they don't think their life is any harder will help other third parties such as yourself build that empathy.

I did not flag their original comment, but it's not for no reason it was flagged to death.

In other cases downvoted posts are often the most interesting precisely because they trigger people with points they don't want to consider. I certainly wouldn't cite it as proof of any position.

Many also don't have the choice to start a family, no matter how badly they want it.

As for starting a family, I agree not all can. My mistake was jumping from their assertion that I must be young to mean I did not have the responsibilities of an older worker such as taking care of a family. The less generous interpretation of that accusation is what? I am stupid? Ignorant of life? Not suffering from the impact of issues that I did not choose?

Some of the "free choices" you claim people can make, will only be possible if some other people don't make those same choices.

Edit: This is not a judgement, but if you felt like it was, I very much want to hear about it.

Unexpected or deliberate change was an opportunity, a challenge, a stimulant! Job hopping (or hopping around relationships) when young can be about exploring the world, finding yourself and your values and isn't inherently bad.

Then you discover what you are good at doing and that you like doing and dedicating time to (or perhaps another person with whom you want to spend all your time) and your priorities change.

Then you might have kids and the work becomes more about financial security for the family then about your personal growth. And so you aren't looking at layoffs and unexpected change as opportunity because you are happy with what you've got.

It just often is an age or 'stage of life' thing for many people.

They are are more likely to set strong boundaries, demand fair compensation, and expect strong leadership. They are less willing to work nights and weekends, accept subpar pay, or tolerate workplace abuse, unlike younger, less experienced employees who may be more naive or eager to conform.

Yes, buuut many will be players from 25 to 35 (with some degree of flexibility), that's why it's still an age thing. Yes, there are persons that are players for life, sure. But IME they are a minority.

Or maybe I'm just projecting, who knows?

You're going to spend half your waking life at work. For me, that's too much time to not want to do so at a place where I have real relationships with my coworkers.

On a related note, it is odd that HN comments rarely seem to include a manager’s perspective.

An employee doesn't have much control of suddenly being locked out of their workspace.

>it is odd that HN comments rarely seem to include a manager’s perspective.

Managers can be screwed by the company too, yes. I understand such decisions aren't always their call.

Fix this and a lot of the job hoping problem goes away.

Just joking :) I firmly respect your opinion on the matter, and understand different people value different things in life.

not if you’re gonna FIRE asap

Anecdotally, the LC bar for many firms has risen to the point that passing requires at least one through of the question before. If you Time bound your practice per question to 20 minutes, this means that you can solve most LC problems at least once in around 8 weeks of 40 hour weeks. Or 6 weeks at 60 hours.

Not a pleasant way to spend two months - but not impractical. I'm unclear what employers are deriving from this exercise at this point.

It filters out the complete frauds.

Yes, there are people who know all the right things to say in a job interview, but cannot code at all. If you hire one of them, it takes a bit to find out they cannot code, and a bit longer to fire them, so you're out $$$$ paying their salaries for nothing.

For example, a recruiter I know will ask a tech candidate "what is 20% of 20,000?" A significant percentage cannot answer the question. Some even cry. It's shocking.

A friend of mine was looking at getting a FAANG job. He was worried about the leetcode tests. I suggested he spend a month going through the leetcode books studying them - that the return on his time investment doing that will be one of the best ROIs he's ever done. He did, and got the job. (Although the LC was just a first gate one had to go through to get to the real job interview.)

Personally, I have no idea how I'd do on an LC test without prep. But I don't have a problem with studying it to get a top job.

Not just that. They block the hiring process. Maybe there was just that one open position on your team, and that bad 3 month hire postponed a good hire by 6 months. It's also very incomfortable to fire and start again.

My interviews contain questions that are basic, and any new team mate should know. I keep asking them because 90% of the candidates actually can't answer them well. You should know what a "dot product" is if you want to work as a ML engineer, that kind of stuff. Or be able to open a text file and count word frequencies.

I can appreciate the gating process because it's a real drag to get hired and then spend more time than necessary not doing my work but trying to help coworkers catch up on very basic and fundamental skills in order to be able to collaborate with them.

During our interview, we ask candidates to design a history system. The key is to realize that our database is only 8Gb, and storing a year of updates is only 160Gb, so $2pm in AWS. Once there, a simple DB table suits, no need to set up Amazon S3.

So we ask them for the multiplication. First we give them the data, and if they don’t do the calculation, we nudge them, then we ask them, then we write the multipliers for them, then we take the calculator out and write the result for them.

Those are Masters degrees. They can’t even do calculations, let alone getting it right, because 500MB x 200 days a year = a few petabytes apparently. And after that, they’re exhausted, it’s impossible to ask them the rest of the questions like “So is it worth worrying about a Rube Goldberg machine when you’re in for $2 of AWS costs?”.

That said, I'm not above your bar as each cloud provider have their own pricing model. I'm not even above your bar for AWS---which I've used the past six years---just for the sheer diversity of their offerings, not to mention regional variations. I know how EC2 servers are priced relative to each other but when we include ECS, DynamoDB, Lambda, etc., I'm gonna need a cheat sheet.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I suspect that hiring based on a candidates ability to produce optimal solutions to LC Hards will bias strongly towards candidates who can't code, but are very good at interviewing.

It's not about skills at this point, companies just want to pretend to hire while not admitting we're now heading towards a recession.

I generally do not use clever algorithms in my code. I just use straightforward ones. Rarely, I might need a better one and go looking for it (like a better hash algorithm). I rarely use a data structure more complicated than an array, list, binary tree, hash, or single inheritance.

What I have, though, is decades of experience with what works and what doesn't work. (My favorite whipping boy is macros. Macros look like they are great productivity boosters. It takes about 10 years to realize that macros are a never-ending source of confusion, they just confuse and obfuscate every code base that uses them. I could go on about this! ...)

I have become pretty good at writing modules that minimize dependencies, and pretty good at the user interface design of a language.

But still, if the job wanted a leetcode test, I'd take it, no problem. I'd study up first, though.

If a young tech bro was interviewing me, I'd suggest he show me his best code, and I'd do a review of it :-) The point of that would not be to humilate him, but to demonstrate the value I can bring to improving code quality.

If I was being interviewed for a job writing a faster divide routine (the ones I wrote were shift-subtract, slower but bulletproof), a better random number generator, a cryptographically secure hash function, a tighter compression algorithm, a faster sort, I'm not the right guy for that.

We all have our blind spots. I do, too.

Beyond the obvious lesson about experience and sunk costs it was also a great lesson about how much time you assume you have for maintenance: when he’d first written that code as a grad student he’d been obsessed with performance since that was a bottleneck for getting his papers out but as his career progressed he spent time on other things, and since it wasn’t broken he hadn’t really revisited it because he “knew” where it was slow. Over time the computer costs eventually outweighed that original savings.

I always try to give everyone I’ve interviewed the benefit of the doubt. You never know what’s going on in their lives, and even if they fail a trivial question it doesn’t mean they are faking the ability to code.

I joined Facebook back in 2018. Didn’t study at all for the interview and passed somehow. Then I probably conducted 200-300 interviews in my time there, so I became quite familiar with the questions. My performance ratings were all exceeds or greatly exceeds. I voluntarily left on my own after four years to join a unicorn startup. I didn’t prep for that interview either but passed it too. Well, the startup failed and many people went back to Meta. So I actually prepared quite a bit this time and scheduled a mock interview with them. The mock interviewer said I did great and not to change a thing. When it came time for the real screening interview... I failed the matching parentheses question.

I generally try not to make excuses. Almost every interview I’ve failed has clearly been my own fault. But in this particular one the interviewer kept interrupting me every two seconds and I absolutely could not think. I had done matching parentheses many times before in practice, but the constant interrupting rattled me to the point where I totally lost focus and bombed it. Not a great experience.

So yeah, I’d just recommend giving people the benefit of the doubt. Everyone has difficult moments occasionally, but it doesn’t mean they’re stupid or can’t code.

Something I have changed my stance on a bit is automated coding interviews. I used to be adamantly against a company giving candidates automated code tests, but I see now that it takes the interviewer out of the equation.

There have been times I’ve received answers in interview that weren’t the written answers, but I looked it up afterward and tested it out… and they were right. I learned something news and tweaked the answer reference as a result. If those questions were in the pre-screening instead of asked directly by me, it would have filtered out good people.

I remember fighting to get access to the pre-screen data to see what the answers were and find if there were any other cases like this, where the non-technical pre-screener was filtering out potentially good candidates, because we couldn’t give them exhaustive answers to questions being asked.

Well yes, that's why I'm against it. A one way "interview" is an audition, not an interview. There's nothing worse than wasting 2, 5, 10+ hours on something that ends up with a template rejection letter.

That's great for the interviewer, but devastating for the interviewee. They can't even get feedback on how to improve.

There is also nothing worse than wasting 2, 5, 10+ hours on an in person interview to just have the interviewer flunk you our be unfair to you.

I still believe that personal interviews are important, I'm just raising the fact that a large portion of an interviewee's success is based upon their interviewer.

>There is also nothing worse than wasting 2, 5, 10+ hours on an in person interview to just have the interviewer flunk you our be unfair to you

The interview stage inflation is definitely a problem, but speaking with actual people still has benefits. You get an idea of their culture and you can still network even in such a situation. It's not guaranteed but you get a much higher chance to get advice and feedback on or off the record if you're polite. People are flexible, some standardized exam may never even reach a human.

>'m just raising the fact that a large portion of an interviewee's success is based upon their interviewer.

Indeed. I'm just stating a viewpoint where an interview needs to be personal. An audition in this software space is about as impersonal as you can get.

It is really entirely up to each interviewer how the interview goes and they are usually scheduled between 2 other meetings so often the interviewer is distracted.

Very strange system imo, lots of randomness

Wat? Feeling the pressure is even worse when you're young!

Think about this contradictory statement for a while. Can it actually be true? Or is there something else going on?

If the interviewee has nothing but sub-1yr stints on their resume, perpetually getting fired before vesting at any company, then yes, it's very possible they actually can't code and just fake it at every interview.

But everyone else... if they have spent years at tech companies writing production code then obviously they know how to code. They might be great or maybe mediocre, but guaranteed they at least know how to code.

So, if your interviewing technique is concluding something that is obviously impossible, then start by considering how to improve the interview technique.

My guess is computer science has a similar issue.

Lots of people with programming in thier job title but they don’t actually program. And based on ltbarcly3’s empirical measurement, “lots” is above 10%. ;)

    V = I * R
    I = V / R
    R = V / I

And yeah, I've been trashed multiple times for this opinion, but I'm not backing down!

And yes, this is part of why the obsession with FAANG on resume is very overrated. Very few companies require the skillsete FAANG needs. Some of thst FAANG culture is orthogonal to what medium/small sized companies require.

I feel like you kind of vaguely are aware of these topics but have never actually had a job or something because you seem completely unfamiliar with the basics of how hiring is done in the industry. Are you from Eastern Europe maybe?

>No HR doesn't investigate candidates or do background checks before you interview

An HR screen isn't a background check. It's "can you talk about your roles and provlems solved like you actually did it. A good HR screen should make sure they aren't blatantly lying

>that would be very expensive and silly.

Let's both not pretend the interview proces is in any way optimized for any metric. You have often non-tech roles create a description for a tech role (leading to famous blunders like "have and jave script is the same") . You have an increasing amount of rounds of interviews to go through for a job that may not exist or may already be reserved. And more and more of the parts are being outsourced, leading to power quality candidates. All that before throwing a reckless reliance of AI on everything.

The most optimal hiring is to focus on high quality hires brought in as fast as possible. Or not to hire if you don't need to hire. But we're not really running on sensible business practices these days.

An HR screen will sometimes remove frauds (not usually because they can't really tell, it removes uncharasmatic frauds only), but it also has a very high probability of removing anyone on the autism spectrum - no matter how qualified. I really don't want people on the autism spectrum removed from my hiring funnel for software engineer. If you ever looked over the shoulder of a recruiter or HR when they do a first pass on resumes you will be horrified at how many of the best candidates they pass over because they have no idea what they are reading, and how many very poor candidates they pass along for very stupid reasons like having 'Yale' for their college (despite it being for History and despite it being the extension school, true story, and this person ended up getting hired despite negative interview feedback and then fired for incompetence a few months later).

Correct. While not perfect, if you have good HR hiring team they will do a decent job at feeling out the people before they get to you.

> I can apply to 100 job and interview for 10 that all fall through.

Part of the difficulty is that (despite any myths around engineering shortage) there are so many qualified people for every role that it is overwhelming.

I just opened a new job req last week, I have over 1100 resumes in the queue already. And this is a pretty specialized technical role in a specialized department, not a generic "javascript software engineer" role, either.

Obviously I can't read all of them, which makes me sad because someone took the time to send their resume and I feel like I should give them the respect of reading it, but there are simply not enough hours in a week. While HR does the screening, I also go and do a random sampling of the resumes and everyone who has applied seems at least moderately qualified. But of course I can only talk to about 1% of them at best.

In a large environment, someone may rarely need to start from nothing, so the interview format throws them.

That said, I think being able to break down a problem to solve it with code is a really important skill. Without it, the person will always have to lean on others to fill that skill gap.

But being able to break things down and come up with a solution is not necessarily something that needs to be done quickly, in the time you have for an interview. Quite often I've been faced with a new problem and done absolutely nothing visible for ages. Literally just reading around the problem, asking questions, and sketching in my mind without writing a single line of code.

This is often faster and better than starting immediately.

I could talk for hours on this subject with concrete examples if anyone ever asked.

I think another problem is that there are so few engineers/architects who really "get it" on this subject. I can only think of a few ex-coworkers with whom I could have the kind of in-depth conversation about app design and organization that I'm picturing.

I've never worked in big tech, always for startups or non-tech corps with a few rock star devs and a lot of decent devs. So maybe it's different at a FAANG. But in my head I'm picturing a bunch of algo-geniuses whose code turns into a big mess over time when requirements take a right-turn and break all their beautiful abstractions. I've worked on a few apps like that and it's not fun.

Your template sounds like a fine way to ask such a question. I think the issue is managers or someone above simply don't want to invest in proper interview questions and instead just do that FAANG does. Even though very few companies need such core algorithmic knowledge but need people who can properly navigate legacy code. FAANGs will actually make sure new hires learn the code base, unlike many companies thst want you to "hit the ground running".

Haha I hate all the code I wrote more than 5 years ago.

How, exactly, would you do that?

Say you open a new position and you get 100 resumes a day, every day, until you shut down the role and pick someone.

How are you hiring the best candidate overall?

How long are you waiting for "the best"?

How many resumes are you really evaluating per day? With 100 coming in, how do you know you didn't miss "the best" one?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem literally tells you exactly what to do in your situation. I'm sure someone, probably a professor or fun video on social media has told you about this a dozen times in your life, but if you didn't pay attention you can always Google it or ask ChatGPT https://chatgpt.com/share/67d3a121-13e4-8006-9ae3-625838875e...

2. While I said the goal was to hire the best candidate, this was as compared to someone who is just barely better than not filling the position. Hiring a top 5 candidate is also very good. The argument in GP was (paraphrasing) "I know people that aren't good programmers but they can manage to do little changes to existing code therefore you shouldn't give interview problems these dummies can't solve."

Or is this ironic?

It was utterly mundane code.

It's not as if testing for performance under stress is useless: Tough on call rotations happen, and you might need someone that does well under pressure at 3 am in the morning. But the picture you get on a screening isn't as clear as it appears.

1. study the leetcode books in advance

2. do lots of interviews

In the military, there's a saying: train hard => fight easy

On a stop-the-world production incident at 3am I know that codebase like the back of my hand, and my job very likely doesn’t depend on whether I solve it in the next 30m. There’s barely anything stressful about it.

On an interview, with my future on the line, and presented with an unfamiliar problem?

The latter has more in common with an open mic night, the prospect of which the vast majority of people are terrified and would break down if they attempted it.

I recommend that when there's an opportunity to get up in front of a mike, take it, and get comfortable with it. It's a skill that will serve you well.

I feel like a good middle is to allow Google for documentation searches, not solution searches. Without searching (or IDE with radix completion), I'd probably fail the test for not knowing the syntax off the top of my head.

I never mesmerized strstr(). But using it frequently makes it stick in my mind.

Might as well put a suitcase with $200k and a copper clock ticking away on the table next to them.

Surprisingly, I have an 80% fail rate on the first question usually, which is just “find the second largest number in an array of numbers” for a 5 YOE role.

I think HN is just overwhelmed with people who somehow got hired into technical jobs but can't do them. Anyone who thinks that 'finding second largest number in an array' or 'finding if a string is a substring of another string' are hard, or that the pressures of an interview are a valid excuse for being unable to do it are simply not intelligent enough to be successful in this field and they are casting about for some excuse to protect their ego. These are problems that a bright 12 year old with no programming experience could do for fun, and these folks are purporting to be educated, experienced, professional programmers.

As much as people like to say 'muh anxiety', I've yet to meet someone who can't do very basic coding in an interview but also they are capable of basic coding in any other context. I would suggest that this sort of person is so rare that you will probably never meet one over the course of a normal career.

I guess they could just by lying "to protect their ego" but in that case why post their comment at all?

It really is the case that some people sometimes completely go to pieces when stressed, and mocking them by saying "muh anxiety" doesn't stop that being true.

To some degree the interview is not about getting the question right but also how you respond to questions about your answers. I would rather have someone who started with a totally incorrect answer and then reason back and forth with them til they got on the right path, than someone who came up with the right answer and then clammed up and refused to explain how they got there. (I once had a candidate tell me, verbatim, "I don't think analyzing performance of an algorithm is part of an engineer's job.")

I would prefer if there were a more humane, less stressful, and scalable way to do an interview. The problem is that as a profession we lack the continued examination/licensing of other fields like engineering or medicine, so we don't have a good barometer of skills otherwise. And I often have to sift through massive numbers of people clearly overshooting their shot to get a good position.

Yes maybe someone can't come up with this in an interview. My point is 99.99% of the time when someone fails this they are lying about their work history or they are so stupid they can't hope to do the job. 00.01% of the time they could do this easily and the stars aligned to give them a rare bad day. The best way to deal with that is to just assume everyone who fails this can't do the work, and the 00.01% person just interviews somewhere else and doesn't have another bad day. I don't even know what the alternative to that is, just hire everyone who claims to be qualified and hope for the best? Give everyone who demonstrates very very strong incompetence signals 2 or 3 more tries?

  def matched(str):
      count = 0

      for c in str:
          if c == "(":
              count += 1
          elif c == ")":
              count -= 1

          if count < 0:
              return False

      return count == 0

I think this is good evidence that, in fact, it's not vanishingly unlikely that someone genuinely competent flubs what should be an embarrassingly straightforward coding task in an interview.

That doesn't, unfortunately, mean I have a good suggestion for a better way of telling who is and who isn't capable of writing code. Maybe this is the best we can do. If it really is just a matter of "sometimes, at random, people have bad days"[1] then provided it's fairly rare this issue doesn't matter too much. I'm more worried about the possibility that it's more "a smallish fraction of otherwise-good people often have this sort of bad day", because then that smallish fraction of people may be getting completely overlooked, which is bad for them because it may take them ages to get a job and bad for employers because it effectively reduces the pool of good people to hire.

[1] In this particular case, the "bad day" seems to have included an obnoxious interviewer, which it's reasonable to hope wouldn't be repeated at another company's interview.

But, again, pointing out a problem unfortunately doesn't guarantee having a good answer. But, equally, not having a good answer doesn't mean the problem isn't real. It would be very nice to believe that all the people failing interviews because they fail to solve an easy coding problem are undeserving incompetents who should be bombing out of the interviews, but it looks to me like that ain't so.

Lets say we interview 100 (N) people for a role. (100 is a lot but pick a number yourself and follow along)

The probability that a random interviewee is a top programmer is lets say 1/50 (T). So in our pool of 100 we have on average 2. Give everyone this problem, and if they get it right they move to round 2 which is 4 more interviews. Lets say 20 (P) people pass to round #2.

We are paying for a total of 100 + 80 = 180 interviews (N + 4P). To give everyone who failed the first round another try would require another 80 (N - P) interviews. So for almost 50% more cost (N-P)/(N + 4P) we gain (T * N * 5%) = 0.1 additional top programmer making it to round 2 on average. Just interviewing another 80 people (same cost) would get us (T * 80 * 95%) == 1.52 additional top programmers to round #2 on average. There's basically no reasonable % you can pick for how often people screw up where it makes sense to do anything but just ignore the possibility.

Before, you were saying: anyone who says "muh anxiety" is just trying to cover for the fact that they're incompetent.

I suggested that we've got pretty good evidence that interview stress really truly can, and not only-vanishingly-occasionally, make competent people fail to do simple interview-type coding tasks.

So now you're advancing a different claim: even if some competent people appear incompetent in some interviews because of the stress of interviewing, you should make interview decisions as if those people are just plain incompetent, because most people who fail to do simple interview-type coding tasks really are incompetent and identifying the few who were just stressed out is difficult.

That could very well be true! But it's not what I was arguing against before.

... But I'll argue against it just a bit, even though I mean it when I say it could well be true.

1. There may be much less inefficient ways of catching the competent-but-stressed candidates than "just interview everyone twice"; completely incompetent people probably don't interview exactly the same as competent-but-stressed ones. (I don't know for sure because, of course, when you interview someone and they don't perform well you don't generally get to tell which category they were in. But I bet it would be possible to find out.)

2. If the situation is that some people are particularly susceptible to interview stress (but that this doesn't make them bad at actual programming jobs unless they're in an extra-stressful environment), the "eh, just reject them" strategy might be good for companies that are hiring but punishingly bad for the people affected who just can't get a job because they are bad at interviews. If there were a good way to identify people who are good but fall apart readily under interview-stress, that might be a big deal for those people. (Which someone on the hiring side might not care about, of course; but it's sad when some group of people gets systematically screwed over.)

I repeat, as I have said before, that I don't have a solution to this problem nor even good reason to believe that there is one. I'm just pushing back against the blithe assertion that there isn't a real problem here.

In an era where linters and autocomplete and IDEs have existed for decades it’s silly to fail an interview based on tiny error checks.

Unless you mean using a "substring" function or regexes... coming up with the naïve O(n^2) algorithm is indeed easy, but finding a fast algorithm like KMP is, I would say, non-trivial?

For the "second-largest number in array" it's rather easy to come up with an O(n) algorithm, so I would consider the two cases to be different.

You sure it's not nepotism, or an inability to make sure the resume fits the person? Or any other number of non-merit based criteria from HR?

And, and having to explain everything, well, this person had never heard of it. And, and for the more, didn't know what modulo was, like, how do you, how do you say you know Java?

I suck at programming but I could bang out 100% of the things mentioned in this thread. In like four languages, including FORTRAN.

For context, back when I was interviewing I encountered many interviewers who process involved simple questions with simple solutions but with extra gaslighting on top. 'Are you SURE that's the right solution?' while I'm in the middle of throwing out a correct answer. It's actually very easy to guide someone away from a correct solution into the wrong one by simply making them second guess themselves under pressure.

It was something that I started to be extra cognizant about when I was the one interviewing people, that it's really quite easy to throw someone off track.

Imagine a person with a pilot's license refusing to fly tandem for an airline interview.

That’s not a great comparison since a pilot has already passed substantially harder tests to get that license and a flight is exactly what the job is. If you have a candidate with a pilot’s license you can assume at least a baseline level of capability which you can’t assume for a software engineer. That has pros and cons but it definitely means interviewing is a noisier process.

The other problem, however, is deeper: the job of flying a plane is exactly what’s tested to get a pilot’s license but what many places do for developer interviews is wildly unlike the actual job so it’s more like interviewing pilots based on trivia questions about the number of rivets on a B-52 and how well they can solve 3-D puzzles, and then being surprised when there isn’t much correlation with real world performance. For example, only at the most toxic companies will the interview be one of the least stressful parts because the rest of the job is a team effort. What makes the interview challenges stressful is doing it without your normal tools while someone else is looking for reasons to fail you, but in a normal job your coworkers are trying to help you succeed because even if you’re not friends you are all better off when your company succeeds. At a startup, trying to ding someone for trivia challenges is like hitting the iceberg to prove that the navigator made a mistake.

Airlines very strictly test pilots and insist on check rides regardless of what official qualifications pilots show up with. They do this because they are professional organizations with decades of experience and it is necessary for safety. Giving someone the benefit of the doubt because they manage to meet the absolute minimum standard that makes operating an airplane legal is insane.

In contrast, we don’t have anything like real certifications for developers and many of the interviewing questions are very unlike the actual job. Hiring would be easier if we did have something closer to what a pilot’s license conveys, but that’d also slow the field down since programming has changed a lot more over the last 50 years than flying.

Once you're on the team, you are mostly practicing plays, doing clinics, and simulating competition, but to get on the team in the first place you have to prove your general fitness by running, say, a 6 minute mile.

You may not be able to do that again easily right away once you've been on the team for a while because you don't practice running for pure time at that distance, but it's a level of fitness you should be easily able to obtain again if you had to, and it's a very useful benchmark to a scout.

When you're laid off, it's time to start doing that "roadwork" again. It will be a bit hard at first in practice, but if you've been a solid contributor, you should be able to get fit enough again to prove that.

Pro teams have scouts, draft based on college performance, trade or poach players from other teams. They don't even have tryouts 99% of the time. You have to be a proven performer for a team in a developmental league.

They're not testing your limits, they're testing for basic competency.

Notwithstanding, I have long argued that a non-profit credentialing body for SWEs offering cerification exams (which also required regular updates) akin to passing the bar or USMLE could go a long way to solving this problem. It would come with other drawbacks, perhaps not worth it, but we have to accept that constant tech interviews is the price we pay for refusal to standardize and professionalize.

Thinking back on it. Not really. I’ve had a few people be outright incompetent, but I’ve never been at risk of them stealing the credit for stuff. The closest I’ve come is people that should probably be fired, but manage to barely hold on by being experts at self promotion.

Glad they exist and I fully support all candidates using them aggressively.