That's funny, I feel like I'm the exact opposite. If I'm learning something new my process is usually:

1. Install it and go to the docs and start the basic tutorial
2. At some point during 1, break out and start building the thing I want
3. After a bunch of trying myself, head to YouTube and find a 20-30 min video on it
4. Go back to coding and feel like I actually know a bit more what I'm doing

I always love watching YouTube's and coding along to them and also pausing it and trying random stuff for a while.

Or Gitlab?

Yeah, I agree it's a sieve with many different gates.

i applied to a gitlab job. the interview process starts with multiple essay questions one of which is "what happens when you initiate a google search" and they tell you to be as detailed as possible.

why the **** does Udemy ask you if you want to leave a review for an 11 hour video after the 8 minutes of introduction videos ?

Because 95%+ of people probably leave by minute 10.

just went on a job interview where i was legit 99% sure i'd get an offer because i crushed it so hard. got rejected. wonder if it's:

1. not a cultural fit, aka age discrimination. also i'm not the right kind of minority (for their diversity $tat$).
2. someone read way too much into my answer about how I interact with our PMs; tea leaf reading, etc.
3. rejecting me before i could reject them, since i was pretty diffident with their recruiter about how much i wanted to work there.

what feedback did they supply?

none

i also went on another interview where i did well but perhaps not crushed. their glassdoor had a recent review from a guy who got rejected who said that they offered detailed feedback about why, but i got nada. i feel like that's basically the "cultural fit" thing that they aren't going to tell you about. if they rejected you because you couldn't reverse that linked list, then yeah, they would just tell you that.

Never hurts to ask. I've gotten some pretty valuable feedback asking for specifics in the past

sure, why not.

i would also note that the recruiter for that 2nd job specifically said in her response that they cannot provide feedback. which is what made me more skepticalface.jpg given the content of that glassdoor review. although to be fair, this might be a new policy of theirs, having come to recently understand why every other company (rationally) declines to give feedback.

Lawsuits?

The soluion to our too-big stand-ups was to have them per workstream - this is around 5 ,people each.

The workstream leads have a meeting once a week, with an option for ad-hoc additional meetings. The once a week meeting covers the status update, optimal resource allocation etc., so isn't a stand up.

Iversonian,

In a situation like that if you think it might be age discrimination you are probably 99% correct.

Totally disagree. Maybe it was a factor but in the vast majority of cases the person interviewing didn’t do nearly as well as they thought they did.

There’s lots of reasons. Things like:

- General human nature where people make themselves better when evaluating their past actions
- Actual cultural mismatch issues. For example, we once passed on a director because his attitudes to management, evaluating people, and firing them didn’t at all match ours. He probably thinks he’s awesome at those things (and lots of people would agree with him) and nailed the interview.
- Someone does ok on the questions that they were asked but the interviewer never got to ask the harder questions because the interviewer took too long or made it clear that they weren’t going to pass.

This is the extreme result, but just in general it’s mostly a negative freeroll and not worth the effort.

You forgot the biggest one:

99% of hiring processes are completely garbage.

I definitely agree with this.

Me too, and that sucks a lot. And I have no idea what to do about it, except of course, the very mercenary style that we did once at the first startup I worked for. We hired anyone who seemed remotely decent. If it wasn't working out after a pretty short period of time (say 2 months), we let them go.

I don't necessarily think this is an improvement over current systems, because there is a lot of ego tied to employment and getting fired sucks. No one ever wants to fire anyone and that's one of the reasons that poor hiring practices suck so much, and one reason why it's so hard to get hired, because everyone has to love you or they won't risk taking on someone, because they're so hard to get rid of.

I have seen more companies make a job suck enough to get people to quit that legit have the balls to tell them their services are no longer required.

The company I interviewed with on Friday asked me to write code on the whiteboard for state machine transitions, reversing Endianness, binary search, reversing a linked list, and implementing a queue; along with a couple of industry specific things.

None of it was difficult, but writing code on a whiteboard sucks. I could have done it so much faster with a laptop and projector.

I also realized that interviewing with a competitor in your same industry can be really hard. I've only had the one job ever since graduating college, so some things I was unsure if they were proprietary (meaning I can't talk about them or risk breaking NDA) or industry standard.

I will say I think I taught them a few things about how to do things, and I certainly learned a few things too. Hopefully none of the things I talked about that they were impressed by and hadn't thought of before were trade secrets....

do CS grads do so much of that stuff that it is just embedded in their brains?

I guess? It's been 20 years since I was in school but I can still do most of this stuff. It's not like I have it memorized, but I've done it enough times that I can re-create it from scratch.

I guess kind of like how I couldn't tell you how to get from my elementary school to my house, but if you dropped me at my old school, I could find my way home.

So it looks like I'm going to be in the enviable multiple offers situation. Any advice from others on best way to get the highest offer I can from the one I am leaning towards?

Do I share the actual offer letter with the company that is lower, just tell them the number, just tell them they are lower, something else?

Any other words of wisdom?

I would never share the actual offer letter because there's inevitably the whole "we wouldn't want them doing that to us" aspect.

This surely has been beaten to death here and on hacker news, but I think the standard play is to just tell the company you want to be at, "I'm being offered X by Y, if you can match that then I'm really excited to get started."

What X and Y are is up to you and depends on your own judgement of the situation and confidence in negotiating.