Not only is Dimitri an amazing engineer - he's also great at building community and event/video production. Michigan Typescript meetups and videos have a level of polish that goes over and above
In the YouTube comments he stated nonetheless that he still bombed big tech interviews, specifically the technical portion, probably because of some ridiculous LeetCode problem he did not memorize beforehand. It just goes to show how these procedures do not effectively determine who is actually a good engineer or programmer. If this guy can't land a job while achieving this, then something is not quite right with the interview process.
hi! yep! this definitely happened. I do mention it in the next "why" video, but it's good feedback to know this is interesting to people because I could say a bit more about what those rejections were like - specifically the one where I failed the technical screening.
I'm actually really excited to share that part of the story because I hope it can be a small thing in the back of people's mind to help them if it happens to them. It can happen to anyone. Interviews are SUCH a lossy process and most engineers I know don't have any training on how to do interviews at all - yet we just assume they know how to evaluate people's skillsets.
Those interviews select for the type of person that believe it is worthwhile to dump tons of time into studying minutia to succeed at those types of interviews.
The purpose of a system is what it does, after all.
You're making an excellent case for using AI during the interview. If you can actually code and do the work, you're hurting no one by using tools to get past these arbitrary barriers during the live interview. The system is clearly flawed when someone demonstrably skilled gets rejected over trivia.
I actually created a tool to help myself get through the live interviews, specifically by listening to the questions and giving me real time answers to things I couldn't recall under that kind of pressure. It's not about not knowing the material, it's about the ridiculous expectation to perform perfectly on demand.
jschoe|1 year ago
dimitropoulos|1 year ago
I'm actually really excited to share that part of the story because I hope it can be a small thing in the back of people's mind to help them if it happens to them. It can happen to anyone. Interviews are SUCH a lossy process and most engineers I know don't have any training on how to do interviews at all - yet we just assume they know how to evaluate people's skillsets.
mattgreenrocks|1 year ago
The purpose of a system is what it does, after all.
adam_hn|1 year ago
I actually created a tool to help myself get through the live interviews, specifically by listening to the questions and giving me real time answers to things I couldn't recall under that kind of pressure. It's not about not knowing the material, it's about the ridiculous expectation to perform perfectly on demand.
stevage|1 year ago