From their perspective, they might be interviewing, say, six people. As you say, they've already weeded out people from their resumes before they even get to the interview. From my experience, and I have heard people note this before, interviews tend to be a Gaussian curve with a normal distribution. People are weeded out by resumes and such. However, if I interview six people, usually someone slips through the cracks who knows nothing or next to nothing. That leaves the remaining five.

Of the five, four are usually interchangeable. They're like you - they get the technical questions right, or right enough. It's obvious they've been writing features for code for a company like yours. But of the five, often one person seems to not just know the easiest questions, or normal questions, but has a very good understanding of the subject matter. You keep probing how much they know, and they have in-depth knowledge about a lot of things. They know how registers on a processor work, they know about cache, they know the big O space of various algorithms, they can explain different approaches to concurrency in depth, or testing, or a lot of things. So you got the answers right, they just did better.

It could be something else - you might be just as good as someone else, but they were recommended by someone already on the team, or on an adjacent team, and they get brought in.

I guess personalities are on a bell curve as well. Maybe one out of six people fail on this. Maybe they're disorganized, or immature, or arrogant. Sometimes they miss basic social cues, or don't follow instructions, or even seem like they have a screw loose. Then four out of six people seem nice enough - professional but friendly. Then maybe one out of six just seems very sharp and smart, or avuncular, or what have you. A lot of it ties together - someone who has done the work to learn a programming language more than the other candidates, you assume is going to be hard-working on features as well, and they also seem sharp because they know so much (about IT, but other things as well).

Some things are contrasting. The hard-working person who knows the programming language in and out, and who gets a lot of feature work done is probably willing to sacrifice a little comity within the group to get a feature out. On the other hand, some people are so stubborn and argumentative, their presence would be a negative, even if they have technical skills. But some personality traits can contrast - I've working with friendly, supportive leads with great technical skills, but if they are a little bit hard charging this type of thing might be expected to come with the package of being very good technically.

In 2009 the economy sank and I was laid off. I was able to go back full time for a while. I was already enrolled and everything, I just started taking 4-5 classes a semester instead of 1, I was also able to take them during the day for a while.

$80k over four years is a certain amount, $80k over more years is less. I think I paid less per than $20,000 for a year's worth of classes. Some people got Pell grants and financial aid, although I just paid for it cash.

It's just a function usually, but it does not always compile. I'd set this as a low bar for programming. We haven't even gotten into classes, architecture, badly-defined specifications and so on.

LLMs are useful for programming, but I'd want them to clear this low hurdle first.

In 2000-2001, dot-com startups were hit harder than the rest of the economy. I worked for Internet startups and dot-coms from 1996 until the end of the summer 2000, where I started consulting for a large investment bank. I figured Internet-related startups were not going to make a comeback in the short term and I was right. The Fortune 500 was kind of starved for technical talent at the time, especially outside the Bay Area, so you could shift. There were some difficulties getting hired - I knew a lot about Red Hat Linux and Apache web servers and Java application servers, and I moved into a world of Solaris e4500 servers and NFS mounts and RAID 10 arrays and middleware. There were later shifts - for backend, things began shifting from monoliths and SOAs to microservices. Ruby on Rails was big from 2007 until 2013 until Javascript web front end began picking up more. Then native/hybrid mobile began cutting into the dominance of web front end. Now AI is coming in. So there are economic ups and downs, but what skills they are hiring for shift as well.

Unless society is entering some major transformative period like the 1930s, these shifts of the business cycle will keep happening. While the general tech market has been stagnant since November 2022, Nvidia stock has gone up 800%, as it has gone from the 15th most valuable company in the world (by market cap) to the 2nd, behind Apple. I have a strong feeling it will surpass Apple in the coming months and years as the most valuable company in the world. Programmers programming CUDA for them and whatnot, programmers programming Pytorch for FAANG and AI startups, and these kinds of jobs are open now, and in a few years companies might be offering $200k TC to people coming out of college who can program that. Or maybe LLMs will hit a wall in the short term and that won't happen. But something will happen - I've seen IT hit a slump a bunch of times and it always comes back (unless, as I said, we get into a situation like the 1930s).

I sacrifice an evening - but not to my company, but to studying Leetcode to move on to the next company. I also have side hustles that I devote time to.

> when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before. If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.

I am helpful to most people when they need help, and they remember this. My code is clean and well architected and well tested, and they can see this too. They also know that I know the language and platform we're using, and general programming (and business) knowledge. Few care whether I'm a "standout contributor" in terms of getting many stories done. Actually if I have a good lead or manager I might go above and beyond for them in terms of doing more.

> a company will never love you back. But your co-workers will.

Well, this is correct. I help my co-workers.

Things are situational. If I got a job helping set up LLM's or something, I might dive in and work a lot of hours just because I feel it is benefiting me too. On the other hand I can be somewhere where it doesn't make sense to work more than forty hours (if that) a week.

We're not telling people to grind Leetcode because we think Leetcode is great, we're telling people to grind Leetcode because this is usually one of the steps you need to do to get in.

I only have to convince one place - Google Ads. Plus bring in the "eyeballs" with my free app, but I have accomplished that more than once.

> Also you have to convince companies to do business with you instead of a well known company.

Just one company in my case (actually several, but 90+% of the money comes from Google)

> Oh and to be competitive you need to have some type of funding. I have to be competitive enough to make a few thousand a month, and with my programming (and database design, and UX, and SRE etc.) skills, I have achieved that.

> And you need to make enough to pay for health care. In the US you do.

On the other hand, I've worked with interns who were pretty good. One I knew had done a lot of side projects while going to school. He is now making about $300k TC, 3.5 years after his internship.

In the climate today, internships are the road to a job. People intern at a company between sophomore and junior year, and then another one between junior and senior year, and hope they have offers from at least one of the two on graduation (plus maybe a few more they applied to separately).

The IT job market has been tight since the end of 2022. I don't know what position someone who is ready is in, but just doing classes probably isn't enough. I tended to learn something in a semester, and then apply it after. Like I learned Java one semester, and during the semester started fixing bugs for a free software project that was online. Then I had a small program I wanted, and did it in Java. Similar with C++, computer graphics and other things - I learned it during the semester, then applied it during summer or winter break on little projects.

On a wider level, I wouldn't disagree the managers and owners of the field can make you work to death without caring about you and the like. On an individual level though, if people want to break in they need to do the right things, know the right things, and get a lucky break. I can say everyone I know who kept at it eventually got a break, but it can take longer than they wanted it to. Also, from late 2022 until now has not been a great time for new talent.

Someone else had the right idea at looking at Linkedin and seeing what people are hiring for, but it would be difficult to become an FTE at a large company. You want somewhere willing to hire you from three months of study. One good bet is a startup that has not gotten angel/seed, but not VC funding yet, as they can't afford to pay market rates even for an SWE of average skill. Another is to work for a company that does consulting, as it is low commitment all around - they already have a place they can bill you for three months, and the billed company is getting you and a few others for three months, and at the end of that will keep whoever worked out and bounce whoever didn't. The bigger the "consulting" company you get into the better, it might be surprising how easy it can sometimes be to get in them after three months of study (although maybe not in 2022).

As others said, you have better options than these if your timeline is longer than three months.

Most of the new code from the past few years has been in Kotlin though.

Where I work we are theoretically doing scrum, but it is the worst of all worlds. Tickets (I mean - stories) are very vaguely specified. While we get almost no specs for the stories, we are asked to point the stories, and are then held to those estimates. We have deadlines, even though the point of scrum is not to have deadlines. Also, the features often tend to be complex and incremental, so if I am off doing other work, no one can easily step in and work on the feature I am doing, so that there is the agileness to move me off the feature I'm working on to fix some fire, but not the agileness to have someone else work on the story.

"That's not really agile, that's not really scrum" - well, whatever. Most of the SWEs I know are in similar boats. It can depend, I did have a PM a few years ago who actually did spec out the stories more. I can get on my PM's back to spec out the stories of course, but I can also spend all day getting on everyone's back to do their jobs as well.

It's none of the benefits of waterfall, with almost all of the downsides. Plus the theoretical benefits of scrum like no deadlines or the ability to move people around like cogs is not something found either.

I got 4o to give me a 33 line, relatively simple and understandable bidirectional BFS Kotlin function for this Leetcode problem which Perplexity (non-Pro) and GPT4 could solve, but not as well as 4o - https://leetcode.com/problems/word-ladder

Of course, even though these are Leetcode hard level problems, they are well-defined and relatively self-contained. I work at a Fortune 100 company and 99% of the time I can pound out the CRUD I do in my sleep - the difficulties I encounter are distractions, the CI server having some problem, the ticket/story I am working out not being fully specified and the PM is MIA that day, all teams are working on the feature at the same time and I need to find out what feature flags to have set and which test headers have been agreed on, the PM has asked me to work on something but some of what he says does not make sense in context so I have to ask for clarification etc. Then there's the meta-game of knowing what to prioritize, with one important component being what will make my manager happy so I get a good yearly review, and what I need to prioritize may differ from what my PM says to prioritize, or even more complexly, what my manager says to prioritize, but doesn't really mean.

Kind of. I work full time for a big company, but also have a software-heavy side business which used to make thousands a month in revenue. I have enough money to be in the software industry with my side business - when I worked on it alone, my expenses were very, very low, unless you count the spare time I have spent on it.

My full-time job keeps me busy and working on my side business eats up time. For example, an API upgrade we were kind of forced into swallowed up a massive amount of my spare time. That doesn't even cover other work I wanted to do in my side business, never mind everything else in life. As luck would have it, I know an experienced programmer who is not working a full time job right now, and I have paid him about $7000 so far this year to do work on my side business. He gets some cash in his pocket and I get some of my spare time back.

In terms of finding jobs like this - I have known this person for over a decade, and he just started doing some work this year.

On another tangent - someone I used to work with on my team left for another company, and started his own side business of a consultancy. He started getting so much business he reached out and a lot of programmers including myself started moonlighting, doing those projects after work. He did so well he left his full-time job to work on his business full-time. Then he started releasing his own projects as well. Me and others I know did work (actually, I recommended the guy who is currently doing work for me to do work for him, and he did some features for a project).

So with regards to my business and this other business - you work with people, some of the more energetic types start their own side businesses, and some of those side businesses grow. I think the parent poster is right, people hiring part-time might tend to be smaller, underfunded businesses.

My current company gives us a MBP or Windows laptop, my team gets MBPs, Linux is not an option. My preference if asked would have been Linux then MBP then Windows.

If Linux were not an option, MBP would be my next choice, since terminal brings me to a Unix shell, and there are things like homebrew etc.

I use my Linux machine for everything. I have an MBP, but I only break it out when I need to do a Zoom call or something like that - you can do it on Linux but I don't want to do the rigmarole of it. I also use it if I know someone has a Mac and I'm trying to debug something on their machine over the phone. Otherwise Linux for everything.

As a next step - even within these 75 questions, Grind 75's eighth answer and fourteenth answer are answered essentially the same way, as are other questions in there. So the next step would be to see these patterns (binary search, priority queues, sliding window, backtracking) and how to answer them, and then be able to solve them in slightly novel problems (in the more complex questions I understand one might run into more than one of these patterns).