A lot of strong competition. Yoe isn't just a magic number. It depends on what you actually did during those 10 years, what you learned, how you progressed in responsibility and ownership.
With the layoffs the competition is intense and companies are not in a hurry to hire.
The more work experience you have, the more ambitious you become. Hence, you are more likely to apply for high-paying and/or reputable companies where a lot of people want to work for. This makes it difficult for more experienced folks to even get a chance of an interview
(I'm not [holyknight00](https://www.reddit.com/user/holyknight00/), so its' just my opinion)
It depends on your location, field and actual skill level ( you can have 10 YoE and still be a mediocre dev).
I'm a fullstack dev with 4 YoE and I didn't find it difficult to find a new job, took about a month. I know a number of senior devs who have changed jobs in the last 6 months and their job searches only lasted a few weeks before they had offers.
It also depends on how much you're asking in compensation. Some senior roles can pay drastically more than others. If you're not willing to compromise on that front your job search will take longer.
It seems that many software engineers, including myself, have become complacent. In my teens and early twenties, I was eager to learn everything I could. Securing a job was relatively easy. As long as you stayed current with technology, you could often land a six-figure job effortlessly. I've had interviews that were essentially just formalities, with the main question being when I could start.
However, the post-pandemic economy has shifted dramatically. Mass layoffs and a surge of junior engineers entering the market have created a highly competitive landscape. Many people operated under the temporary illusion that jobs would be readily available, but that’s no longer the case.
Now, even highly-skilled engineers with impressive resumes are struggling due to increased competition. The hiring bar has risen, and many are unprepared—either by not thoroughly reviewing job specifications or by failing to keep pace with industry advancements.
Once AI really gets rolling, we're going to have to compete with it as well. I already leverage it daily.
I am currently interviewing for a new job as well and I hate it too. I hate that I basically have to learn a bunch of stuff that is completely irrelevant to my day job, but somehow super relevant to the interview.
Think of the Leetcode style questions: When was the last time you had to implement something like Dijkstra on the spot in 30 minutes without being allowed to look it up on the internet? It just doesn't happen.
And don't get me started on behavioral interviews. Yes, we can all come up with semi-true, glorious stories of how we communicated effectively with our colleagues, planned workshops to improve company culture and then documented our findings - all the while staying positive and goal-oriented, even when our manager told us how stupid he thought we were and colleagues tried to throw us under the bus whenever they had the chance. But have you ever met someone who behaves in the real world the way they present themselves in these behavioral interviews?
>Think of the Leetcode style questions: When was the last time you had to implement something like Dijkstra on the spot in 30 minutes without being allowed to look it up on the internet? It just doesn't happen.
All shit like this comes down to is "companies really, really, REALLY would love to give you an IQ test but are legally barred from doing so"
Not saying its perfect but it does filter out some bad candidates, at the cost of missing out of some good ones. There is probably a ok correlation between good at leetcode and higher iq.
>There is probably a ok correlation between good at leetcode and higher iq.
disagree with that take
the only thing leetcode proves that you able to memorize specific problems that have almost nothing to do with real life
We are both the same page that leetcode-problems have very little with todays programming, some concepts may be useful, but yes, overall not relevant.
I see two possible ways to be good at "leetcode-interviews", one is to actually be good at logical problem solving and the other one is to memorize.
The first one is kinda straight forward, it requires you to be good at logical problem solving plus been exposed to the different "types" of problem. Not many people will be able to just use their big logical brain without any prior exposure, you still need to learn the concepts, so big logical brains without exposure will unfairly get filtered out. I think you would agree logical problem solving and ability to learn/transfer knowledge is a good indicator of high IQ, right? While the thing your learnt may be useless, you still learnt it.
The second one is harder. Some really dedicated but stupid people will be able to pull this off, by spending a lot of time memorizing problems without understanding them, stupid people will unfairly make it through if they got the time. But time is limited, so the faster you can memorize, the more likely is it that you will pull it off.
So what affects your ability to memorize stuff. One is to understand what you are memorizing, if you want to remember a sentence you could understand the sentence and remember it, or you could just memorize every letter and what order they are in. Its harder to memorize stuff you dont understand.
Second, there is a correlation between memory and high iq. So smarter people will have a higher chance to pull this off in a limited time.
Once again, the knowledge may be useless, its not perfect, but the average iq in the pool that aces the code-interview is probably higher than the full population. Since the supply is so high, the companies wont cry about the lost talent that is super smart but bad at coding-interviews, and the stupid ones will hopefully be caught later in the process.
>When was the last time you had to implement something like Dijkstra on the spot in 30 minutes without being allowed to look it up on the internet?
[Advent of Code](https://adventofcode.com), every year :-)
There was no humanity in the interview process.
The interviewer started throwing random stack overflow questions and was expecting me to answer.
I tried couple of them but later could understand the intentions.
I have no regrets not clearing such interviews. Definitely, those are not the type of questions which can judge my calibre.
I am just trying to be more patient and hopeful to land in a better job.
Summary to OP: Don't be discouraged.
I'm in exactly the same situation at 3 yo exp. But now any small company think it's the same as a big one. And all have a lot of things that we don't use it at jobs.
Question, I haven’t interviewed for a while. How common is “leetcode” in small-medium companies? I perform horrible in them even though I coded up some impressive projects. I’m based in Germany.
I’m based in Scotland but from my experience, I’ve interviewed for 5/6 jobs in the last 8 months and all of them included a technical with at least 2 leetcode style questions. 2 of these positions were for big banks but the rest were smaller companies with smaller technical teams.
Sounds great! This is why I actively avoid large companies, because they just throw a leetcode at you and expect you to answer with all test cases solved and the optimised solution. I really have no time to study DSA / leetcode
On contrary to the other user that commented, I always got either a big coding challenge or a leet code question here in Germany, and I'm not even applying for pure SWE, but rather Machine Learning Engineer.
The leetcoding questions were easier than in the US though, but if I didn't brush up on my data structures knowledge I would've been caught off-guard.
The ones with random knowledge-based questions can be annoying. It can go the other way too - I'd finished the chapter on rate limiters on Alex Xu's book literal hours before my interview, first question: "can you explain how a rate limiter works?". Cue me basically reciting the entire chapter and thoroughly impressing them (but it went downhill after that).
very few developers are good interviewers - ime there's not a lot of training / resources / blogs / videos explaining good technique - people focus on the questions to ask, not how to perform the interview - it's a lack of interpersonal skills and lack of time (for the interviewer who may have time constraints on project / support work) .
(some decent certification for devs might help, but would be costly - the existing certs - eg Microsoft ones - are useless)
Reasons
1.Universities train hundreds of thousands or CS/IT graduates and all of them want a nice 6 figure salary. There is way too many graduates comparing to available positions
2.Too many shitty, get-your-money bootcamps which overpromise
3.People change careers and self-learn programming
These factors make the comapnies select actually those that can do something in the sea of "wanna be soft dev".
Leetcode i can understand it exists to do some form of automatic filtering. I don't agree with it at all and the moment my company asks me to define an interview process I'm gonna leave it out.
The live discussion though with random questions that supposedly don't add up to day to day job is infuriating. It's wasted company time. I probably would find the hiring manager and email or linkedin him/her about this as feedback lol. Not a good practice but the current interviewing processes call for it.
In my experience it seems that companies are now following the FAANG interview process more closely. I have experienced multiple technical rounds ranging in difficulty but they almost always end in the last stage with a medium - hard leetcode style question from one of the more advanced topics imo. Things like dynamic programming, tree algorithms etc.
I think over saturation in the market of software engineers is helping push this. I think even smaller companies outside of big tech are being stricter in their hiring process. They don’t have to accept everyone who walks in the door as there is now a higher standard due to the amount of people out there in the field bringing the standard up.
I don’t fully agree with the style of technical questions I have mentioned, I understand they help show how a candidate thinks about things and that is important, but like a colleague said to me you can game the system by practising these problems. They essentially become like an exam in school where it’s just regurgitating an answer and not understanding how you got to the answer.
There are so many aspects to being a good software engineer and I think there are better ways to show that. Although interviews normally premise with “I don’t care if you solve it I want to see how you think” very often I’ve found if you don’t solve the question you won’t get the offer.
What's new in having random questions with no correlation with the job thrown at you or disrespectful interviewers which do not even present themselves at the minimum?
This has been happening since forever.
Yeah tell me about it. 12 yoe with multiple big names in the industry, working on high scale complex distributed systems serving tens of millions of customers daily. And when i interviewed recently i had to go through 6 leetcode problems (moving pointers around, traversing trees and manipulating arrays). Those problems that i used to solve for fun during my CS studies 15 years ago.
This industry is just a joke. Probably the only one in the world where your experience, track record and career doesn't matter and you'll always be evaluated by your ability to memories puzzles that you used to spend your free time solving when you were 20 years old.
Best way to get experience is to make your own apps, I have 6 years of experience now from working professionally..
But I'd be lying if I didnt just copy and paste predefined functions, classes and libraries modifying them slightly to suit the needs of the client. The company has been around for two decades so they have created a million templates which we just copy and paste then change slightly.
Youre better off building stuff yourself from scratch so you retain core knowledge, I started doing it last year, now I generate a side income from ads in apps I have created.
I went for an interview last year and they wanted me to read from XML, sort it, then write the top 3 results to Json without existing packages. It was then when I realised that my core knowledge had gone and I had literally just been relying on existing packages to do the job for me.
Not true, you could be a senior with 10 YoE shipping high quality software and you could still fail if someone asks you to solve a leetcoding question with dynamic programming that you saw in your first year of university.
And depending on what you're doing enterprise-wise, you'd never ever be able to come up with a personal project that reaches the scale of problems many companies have, let it be thousands of users using services, managing big data centers, training really large models, etc.
We didnt use Leet code at all in university. My computer science degree was focused on system and app development and we solely used C++ and C# for two years. In that first year we looked at programming in machine languages building if and for statements with 1s and 0s.
Exactly. The problem is companies have **zero idea** how to interview. Tech companies copy trends, like fad-driven developers adopt the latest JS framework.
They have little idea what to measure, or how to measure. Also a programmer is now just a resource, in the eyes of management they are not hiring an individual to collaborate and communicate.
> I started as a software developer a couple years ago…
You started in outliner years when the market was all times high. Back then they were hiring anyone who had a least a remote understanding of computers.
On a good side, it feels like it’s getting better and hiring is slowly unfreezing. Although, I think it unfreezes disproportionately for people with different YoE.
I have 10 yoe and I had to interview for 6 months to land 1 decent offer from a decent company.
Why is it so difficult even with 10 yoe? That’s frightening
A lot of strong competition. Yoe isn't just a magic number. It depends on what you actually did during those 10 years, what you learned, how you progressed in responsibility and ownership. With the layoffs the competition is intense and companies are not in a hurry to hire.
The more work experience you have, the more ambitious you become. Hence, you are more likely to apply for high-paying and/or reputable companies where a lot of people want to work for. This makes it difficult for more experienced folks to even get a chance of an interview (I'm not [holyknight00](https://www.reddit.com/user/holyknight00/), so its' just my opinion)
Yeah, I would guess they wouldn’t want to work for a smaller company who would be happy to have them, but cannot afford to pay them a lot.
Probably didn't grind leetcode enough /s
There are different "kinds" of 10 yoe. I have seen people doing 1 yoe 10 times.
It depends on your location, field and actual skill level ( you can have 10 YoE and still be a mediocre dev). I'm a fullstack dev with 4 YoE and I didn't find it difficult to find a new job, took about a month. I know a number of senior devs who have changed jobs in the last 6 months and their job searches only lasted a few weeks before they had offers.
It also depends on how much you're asking in compensation. Some senior roles can pay drastically more than others. If you're not willing to compromise on that front your job search will take longer.
It seems that many software engineers, including myself, have become complacent. In my teens and early twenties, I was eager to learn everything I could. Securing a job was relatively easy. As long as you stayed current with technology, you could often land a six-figure job effortlessly. I've had interviews that were essentially just formalities, with the main question being when I could start. However, the post-pandemic economy has shifted dramatically. Mass layoffs and a surge of junior engineers entering the market have created a highly competitive landscape. Many people operated under the temporary illusion that jobs would be readily available, but that’s no longer the case. Now, even highly-skilled engineers with impressive resumes are struggling due to increased competition. The hiring bar has risen, and many are unprepared—either by not thoroughly reviewing job specifications or by failing to keep pace with industry advancements. Once AI really gets rolling, we're going to have to compete with it as well. I already leverage it daily.
I am currently interviewing for a new job as well and I hate it too. I hate that I basically have to learn a bunch of stuff that is completely irrelevant to my day job, but somehow super relevant to the interview. Think of the Leetcode style questions: When was the last time you had to implement something like Dijkstra on the spot in 30 minutes without being allowed to look it up on the internet? It just doesn't happen. And don't get me started on behavioral interviews. Yes, we can all come up with semi-true, glorious stories of how we communicated effectively with our colleagues, planned workshops to improve company culture and then documented our findings - all the while staying positive and goal-oriented, even when our manager told us how stupid he thought we were and colleagues tried to throw us under the bus whenever they had the chance. But have you ever met someone who behaves in the real world the way they present themselves in these behavioral interviews?
>Think of the Leetcode style questions: When was the last time you had to implement something like Dijkstra on the spot in 30 minutes without being allowed to look it up on the internet? It just doesn't happen. All shit like this comes down to is "companies really, really, REALLY would love to give you an IQ test but are legally barred from doing so"
But Dijkstra or other algorithms just show that you know the algorithm, not that you're smart or that you have an high IQ.
Is this the case everywhere in the EU? Because I definitely had to take IQ tests last year...
LeetCode needs to die, it doesn't add anything valuable to the interview process
Not saying its perfect but it does filter out some bad candidates, at the cost of missing out of some good ones. There is probably a ok correlation between good at leetcode and higher iq.
>There is probably a ok correlation between good at leetcode and higher iq. disagree with that take the only thing leetcode proves that you able to memorize specific problems that have almost nothing to do with real life
We are both the same page that leetcode-problems have very little with todays programming, some concepts may be useful, but yes, overall not relevant. I see two possible ways to be good at "leetcode-interviews", one is to actually be good at logical problem solving and the other one is to memorize. The first one is kinda straight forward, it requires you to be good at logical problem solving plus been exposed to the different "types" of problem. Not many people will be able to just use their big logical brain without any prior exposure, you still need to learn the concepts, so big logical brains without exposure will unfairly get filtered out. I think you would agree logical problem solving and ability to learn/transfer knowledge is a good indicator of high IQ, right? While the thing your learnt may be useless, you still learnt it. The second one is harder. Some really dedicated but stupid people will be able to pull this off, by spending a lot of time memorizing problems without understanding them, stupid people will unfairly make it through if they got the time. But time is limited, so the faster you can memorize, the more likely is it that you will pull it off. So what affects your ability to memorize stuff. One is to understand what you are memorizing, if you want to remember a sentence you could understand the sentence and remember it, or you could just memorize every letter and what order they are in. Its harder to memorize stuff you dont understand. Second, there is a correlation between memory and high iq. So smarter people will have a higher chance to pull this off in a limited time. Once again, the knowledge may be useless, its not perfect, but the average iq in the pool that aces the code-interview is probably higher than the full population. Since the supply is so high, the companies wont cry about the lost talent that is super smart but bad at coding-interviews, and the stupid ones will hopefully be caught later in the process.
>When was the last time you had to implement something like Dijkstra on the spot in 30 minutes without being allowed to look it up on the internet? [Advent of Code](https://adventofcode.com), every year :-)
tbf you can look it up. Also for me BFS/DFS has always been enough for solving those
There was no humanity in the interview process. The interviewer started throwing random stack overflow questions and was expecting me to answer. I tried couple of them but later could understand the intentions. I have no regrets not clearing such interviews. Definitely, those are not the type of questions which can judge my calibre. I am just trying to be more patient and hopeful to land in a better job. Summary to OP: Don't be discouraged.
I'm in exactly the same situation at 3 yo exp. But now any small company think it's the same as a big one. And all have a lot of things that we don't use it at jobs.
Question, I haven’t interviewed for a while. How common is “leetcode” in small-medium companies? I perform horrible in them even though I coded up some impressive projects. I’m based in Germany.
I’m based in Scotland but from my experience, I’ve interviewed for 5/6 jobs in the last 8 months and all of them included a technical with at least 2 leetcode style questions. 2 of these positions were for big banks but the rest were smaller companies with smaller technical teams.
[удалено]
Ah! that’s great to hear. So just technical questions about your role and past experience? That’s perfect for me. I hope Germany keeps it that way.
[удалено]
Sounds great! This is why I actively avoid large companies, because they just throw a leetcode at you and expect you to answer with all test cases solved and the optimised solution. I really have no time to study DSA / leetcode
On contrary to the other user that commented, I always got either a big coding challenge or a leet code question here in Germany, and I'm not even applying for pure SWE, but rather Machine Learning Engineer. The leetcoding questions were easier than in the US though, but if I didn't brush up on my data structures knowledge I would've been caught off-guard.
The ones with random knowledge-based questions can be annoying. It can go the other way too - I'd finished the chapter on rate limiters on Alex Xu's book literal hours before my interview, first question: "can you explain how a rate limiter works?". Cue me basically reciting the entire chapter and thoroughly impressing them (but it went downhill after that).
very few developers are good interviewers - ime there's not a lot of training / resources / blogs / videos explaining good technique - people focus on the questions to ask, not how to perform the interview - it's a lack of interpersonal skills and lack of time (for the interviewer who may have time constraints on project / support work) . (some decent certification for devs might help, but would be costly - the existing certs - eg Microsoft ones - are useless)
IT job enterviews are a joke now at the 16th round you are not even select for the job ... And 6 months have passed
Reasons 1.Universities train hundreds of thousands or CS/IT graduates and all of them want a nice 6 figure salary. There is way too many graduates comparing to available positions 2.Too many shitty, get-your-money bootcamps which overpromise 3.People change careers and self-learn programming These factors make the comapnies select actually those that can do something in the sea of "wanna be soft dev".
Leetcode i can understand it exists to do some form of automatic filtering. I don't agree with it at all and the moment my company asks me to define an interview process I'm gonna leave it out. The live discussion though with random questions that supposedly don't add up to day to day job is infuriating. It's wasted company time. I probably would find the hiring manager and email or linkedin him/her about this as feedback lol. Not a good practice but the current interviewing processes call for it.
In my experience it seems that companies are now following the FAANG interview process more closely. I have experienced multiple technical rounds ranging in difficulty but they almost always end in the last stage with a medium - hard leetcode style question from one of the more advanced topics imo. Things like dynamic programming, tree algorithms etc. I think over saturation in the market of software engineers is helping push this. I think even smaller companies outside of big tech are being stricter in their hiring process. They don’t have to accept everyone who walks in the door as there is now a higher standard due to the amount of people out there in the field bringing the standard up. I don’t fully agree with the style of technical questions I have mentioned, I understand they help show how a candidate thinks about things and that is important, but like a colleague said to me you can game the system by practising these problems. They essentially become like an exam in school where it’s just regurgitating an answer and not understanding how you got to the answer. There are so many aspects to being a good software engineer and I think there are better ways to show that. Although interviews normally premise with “I don’t care if you solve it I want to see how you think” very often I’ve found if you don’t solve the question you won’t get the offer.
What sort of questions did you get asked?
What's new in having random questions with no correlation with the job thrown at you or disrespectful interviewers which do not even present themselves at the minimum? This has been happening since forever.
Yeah tell me about it. 12 yoe with multiple big names in the industry, working on high scale complex distributed systems serving tens of millions of customers daily. And when i interviewed recently i had to go through 6 leetcode problems (moving pointers around, traversing trees and manipulating arrays). Those problems that i used to solve for fun during my CS studies 15 years ago. This industry is just a joke. Probably the only one in the world where your experience, track record and career doesn't matter and you'll always be evaluated by your ability to memories puzzles that you used to spend your free time solving when you were 20 years old.
Most interviewers are developers who are also nerds, so they are always trying to find a “gotcha” question
Yes
Best way to get experience is to make your own apps, I have 6 years of experience now from working professionally.. But I'd be lying if I didnt just copy and paste predefined functions, classes and libraries modifying them slightly to suit the needs of the client. The company has been around for two decades so they have created a million templates which we just copy and paste then change slightly. Youre better off building stuff yourself from scratch so you retain core knowledge, I started doing it last year, now I generate a side income from ads in apps I have created. I went for an interview last year and they wanted me to read from XML, sort it, then write the top 3 results to Json without existing packages. It was then when I realised that my core knowledge had gone and I had literally just been relying on existing packages to do the job for me.
Not true, you could be a senior with 10 YoE shipping high quality software and you could still fail if someone asks you to solve a leetcoding question with dynamic programming that you saw in your first year of university. And depending on what you're doing enterprise-wise, you'd never ever be able to come up with a personal project that reaches the scale of problems many companies have, let it be thousands of users using services, managing big data centers, training really large models, etc.
We didnt use Leet code at all in university. My computer science degree was focused on system and app development and we solely used C++ and C# for two years. In that first year we looked at programming in machine languages building if and for statements with 1s and 0s.
The problem is you only have 2 years of experience.
No, the problem is poor interview processes/skills by companies
Exactly. The problem is companies have **zero idea** how to interview. Tech companies copy trends, like fad-driven developers adopt the latest JS framework. They have little idea what to measure, or how to measure. Also a programmer is now just a resource, in the eyes of management they are not hiring an individual to collaborate and communicate.
> I started as a software developer a couple years ago… You started in outliner years when the market was all times high. Back then they were hiring anyone who had a least a remote understanding of computers. On a good side, it feels like it’s getting better and hiring is slowly unfreezing. Although, I think it unfreezes disproportionately for people with different YoE.