IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

TJT said:

Thinking about this a little today. I realized that the interview process today for Mid-Senior+ is the same as it was for entry level now. Entry level tech jobs had grueling interviews. The one I did for GM as an entry level developer was 4 interviews, 2 of which were white boarding. While it is difficult to get the job it is quite easy to keep the job. Especially in larger organizations.

When I got my current role as a "mid level" after 6 years at GM it was a 3 interview process and the questions about technical stuff were relatively deep but they required no whiteboard coding. More like, "walk us through how you would approach this common issue for the role and tell us why you would do X or Y." Every interview I had from 2019-2024 or so was like this. This past year or so its full on 5-7 stage process with whiteboarding, leetcode, take home assignments, aggressive filtering, everything. If anything it makes me not want to get a different job that badly because that shit straight sucks to do.

The old format was enjoyable.

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TJT said:

Thinking about this a little today. I realized that the interview process today for Mid-Senior+ is the same as it was for entry level now. Entry level tech jobs had grueling interviews. The one I did for GM as an entry level developer was 4 interviews, 2 of which were white boarding. While it is difficult to get the job it is quite easy to keep the job. Especially in larger organizations.

When I got my current role as a "mid level" after 6 years at GM it was a 3 interview process and the questions about technical stuff were relatively deep but they required no whiteboard coding. More like, "walk us through how you would approach this common issue for the role and tell us why you would do X or Y." Every interview I had from 2019-2024 or so was like this. This past year or so its full on 5-7 stage process with whiteboarding, leetcode, take home assignments, aggressive filtering, everything. If anything it makes me not want to get a different job that badly because that shit straight sucks to do.

The old format was enjoyable.

Click to expand...

Khane said:

I'm not sure why he thinks its acceptable and appropriate to come into a thread where none of what he is describing happened and people are commiserating about how this current state of things is effecting them in negative ways and act like that.

But sure Kirun, I guess all of us who just went into a field we enjoyed that also happened to be lucrative are now getting our "just desserts". Sure.

It was 1998 and I was 16 years old when I decided to apply to colleges for a CS degree. What a dumbass right?!

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Kirun said:

Oh, come on. This whole "why is he being mean in our commiseration thread" routine is just an attempt to reframe criticism as cruelty so it can be safely ignored.

No one is barging in to dance on graves. What's I'm pointing out is a pattern and hypocrisy (which happens a LOT on this forum and people get really titty twisted when called out on it). It's uncomfortable precisely because it hits close to home. When factory workers lost jobs to automation, they were told it was inevitable and they "should've planned better". When retail collapsed, people sneered about "unskilled labor." When journalists got hollowed out by blogs and algorithms, they were told the market had spoken. Truck drivers? Call center workers? Same story. Sympathy was scarce, and smugness was plentiful.

Now the wheel has turned slightly, and suddenly the expectation is emotional insulation from criticism because this time the affected group "just picked something they enjoyed that paid well." So did plenty of the people who got wiped out before. That didn't stop anyone from mocking them, moralizing at them, or telling them they should have "seen it coming", they should "learn2code", or need to get "skilled".

And the 1998 anecdote is doing a lot of emotional work it doesn't actually support. No, choosing CS in 1998 didn't make someone a dumbass. What does deserve scrutiny is the decades-long posture that followed. Where tech positioned itself as "uniquely" future-proof, uniquely rational, and uniquely entitled to stability, while openly sneering at other professions for not being "adaptive" enough.

That's the part people are reacting to. Not the personal hardship, not the stress, not the fear. It's the insistence that this disruption is tragic and unfair, while all the previous ones were just the market doing its thing. So no, this isn't about "just desserts" in some cartoonish moral sense. It's about accountability for attitudes. You don't get to spend years telling other workers that pain is the cost of progress and then demand a safe space when progress shows up at your door.

History doesn't repeat because people are cruel. It repeats because every profession is convinced (right up until the moment it isn't) that their work is different.

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Kirun said:

Oh, come on. This whole "why is he being mean in our commiseration thread" routine is just an attempt to reframe criticism as cruelty so it can be safely ignored.

No one is barging in to dance on graves. What's I'm pointing out is a pattern and hypocrisy (which happens a LOT on this forum and people get really titty twisted when called out on it). It's uncomfortable precisely because it hits close to home. When factory workers lost jobs to automation, they were told it was inevitable and they "should've planned better". When retail collapsed, people sneered about "unskilled labor." When journalists got hollowed out by blogs and algorithms, they were told the market had spoken. Truck drivers? Call center workers? Same story. Sympathy was scarce, and smugness was plentiful.

Now the wheel has turned slightly, and suddenly the expectation is emotional insulation from criticism because this time the affected group "just picked something they enjoyed that paid well." So did plenty of the people who got wiped out before. That didn't stop anyone from mocking them, moralizing at them, or telling them they should have "seen it coming", they should "learn2code", or need to get "skilled".

And the 1998 anecdote is doing a lot of emotional work it doesn't actually support. No, choosing CS in 1998 didn't make someone a dumbass. What does deserve scrutiny is the decades-long posture that followed. Where tech positioned itself as "uniquely" future-proof, uniquely rational, and uniquely entitled to stability, while openly sneering at other professions for not being "adaptive" enough.

That's the part people are reacting to. Not the personal hardship, not the stress, not the fear. It's the insistence that this disruption is tragic and unfair, while all the previous ones were just the market doing its thing. So no, this isn't about "just desserts" in some cartoonish moral sense. It's about accountability for attitudes. You don't get to spend years telling other workers that pain is the cost of progress and then demand a safe space when progress shows up at your door.

History doesn't repeat because people are cruel. It repeats because every profession is convinced (right up until the moment it isn't) that their work is different.

Click to expand...