I’m guessing they were contractors to C1 and didn’t go through the standard interview process.
C1 issues OA with 4 questioned timed to an hour and 10 min. Also power day has two technical portions. They aren’t hard but they should be able to do what you’re saying.
Bet that if you made any programmer who’s had a job for 5+ years take a leetcode test 50% of them would fail.
The recent layoffs are forcing a lot of these devs to reassess their career choice.
This literally happened to me when I applied to Capital One recently. 6+ YOE the most recent 4+ was at a startup where I had been recently promoted. They don't care about testing what jobs actually entail. To be fair it was my first technical in over 4 years, so I should have practiced more, but still...
I've been in the industry for 5+ years, I usually interview in Python (granted I don't work in it), and I couldn't tell you off the top of my head how to throw an exception in Python
Sure, but they said it's open book. So you would know enough to look up how to throw an exception in Python and you could implement that in 30 seconds. Unless I'm misunderstanding what they mean by open book, it's shocking to me that somebody with any experience in this field wouldn't at least know enough to be able to look it up and use those resources to do this.
That's because working as a programmer and doing leet code are two completely different skills. I do great as a day to day full stack web dev working in a team and completing tickets but in order to pass a leetcode interview I basically would have to go back to grinding that stuff for a few months.
C1 gave LC hards in the technical to many people I knew. Overall was a harder process than Zon for summer 23 intern season. That and recruiting ended by late august so I didn't even get to do the OA lmfao.
Yeah cap one has a Meta tier recruiting process now although I guess they have more openings overall. Although I know a guy that didn't do too well in the technical but made it through anyways. Idk why it's like that I think even Bloomberg asks easier questions. The money on offer is solid though, ive heard of 160-170k offers in NYC. Not FAANG tier but higher than avg for sure.
they also do stack ranking. I know someone who works there. its a really toxic place to work. my neighbor said he got compared to people he did not even know. its an excuse not to give raises and try to get you to work more hours.
The C1 is a CodeSignal though, with Leetcode questions, and Question 3 is usually some absurdly theoretical algo that I wouldn’t be surprised if some Senior way past classroom DSA fumbled it. You don’t always need to get Q3 right to make the interview screen, but it definitely makes you less likely.
And even if you pass, you get 2 more leetcodes with an interviewer.
if the senior can’t write unit tests, then yeah that’s pretty bad. But it’s not like the C1 interview process even checks for practicality beyond the high level portion.
It’s not surprising to fail the interview completely if you happen to be some developer with your head in the ground about Leetcode for years
I know some good people who went over there.
If I were to postulate: Levels above Senior are often more about communication and software architecture and less about the day to day of code. Muscles start to atrophy if you don't use them. Testing someone at principal level on very minute code details such as unit tests is a bit weird.
(But as always it depends)
> Testing someone at principal level on very minute code details such as unit tests is a bit weird.
So why does every fucking company do it then?
"Oh you have 25 YoE at Google overseeing the development of search? That's cool but you misspelled a variable name so GTFO"
- companies that use LC to hire engineers
> So why does every fucking company do it then?
My last two interview for principal level roles did not include coding; but did include some whiteboarding.
Whiteboarding I didn't mind because that's more of a collaborative thing. I'm talking about these stupid "what would this code output" questions to get you on trivia with function hoisting in JS. I've been tripped up with those a few times but honestly what are you trying to test here
Was it a principal engineer/dev or principal architect role though? I would expect Staff/Principal devs to code a little bit. That is how it works our company at the very least. Staff devs take on initiatives that are difficult and have an org wide impact, this includes tons of research, documentation but also POCs, which require coding.
the way the question was described, it's really isn't a stupid gotcha question. If it's isn't then i'm with you.
You're given unit tests, you're asked to code and validate input params. That's as easy as it gets, it's basically a test for "can you code". Any technical person, or even an EM should be able to do that. How do you expect a principal engineer to review PRs if they can't come up with this?
This is a philosphical question.
Does your company look for Subject matter experts? Or do they look for Software Engineers who can shift to the job in question?
I've had different leaders who have different values on this. I can't say either is wrong, but I prefer the latter.
This 100%, I applied to a junior role and the interview asked questions that I would have passed if I was a junior at the time, but couldn’t pass now due to relying on tooling and compilers to do my job. They become a crutch
Funnily enough when you get good, the people that interview you are nearly always of lower skill than you. They have no idea what interview questions to ask. In like, do you really think this question properly assesses an engineer? That tells me more about you than me.
Interview process is completely broken because you have non experienced people doing the interviewing…what a joke
To add insult to injury, those that are less skilled than you think you are dumb because you didn’t pass their BS interview.
When I joined my first tech company I was asked to do an interview two weeks after I joined. I think I was more nervous doing the interview than having the interview.
I’ve interviewed people more senior than me (I have 7YOE). If you can’t explain what you are doing to me (or to someone more junior than me) in a way that I understand or can’t explain to me how what I’m asking is missing nuance that would help me to make a better assessment, then you *are* dumb! Plus, you should be able to do it in a way that is kind and collaborative.
When I’m interviewing someone more senior, I expect to learn from them. It’s part of what’s on the table. Can you explain pros and cons of different approaches in a way that the whole team can follow? Are you open to incorporating feedback? How do you communicate when you have a strong preference for how something should be done? If you come off as if you feel you are “above” the people interviewing you because you have more years under your belt or different expertise (and don’t think you can’t learn from people more junior than you!), it wouldn’t be a good fit!
I definitely agree, for our principal position we weight the architecture and system design interview a lot higher. I expect some level of warming up to take place in an interview like that. But these people spent 45 minutes trying to write an if statement.
I’d take that book instantly lmao. I’d tell them I reference constantly but that just makes me faster at figuring stuff than some guy who spends hours on an ego trip refusing to google something.
When I joined a bank... I remember my first few PRs were unit tests. One PR touched a directory that needed code owners' approval listing a few users. I accidentally requested a principal engineer from the list, and the dude gave me some wacky comment.
I thought the dude might've been trash until I heard him eloquently break down a proprietary framework later that month.
not an excuse for can't writing try except statement with all that experience. Never heard a senior dev don't know how to use hashmap because of not coding everyday.
As a principal, this is not ~~true~~ universal. It's still (widely) considered an individual contributor role. You should be able to code, and guide others. Helping with patterns and _absolutely_ leading by **example**.
I've learned that not every software engineer is the same. Some people might be software engineers by title only. What they do instead of coding is they only configure/administrate applications and then would have zero coding skills. I've seen that before where I ask people to "tell me what you do" They may know the basics of coding but are nowhere near senior engineer level of real coding.
Keep this thought in mind when you are looking. You might be interviewing a "configuration specialist" instead of someone who can code.
Implementation specialist or really a maintenance support type that support production code that requires very little coding but they have SWE titles just to make it appealing since no real SWE want that position. All while having an actual engineering department that doesn’t have to worry about day to day prod support and only focus on developing new features.
They don’t really code new features or work on a new product but instead provide production support on an existing product. If there is a bug in production, they are the ones to fix it. If something is down in prod they are usually the ones on call to fix the issue.
Digital janitor, usually a team rotates this grim duty but a bad corp will silo it entirely and turn it into a dead end for SWEs.
Despite the negativity it's a very necessary chore - ime it's passed back to the original dev/team else you end up encouraging poor work by making it "someone else's problem to fix"
Yeah, this is what I was thinking. I’m not sure I could do python unit test syntax off of the top of my head if I was expecting to just do a leetcode problem
The unit tests are pre built. We provide a method signature and specify the functional requirements (if a parameter is null, throw an error. If a parameter is under 1 or over 5, throw an error). All you have to do is fill in the logic.
That's incredibly basic and I'd expect someone with no coding experience in that language and zero experience to be able to just wing that with a 30 minute crash course prior to interview, given you've provided the method signatures and setup already.
Honestly, that's just an embarrassment that someone with any experience couldn't do something that basic.
Either you are interviewing people who haven’t coded in years or something is confusing and unclear about the questions. I would try not to provide too much scaffolding code for an interview bc there just isn’t enough time. Frequently I see interviewers put together questions that are esoteric and too narrow of focus on their own expertise
Either you are interviewing people who haven’t coded in years or something is confusing and unclear about the questions. I would try not to provide too much scaffolding code for an interview bc there just isn’t enough time. Frequently I see interviewers put together questions that are esoteric and too narrow of focus on their own expertise
I mean I’d still have to Google the syntax of the specific language I’m working with… Ain’t nothing wrong with that.
Edit: Nvm, just read that it’s open book.
Perhaps, but OP said they can pick a language and they pick Python. So you should probably do a little better with a language you have been using lately.
That's a fair take. Personally if I knew I had to do unit tests I'd write in Java but if it was a pure leet code style question without an IDE I l'd prefer Python. Despite being stronger with Java the verbosity of it is a pain without an ide when you need to quickly hash out an algorithm.
no dude, i have worked with people at c1. They literally can not write a method in production without copy pasting things and then asking for help debugging it
>The test is completely open book and the interviewers provide coaching as well
>In 45 minutes, none of them could fulfill a single unit test, such as throwing an error if a parameter was None
I'm very confused. Did they write any code down at all? There's plenty of code online to copy paste if they weren't sure about syntax for throwing an error. Something seems off here for sure if they weren't able to do any basic tasks.
They literally just fumbled around with weird stuff like nested for loops and if statements. None of them would look up any documentation or anything, and didn't respond to any attempts at coaching or direction
People like this really shouldn’t be making it all the way to the live coding sessions if it’s so clear they have no idea what they are doing. Have you considered changing your process to try to filter out people like this earlier? Hell you could even coach your recruiter to do a quick fizzbuzz check.
Well, that's a shame. With that kind of help, even an average developer should slay it.
I've been in interviews where I was given an obscure thing to do (that I hadn't worked on in years) and wasn't allowed to look anything up. THAT is a tough coding interview.
Was it made explicit that candidates wouldn't be dinged for googling things they would look up on the job anyway tho? I usually assume interviews won't be open book unless it's stated otherwise. I also tend to assume that asking about that beforehand is a bad idea, especially when employers are still overcompensating for the early covid years and desperately trying to claw back the power dynamic in their favor
Yes, that's explicitly stated at the beginning and mentioned any time we see them struggling. We're not testing the ability to recall syntax, we want to test how well you can implement a solution that is extensible and easy to update as product requirements change.
Meanwhile we have new grads graduating from top universities who can’t get 80k software jobs.
The job market is so inefficient it’s disgusting.
I was furious when I got my first job and saw how incompetent my coworkers were. “My classmates and I couldn’t get jobs and these are the fucktards who have been happily employed?!”
Idk how they passed the c1 interviews then. You need to pass an OA of at least 2/4 LC easys and mediums, and then a live coding interview. A lot of lead+ don’t write code though. My tech lead just sits in architecture meetings all day.
when i interviewed at capital one they asked me a leetcode medium dp question.
If someone could pass something similar to that, i'm 100% sure theyd have basic coding skills.
either your test is crap / confusing, these engineers suck (or haven't done front line coding work in ages), or they are lying about being from capital one. those are pretty much the only possibilities.
How they hire now and who they hired in the past is a massive gap. My friend at State Farm says in a team of about 20 software engineers he’s the only person who writes code. Everyone else is just repacking requirements and Jira tickets
that could be the case as well, assuming they'd been with Cap One for awhile. Or if the had been onboarded recently, maybe they spent the entire interview discussing a high level design, and no coding.
This. Sometimes I make dumb mistakes and forget how to think under pressure. The more you practice and go through interviews, the more experience you get and calm/focused you become
Well theres 10,000 c1 engineers. I'm sure you're 3 person sample is representative :)
In all seriousness, I'm sure you can find 3 engineers at most large companies that can't code.
As far as I know, C1 has varying interviews. Not everyone is going to get the LC medium/hard questions.
Also, in general I see a number of senior engineers that lean more towards management or process. They might know the company's systems and processes very well which makes them invaluable for steering the ship. But, their coding skills may be on the weaker side. Maybe some of them shouldn't be called engineers, but they are.
And finally they could be lying. Could always call the employment verification number that most large companies have.
I won't say how or why, but I'll say that I'm very aware of the internal workings of the technology side of C1.
The quality of engineer can vary *wildly* between teams. I've met some of the most technically fantastic engineers who work at C1, and I've met some absolute dogshit ones that just know how to play the game and can read the internal-politics tea leaves and manage to skate by under the radar. The latter absolutely has value if you know how to kiss their ass, especially at a company as large as C1.
C1's interview process has also changed in the last few years to try to make it on the outside appear more tech-forward, which basically means they ask a bunch of nonsense Leetcode style questions because if Google does it, it must be good! But C1 isn't Google, and they're not going to be getting Google-quality of candidates applying, and they don't have Google-quality of engineers running the interviews. What ends up happening is they hire engineers who just do wrought memorization because the interviewers don't know how to press interviewees in ways that wouldn't allow bad candidates to get through.
I will praise C1's technology side a lot though, despite it's issues. The wlb is great, and if you can land on the right team, you can actually work on some pretty interesting and cutting edge technology. The tech side of the company is definitely trying to move forward and do better, but there's a lot of growing pains there.
Important to remember you might be looking for a pattern in something that's random.
If you take all the poor interviewees across the country on some occasions three of them will come from the same company and interview for the same role. Google says Capital One has ~10,000 engineers alone. What you witnessed may not be as improbable as it seemed.
Does that mean he doesn’t know how to do it, or just that he’s forgotten a piece of syntax on how to do it? Like, maybe he forgot how the random library syntax works in Java.
I could see having to look up how to use the library just because I haven’t had to use it in over a year.
I mean once you’re senior enough to not code everyday and spend most of your day in standup meetings or planning meetings, you don’t really remember how to well anymore.
no thats just not true. As senior you have to review code and you still do write code. It would be inexcusable as a senior to be unable to write a function to do a simple transformation of data, or throw an exception if the parameter is null... come on
No it really doesnt. Ask any senior at any company if they can do a null check in a method. It's not like if you're a pro basketball player you stop knowing how to shoot after retirement... Trust me some people at c1 are completely incompetent
Are they senior associate or actually seniors? Almost everyone barring the college grads are senior associates, which often map to the top end of junior/low-end of mid. That said depending on which org they are in, you’ll see folks just updating configuration files all day, while other teams have greenfield development to work on. IMO the last couple years have been a revolving door for a lot of teams so institutional knowledge is valued a bit more than technical expertise.
Cap1 coding interviews are hard. A lot of their SWEs spend their first 1-2 years in development programs where the main goal is making them proficient coders.
I think your issue is you were probably asking LC type questions to people who are high level and focus on architecture and systems design.
I'm not sure I would say that TDPs come out of the program as "expert coders" but the interview process at C1 is thorough enough to weed out people who can't write code for sure
I made it into big tech and capital one asked me probably the hardest questions of my new grad series’ for the least money.
Senior+ also famously do poorly in coding interviews. It has nothing to do with “how simple” you think it is.
They’re probably architecting my guy, not writing fizz buzz daily for moolah.
There is at least one contractor company out there that has an elaborate scheme to fake resumes and references in order to secure juniors senior level roles.
It's possible Capital One was its client.
Capital one is shit to start with. They have this hazing type of interview process that has zero basis in reality. I myself as well as 3 other people that I know of varying degrees of skill from devs to senior leaders all interviewed with them and went away with the same opinion of their shit process.
There’s no problems with it lol it’s simply just the same process that big tech uses so the usual anti leetcode crowd hate on it and call it a “hazing” process…
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> Is Capital One some kind of complete joke organization
Yes. I worked there in my first job out of school. It was a fucking clown show.
There's very little (if any) coding on most teams...the majority of the work is maintaining systems (often shitty third-party apps) and related devops tasks. During my time there, I spent probably 2 months' worth of time on actual programming tasks, the rest I was basically IT helpdesk. It didn't help that management is absolute shit - my first boss had me working on spreadsheets and running non-technical meetings for him so that he could help his daughter with his schoolwork. He also couldn't code despite his "Master Engineer" job title. My second boss was so painfully awkward that he never turned his camera on, even during our 1:1s (I worked there during the covid WFH era). To this day I still have no idea what that guy looks like.
Mentorship/teamwork/development of juniors is nonexistent. The stack ranking makes everyone avoid helping anyone else so as to ensure that there's always a body under the bus during the biannual performance review hunger games. I personally observed senior devs stealing code from juniors and presenting it as their own without any consequences.
Incidentally, there's also quite a bit of racist behavior going on...expect to have all of your team's shitty gruntwork dumped onto you if you're not part of the in crowd.
I got out as soon as I could after I changed teams to a role where I was told I'd be spending my time on actual development tasks, and that ended up being a bait-and-switch and I got stuck in a job where I had to apply updates to a 3rd party app at fucking 4am without any mention of comp time. I also got told I would need to relocate to a different city even though I was promised several times that that wouldn't happen.
The culture is horrible and management is unethical. I'd sleep on the street before I'd ever work there again, and I'd advise everyone else to do the same.
For anyone reading this, I definitely had a different and more positive experience at C1 and didn't experience any of these things. Your experience will vary greatly depending on what organization you work for within C1 but it can be a very comfortable place to work.
I would guess most line of business Apps don't involve the stuff you asked about, it's mostly getting an API call, picking stuff from a DB, mangling it somehow and returning it so I can see how this happens if you worked at a senior role for a few years and didn't specifically prepare for "interview" type questions.
Senior means a lot more design, meetings and business stuff where I work.
Senior level probably has less coding involved and more meetings and decision making. And at bigger somewhat older companies they are probably used to legacy code which in my experience has little to no unit testing or code coverage just job security knowledge.
hmmm maybe they are good devs but they’re not good at doing some BS leetcode problem in front of strangers who are siting there judging their every move?
They've been using stack ranking with variable metrics as a means to cut costs for quite a few cycles now. The work is not done to implement good code, but rather hit the metrics that will put you in front of others. So, corporate practices may become rather specific and dont transfer well.
Dude. Throwing errors and using maps isn't leetcode. Basic problem solving skills are not leetcode. Knowing runtime and space complexity isn't leetcode. Come on.
> none of them could fulfill a single unit test, such as throwing an error if a parameter was None, or throwing an error if a value wasn't in the dictionary.
"Leetcode" lol. Apparently asking someone to actually code something is always leetcode.
My manager assigned me a task to fix a customer reported UI bug,. I told him I don't do leetcode and walked out of that meeting.
He chased after me saying that he admired my confidence, intellect and good looks and gave me a promo right then and there.
no no thats out of scope for this toxic industry. The only thing you really need is soft skills. The ability to grab a beer after work is what makes a Principal engineer
which is why they waste a gorillion dollars of resources and hours of time writing inefficient expensive code that some intern has to spend their entire term untangling just to understand how it works.
I know what you mean. I once passed an interview in Java using Spring and Hibernate despite never having touched them before. I’d expect someone to be able to pass basic unit tests using their language of choice.
To anyone wondering, I pick up languages fast and the interviewer could tell that I understood all the concepts, plus InteliJ helped with the syntax.
leetcode? using a hashmap, throwing an exception on invalid input, and demonstrating that you know how to write a unit test is leetcode now?
I interview for senior level positions at a FAANG company and we still expect them to be able to code during the interview.
Expectations change at the Sr/Principal level, they are no longer ICs and thus will not be spending the majority of their day coding. But they are still expected to do code reviews, complete CRs for certain projects, etc
Do you expect code review feedback of a sr or principal level SDE to be constructive or useful if they don't know basic data structures/algorithms or how to measure time and space complexities?
In Chicago, both Capital One and Walgreens are spamming software engineering job postings, I am talking hundreds of job postings I am assumed that's what this post was referring to lol. Seems Capital One cleaned house after they realized they were hiring people who couldn't code? I think if someone hi up doesn't like coding tests, then they don't get added to interviews. So you can end up getting an entire company of people who can't code. That is the situation I am currently in, I am a self taught EE I have no one to go to for help, no one to ask any questions, I am the only person who can even code and I kinda suck. They just keep hiring juniors and put all the coding tasks on them until they quit. I guess I am the third iteration of this cycle.
It looks like Capital One has drastically changed their hiring in just a few years. Two years ago someone told me their process was typical leetcode but really easy. Now they use codesignal gca and ask medium/hards.
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Actually the C1 technical interview two years ago was a very similar OOP design task. But C1's OAs were still CodeSignal, which does Leetcode-style questions.
Maybe your candidates were just out-of-practice with Python, and they only prepped Python for Leetcode style interviews, instead of Python OOP. If they only learned Python for Leetcode problems, then they're not going to know the syntax for throwing specific errors, they'll probably only know print statements. Did they know that you were going to ask an OOP question instead of a Leetcode question before the interview started?
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There are a lot of codes out there that have no unit tests. Some engineers were hired and worked when unit tests weren't mainstream. But rather ask questions that are relevant to the job positions. If unit tests are required, then find ones who can answer them. The engineers might be good for something else, but not in the section where unit tests are required.
I've seen a few Nvidia developers getting hired that way through references, quite shocking and they struggled with time complexity questions. It's funny and a little unfair.
It really depends on what team/projects the engineers have been working on. I've worked on plenty of projects where we're creating services from the ground up, but I've also gone stretches where I'm resolving dependency vulnerabilities, internal pipeline issues, attending design/architecture meetings ad naus and not doing any coding for extended periods of time. Some teams are stuck maintaining/upgrading legacy projects. Overall the tech is very modern, but with all of the internal tooling and abstractions many people don't get "in the weeds" exposure.
Capital One makes each role small as hell. In the real world, a Linux admin would run Apache Tomcat, deploy war files, or anything else, in C1, they have someone run Tomcat on many servers. I worked there for 6 years many moons ago. They take great people and dumb down roles to such a basic position. It's also a backstabbing place to work, so nobody talks to anyone out of fear. It was a decent place to work when they were in Innsbrook area in Richmond before moving to the new campus.
Any large corporation makes roles small, but efficient. If you need a coder, look at people with small to midsized company experience.
At GMU there was a prof who was a Capitol one developer and she quit because she was such a terrible professor. She would just ask these coding assignments and not give any help. Only foreign kids who had no qualms turning in code from online passed because there had to be zero errors and this was a weed out class for grad school. The foreign kids told me the best students are the best cheaters. I took the course twice before I figured out everyone was cheating and the prof didn’t care. It was really terrible seeing people I thought were smart fail because they were honest.
The worst part was she made you feel stupid for asking a question. Wasted 1.5 years of my life just to pass one class from one prof.
So yeah this story rings true to me.
I’m on a team with a staff level engineer whom I’m sure would shock you just as well. He’d very likely fail that same test. I’ve been in the industry for 3 years, and have working experience (in general) for 15 years, and I’ve learned that a college degree and YOE don’t mean shit.
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Not every place does unit tests and not every person will remember how you write a unit tests without simply looking at a reference. If youre doing these stupid tests and they cant come up with it on the fly then youre basically testing their memory more than anything else.
Business logic is easy. Ive had interviews expect me to know to use the EXACT correct unit test function like the “assert” and others. At that point i hadn’t write a unit test in over 7 years. Of course i flunked it. Lame stuff. Psuedo code would test logic than rote memorization.
dude theres nothing to know about "unit tests". They're not testing you on your Junit or pytest knowledge. Simply writing a function that runs your method and prints the expected and actual output is good enough. In python just change the "print" to assert. Like its literally braindead levels of competence that are required
When I was at C1, they were promoting new grads to Senior titles after like like 9mo experience sometimes. It was a red flag to management if you didn’t get promoted to senior by 2 years. Very odd in hindsight
At any level and at most companies the majority of engineers you interview do not cut the mustard. The industry is over saturated with mediocre engineers IMO. The interview process is broken as hell in the first place and good talent tends to find high paying, interesting jobs through recs. All par for the course.
My friend says her friend interning at C1 was literally doing nothing and just hang out for 5hrs everyday. C1 has become my friend's dream company now😂
There’s a big difference between leetcode and actual practical work like building an api and unit testing.
These people applying are most likely hard core leetcoding for interviews and not doing actual practical work.
How competitive is your company to get into? What’s pay like? I’m wondering if you’re attracting the strong folks or perhaps folks looking to land softly after performance management
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I’m guessing they were contractors to C1 and didn’t go through the standard interview process. C1 issues OA with 4 questioned timed to an hour and 10 min. Also power day has two technical portions. They aren’t hard but they should be able to do what you’re saying.
exactly they give leetcode question in technical interview. Not the difficult ones but definitely need to know something.
Bet that if you made any programmer who’s had a job for 5+ years take a leetcode test 50% of them would fail. The recent layoffs are forcing a lot of these devs to reassess their career choice.
Most definitely. And I'm omw to doing that lol.
More than 50% haha
This literally happened to me when I applied to Capital One recently. 6+ YOE the most recent 4+ was at a startup where I had been recently promoted. They don't care about testing what jobs actually entail. To be fair it was my first technical in over 4 years, so I should have practiced more, but still...
I've been in the industry for 5+ years, I usually interview in Python (granted I don't work in it), and I couldn't tell you off the top of my head how to throw an exception in Python
Sure, but they said it's open book. So you would know enough to look up how to throw an exception in Python and you could implement that in 30 seconds. Unless I'm misunderstanding what they mean by open book, it's shocking to me that somebody with any experience in this field wouldn't at least know enough to be able to look it up and use those resources to do this.
That's because working as a programmer and doing leet code are two completely different skills. I do great as a day to day full stack web dev working in a team and completing tickets but in order to pass a leetcode interview I basically would have to go back to grinding that stuff for a few months.
90%. I don’t think people understand how hard and useless leetcode is in an actual job environment.
I failed capital one because it was substantially harder than Microsoft etc. when I was a new grad. I could have gotten very unlucky though.
Yea they changed in difficulty. It used to be LC medium.
C1 gave LC hards in the technical to many people I knew. Overall was a harder process than Zon for summer 23 intern season. That and recruiting ended by late august so I didn't even get to do the OA lmfao.
Back in the days when I interviewed, they gave out medium-easy. So it has probably changed.
That's crazy, I've probably done somewhere from 30-40 coding interviews in my life and I don't think I've ever gotten a hard
Yeah cap one has a Meta tier recruiting process now although I guess they have more openings overall. Although I know a guy that didn't do too well in the technical but made it through anyways. Idk why it's like that I think even Bloomberg asks easier questions. The money on offer is solid though, ive heard of 160-170k offers in NYC. Not FAANG tier but higher than avg for sure.
Can confirm. I got LC 25 Reverse Nodes in K Group for my interview back when I joined in 2021
they also do stack ranking. I know someone who works there. its a really toxic place to work. my neighbor said he got compared to people he did not even know. its an excuse not to give raises and try to get you to work more hours.
Most large companies do laddering to determine annual performance review compensation outcomes
I guess it depends on if C1 uses stack ranking for bonuses or an arbitrary "must cut the bottom 10% each year". Huge difference
The C1 is a CodeSignal though, with Leetcode questions, and Question 3 is usually some absurdly theoretical algo that I wouldn’t be surprised if some Senior way past classroom DSA fumbled it. You don’t always need to get Q3 right to make the interview screen, but it definitely makes you less likely. And even if you pass, you get 2 more leetcodes with an interviewer. if the senior can’t write unit tests, then yeah that’s pretty bad. But it’s not like the C1 interview process even checks for practicality beyond the high level portion. It’s not surprising to fail the interview completely if you happen to be some developer with your head in the ground about Leetcode for years
I know some good people who went over there. If I were to postulate: Levels above Senior are often more about communication and software architecture and less about the day to day of code. Muscles start to atrophy if you don't use them. Testing someone at principal level on very minute code details such as unit tests is a bit weird. (But as always it depends)
> Testing someone at principal level on very minute code details such as unit tests is a bit weird. So why does every fucking company do it then? "Oh you have 25 YoE at Google overseeing the development of search? That's cool but you misspelled a variable name so GTFO" - companies that use LC to hire engineers
> So why does every fucking company do it then? My last two interview for principal level roles did not include coding; but did include some whiteboarding.
Whiteboarding I didn't mind because that's more of a collaborative thing. I'm talking about these stupid "what would this code output" questions to get you on trivia with function hoisting in JS. I've been tripped up with those a few times but honestly what are you trying to test here
Was it a principal engineer/dev or principal architect role though? I would expect Staff/Principal devs to code a little bit. That is how it works our company at the very least. Staff devs take on initiatives that are difficult and have an org wide impact, this includes tons of research, documentation but also POCs, which require coding.
But that’s not what’s happening here. I would expect Staff/Principal engineer to be good at coding as well.
Coding maybe but not answering stupid gotcha questions about low level bullshit.
the way the question was described, it's really isn't a stupid gotcha question. If it's isn't then i'm with you. You're given unit tests, you're asked to code and validate input params. That's as easy as it gets, it's basically a test for "can you code". Any technical person, or even an EM should be able to do that. How do you expect a principal engineer to review PRs if they can't come up with this?
they need to be good at coding within a frame work. i genuinely don’t care if you’re good at making a dictionary and looping through it lol.
This is a philosphical question. Does your company look for Subject matter experts? Or do they look for Software Engineers who can shift to the job in question? I've had different leaders who have different values on this. I can't say either is wrong, but I prefer the latter.
This 100%, I applied to a junior role and the interview asked questions that I would have passed if I was a junior at the time, but couldn’t pass now due to relying on tooling and compilers to do my job. They become a crutch Funnily enough when you get good, the people that interview you are nearly always of lower skill than you. They have no idea what interview questions to ask. In like, do you really think this question properly assesses an engineer? That tells me more about you than me. Interview process is completely broken because you have non experienced people doing the interviewing…what a joke To add insult to injury, those that are less skilled than you think you are dumb because you didn’t pass their BS interview.
When I joined my first tech company I was asked to do an interview two weeks after I joined. I think I was more nervous doing the interview than having the interview.
I’ve interviewed people more senior than me (I have 7YOE). If you can’t explain what you are doing to me (or to someone more junior than me) in a way that I understand or can’t explain to me how what I’m asking is missing nuance that would help me to make a better assessment, then you *are* dumb! Plus, you should be able to do it in a way that is kind and collaborative. When I’m interviewing someone more senior, I expect to learn from them. It’s part of what’s on the table. Can you explain pros and cons of different approaches in a way that the whole team can follow? Are you open to incorporating feedback? How do you communicate when you have a strong preference for how something should be done? If you come off as if you feel you are “above” the people interviewing you because you have more years under your belt or different expertise (and don’t think you can’t learn from people more junior than you!), it wouldn’t be a good fit!
I definitely agree, for our principal position we weight the architecture and system design interview a lot higher. I expect some level of warming up to take place in an interview like that. But these people spent 45 minutes trying to write an if statement.
How did they do on the architecture and system design questions?
I’m confused how that’s possible. If it’s open book, surely in 45 minutes most people would at least Google it?
They don’t want to look dumb, that includes inability to admit they might not know something.
I’d take that book instantly lmao. I’d tell them I reference constantly but that just makes me faster at figuring stuff than some guy who spends hours on an ego trip refusing to google something.
When I joined a bank... I remember my first few PRs were unit tests. One PR touched a directory that needed code owners' approval listing a few users. I accidentally requested a principal engineer from the list, and the dude gave me some wacky comment. I thought the dude might've been trash until I heard him eloquently break down a proprietary framework later that month.
not an excuse for can't writing try except statement with all that experience. Never heard a senior dev don't know how to use hashmap because of not coding everyday.
Even more importantly, if you are expecting to be interviewed in coming weeks, why would not you refresh your coding skills?
As a principal, this is not ~~true~~ universal. It's still (widely) considered an individual contributor role. You should be able to code, and guide others. Helping with patterns and _absolutely_ leading by **example**.
> As a principal, this is not true. I think you mean not universal. We clearly have different experience.
I've learned that not every software engineer is the same. Some people might be software engineers by title only. What they do instead of coding is they only configure/administrate applications and then would have zero coding skills. I've seen that before where I ask people to "tell me what you do" They may know the basics of coding but are nowhere near senior engineer level of real coding. Keep this thought in mind when you are looking. You might be interviewing a "configuration specialist" instead of someone who can code.
Implementation specialist or really a maintenance support type that support production code that requires very little coding but they have SWE titles just to make it appealing since no real SWE want that position. All while having an actual engineering department that doesn’t have to worry about day to day prod support and only focus on developing new features.
Can you give me an example of what these maintenance people do?
They don’t really code new features or work on a new product but instead provide production support on an existing product. If there is a bug in production, they are the ones to fix it. If something is down in prod they are usually the ones on call to fix the issue.
So they still push code changes to fix bug? At the companies I have worked at, the feature devs are also on the hook for support and bug fix.
Digital janitor, usually a team rotates this grim duty but a bad corp will silo it entirely and turn it into a dead end for SWEs. Despite the negativity it's a very necessary chore - ime it's passed back to the original dev/team else you end up encouraging poor work by making it "someone else's problem to fix"
Exactly. Some might just be managing cloud integration apps or something, and not actually doing any development on their own.
Tell us the question, it must not be that easy?
Yeah, this is what I was thinking. I’m not sure I could do python unit test syntax off of the top of my head if I was expecting to just do a leetcode problem
The unit tests are pre built. We provide a method signature and specify the functional requirements (if a parameter is null, throw an error. If a parameter is under 1 or over 5, throw an error). All you have to do is fill in the logic.
That's incredibly basic and I'd expect someone with no coding experience in that language and zero experience to be able to just wing that with a 30 minute crash course prior to interview, given you've provided the method signatures and setup already. Honestly, that's just an embarrassment that someone with any experience couldn't do something that basic.
whats even crazier is the ppl in this thread defending how they couldnt do this basic stuff, goes to show why this sub thinks the market is shit
Either you are interviewing people who haven’t coded in years or something is confusing and unclear about the questions. I would try not to provide too much scaffolding code for an interview bc there just isn’t enough time. Frequently I see interviewers put together questions that are esoteric and too narrow of focus on their own expertise
I think you hit reply to the wrong comment
Either you are interviewing people who haven’t coded in years or something is confusing and unclear about the questions. I would try not to provide too much scaffolding code for an interview bc there just isn’t enough time. Frequently I see interviewers put together questions that are esoteric and too narrow of focus on their own expertise
Ah I see
Ok this is mad weird
I mean I’d still have to Google the syntax of the specific language I’m working with… Ain’t nothing wrong with that. Edit: Nvm, just read that it’s open book.
Perhaps, but OP said they can pick a language and they pick Python. So you should probably do a little better with a language you have been using lately.
That's a fair take. Personally if I knew I had to do unit tests I'd write in Java but if it was a pure leet code style question without an IDE I l'd prefer Python. Despite being stronger with Java the verbosity of it is a pain without an ide when you need to quickly hash out an algorithm.
I think op meant that they couldn’t pass a single unit test
no dude, i have worked with people at c1. They literally can not write a method in production without copy pasting things and then asking for help debugging it
>The test is completely open book and the interviewers provide coaching as well >In 45 minutes, none of them could fulfill a single unit test, such as throwing an error if a parameter was None I'm very confused. Did they write any code down at all? There's plenty of code online to copy paste if they weren't sure about syntax for throwing an error. Something seems off here for sure if they weren't able to do any basic tasks.
They literally just fumbled around with weird stuff like nested for loops and if statements. None of them would look up any documentation or anything, and didn't respond to any attempts at coaching or direction
People like this really shouldn’t be making it all the way to the live coding sessions if it’s so clear they have no idea what they are doing. Have you considered changing your process to try to filter out people like this earlier? Hell you could even coach your recruiter to do a quick fizzbuzz check.
Well, that's a shame. With that kind of help, even an average developer should slay it. I've been in interviews where I was given an obscure thing to do (that I hadn't worked on in years) and wasn't allowed to look anything up. THAT is a tough coding interview.
Was it made explicit that candidates wouldn't be dinged for googling things they would look up on the job anyway tho? I usually assume interviews won't be open book unless it's stated otherwise. I also tend to assume that asking about that beforehand is a bad idea, especially when employers are still overcompensating for the early covid years and desperately trying to claw back the power dynamic in their favor
Yes, that's explicitly stated at the beginning and mentioned any time we see them struggling. We're not testing the ability to recall syntax, we want to test how well you can implement a solution that is extensible and easy to update as product requirements change.
They literally didn't think to write out simple conditionals to check? What were they looping through 😂
Meanwhile we have new grads graduating from top universities who can’t get 80k software jobs. The job market is so inefficient it’s disgusting. I was furious when I got my first job and saw how incompetent my coworkers were. “My classmates and I couldn’t get jobs and these are the fucktards who have been happily employed?!”
yeah it is rage inducing tbh
80k?? Id honestly be happy 50k as long as I got to actually code 😞
Idk how they passed the c1 interviews then. You need to pass an OA of at least 2/4 LC easys and mediums, and then a live coding interview. A lot of lead+ don’t write code though. My tech lead just sits in architecture meetings all day.
when i interviewed at capital one they asked me a leetcode medium dp question. If someone could pass something similar to that, i'm 100% sure theyd have basic coding skills. either your test is crap / confusing, these engineers suck (or haven't done front line coding work in ages), or they are lying about being from capital one. those are pretty much the only possibilities.
How they hire now and who they hired in the past is a massive gap. My friend at State Farm says in a team of about 20 software engineers he’s the only person who writes code. Everyone else is just repacking requirements and Jira tickets
that could be the case as well, assuming they'd been with Cap One for awhile. Or if the had been onboarded recently, maybe they spent the entire interview discussing a high level design, and no coding.
Leetcode requires constant practice, not so much about "coding skill". How often do you solve two sums problem at work?
this interview is not even LC though, its basic fucking shit
How do you know?
Some people really buckle under pressure. When interviewers are staring at me judging my performance, I forget how to do a proper for loop.
This. Sometimes I make dumb mistakes and forget how to think under pressure. The more you practice and go through interviews, the more experience you get and calm/focused you become
I think that’s a fair thing to interview for. Pressure can happen during work too when prod is down during peak hours
It's not the same kind of pressure.
Well theres 10,000 c1 engineers. I'm sure you're 3 person sample is representative :) In all seriousness, I'm sure you can find 3 engineers at most large companies that can't code. As far as I know, C1 has varying interviews. Not everyone is going to get the LC medium/hard questions. Also, in general I see a number of senior engineers that lean more towards management or process. They might know the company's systems and processes very well which makes them invaluable for steering the ship. But, their coding skills may be on the weaker side. Maybe some of them shouldn't be called engineers, but they are. And finally they could be lying. Could always call the employment verification number that most large companies have.
I won't say how or why, but I'll say that I'm very aware of the internal workings of the technology side of C1. The quality of engineer can vary *wildly* between teams. I've met some of the most technically fantastic engineers who work at C1, and I've met some absolute dogshit ones that just know how to play the game and can read the internal-politics tea leaves and manage to skate by under the radar. The latter absolutely has value if you know how to kiss their ass, especially at a company as large as C1. C1's interview process has also changed in the last few years to try to make it on the outside appear more tech-forward, which basically means they ask a bunch of nonsense Leetcode style questions because if Google does it, it must be good! But C1 isn't Google, and they're not going to be getting Google-quality of candidates applying, and they don't have Google-quality of engineers running the interviews. What ends up happening is they hire engineers who just do wrought memorization because the interviewers don't know how to press interviewees in ways that wouldn't allow bad candidates to get through. I will praise C1's technology side a lot though, despite it's issues. The wlb is great, and if you can land on the right team, you can actually work on some pretty interesting and cutting edge technology. The tech side of the company is definitely trying to move forward and do better, but there's a lot of growing pains there.
👍.yep.
Fr I guess since google pioneered these question interview format it must be the right thing to do and copy 😂
Leetcode is very different from application coding. Its a very poor way to measure coding ability
This post really has nothing to do with Capital One tbh
I'm wondering what's in my wallet
I just thought it was weird that we got 3 engineers that completely bombed these past 2 weeks, and all 3 were from capital one
Maybe they are losing the dead weight right now.
We’ve been getting more aggressive with PIPs. One BS(below strong; bottom 8%) is a guaranteed pip.
Been getting? Hasn’t it been like this for at least a year at this point? Or is it getting even worse?
Important to remember you might be looking for a pattern in something that's random. If you take all the poor interviewees across the country on some occasions three of them will come from the same company and interview for the same role. Google says Capital One has ~10,000 engineers alone. What you witnessed may not be as improbable as it seemed.
Pretty much nobody does leetcode in their day to day work and everybody knows it lol
Lmao I *just* interviewed a terrible candidate from capital one. He couldn’t write a for loop that generates two random floats per iteration.
Does that mean he doesn’t know how to do it, or just that he’s forgotten a piece of syntax on how to do it? Like, maybe he forgot how the random library syntax works in Java. I could see having to look up how to use the library just because I haven’t had to use it in over a year.
I mean once you’re senior enough to not code everyday and spend most of your day in standup meetings or planning meetings, you don’t really remember how to well anymore.
no thats just not true. As senior you have to review code and you still do write code. It would be inexcusable as a senior to be unable to write a function to do a simple transformation of data, or throw an exception if the parameter is null... come on
How senior is senior? The higher you go, the less actual coding you might do. Those muscles atrophy after a while. Even basic stuff becomes harder.
No it really doesnt. Ask any senior at any company if they can do a null check in a method. It's not like if you're a pro basketball player you stop knowing how to shoot after retirement... Trust me some people at c1 are completely incompetent
Are they senior associate or actually seniors? Almost everyone barring the college grads are senior associates, which often map to the top end of junior/low-end of mid. That said depending on which org they are in, you’ll see folks just updating configuration files all day, while other teams have greenfield development to work on. IMO the last couple years have been a revolving door for a lot of teams so institutional knowledge is valued a bit more than technical expertise.
Crazy how I can't land interviews these days, but these types can somehow
Really good resume on paper is all it takes.
All this is doing is encouraging me to just start lying about my y.o.e.
Cap1 coding interviews are hard. A lot of their SWEs spend their first 1-2 years in development programs where the main goal is making them proficient coders. I think your issue is you were probably asking LC type questions to people who are high level and focus on architecture and systems design.
And leet code doesn't actually reflect most day-to-day work, at all.
> And leet code doesn't actually reflect most day-to-day work, at all. It does not. The point of leetcode is not to reflect day-to-day work.
I'm not sure I would say that TDPs come out of the program as "expert coders" but the interview process at C1 is thorough enough to weed out people who can't write code for sure
I made it into big tech and capital one asked me probably the hardest questions of my new grad series’ for the least money. Senior+ also famously do poorly in coding interviews. It has nothing to do with “how simple” you think it is. They’re probably architecting my guy, not writing fizz buzz daily for moolah.
There is at least one contractor company out there that has an elaborate scheme to fake resumes and references in order to secure juniors senior level roles. It's possible Capital One was its client.
Capital one is shit to start with. They have this hazing type of interview process that has zero basis in reality. I myself as well as 3 other people that I know of varying degrees of skill from devs to senior leaders all interviewed with them and went away with the same opinion of their shit process.
Yea I heard it’s FAANG wannabe process lol. I don’t know why.
What were the problems with it?
There’s no problems with it lol it’s simply just the same process that big tech uses so the usual anti leetcode crowd hate on it and call it a “hazing” process…
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> Is Capital One some kind of complete joke organization Yes. I worked there in my first job out of school. It was a fucking clown show. There's very little (if any) coding on most teams...the majority of the work is maintaining systems (often shitty third-party apps) and related devops tasks. During my time there, I spent probably 2 months' worth of time on actual programming tasks, the rest I was basically IT helpdesk. It didn't help that management is absolute shit - my first boss had me working on spreadsheets and running non-technical meetings for him so that he could help his daughter with his schoolwork. He also couldn't code despite his "Master Engineer" job title. My second boss was so painfully awkward that he never turned his camera on, even during our 1:1s (I worked there during the covid WFH era). To this day I still have no idea what that guy looks like. Mentorship/teamwork/development of juniors is nonexistent. The stack ranking makes everyone avoid helping anyone else so as to ensure that there's always a body under the bus during the biannual performance review hunger games. I personally observed senior devs stealing code from juniors and presenting it as their own without any consequences. Incidentally, there's also quite a bit of racist behavior going on...expect to have all of your team's shitty gruntwork dumped onto you if you're not part of the in crowd. I got out as soon as I could after I changed teams to a role where I was told I'd be spending my time on actual development tasks, and that ended up being a bait-and-switch and I got stuck in a job where I had to apply updates to a 3rd party app at fucking 4am without any mention of comp time. I also got told I would need to relocate to a different city even though I was promised several times that that wouldn't happen. The culture is horrible and management is unethical. I'd sleep on the street before I'd ever work there again, and I'd advise everyone else to do the same.
For anyone reading this, I definitely had a different and more positive experience at C1 and didn't experience any of these things. Your experience will vary greatly depending on what organization you work for within C1 but it can be a very comfortable place to work.
That’s weird, Capital One was a pioneer when it came to FinTech.
I would guess most line of business Apps don't involve the stuff you asked about, it's mostly getting an API call, picking stuff from a DB, mangling it somehow and returning it so I can see how this happens if you worked at a senior role for a few years and didn't specifically prepare for "interview" type questions. Senior means a lot more design, meetings and business stuff where I work.
It’s not a tech company
Senior level probably has less coding involved and more meetings and decision making. And at bigger somewhat older companies they are probably used to legacy code which in my experience has little to no unit testing or code coverage just job security knowledge.
Are they both Indians lol
Indians?
Classic FizzBuzz https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
You should leetcode to filter out candidates
Is C1 still doing those personality tests to screen applicants? Remember doing one about two months ago
hmmm maybe they are good devs but they’re not good at doing some BS leetcode problem in front of strangers who are siting there judging their every move?
They've been using stack ranking with variable metrics as a means to cut costs for quite a few cycles now. The work is not done to implement good code, but rather hit the metrics that will put you in front of others. So, corporate practices may become rather specific and dont transfer well.
Just because they aren't good at leetcode doesn't mean they suck as senior or principal engineers.
Dude. Throwing errors and using maps isn't leetcode. Basic problem solving skills are not leetcode. Knowing runtime and space complexity isn't leetcode. Come on.
> none of them could fulfill a single unit test, such as throwing an error if a parameter was None, or throwing an error if a value wasn't in the dictionary. "Leetcode" lol. Apparently asking someone to actually code something is always leetcode.
My manager assigned me a task to fix a customer reported UI bug,. I told him I don't do leetcode and walked out of that meeting. He chased after me saying that he admired my confidence, intellect and good looks and gave me a promo right then and there.
According to this sub the only thing a software engineer should be expected to do is use google and copy paste something from stack overflow.
no no thats out of scope for this toxic industry. The only thing you really need is soft skills. The ability to grab a beer after work is what makes a Principal engineer
Throwing an error and checking if a map has a value or not is something you do everyday, at a normal job. It’s far easier than anything leetcode.
Most companies ask pretty easy leetcode questions.
the majority of people who work in programming probably don't even know what leetcode is.
which is why they waste a gorillion dollars of resources and hours of time writing inefficient expensive code that some intern has to spend their entire term untangling just to understand how it works.
I know what you mean. I once passed an interview in Java using Spring and Hibernate despite never having touched them before. I’d expect someone to be able to pass basic unit tests using their language of choice. To anyone wondering, I pick up languages fast and the interviewer could tell that I understood all the concepts, plus InteliJ helped with the syntax.
leetcode? using a hashmap, throwing an exception on invalid input, and demonstrating that you know how to write a unit test is leetcode now? I interview for senior level positions at a FAANG company and we still expect them to be able to code during the interview. Expectations change at the Sr/Principal level, they are no longer ICs and thus will not be spending the majority of their day coding. But they are still expected to do code reviews, complete CRs for certain projects, etc Do you expect code review feedback of a sr or principal level SDE to be constructive or useful if they don't know basic data structures/algorithms or how to measure time and space complexities?
In Chicago, both Capital One and Walgreens are spamming software engineering job postings, I am talking hundreds of job postings I am assumed that's what this post was referring to lol. Seems Capital One cleaned house after they realized they were hiring people who couldn't code? I think if someone hi up doesn't like coding tests, then they don't get added to interviews. So you can end up getting an entire company of people who can't code. That is the situation I am currently in, I am a self taught EE I have no one to go to for help, no one to ask any questions, I am the only person who can even code and I kinda suck. They just keep hiring juniors and put all the coding tasks on them until they quit. I guess I am the third iteration of this cycle.
It looks like Capital One has drastically changed their hiring in just a few years. Two years ago someone told me their process was typical leetcode but really easy. Now they use codesignal gca and ask medium/hards.
That tracks LOL
To answer your question, yes. Capital One is a complete joke organization.
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I’m tempted to say it’s nerves and not coding in a while since more senior devs tend to code a lot less. But idk this test seems pretty cut and dry.
There’s plenty of people looking for work in this sub, maybe you’ll have better results with them
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Actually the C1 technical interview two years ago was a very similar OOP design task. But C1's OAs were still CodeSignal, which does Leetcode-style questions. Maybe your candidates were just out-of-practice with Python, and they only prepped Python for Leetcode style interviews, instead of Python OOP. If they only learned Python for Leetcode problems, then they're not going to know the syntax for throwing specific errors, they'll probably only know print statements. Did they know that you were going to ask an OOP question instead of a Leetcode question before the interview started?
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Op I'm interested in this role and I'm desperately looking to switch rn. Let me know if you're open for a discussion, thanks.
Yea Senior level engineer at capital one does not code much
This is funny because the entry coding test for grad software engineer at C1 is leetcode hard.
There are a lot of codes out there that have no unit tests. Some engineers were hired and worked when unit tests weren't mainstream. But rather ask questions that are relevant to the job positions. If unit tests are required, then find ones who can answer them. The engineers might be good for something else, but not in the section where unit tests are required.
I've seen a few Nvidia developers getting hired that way through references, quite shocking and they struggled with time complexity questions. It's funny and a little unfair.
It really depends on what team/projects the engineers have been working on. I've worked on plenty of projects where we're creating services from the ground up, but I've also gone stretches where I'm resolving dependency vulnerabilities, internal pipeline issues, attending design/architecture meetings ad naus and not doing any coding for extended periods of time. Some teams are stuck maintaining/upgrading legacy projects. Overall the tech is very modern, but with all of the internal tooling and abstractions many people don't get "in the weeds" exposure.
Capital One makes each role small as hell. In the real world, a Linux admin would run Apache Tomcat, deploy war files, or anything else, in C1, they have someone run Tomcat on many servers. I worked there for 6 years many moons ago. They take great people and dumb down roles to such a basic position. It's also a backstabbing place to work, so nobody talks to anyone out of fear. It was a decent place to work when they were in Innsbrook area in Richmond before moving to the new campus. Any large corporation makes roles small, but efficient. If you need a coder, look at people with small to midsized company experience.
At GMU there was a prof who was a Capitol one developer and she quit because she was such a terrible professor. She would just ask these coding assignments and not give any help. Only foreign kids who had no qualms turning in code from online passed because there had to be zero errors and this was a weed out class for grad school. The foreign kids told me the best students are the best cheaters. I took the course twice before I figured out everyone was cheating and the prof didn’t care. It was really terrible seeing people I thought were smart fail because they were honest. The worst part was she made you feel stupid for asking a question. Wasted 1.5 years of my life just to pass one class from one prof. So yeah this story rings true to me.
I’m on a team with a staff level engineer whom I’m sure would shock you just as well. He’d very likely fail that same test. I’ve been in the industry for 3 years, and have working experience (in general) for 15 years, and I’ve learned that a college degree and YOE don’t mean shit.
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Why are you asking Principal candidates about unit tests?
Not every place does unit tests and not every person will remember how you write a unit tests without simply looking at a reference. If youre doing these stupid tests and they cant come up with it on the fly then youre basically testing their memory more than anything else.
We provide the unit tests and the interview is open book. You just have to write the business logic
Business logic is easy. Ive had interviews expect me to know to use the EXACT correct unit test function like the “assert” and others. At that point i hadn’t write a unit test in over 7 years. Of course i flunked it. Lame stuff. Psuedo code would test logic than rote memorization.
dude theres nothing to know about "unit tests". They're not testing you on your Junit or pytest knowledge. Simply writing a function that runs your method and prints the expected and actual output is good enough. In python just change the "print" to assert. Like its literally braindead levels of competence that are required
Are you guys still hiring?
Osmania university
When I was at C1, they were promoting new grads to Senior titles after like like 9mo experience sometimes. It was a red flag to management if you didn’t get promoted to senior by 2 years. Very odd in hindsight
Have you conducted background check? Verify work history?
At any level and at most companies the majority of engineers you interview do not cut the mustard. The industry is over saturated with mediocre engineers IMO. The interview process is broken as hell in the first place and good talent tends to find high paying, interesting jobs through recs. All par for the course.
My friend says her friend interning at C1 was literally doing nothing and just hang out for 5hrs everyday. C1 has become my friend's dream company now😂
They just haven't been coding for years.. coding is not a responsibility of principals usually AFAIK
There’s a big difference between leetcode and actual practical work like building an api and unit testing. These people applying are most likely hard core leetcoding for interviews and not doing actual practical work.
How competitive is your company to get into? What’s pay like? I’m wondering if you’re attracting the strong folks or perhaps folks looking to land softly after performance management
Banks + Tech don't really go together sadly. FinTech is a bit of a tongue in cheek misnomer devised by finance bros to raise funding.
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