In the tech industry, the hiring process that most companies use to assess potential candidates is not the most efficient approach in selecting new hires or interns. Nowadays, the hiring process adopted by most tech companies generally involves solving coding problems, which I believe is not the best way to assess someone for a software engineering position. Although I disagree with the current approach for hiring, I am forced to yield to what companies are looking for and get better at solving coding challenges. In order to prepare for such a hiring process, my primary source of preparation has been LeetCode. It has the best collection of coding problems that accurately reflect the type of questions that applicants would normally encounter in an assessment or interview. Solving problems in LeetCode during my spare time has tremendously helped me in my preparation for software engineering interviews, especially for the technical sections. During my spare time, I also worked on a personal project, which allowed me to showcase some of my skills and passion to my interviewers. Because I was into video games outside of programming, I decided to create a social media platform for League of Legends. With only a year of experience in programming, building such an application was a great challenge, but I was able to learn so much from it. In my journey, I got to learn about new technologies, like React.js, Node.js, and MongoDB, building a web application from scratch, and deploying my own application on the cloud. Whenever I am asked to share a project that I’ve worked on, I always like to talk about this one because it best reflects my passion for programming. Notre Dame has also played an instrumental role in helping me prepare for the hiring process. Beyond the required courses in the Computer Science curriculum, one class that helped me in particular is Bui’s Programming Challenges class. That class gave me early exposure to technical interview questions by challenging me to apply the concepts that I’ve learned, like data structures and algorithms, to solve problems with code. I don’t think I would have passed some of my interviews if I didn’t take this course.
Despite all this preparation for the hiring process, the work life is completely different than what the interviews assess. Based on my summer internship, my experience had nothing to do with solving coding problems. Instead, I had to participate in several meetings for standup and sprint planning, cooperate with my teammates, and quickly adapt and expand on the already implemented infrastructure. In other words, the key qualities that I found were crucial in thriving in a tech environment were communication, teamwork, and adaptability. If I were running the hiring process, I would relieve the focus on solving coding problems and place more emphasis in personal projects and interaction with other people. Ultimately, I view the overall hiring process of the tech industry to be ethical, but I can’t help to question whether it is an efficient, effective way to measure a candidate’s fit for the position when the actual work entails doing more than just solving coding problems.
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