u/saltedhashneggs wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Only like 10% of this was a shot at you and just because of how deeply we disagree with your advice to OP on getting their foot in the door. We all know who you are here and are clearly otherwise a good dude. Just so privileged of a mindset to deter people from 6figure opportuni
u/michaelnovati replied ·
Yeah this is a better discussion.
So data structures and algorithms have been taught since the 1960s and 70s.
Microsoft started asking them in the 1990s and if was the industry standard that top companies used since then.
DS&A creates a fair playing field by normalizing for language and framework and evaluating one's problem solving.
Leetcode has steered off course and people care too much now about passing questions versus understanding why these questions are asked and how to approach them.
Good engineers being paid $1M a year who are high performers and developing interview processes aren''t gatekeeping their jobs. They will have their jobs either way.
They are also data driven engineers.
The data tells them that people with CS degrees from those 10 schools and who pass DS&A tend to be the LONG TERM high performers.
I challenged this at Meta. Response: that's what the data says. The individual cases of exceptional performance from others were edge cases that were not reproducible.
I was one of the highest performing engineers at the whole company and I went to a school that Meta didn't recruit at. They didnt care and all of a sudden start recruiting there, because I was an anomaly.
A few bootcamp grads become high performers too. That doesn't matter if most aren't.
If you are a bootcamp grad you have to fight to be an anomaly and not expect to be handed a job like a Stanford grad.