Apparently Bezos buying a $63 million house is the same as me buying a banana.

It’s time to go buy a banana.

January 10, 2023

Disclaimer: Dear Amazon, please do not write a letter to my school’s upper echelons to get me kicked out of school. I swear that I have never used any AI tools to cheat on my Amazon OA, nor have I ever eaten your free bananas inside The Spheres in 2016. I categorically deny any allegations that I have claimed everyone I know in big tech has been an Amazon intern and never converted to full-time.

Roy Lee, a modern day digital Robinhood, or at least what he claims to be. If you haven’t heard of him yet, let me introduce you to his second LinkedIn account (because his first one got banned).

This wasn’t the first time I had heard of an invisible LLM overlay on Zoom technical interviews allowing coders to cheat on their OAs. The fact of the matter was that I had already seen this now deleted post back in December, reposted it on my Close Friends, and proceeded to never make use of it because my resume wasn’t passing any ATS screens in the first place.

Two years ago, during my blessed semester system long winter break, I popped my existence into a UW CS class. At last, I had reaped the benefits of my family’s taxpayer dollars at the University of Washington Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science ampersand Engineering. While two of my high school friends were actually enrolled in that class, the other four of us east coast school imposters…. Well, I’m sure we left a couple seats open.

The professor was a woman, which instantly made me a fan of her, who had previously worked in technical recruiting. She spoke with the second millennium’s sarcasm, a professionalism undercut by an air of sharp criticism.

“About a decade ago, Gayle Laakmann McDowell published a book titled Cracking the Coding Interview,” she stated. “She also owns an interview prep agency. Make what you will of that. Since then, all coding interviews have been modeled off this book, so we’re going to be learning this book.”

I ask and get asked this a lot, “Have you been grinding LeetCode?” The wildly notorious website known as LeetCode is basically Cracking the Coding Interview on steroids. If you thought a 687 page 2.75 pound green book was a lot, let me introduce you to the 3520 programming question practice website, exercising the same skills you will never use on the job.

The same job that pretty much everyone is using AI for anyways. The last time I wrote a file all by myself was in Fall 2022. A bunch of people nowadays spread the word that Intro to CS was “no sweat,” tabbing their way through their homework. But I just so happened to take this class before ChatGPT became mainstream. So I sweated. Putting my A- aside, every programmer to ever exist encourages the use of AI. They’re not saying to be bad coders (*cough cough VIBE CODERS), but AI allows us to execute on a vision from start to finish faster.

“You just gotta play the game.”

I fervently disagree. The current game requires us to build personal projects rapidly, attend sleepless hackathons, maintain leadership in clubs, grind LeetCode, mass apply to 300 internships with the Simplify extension, and maintain a solid GPA. Simple. This is also the reason why the CS guy stereotype is that they don’t shower. Showering wastes precious time you could be using to work to boost your resume.

At times, I lose faith in my CS abilities because I sleep at night, get dinner with friends, shower, pursue hobbies, etc.

The current game values putting your all into CS, throwing away any semblance of humanity left inside of you. The entire process has become extremely robotic, and I mean literally. The JavaScript Simplify extension fills out applications with the click of a button, and ChatGPT does the interview.

The Interview Coder is not the end but the beginning of rethinking CS interviews. We need to be able to sift through the oversaturated industry and restore humanity to the process. And then maybe I’ll actually apply to internships again.