Comment by fragmede 3 days ago
Given that the bar for getting into Harvard is rather high these days, shouldn't we expect the median grade in Harvard to be fairly high? If C students aren't allowed into Harvard these days, doesn't it make sense they aren't giving out Cs?
>Harvard is happy to churn out a nonzero number of students wholly unprepared for meeting extremely basic expectations for the prototypical job of their chosen degree
From one of my professors who did their graduate work at an Ivy, apparently there are a lot of rich kids who can't be failed because their parents donate so much money to the school. But I don't think Harvard has ever had the best undergraduate reputation (among the Ivies), its more well known for its grad/professional programs.
From the people I know that studied at places like Harvard and Yale (which since I'm Canadian isn't a huge sample size), I've been told that there are essentially two different streams of undergrads there - those on legacy admissions and those who qualified otherwise (either via brains, affirmative action, or other means). I was left with the impression that the legacy admissions are mostly people who've coasted through life. The rest are a full spectrum of people.
Most of Harvard's endowment is via alumni, so it doesn't surprise me in the least they continue with it.
If you don’t cram for leetcode, you won’t pass a leetcode interview. It takes some kids a few interviews to figure that out, even they are from elite school like MIT. You were just their learning experience.
If you can't solve FizzBuzz in half an hour with a language of your choice while being able to look up syntax, your problem isn't that you failed to cram for leetcode, it's that you don't know how to write code.
There's nothing inherently wrong with not being able to write code, but you probably shouldn't be applying for software engineering roles where the main responsibility of the job is ultimately to write working code.
Just to be clear I have no problem passing these interviews, I just spent a few weeks cramming leetcode and got a job at Google. Leetcode wasn’t the main reason I was hired, but it was a filter that I had to get through (I’ve never been given fizzbuzz before, but I assume that is just because it’s no longer in style and hasn’t been for more than a decade). You just don’t throw yourself into on the fly coding, you practice them because your competition has and you will look bad if you don’t. Let’s not pretend that any of us are ready to do alien dictionary at the spur of a moment, or thats a useful skill for our role.
I get the impression you latched on to the word leetcode and took away something very different
FizzBuzz, reversing a sentence -- this is programming your way out of a wet paper bag, not elite and esoteric skills that need advanced study and cramming
Similar concept. You have them do some task like fizzbuzz to see if they can program stuff on the fly that they would never need to do in real life. You practice that since school doesn't prepare you for that unless you do ACM programming contests or something. The interview demands this to see if the candidate is capable of cramming for the interview, which correlates with the effort, ability they could put into the job, not with what the skills they actually apply on the job, which are hard to measure in a one hour interview slot anyways.
Yeah, LeetCode interviews are their own weird universe. Even smart people get wrecked until they realize you have to treat it like an exam. Most failures aren’t about ability, it’s just pattern recall under pressure. I’ve passed some rounds I had no business passing just because I stayed calm. StealthCoder helped me a bit there since it keeps me from blanking during the actual interview.
I'm curious about the degree validation thing. Did you or your employer validate the degree before the interview?
A bit of context on that grading question here. It was interesting to me that grading has gone through a couple waves of inflation over the decades: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/what-i-talk-about-when-i-tal...
I've interviewed Harvard CS grads for SWE roles at big tech who couldn't write a working program for fizzbuzz, for defanging an IP address, or for reversing words in a sentence, in a language of their choice, with leetcode's provided instructions, in half an hour, with unlimited attempts, gentle coaching from me, and the ability to use the internet to search for anything that isn't a direct solution (e.g. syntax).
Yes, more than one.
Either the bar for getting into Harvard cannot possibly be as high as it's made out to be, someone's figured out how to completely defeat degree-validation service providers, or Harvard is happy to churn out a nonzero number of students wholly unprepared for meeting extremely basic expectations for the prototypical job of their chosen degree.