The best part about this book is that there's zero marketing around "how to be successful in life" or "what successful people do" or "how to become rich". But it actually describes the real way to achieve those things :) unlike 99% of books with flashy titles, etc. It's been an eye opener!
"meaningful depends entirely on your expectations".
Totally. That's what I meant. To me personally a meaningful day means no complaints, good connections with people, have at least a positive impact on people, etc. This doesn't have to be extreme. It's a strategy to push away negative thoughts and to focus on what really matters every single day.
I think the category “startup” is too generic for us to provide you a valuable answer. What is the size of the company? How long have they been running? What stage (seeds, A, B, etc), who are the founders? What is the domain?
Give us more details and we’ll provide you very targeted questions to ask. Since you’re talking about an offer, I’m assuming this for a specific startup...
My theory was pure imagination :) I 100% agree with what you said. The primary goal is to raise the bar of entry. The problem is, current SWE evaluations focus too much on one single task. The ration "writing functions" versus the rest might be about 20% vs 80%. We focus too much on the 20%. How about team work, collaboration, knowledge transfer, project related issues, mentoring people, setting up environments, understanding users, collaborating with product managers and designers, etc.
If you think about it, it's a pretty risky process for companies. Judging a candidate based on a few 45-min whiteboard exercises and a high level system design question, we're looking at only 20% of the whole picture.
Who knows? Maybe all tech companies came to an agreement one day, a little secret we don't know about. Why do they all require that type of interviews? Employee retention... If interviews for software engineers were focusing on real work experience only, everyone would be able to switch jobs very easily. Think about it. It would be so easy to get in without even putting extra work because you'd be evaluated on your day to day tasks, rather than something that requires months of intensive practice. It's a way to scare engineers and to keep them away from switching jobs.
Now let's say you don't have any experience and you're fresh out of college. What happens with today's setup? Well, you're perfectly able to tackle these interviews since all you know are algorithms, data structures, etc. There's no retention involved since it would be your first gig ever. It's a perfectly well designed process for Tech companies, but it's awful for us I agree.