Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Should I give up on FAANG as a low IQ late 30s engineer?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 43 posts

Ask HN: Should I give up on FAANG as a low IQ late 30s engineer?

#1

Post by lowiqfangwannab »

I am a software engineer in my late 30s and I've been trying unsuccessfully to join faang for a year now. I am unable to pass any type of leetcode challenge. I can barely do leet code easy questions and it takes me ages to get it.

I have tried memorising solutions, patterns and grinding problems over and over. I have gone through a few algorithms books (CLRS) but i find the maths and proofs really hard.

Bitwise, Recurrence relations and DP give me nightmares so do maze traversal and flood filling problems, I am astonished people can actually get through these interviews the way FAANG demands nowadays (perfect solution to leetcode HARD on a whiteboard, while explaining your thought process outloud, hints given are counted against you).

This is pure insanity to me, i am slow, my iq is not that high, i have social anxiety and find it really hard to articulate my thought process as I solve problems in a more instinctual way (i.e does this feel right or not?) I need to look up stuff all the time as my memory is not very good as well.

Then there's the system design rounds where they expect you to come up with a quad tree and know every single cache hit, memory and cpu cost by heart.

I am considering joining a bootcamp for interviews but it is 6k and I am not sure if its worth it for me given my limitations.

I really need the money and security plus having faang in my resume opens doors, i have seen it in my current organisation where they hired ex faang tech leads and they are considered the best of the best by everyone. These are the only reasons I am willing to put up with this.

Is it a good idea for me to continue to put effort into this? I only have my full time job but have no friends or family so i have a lot of spare time to put into this.

Does anyone have any similar stories of old mediocre developers getting to faang? Is there a recommended pathway for people in this situation?

Thanks in advance.

Re: Ask HN: Should I give up on FAANG as a low IQ late 30s engineer?

#2

Post by ggm »

You're unlikely to get there in a leap. Most people make goals in increments and you self identify as unlikely to get the inferential leap outcome.

That said, I didn't make the bar either and I sought lower entry bar goals to achieve a state of reasonable contentment.

"Aim high" is great, but it has to be tempered with realism. Aim plausibly high. Aim plausible and then seek a goal just beyond.

I do not think you should sink $6k into a boot camp. I think you should seek coding clubs in a more social space and build a network. Find people who are interested in discussing some aspect of the problem surface, and avoid the unpleasant supercilious ones. Keep your job, try to improve in it, and find an increment role to move up in.

Also, IQ is mostly bunkum. Just ignore it. Being neurodiverse is not bunkum. Understanding your own personality is good.

Re: Ask HN: Should I give up on FAANG as a low IQ late 30s engineer?

#3

Post by the_only_law »

Maybe, while having high intelligence is necessary to really understand those problems and how to approach them, a lot of the resources around these interviews seem to involve simply memorizing the solutions to the most common problems.

To be fair, these also seem to be targeted towards entry level positions, I can;t say how that strategy would assist someone trying to get in at another level.

Re: Ask HN: Should I give up on FAANG as a low IQ late 30s engineer?

#4

Post by rmk »

I think you need focused preparation. I have found that intense prep of a few weeks generally gets you comfortable with the basics. Then you have the momentum you need to start building up your skills on the harder questions.

Bitwise operations are not representative of interview questions, neither is formally solving Recurrence Relations (that is more of an academic algorithm class thing, where the focus is on formal proofs of asymptotic complexity). DP questions are rarely asked during screening, but will likely get asked in advanced rounds of interviews.

You do not need to go to a bootcamp for interviews, but you need a focused plan and you need to stick to it for several weeks at the very least. Also make sure to interview promiscuously at your non-target companies before you take a stab at the FAANG-level companies. Interviewing is a skill and gets better with practice.

For System Design interviews, I do not have much to say except that they are used as a gauge of your seniority, particularly if the person doing the interviewing is more experienced than you. It's useful to know some things in this area but it's much more important to be very comfortable in the coding department.

For coding, I suggest this: - Know your Data Structures and be able to implement them: - Linked Lists - Stacks - Queues - Hash Tables - Binary Trees, Binary Search Trees, and Heaps - Tries - Graphs (Adjacency List and Matrix representations) - Libraries for the above in your language (Collections in Java, Containers/STL in C++, for example).

- Do simple problems in these categories and become expert in them: - Linked Lists - Array problems - Binary Trees/Binary Search Trees (These are great for learning recursion) - Backtracking (These are also great for learning recursion) - Sorting - Graphs Problems (search, connected components etc.) - Dynamic Programming

- Focus on techniques, not specific problems (save for the basics above. You should know how to do simple problems in the above categories cold).

This level will prepare you for a good coding interview at any company thats below the FAANG-level. For the FAANGs, you must do harder problems, but should also know how to do them cold. That part is hard and somewhat open-ended. The basics I have mentioned above can be done with around 4-6 weeks of intense prep.

Re: Ask HN: Should I give up on FAANG as a low IQ late 30s engineer?

#5

Post by rmk »

the_only_law wrote: post #3

Maybe, while having high intelligence is necessary to really understand those problems and how to approach them, a lot of the resources around these interviews seem to involve simply memorizing the solutions to the most common problems. To be fair, these also seem to be targeted towards entry level positions, I can;t say how that strategy would assist someone trying to get in at another level.

You are asked these things no matter you level in FAANG interviews. You need high enough intelligence to understand how to solve these problems if you are shown a solution, but I do not think you need much more intelligence than that to do well in a FAANG interview. It's more about how fluent you are given that you have already done some prep.

Re: Ask HN: Should I give up on FAANG as a low IQ late 30s engineer?

#9

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

punkbit wrote: post #7

If you struggle, it'll be a struggle everyday once you get into one of those corporations. Listen to yourself.

+1 to this. Given what the original poster has said, they are probably going to get ground to bits even if they do get into a FAANG. It requires both raw technical ability and considerable social and political skills to survive because everybody there is jockeying to climb to the next level. A number of the FAANGs are also ruthless about culling people who aren't succeeding, at least until a certain promotion level is reached.

Re: Ask HN: Should I give up on FAANG as a low IQ late 30s engineer?

#10

Post by icsa »

Why do you necessarily want to work at a FAANG company? There are plenty of other fine organizations that pay reasonably well and don't have such a high interview bar.

Perhaps you should consider a non-tech company (e.g. retail, healthcare, real estate, hospitality et cetera) that uses technology versus creates technology. The bar will be lower and the pay should be decent but not exceptional.

Post reply on HN