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Show HN: Onsites.fyi - Curated Big Tech Interview Experiences

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Re: Show HN: Onsites.fyi - Curated Big Tech Interview Experiences

#81

Post by ldjkfkdsjnv »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #80
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to know the truth that these "genius" engineers at Meta/FAANG are mostly getting in by memorizing. They try interviewing at five top companies. One of those interviews they will absolutely crush, and then will get an offer at 400k+.

Lol wtf are you talking about. There is no way you can memorize 2000 Leetcode questions. When I interviewed at a google and netflix, not one of the coding questions were on any site (leetcode or hackerrank). After the interviews I wanted to look at the solutions afterwords so I searched for them, couldn't find anything. It was only microsoft that would ask the common canned questions.

People are going on leetcode.com, they find the company they are interviewing for, they remove all questions more than a year or two old, then they sort by frequency. They start memorizing the most frequent questions first. Then they pass the interview. There are other forums with question banks (airbnb's whole question bank is leaked), but I wont get into that

Re: Show HN: Onsites.fyi - Curated Big Tech Interview Experiences

#82

Post by [deleted] »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #36

To reiterate: Ignore all study materials. Go to leetcode.com and literally memorize the most common questions for the company you are interviewing at. This is what your competition is doing. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. Just memorize it Do the same thing for system design. Memorize the answers word for word. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. The highest paid tech jobs go to candidates that regurgitate perfect answers to inter…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Onsites.fyi - Curated Big Tech Interview Experiences

#83

Post by VirusNewbie »

neilv wrote: post #37
spongebobstoes wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad that you have had this experience! However, passing leetcode questions will typically open up new job opportunities and increase total compensation. Anecdotally, I actually find it a good filtering signal for top talent. That is, all the best engineers I've worked with have always been able to crush leetcode interview questions, even if they find the questions annoying. I think it is probably only a good fil…

Leetcode interviews are for people who studied and practiced for Leetcode interviews specifically. It doesn't have much to do with programming, and has almost zero to do with software engineering.

Lists, sets, graph traversals, parsing, knowing when to use hashmaps, using recursion, knowing when to use a priority queue don’t have much to do with programming or software engineering?

Re: Show HN: Onsites.fyi - Curated Big Tech Interview Experiences

#84

Post by VirusNewbie »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #81
VirusNewbie wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol wtf are you talking about. There is no way you can memorize 2000 Leetcode questions. When I interviewed at a google and netflix, not one of the coding questions were on any site (leetcode or hackerrank). After the interviews I wanted to look at the solutions afterwords so I searched for them, couldn't find anything. It was only microsoft that would ask the common canned questions.

People are going on leetcode.com, they find the company they are interviewing for, they remove all questions more than a year or two old, then they sort by frequency. They start memorizing the most frequent questions first. Then they pass the interview. There are other forums with question banks (airbnb's whole question bank is leaked), but I wont get into that

But i passed both of those interviews without having seen a single question before.

Re: Show HN: Onsites.fyi - Curated Big Tech Interview Experiences

#85

Post by ipaddr »

jrockway wrote: post #71
DanAtC wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, make your problem the interviewee's problem and waste more of everyone's time.

Google gets away with this because they pay so well. An hour of extra interviewing gets you an extra $400,000 a year. Show up to a 1 hour zoom meeting instead of having a long lunch, then put the money in your savings account (or in the stock market when savings accounts stop being so good) and retire at 35. I left Google for a startup and got basically half the total compensation. 6 years after leaving, I am making…

But you left?

Re: Show HN: Onsites.fyi - Curated Big Tech Interview Experiences

#86

Post by otteromkram »

paulddraper wrote: post #49
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #36

To reiterate: Ignore all study materials. Go to leetcode.com and literally memorize the most common questions for the company you are interviewing at. This is what your competition is doing. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. Just memorize it Do the same thing for system design. Memorize the answers word for word. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. The highest paid tech jobs go to candidates that regurgitate perfect answers to inter…

Someone is going to take you seriously. Don't memorize it, learn it, become good at it. No matter how much you memorize, there's going to be something you don't. But I think you know that.

OP didn't say to never learn it. They said just cram it in for the interview.

Once you get the job, sure learn it. Unless your job doesn't require it or you're not that interested.

But, online we need to be pedantic. That's rule 1.

Re: Show HN: Onsites.fyi - Curated Big Tech Interview Experiences

#87

Post by otteromkram »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #81
VirusNewbie wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol wtf are you talking about. There is no way you can memorize 2000 Leetcode questions. When I interviewed at a google and netflix, not one of the coding questions were on any site (leetcode or hackerrank). After the interviews I wanted to look at the solutions afterwords so I searched for them, couldn't find anything. It was only microsoft that would ask the common canned questions.

People are going on leetcode.com, they find the company they are interviewing for, they remove all questions more than a year or two old, then they sort by frequency. They start memorizing the most frequent questions first. Then they pass the interview. There are other forums with question banks (airbnb's whole question bank is leaked), but I wont get into that

Can we not advertise that cesspool of a company?

They are a pile of trash who are more than happy to place travelers in dangerous scenarios, while moving refund goalposts down the infinitely+long field.

Any mention of the company is advertising, whether you want to believe it or not.

Re: Show HN: Onsites.fyi - Curated Big Tech Interview Experiences

#88

Post by otteromkram »

airstrike wrote: post #79
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not as bad once you accept its memorization, and treat it like that.

Sadly not everyone is equally adept at memorization, so if you're solving for that as a hiring manager, you will only (mostly) appeal to this subset of people

Then they're probably not a good candidate for a high-paying, high-expectations job.

Thank you for pointing that out.

Re: Show HN: Onsites.fyi - Curated Big Tech Interview Experiences

#89

Post by frozenport »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #26

Horrible. I’ve been doing software engineering for 12+ years and I’ve never had to pass leetcode questions. I have worked for 5 companies in total, and I think I have been in around 15-20 tech interviews in total as well. The interviews I passed didn’t ask me leetcode questions (I had to do take home assignments and system design). In my last interview they finally stop asking coding questions (staff position). No Fa…

You're probably making 3x less

Re: Show HN: Onsites.fyi - Curated Big Tech Interview Experiences

#90

Post by oooyay »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #36

To reiterate: Ignore all study materials. Go to leetcode.com and literally memorize the most common questions for the company you are interviewing at. This is what your competition is doing. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. Just memorize it Do the same thing for system design. Memorize the answers word for word. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL. The highest paid tech jobs go to candidates that regurgitate perfect answers to inter…

I don't think this is very good advice. Enough of the companies that believe in testing by algorithms are smart enough to change their questions slightly for each candidate.

I'm not sure, however, what if anything testing by algorithms proves. Sure, you should know how and when to use them like I know how and when to use different blades of a saw. Nobody has ever asked me to tell them how the saw gets made though. The things that matter to me as a Senior+ engineer these days are:

- Do you know how and when to use various algorithms

- Are you going to conform to a given code bases styling and standards

- Do you know how to properly test a given piece of functionality

- Do you know how to interrogate the debugger to find answers to your own questions

- Do you know commonly accepted standards and where to find them

- Are you going to over engineer and completely pollute the code base with unmaintainable code or infrastructure

Algorithms and systems design test for only one of the above. If we ever get a tech union algorithm interviews are on a top five of things I'd like them to do away with.

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