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I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

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Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#501

Post by skh »

Aeolun wrote: post #423
notyourwork wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which makes sense right? Same reason a military general doesn’t start as a general. Architecture takes experience in the weeds to give a breadth you can leverage as you reason through architecture. Architecture isn’t aslways black and white decision making based on some specs which is where experience can help a ton.

Generals often start out as lieutenants though (e.g. officer academy drops you in on a higher rank).

In the U.S. military this is not true. People graduating from OCS, ROTC, or one of the academies start off at O-1 (2nd Lieutenant).

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#502

Post by [deleted] »

autokad wrote: post #367
cornellwright wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is BFS really that hard, especially if the interviewer is willing to talk it out with you and doesn't care a lot about finding the most efficient solution possible? I've been out of college more than 10 years now, do a mix of hardware and software (so am not coding all day everyday) and I can hack together algorithms like BFS if I spend a couple of minutes thinking about it. I get that there are many awful interviewe…

I'm a data scientist, and google asked me to sum all values of nodes at each height of a tree. I had to implement the tree, bfs, and the algo (which was easy once you have bfs) in a 25 minutes, minus any talky time. BFS is not something I thought about much in the last 5 years, and quite frankly could care less about. I got stuck when I knew I needed 'something' to finish implementing BFS, but couldn't remember and t…

[deleted]

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#503

Post by [deleted] »

abledon wrote: post #215
honkycat wrote: post #104

I've always been curious about working at one of these companies. I believe if I set the goal of getting hired at one of these places, I would probably be able to get a job: - 10 years professional programming experience - half-life, Quake, Starcraft, Warcraft II modding experience growing up - Avid reader ( ~50+ books/yr ) - tons of self practice and continuing education. I just like learning new things and find pro…

we all have time and energy. Time passes us by equally for everyone but its our choice how we spend our energy.

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Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#504

Post by nicoburns »

jsmeaton wrote: post #352
acpetrov wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just graduated, so I'm not dealing with constant internship interviews anymore, but at the time I absolutely hated it. My frustration isn't exactly like yours (my time is probably a lot less valuable). I feel that the questions are all geared at puzzle solvers. If you're a puzzle solver, you love answers. You love digging into the details. You love finding out the basic components of a system. I think these are the…

Honestly, it sounds like you may be geared more towards software architecture rather than software development. If you like the sound of the bigger picture more than the details, it might be something you could look into.

I like roles where I get to do both! I've found that a lot of problems come from these being different roles, and the developers not really understanding or buying into the vision of the architects (who might be able to see the big picture, but can often make decisions that make no sense due to being removed from the details of the existing implementation).

Of course in really large companies I suppose having these as a seperate role is a necessary evil. But I still think there should be much more collaboration and interaction between people in these different roles than I generally see.

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#505

Post by sidibe »

existencebox wrote: post #317
pradn wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interview at Google and I never look at resumes - to avoid bias. I don't want to be biased by whether you went to Yale or UT Austin. My question is always a standard algo/DS question anyway.

I say the following having worked at multiple "big-5" including G. Do you not feel any of the twist in your stomach that I feel when reading your post? That we're discarding any vestige of track record and accomplishment (that I pragmatically see as having correlated better than any other variable with effective coworkers in the past) for a readily gamable trivia question that I take some perverse pride in not having…

I can't speak for GP but I'm guessing they don't feel that taking the big picture view is their role in the interview process. In some companies the interviewer is just there to be another data point for the people who make the decision, and if their role is to just ask whiteboarding question it seems like looking at the resume could be the wrong thing to do.

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#506

Post by barry-cotter »

lr4444lr wrote: post #463
alasdair_ wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm a data scientist, and google asked me to sum all values of nodes at each height of a tree. I had to implement the tree, bfs, and the algo (which was easy once you have bfs) in a 25 minutes, minus any talky time. THIS is the problem. The (unreasonably) timed nature of the exercise means that the only people that will do well are the people that prep heavily for this specific skill, in much the same way that peopl…

Now take this analogy one step further: why aren't lawyers asked stupid timed LSAT questions at every job interview? Because they take a really challenging professional exam called the bar, which is a strong base level guarantee of actual knowledge and competence. Software Eng. have been fighting this kind of credentialing because somehow tech is "top innovative" for such standards. Hence the status quo, and why comp…

> Now take this analogy one step further: why aren't lawyers asked stupid timed LSAT questions at every job interview?

Because which law school they went to is on their resumé and the average LSAT scores for each school are trivially available, tracking very, very closely with school prestige.

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#507

Post by yowlingcat »

40acres wrote: post #32
avitzurel wrote: post #8

I really dislike the fact that you need to study for weeks with specific questions that really have no hold in real life. I've been doing this for 16+ years and I have never asked the type of questions you encounter in these books. Not even once.

The specific questions don't have a hold in real life but the patterns behind them do. Most problems to be solved in computer science, with enough abstraction, have already been solved. I joined a new software development scrum at work and have been helping optimize how long our application takes (it can be thought of as an encoding engine) we've seen huge leaps in improvement with very simple solutions, 75% of the t…

The patterns _can_ have a hold. It's always fun to optimize slow engines, but it always feel more to me like rote/busy work than actually building the system from scratch and engaging in product engineering. But, I guess that's kinda your point -- very simple solutions that revolve around simple, common core structures can lead to huge leaps in improvement. But this kind of real world optimization has medium breadth and depth. It's got a lot more breadth than many algo interviews I've gotten, and yet less depth. I've found that's been the real structural weakness in weak algo interviews I've had -- they just overindex on deep knowledge of algo optimization and underindex on communication, reading and design ability. I'm drawing from a pretty small and outdated sample, though; the last time I had the patience to interview with a BigCo was more than five years ago.

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#508

Post by nicoburns »

cornellwright wrote: post #394
spyspy wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and a lot of other commenters are getting hung up on the BFS example. It's just that - an example. There are dozens of algorithms that are "common" enough to be asked about and diminishing returns to having them all memorized.

Sure, but that's my point. So long as the interviewer is telling you what they'd actually like you to do, you should be able to just derive the algorithm you need to do it. At some point the algorithms become difficult enough (particularly if you add lots of constraints like efficiency) that it's pretty unreasonable to expect that in an interview though, and at that point it's a bad question. Rather than memorizing a…

My first reaction when inplementing anything more than a very simple algorithm is to google the best way to do it.

Of course, I could probably come up with a way to do it by myself. I could probably even come up with an efficient way if I spent an afternoon/day on it.

But why do that when I can google it, and get 3 blog posts and 2 stack overflow answers detailing the different options and the trade offs between them, most likely even with an implementation I can base mine off of?

That's why these interview situations are stupid. They're like school where copying is cheating, whereas in real-world situations copying is a great way of doing something.

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#509

Post by ec109685 »

Vel0cityX wrote: post #479
spyspy wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and a lot of other commenters are getting hung up on the BFS example. It's just that - an example. There are dozens of algorithms that are "common" enough to be asked about and diminishing returns to having them all memorized.

Except you don't need to have them _memorized_. You shouldn't. That's not the point.

But given it is straightforward to memorize, it isn’t a good test.

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#510

Post by sampo »

randcraw wrote: post #122
SamReidHughes wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Facebook makes one of the most useful pieces of software for everyday people. It's not a "destructive" product.

Many in Myanmar and Philippines might disagree. Facebook Admits It Was Used to Incite Violence in Myanmar https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo... What Happens When the Government Uses Facebook as a Weapon? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodri...

In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, they used a radio station to incite hatred and, well, the genocide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide

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