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“I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

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Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#541

Post by mdgrech23 »

decafninja wrote: post #483
neverminder wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are also counter-examples to your thinking. Brian Acton was rejected by Facebook, then went on founding WhatsApp and eventually selling it to the same Facebook for $19B. "Life altering amount of money", wouldn't you agree? Probably one of the most expensive rejections in history.

That's an extremely, extremely, extremely, unlikely edge case though. You're more likely to get simultaneous offers from all the letters in FAANG while also simultaneously becoming a 1MM+ subscriber Youtube star than you are of repeating Brian's story (or even a fraction of it).

I think a major take away here is the interviewers weed out ppl who don't know complex algorithms off the top of their head but you don't really need that to make a successful app anyhow.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#542

Post by rhombocombus »

vsareto wrote: post #441
neverminder wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because when companies get that big and famous they no longer need that many creative individual thinkers, they need obedient drones. With disproportionately large numbers of applicants they get, they are able to make you jump through all the hoops they put in front of you, because if you won't there are thousands of others who will.

NGL, I'd jump through hoops for 250k + other compensation Part of why this has stuck around for so long is that so many people are willing to do that because it's a life-altering amount of money

Not my thing personally (at least not today). I could buy a lot more toys and BS and retire earlier if I took one of those jobs, but my already generous (not by FAANG standards) programmer salary is enough and it comes along with a sane schedule and reasonable work expectations. The value in this is I get more time outside of work to enjoy my life, which is worth more than an extra pile of lucre when I already get by pretty comfortably.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#543

Post by dnautics »

_benj wrote: post #519
dnautics wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one of the companies I interviewed at had a question where they showed me a bug in what looked to be an old version of their UI and I had to debug it as a pair with them piloting. I didn't get the job (probably in part because as an "almost totally backend" it took me a bit of time to decide to look at the web console), but it was literally the best interview I'd been on. It really exercised everything you could poss…

I wish companies like that would be easier to find! From the feel of this thread it seems to me that a company that explicitly states on "Who's Hiring" that they don't do leetcode, but do actual pair programming for evaluating candidates would have an advantage above the rest!

My PL of choice is Elixir. I had zero interviews with leetcode questions, but there was one where they asked me to verbally describe how a hash table works under the hood, they didn't seem to care too much about the answer so long as it was ballpark and you said "O(1)" or I think I said "fake, amortized O(1)".

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#544

Post by okareaman »

rsynnott wrote: post #492
okareaman wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly: (from https://arto.s3.amazonaws.com/notes/go ) "The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they're not researchers. They're typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They're not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for…

This sort of "programming language designed for people we apparently have a very low opinion of" approach also greatly informed the design of Java, though Java has spent the last 20 years slowly retreating from it. It looks like Go might be following the same path; it's apparently getting generics at some point!

Can you imagine how many times Google was burned by junior devs writing C++ no matter how smart they were? Memory bugs at Google scale must be expensive. They had to come up with Go.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#545

Post by okareaman »

chrisseaton wrote: post #493
okareaman wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - it's not enough to be able to solve the problems, you need to be able to solve them on the spot, without much thinking, in an interview context Sounds like they're looking for assembly line programmers - crank out the code, pass it off, then on to the next piece of code without pause. This would be a nightmare for me. The high salaries and prestige of these companies definitely would not be worth it. I'm not neur…

> Sounds like they're looking for assembly line programmers Sounds like the exact opposite - they're specifically looking for people who can actually solve algorithmic problems, rather than just code them up.

I didn't say you didn't need to solve algorithmic problems. That's why you study and go to college. I said you needed to be fast.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#546

Post by programmertote »

yodsanklai wrote: post #434
programmertote wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind sharing, where do you learn/read-up about the system design questions? I am not a software architect although I designed and built small modules/libraries of my own, but I don't think it's sufficient to learn about system design questions found in interviews (not just FAANG's).

A great starting point is "designing data-intensive applications". Then you can read about various designs here and there. But you don't need to go that very deep. What they ask is very specific and (unfortunately) you're better off going through 10-20 typical interview questions and their solutions. Typical questions are "how would you design Google News/Twitter/...". There are many resources available, all of this…

Thank you very much!

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#547

Post by chrisseaton »

okareaman wrote: post #545
chrisseaton wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like they're looking for assembly line programmers Sounds like the exact opposite - they're specifically looking for people who can actually solve algorithmic problems, rather than just code them up.

I didn't say you didn't need to solve algorithmic problems. That's why you study and go to college. I said you needed to be fast.

But an 'assembly line', line-of-business programmer has almost no need to solve algorithmic problems. Why would they test that if that's what they needed?

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#548

Post by erikerikson »

Interviews do have to check whether the requirements of the role are met by the candidate but the real value in an interview is uncovering the candidates greatest strengths and loves in the domain of the position. That tells you so much more about how they will show up every day and the kinds of value they will create.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#549

Post by biddit »

tinkertamper wrote: post #76
zug_zug wrote: post #8

A rather tired conversation in my opinion. Everybody likes to complain about interviews, but every single alternative I've heard is even worse: Take-homes are biased toward those willing to work hours for free, a "track record" is biased toward those who inflate their resume, a casual conversation is biased toward the likable and native english speakers, high-level whiteboarding is biased towards people who are good…

Recently I started trying something new for our interviews. I start with a phone interview that is more about discussing their background, expertise, what they need to feel productive, and explain the role. If I think they’d be a good culture and expertise fit, I send them something like this (I’ve made a few): https://gist.github.com/tywalch/cf60e4c942ab6a80e481f4ba6754... . It’s a small “api service” that represent…

I had an interview a few years ago where they literally hauled out some of their legacy code (unstructured PHP written in the PHP 4 era), and asked me to make a list of what I'd do to clean it up and make it more manageable. No coding involved.

It was a very pleasant experience from this side too and allowed me to express all of my domain knowledge without making a significant investment. This is such a great approach IMO.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#550

Post by michaelt »

rsynnott wrote: post #492
okareaman wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly: (from https://arto.s3.amazonaws.com/notes/go ) "The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they're not researchers. They're typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They're not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for…

This sort of "programming language designed for people we apparently have a very low opinion of" approach also greatly informed the design of Java, though Java has spent the last 20 years slowly retreating from it. It looks like Go might be following the same path; it's apparently getting generics at some point!

Eh, I've always seen this as the counterpart of the old meme that there are no bad languages, only bad programmers.

He's not going to get many C programmers to adopt his language if he gets on stage and announces C is a crap language and anyone who thinks their code doesn't have memory bugs just hasn't found them yet. Is this asshole saying I'm bad at my job?

On the other hand, if he says that of course you, dear reader, have never coded a bug in your life - it's other programmers who do that, and this new language will help you collaborate with those poor unfortunates? That's an easier pill to swallow.

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