Another thing I found quite common in these people who can easily get a lot of great offers is that they keep writing things down, so that they never forget what they have learnt. A blog for digestions and summarizations is very usefully and can help a lot.
Interview advice that got me offers
51–60 of 372 posts
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#52The hardest part about interviewing is that there is no feedback loop; I once interviewed at 10 companies within 2 weeks and got rejected from all of them, but to this day I still don't know what part I need to improve upon.
Same. I interviewed with Amazon twice and it's like a 10-hour meat grinder. No offer either time and I have no idea what I did wrong.
I absolutely don't get those wide open questions like "How would you design 1-hour delivery?" (real question btw). As someone who has done a lot of consulting work, my instincts are never, ever try to answer such a ridiculously broad question on your own with no context. The answer to me is to budget for several weeks of planning with a broad range of stakeholders to prioritize features and come up with an initial technical approach that we can refine after an MVP launch, but I don't think that's what they wanted to hear.
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#53> Keeping those skills sharp even when you’re not job hunting. I rather hire someone with wisdom across multiple areas than a bleeding edge expert in few, very narrow specialty. In my experience, a group of generalists will often deal better with a problem than a group of specialist.
I don’t believe in generalists. Everyone has interests and strengths that over time move them in a direction to specialization. To say one codes both the front end and back end of a web site is about as general as I’d accept.
Example, game developers and financial systems engineers have very little shared domain knowledge and would require a huge amount of context switching on the order of months.
Mobile engineers also rarely want to work on server code. The tooling, the languages, the UX, they don’t even intersect on a vin diagram. Tools like react-native try to work around this discrepancy, but it’s few and far between.
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#54Interesting stuff. For the Bloomberg thing, I would probably view warily any company that offered so much to try to get me to join. I'd wonder why they need to try so hard to get people to join.
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#55h1b helps too
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just about "algorithm hazing" but about presentation and communication skills that are often not a big part of the job of especially lower level developers, or at least not assessed in the same way. Keeping your communication and presentation skills sharp will not just benefit you in finding a new job, but also in advancing where you are, but you're rarely fired if you fail to improve at it.
>presentation and communication skills These can be assessed completely without whiteboard quizzes.
If I was going to judge dev interviewees solely on presentation and communication I'd have hired FEWER people than I have using algorithm questions as well.
If you're junior, and you can't tell me anything interesting about the work you've done in the past, but can at least write some code quickly to solve some sample problems, you've at least shone something.
If you're pretty experienced, though... not having much you can talk in depth about is a bigger flag.
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can confirm as a senior engineer at a FAANG. I've rejected people for showing negative non-technical traits but being ok technically, and recommended people for hire with not the best technical skills but with excellent non-technical/leadership traits. Life is too short to work with assholes if it can be helped.
> I've rejected people for showing negative non-technical traits I'm not an expert, but this can be a really slippery slope to implicit bias creeping in to your hiring decisions, especially if these traits are outside of your area of interview/expertise.
I bet physical appearance plays into whether someone's perceived this way too.
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#58> Your mad technical skills no longer matter to them. If anything, humility and an openness to learning will show you in the best light. I've been interviewing for the last couple of weeks and I agree with this. Being a "good" human being, i.e. candid, humble, kind, friendly, seems to be valued a lot more than what I thought before. At the end of the day is people working with people, and the more humans that interac…
I recently had a technical interview where I stumbled the whole way through, but I kept my attitude lighthearted, asked plenty of dumb questions, and am pretty sure I even said "Oh, geez, I'm an idiot" at one point. They acknowledged that I was a weak candidate, but they liked me enough to extend an offer amounting to a 33% salary increase over my current job--and with an additional 33% bump after 6 months if I can p…
That doesn't seem to apply at FAANGs. I had some positive interviews where I went out of my way to build some rapport and it got a lot of smiles but no offer. It definitely worked at the completely not FAANG company that I work for now. I think I'm probably better off this way.
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#59One additional tip on recruiters: have a cheat sheet ready (web page or public Google doc) that answers the basic questions they'll have for you and makes clear your expectations. Here's the info I ask them to provide: - Job Title and Salary - Job Description - Company Overview and Location - Steps in Hiring Process Whenever I'm emailed by a recruiter, I politely thank them for reaching out, paste the link to the che…
Do you find that recruiters will typically give you a salary range beyond "competitive" before you've started the interview process?
Yes. My cheat sheet includes a "Minimum base salary" bullet point that is much higher than my walk-away number. This anchors the discussion.
I find the recruiters who get back to me are pretty open and transparent. If not, that's a sign they're probably not well connected with the company and may even simply be front-running a listing they found on a job site.
On preview: what @kortilla said. I don't find it limiting since it's a number I would be happy accepting (all other things being acceptable). I'm not out to maximize my salary. I want to maximize my well-being.
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
You usually have to be the first mover and be willing to give them a number you’re looking for.
This would limit your options, though.
This limits options that are unwilling to meet your requirements; places you would have passed on due to insufficient salaries anyway. If you're willing to take lower salaries, lower your minimal salary requirements to receive more of them.
Dictating salary reqs up front does two things:
1. Reduces time wasted on folks or orgs that don't want to pay your rate.
2. Immediately moves discussion away from a dance around salary to salary _negotiation_. Any good HR org that can't meet your salary reqs and still wants you will try to compensate in other ways (stocks, RSUs, benefits, bonuses, etc).