I need to get a good software engineering job, BUT I'm tired of the take home projects, the 5 phase interviews just to drop you 1h before a final -not important just burecreacy-google meeting with the VP of Engineering, recuriter just tells you there's been some internal miss-communication on the roles they're hiring and they're not looking for frontend roles anymore, and they're sorry...
Nevermind I'm pretty good at backend too with node/python and devops chops...
I need to learn vue and nuxt for applying to a job now, It would take me 20% effort and time doing it in react/next but who cares... not the recuriters or companies..
The 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.
If you aced the technical questions, then it must be the behavioral part. One big trap there is the question about conflict resolution. The naive answer "I avoid conflicts" is a mistake: according to the trendy big five personality traits system, avoiding conflicts is a sign of guess what? combative personality. You want to present yourself as a "agreeable" person. The person asking these questions is rarely a psychologist. Instead the interviewer is given a big spreadsheet with 50 or so canned questions and 5 or so columns with examples of answers and how those answers must be interpreted. Finally the interviewer crosschecks your answers with the spreadsheet and gives ratings to five personality traits. In your case, you must be said some keyword, the interviewers, who can't care less, matched that keyword with the spreadsheet and you got a bad rating. The HRs also can't care less, so they obviously don't bother to double-check the ratings (if anyone bothered to actually record your answer). Anyways, morale of the story is that behavioral questions are just like leetcode: you need to know the right answers before you start the interview.
> 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 have had opposite experiences. Many of my interviews were straight evaluations on technical ability, many of which I failed. Amazon in particular, I had told the interviewer that my day-to-day was in C#, but they continued to ask rigorous javascript questions, of which I could explain most of the answer, but failed to find the very specific javascript answer they were looking for. As a result, I was blocked by Amaz…
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.
That is a good point. The company is certainly no FAANG, but those aren't quite my cup of tea, so I am grateful for that.
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.
FAANGs are a different beast altogether. Especially at the IC level, it is 99% technical, given a normal-human-being-behavior. Then, technical the way they (individual interviewer and company) evaluate it and you don't know about, since I had a few interviews in which I was confident I did a very good job (I am not a junior...) and they got back with a rejection on technical grounds.
One striking example was when I solved the coding problems posed to me in 15 minutes out of the 45 available, the interviewer said "that's great, I don't have any more questions, please use this time for you to ask about the company" and then the recruiter told me I was rejected because I did not do the coding part well enough.
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.
This assumes that your soft skills evaluations are more colored by implicit bias than your technical evaluations. Everything is colored by bias, it's just different kinds of bias. And stuff being inside your area of expertise is no defense against bias. You might subconsciously assume someone doesn't know certain technical things and simply not bother to ask the question.
I recently got interviewed by a FAANG company, and it was not a nice experience, it had like 4 hours of back to back interviews with 4 different people and couple of them didn't even bother.. on the technical side, I was asked questions that didn't even fit my profile :( . although am waiting for their response, regardless of whether i have cleared their "tech" rounds, at this point I dont even care about that interv…
If you're not up for four to eight hours of interviews (with a break or two, depending on how long the day is), asking the standard bank of questions, it doesn't sound like you're a good fit for a big tech company.
But why did you bother applying?
None of what you describe seems like it should have been a surprise.
Great advice. Especially practice interviewing and keeping skills up. Alas, the interview barriers set up by many companies would leave them without staff if applied to their current employees.
You usually have to be the first mover and be willing to give them a number you’re looking for.
Never give the first number https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24588379
If you can't articulate your own sense of your worth, it's very hard to engage with someone I've found.
Note - I've always given my number first (and all consultants tend to) and it's worked out fine.
Note, most people don't like dealing with places that are not upfront with the number to purchase the item / time etc. So if you are selling your labor, have some sense of its value /price.
> 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…
That explains a lot of the shitty software lately. Just joking. No, not really.