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Interview advice that got me offers

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Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#221

Post by jldugger »

tomcam wrote: post #206
mdorazio wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is terrible, outdated advice for anyone with more than a couple years experience. The value you get out of it is not wasting everyone's time when the salary available isn't even close to high enough. Decide what your minimum compensation requirement is, increase this by some percentage that would make you happy, and give that to recruiters. You will get far more out of avoiding bullshit than you will potentially…

I am an old guy who is a better-than-average negotiator (top 20%, not top 1%) and I’d like to hear more about that. In my view, it is never advantageous to come up with the first number in any kind of business negotiation and I have done tens of millions of dollars in negotiations for myself over the last couple of decades. But I haven’t interviewed for a job in 20 years. I would like to hear more about why that conc…

LinkedIn makes it pretty simple to get many recruiter contacts a day. These are not qualified leads, and many are dialing for dollars -- hoping to fill a vacancy with a warm body long enough to get the agency fee.

Most people ignore these contacts, so it does kinda work to match needy recruiters with underemployed IT pros. But when you're already at FAANG making 400k a year, it can take a recruiter phone call, two tech screens, and an onsite before compensation comes up, and you're now invested like 10 hours into a negotiation where your BATNA exceeds whatever budget they have written down. I've had one recruiter get a bit angry even over it, as if my number was unrealistic (I assume they were unprepared to make a competitive offer).

Since there are so many of these lowball recruiters, some people resort to screening them out up front with a salary negotiation.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#222

Post by chris11 »

d4mi3n wrote: post #60
saagarjha wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you're willing to take lower salaries, lower your minimal salary requirements to receive more of them.

To me that feels more complicated in Silicon Valley with equity. Once a minimum salary is met, I'll care about total compensation, not just the base salary. I'd be nervous that mentioning a low salary could lower an offer, and I don't a have reasonable number for salary I would accept if the company doesn't give much equity.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#223

Post by st1x7 »

deckard1 wrote: post #219
st1x7 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are a nice way to filter people who are not willing to spend a lot of time studying challenges to have job interviews though. They filter for general problem solving skills. Whether you acquired those skills through a degree, self-study, a week of leetcode or 3 months of leetcode will be up to your individual background and aptitude. It's a hiring process - filtering for something is the whole point. Personall…

They filter for memorization. Most leetcode problems you will not be able to solve in the allotted time without first being familiar with the problem or one very similar to it. Because most of those problems (and many CS algorithms) hinge on a certain "trick" to solving them. The way to pass a leetcode interview is to know exactly what the interviewer is asking and then pretend like you've never seen this problem bef…

I think that you're misrepresenting the process of solving these problems. Recognising that you need to use a certain data structure or that a problem falls in a larger class of similar problems is a skill that you can develop. Just because you get better at it with practice, doesn't mean that it's the same as memorization or that there is some special trick to solving each problem.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#224

Post by borroka »

jefftk wrote: post #162
borroka wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> 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. That's terrible behavior from the interviewer. Did you try raising this with your recrui…

The decision is already made, there is no point, nobody is going to backpedal on anything. I remember saying: "I don't get it", but she was clueless about the interview itself. It was a company in LA with a ghost.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#225

Post by tootie »

borroka wrote: post #75
tootie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

The one moment I know went wrong was when I couldn't remember the name "trie" and the interviewer just wrapped up and left 15 minutes early. And I still had 3 more sessions that day.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#226

Post by chollida1 »

doggosphere wrote: post #42
chollida1 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most engineers are introverts is this a defensible statement? I haven't seen any research that would lead me to believe that most engineers are introverts.

Defensibly anecdotally. Perhaps you have seen a classroom full of engineering students?

I am an engineer, have an engineering degree. Fully disagree with your assertion.

I'll fall back on my anecdotal evidence of the monthly keg parties that the engineering department threw to counter your example.

Again the statement that most engineers are introverted is in no way defensible and its insulting to try and group us all together like that.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#227

Post by iainctduncan »

steverb wrote: post #202
random5634 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do hiring (not recruiting). I generally want to understand what someone's ask is first. After that I'm usually very upfront (ie, immediate verbal feedback) on how that falls into the position vs their apparent skill set etc. If they have come in low (not uncommon for non bay area folks) I'll let them know that there are opportunities for growth beyond where they would start at. If they are someone we want we'll gen…

"If they are too high I'm usually upfront that at that rate they'd be flat compensation wise for a number of years" I've heard that once before and it always puzzled me. Basically you're telling the candidate that you want to underpay them now, so you can eventually pay them what they are worth. The math is in their favor even if they don't get a raise next year. And of course, next year they will be worth more anywa…

I didn't fall the for the line, but I had that used on me. Raise time came up and I was told that after review my salary was still inline with what they wanted to pay for my experience, because I had negotiated up from their initial offer on initial here. I was gone several months later. Such a stupid thing to do.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#228

Post by xyzelement »

_qulr wrote: post #218
xyzelement wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same kind of person who never finds a partner because of the "ceremony around" dating, I guess? In both situations, it's not like you're adding a commodity product to your Amazon shopping card. The matching is non-trivial and both parties have to recognize and commit to the effort-full process. To abstract your comment all the way out - how many people live well below their potential because they are too lazy or afra…

> Same kind of person who never finds a partner because of the "ceremony around" dating, I guess? If dates were conducted like coding interviews — assuming the candidate is a liar and forcing them to prove in detail why they're not — you'd never get a second date. A job is supposed to be a voluntary, mutually advantageous relationship between two parties. So interviews ought to be kind of like dating, where you're tr…

>> Employers too often assume that interviews are a one-way street, where the candidate wants the job no matter what and will do anything to get it. On the contrary, the candidate can walk away at any time, and the employer needs to woo the candidate just as much as the candidate needs to woo the employer.

I guess I am lucky but I never had (or gave) an interview of the former, so it DID feel like this: "On the contrary, the candidate can walk away at any time, and the employer needs to woo the candidate just as much as the candidate needs to woo the employer."

Hence my comment. It sounds like you've interviewed at some shitty places or maybe underappreciated how much power you actually have.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#229

Post by edumucelli »

The same kind of articles over and over again with lots of text, but in reality everyone knows that in tech if you want a FAANG (and now extended to several other companies) job you better spend hours in Hackerrank/Leetcode. All the rest (except maybe Amazon with their "principles" thing) is a nice-to-have.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#230

Post by RogerL »

uh_uh wrote: post #184
dcolkitt wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that industrial psychology has consistently found that fluid intelligence is the best predictor of job performance. Even more so than experience.[0] Whiteboard interviews are used, not because they have a lot of relevance to the job, but because they're a hard-to-fake indicator of high intelligence. Somebody who shows a lot of mental fluidity with complex data structures, almost assuredly can quickly m…

Doing well on whiteboard interviews can be a sign of high intelligence (a true positive result). But what signal does doing poorly on them give? Did you measure the candidate's intelligence (true negative), or preparedness maybe anxiety levels (false negative)? I guess the answer is that it does not matter as long as you have a large enough true positive candidate pool. And FAANG has this.

Sure it matters. Who doesn't do well due to stress? I think you'll find women, minorities and basically a lot of people outside of the cultural norm/majority do poorly.

That's not an argument that you can eliminate test anxiety, but certainly if we can reduce it without destructively eliminating the high value candidate pool we should do so.

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