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Interview advice that got me offers

zainrizvi.io

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Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#271

Post by hugey010 »

slg wrote: post #166
ZainRiz wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great advice. A single memorable event you went though tends to highlight many different skills, so having a few stories down well will let you answer most of those questions And what if it doesn't answer the interviewer's question perfectly? Their real goal was to try to get to know you better. The question was just a prompt to get a better signal about you, and you delivered above and beyond what was asked.

>And what if it doesn't answer the interviewer's question perfectly? Exactly. You only need to avoid the extreme of looking like a politician in a debate completely dodging a question. And even if you do get too far away from the question, you can always close it out with a joke about how off topic you got which gives you a chance to connect with the interviewer on a human level.

I love when candidates go on sort of relevant tangents. It shows they've actually done the work and formed opinions about it. Pros and cons, maintenance and growth, missteps and how they've been burned, competing or preferred solutions, etc. It means they are capable of more than: I can code in X and help clear your backlog.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#272

Post by nitwit005 »

dcolkitt wrote: post #159
MattGaiser wrote: post #28

> Keeping those skills sharp even when you’re not job hunting. Can I just add "Leetcoder" as a part time job on my resume? It is amusing how in this industry, your ability to interview will not at all be improved by spending time doing your job unless it is algo heavy. It is a separate job entirely.

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…

If fluid intelligence was truly perceived as the most important thing, then people would just skip the coding entirely and try to directly measure fluid intelligence. There are companies more than happy to run IQ tests and the like to screen candidates. Probably a lot cheaper than the current hiring processes.

The fact that they aren't trying that, and are instead attempting to get a measure of coding ability, suggests they don't really believe in the approach.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#273

Post by nitwit005 »

nrmitchi wrote: post #45
Bahamut wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.

You'll probably end up with some good looking staff with excellent teeth. People always like pretty people.

Or these days, possibly the people with excellent webcam setups?

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#274

Post by BalinKing »

st1x7 wrote: post #182
speedgoose wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but the algorithms challenges are not very representative of the actual work we do in our industry. 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 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 general problem solving skills.

Not necessarily saying you're wrong, at least not when it comes to general trends, but nonetheless this definitely needs a citation. Is there really that much of a correlation between 1) general intelligence and 2) happening to find the "trick" corresponding to a typical tech interview problem?

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#275

Post by BalinKing »

chrisseaton wrote: post #30
deeeeplearning wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting better at leetcode is hardly "bettering oneself", what a bizarre point of view.

If Leetcode is all you can think of to do to learn and practice skills then you've got a poor imagination. One side project I did in my spare time outside of work got me onto my PhD and has literally saved people's lives. People here probably think that's a waste of time and I should have just lazed about instead.

> If Leetcode is all you can think of to do to learn and practice skills then you've got a poor imagination.

I think the point is that real-world experience often doesn't translate into Leetcode skills, meaning that you have no choice but to devote time to the otherwise-useless[0] skill of solving Leetcode problems. If making a cool side project, etc. was what helped most software developers get better at interviews, "people here" wouldn't be complaining in the first place.

Sure, you are learning something by solving Leetcode problems, but not anything useful[1] except in the artificial world of software interviews.

[0] This is probably heavily dependent on the specific jobs in question—I'm only speaking from my personal experience.

[1] Same as [0].

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#276

Post by jcrites »

I've found that if you are transparent as recruiters and treat them as partners , sharing the offers you've gotten at other companies, they will reciprocate. At one of the Big Tech companies where I interviewed and they ultimately decided not to give me an offer (it was a near thing and I had other offers), the recruiter gave me tips about what other companies she was aware of that were paying well in my area (that I wasn't aware of).

Your relationship with recruiters is more complicated and nuanced than the game-theory relationship would lead you to be believe. Maybe I could have gotten slightly better offers if I had used classic hardball negotiating tactics, but from colleagues, other recruiters, and other data sources, it looks like being transparent resulted in me getting top-of-market offers for my job role at the companies where I was interviewing and got offers.

My philosophy is to interact with everyone as if I'm planning to join their team from the beginning, almost as if I'm already a team member. That entails among other things that if you're going to join someone's team then you'll interact with them with transparency and vice versa.

During my recent round of interviews, I shared the ballpark details about all the offers I got and all the companies I was interviewing with with every company I was working with, and I was pleasantly surprised with the results. Recruiters would give me tips like "Competitor X's offer is likely to offer the highest compensation, but here are some reasons you should consider us", or "Offer Y from is a very good offer", all from recruiters at other companies. If I had been cagey I don't think I would have built relationships with recruiters where they'd share tips like that with me.

I think a no-bullshit approach is refreshing and worth considering. The trick is being high demand as talent -- having multiple offers and being a desirable candidate for employers to hire.

The recruiters that I recently worked with at all the big tech companies, pre-IPO tech companies, and startups were all very professional and I think I only benefited from treating them as partners in the profess of finding the best next job -- because the company and employee are looking for a mutual fit, after all. This resulted in me having a number of great offers (a few where I don't have details yet) that I'm currently in the process of deciding between.

There might be really good negotiators who could do even better, but simply showing that you're high demand in the market was enough for me to get good offers from the companies I was working with who made them.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#277

Post by ativzzz »

mnouquet wrote: post #268
vincentmarle wrote: post #9

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.

While I totally agree, would you ask a failed date why you didn't qualify to get laid...

I mean why not?

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#278

Post by akdas »

Smaug123 wrote: post #220
akdas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge +1 on explicitly setting expectations. I've written on this topic[0], and there are a lot of different ways interviewers don't set expectations: - Is the interviewer looking for syntactically correct code, or general algorithmic skills? - For a warmup, is the interviewer looking for a basic solution, or an optimal solution? - For architecture walkthroughs, what level of detail is expected? The extra pressure is…

On the other hand, I go through months where half my job is devising ways to extract requirements from users who just want me to "make this problem go away"! I consider it very reasonable to test someone's ability to work out what problem they're meant to be solving.

You know what your job is: to figure out the problem. And the interviewer should be clear they are looking for you to figure out the problem to solve.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#279

Post by throwaway80332 »

xyzelement wrote: post #198
itronitron wrote: post #102

Worth noting that the author claims to get lots of job offers but is not able to "create an array" in a language of their choice from memory.

I think you're saying this to dismiss the wisdom of the author. I think it's actually worth noting that you can be a very valuable developer and not remember minutiae. For example, in the last few days I wrote in C++, Python and JS. Do you think my fingers always typed the right type of bracket to create an array as I jumped between the languages? Who cares.

tis the same brackets tho

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#280

Post by scsilver »

dcolkitt wrote: post #159
MattGaiser wrote: post #28

> Keeping those skills sharp even when you’re not job hunting. Can I just add "Leetcoder" as a part time job on my resume? It is amusing how in this industry, your ability to interview will not at all be improved by spending time doing your job unless it is algo heavy. It is a separate job entirely.

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…

Before taking algos/data structures I did terrible on whiteboards. After, I do well. From this experience, they seem reasonable indicators of a cs grads intelligence. I doubt I am too much better of a software engineer in my day to day job, but I do think this toolkit does unlock a second disperate level of engineering ability, to code core algos for novel software.

I just have a problem suggesting learning this one set of skills really boosts my fluid intelligence. Im probably just as intelligent as I was before.

But I do get the cooralating signal as a cheap, low false positive approach to selecting good candidates.

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