> 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.
We need to band together and stop rewarding companies who pull this shit in interviews. Leetcode problems are not applicable to 99% of the actual work in most software engineering roles. There are other, gentler ways to find out if someone knows what binary trees, dynamic programming, sorting, and big O notation are.
Speak for yourself. I love Leetcode. It's a standardized process that I can study for and basically be guaranteed to get a job in a sunset of companies that pay extremely highly.
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…
It's because they thought you memorized the problems and solutions. Next time if you get something you know, feign ignorance and just stumble through it naturally.
There is no stock right or wrong answer for those kinds of questions. You should ask questions to understand which area the interviewer wants you to concentrate on (if any). Some interviewers are happy if you choose an area where you can showcase your experience, others expect you to answer an area they have in mind. If you cover enough, with enough detail, they will be happy. Ask questions.
That's what I thought, but they seemed annoyed at my questions.
There is a correct answer actually, one which can be studied for. That question is a system design question, they wanted you to come up with some architecture for it, that you will know once you study system design. To do so, just search up "system design questions site:GitHub.com".
Tip 3 is huge. I ask hard questions during interviews, and I don’t expect a perfect answer. What I do want is the interviewee to handle failure without being defensive, and to ask probing questions.
Heh, I once was introduced to a particular interview question. It has a solution that is hugely better than the best naive solution, but is basically a giant gotcha that seems obvious in retrospect. I couldn't find it myself even though I was stumbling around in its neighborhood. Obviously I gave this question informally to a ton of people as entertainment (Bay Area techies in various companies), and most couldn't fi…
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.
I think you'll find men, people in majorities and lots of people on average will do poorly, also.
What you are saying is an ethical/moral consideration and it is a valid one. When I said it doesn't matter, I meant that FAANG is commercially not incentivised to account for the anxiety factor. Even if they miss out on good candidates due to their anxiety, they can still choose from plenty of good candidates who don't suffer from anxiety. Given how many people are aspiring to join FAANG, I'd assume it's a buyer's ma…
I'm not sure that's true. What you describe is the case for any individual candidate, but doesn't account for how those candidates interact with one another. Specifically, it has repeatedly been shown that more diverse teams will consistently outperform more homogeneous ones. If your company only hires above the 95th percentile but their method for finding that quality cutoff is heavily skewed towards a certain demog…
> Specifically, it has repeatedly been shown that more diverse teams will consistently outperform more homogeneous ones.
From the data I've seen made public, FAANG are usually more diverse than other 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 psycho…
Can you elaborate on how avoiding conflicts is a sign of a combative personality?
People with combative personalities do not avoid conflict, they seek them out.
I think if you read up on the Big Five you may get a more refined understanding of how personality metrics are measured nowadays.
You can reach out to companies that interest you directly, using their career page, finding people who work there and contacting them (LinkedIn, or via Twitter but preferably through an introduction), or some combination of both. You'll usually get a message back if your online presence shows some sort of proof of skills.
Have you found a job using this approach? I just think that if I were on the receiving end, i'd be a bit creeped out if there wasn't an introduction. How would I get an introduction? Thanks for the unique tip though.
I know my manager has had people reach out cold on LinkedIn. His profile makes it pretty clear he’s hiring so he doesn’t mind at all. If he gets a good vibe he’ll setup a call between me and the potential candidate. If that all goes well we’ll kick off the formal recruitment process.
You can reach out to companies that interest you directly, using their career page, finding people who work there and contacting them (LinkedIn, or via Twitter but preferably through an introduction), or some combination of both. You'll usually get a message back if your online presence shows some sort of proof of skills.
Have you found a job using this approach? I just think that if I were on the receiving end, i'd be a bit creeped out if there wasn't an introduction. How would I get an introduction? Thanks for the unique tip though.
I got most of my jobs this way. It becomes easier later as your network grows and can vouch for you. If you don't have an existing network to help introduce you, find some people working where you're interested, contribute helpful stuff to their GH projects and ask them a referral. Takes more upfront work but it creates an internal ally who will be interested in helping you get in.
It's fairly easy to get someone to push your resume forward internally, if that person has some sort of (even benign) reason to think you'd be a good hire. Everyone wants to hire good people and often we're compensated for referrals who pan out.
To play Devil's Advocate, and I ask as someone not in the industry (I'm in academia) - is the difference between expectations really that large? I would imagine (perhaps unreasonably) that a relatively seasoned person on the job market would have a reasonable understanding of their market value within a few percentage points - so the recruiter might be willing to pay up to $105/hour, while you low balled it at $100/h…
I'm still early in my career, but the last two rounds of interviews I've done have yielded initial offers with a spread of $100k+/yr in total comp and $60k+/yr in base salary. Just to have concrete numbers to work with, suppose initial offers exactly correspond to final pay and that you're currently making toward the lower end of that range (e.g. because raises haven't kept up with your increased skill and increased…
I think my concern really is about the final 'negotiated' compensation & the parent's universal strategy to get there. I would imagine (correct me if I'm wrong) that regardless of the spread of the initial offers, you can reach a final negotiated compensation that is more or less in line with your market value. I would imagine that the more seasoned you are, the better you are at estimating your market value. You have a relatively clear eyed belief about what the final negotiated compensation would be, so why not just pad that as your starting bid? What's the downside? The parent's strategy of never revealing your number first doesn't make sense in that regard. For a seasoned worker, I don't see the payoffs at all.