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Tech Interview Handbook

techinterviewhandbook.org

11–20 of 132 posts

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#11

"GPA does matter" No, it does not, unless you're a recent graduate. Absolutely nobody pays attention to your GPA, if you're more than a few years in your career.

As a new grad I didn't have my GPA on my resume and it never actually came up except for the occasional transcript request. I had a fine GPA, but not high enough for it to be a nice datapoint.

I had plenty of interest with lots of companies, including many FAANGMGOEWVIOPJW companies.

This was years ago though.

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#12

These interviews are becoming their own profession.

I've been an interviewer with Karat for 2.5yrs, it's genuinely great. https://karat.com/

I know you made the statement in jest, but trying to improve on the interview process is not a bad idea. At the very least, it's less engineering time wasted conducting interviews.

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#13

Let me give a cautionary tale in the form of an ad (my email is in my profile). Full disclaimer: it's both, but the value to the discussion is the cautionary tale part. Feel free to ignore the ad part. Edit: I tacked on a perspective how I started to like leetcode questions, I hope that helps people find some inspiration to get through the leetcode grind. If I can do it during the evenings, then so can you! ;-) I'm l…

If it helps, I didn't really start to grok system design and architecture until more than 2 years full time. Before that it was just a bunch of functions/methods, classes that used each other. Slowly though, you start to notice the patterns, you see what failed badly and how it failed (bad design). You get burnt having to solve problems in badly designed code. You get stuck trying to test badly designed code. You slowly see the bigger picture, how to put together these small pieces into that complete application that isn't a tangled mess and unmaintainable (bad design = maintainability being inversely related to time * functionality, or some equation of that sort).

Of course this has nothing to do with what system design questions (most) interviewers care about. But this is the system design that matters on the job.

Read books for the real system design after you land the job, they won't really stick before you get expeirence - refactoring legacy applications, pragmatic programmer, clean coder, clean code, clean architecture (all clean books are by 'Uncle Bob').

For interview system design (I'm not speaking from too much experience here), youtube has some good videos "software system design interview", I've seen "grokking the system design interview" book being mentioned.

Good luck. Hope this helps somewhat.

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#14
post #6

These interviews are becoming their own profession.

The last time I interviewed, I did it full-time for about a month. Was kind of fun actually: you're solving isolated little coding problems, talking with companies about their engineering and business challenges, meeting smart and friendly people, and at the end of it all you get a big pay raise. The downside is mostly that it's a ton of scheduling calls and on-sites (back when those were in person). At the end of th…

Well yes.

To get a software engineering job, step 1 is to quit your software engineering job to study full time to get a job doing something very similar.

Doing your job as a software engineer is an impediment to interviewing as one.

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#15
One thing that always blows me away (literally) is candidates that will eat like a tunafish sandwich with onions five minutes before they come in for an interview.

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#16
post #10

Here are some psychological tricks that will help you ace a job interview. Tailor your answers to the interviewer's age. Generation Y interviewers (between 20 and 30): Bring along visual samples of your work and highlight your ability to multitask. Generation X interviewers (between 30 and 50): Emphasize your creativity and mention how work/life balance contributes to your success. Baby Boomer interviewers (between 5…

Since when are 35 year old in 2021 gen-x?

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#17

This is... incredibly disconnected from my 15-odd years of experience in my career. Is this how Silicon Valley engineering careers work?

This is really skewed to recent or new graduate and elite universities. When I was out of college, 15 years ago, some of the internships listed were hard or near impossible to get into. Take for example Goldman Sachs. They should be listing more regular internships and not those who managed to matriculate into the elite of the elite (hint: not a meritocracy). If anything it creates disillusionment that STEM careers are a straight path to being the next Bezos. It is like golfing: pick up golf to play golf not to play on the PGA tour.

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#18
post #10

Here are some psychological tricks that will help you ace a job interview. Tailor your answers to the interviewer's age. Generation Y interviewers (between 20 and 30): Bring along visual samples of your work and highlight your ability to multitask. Generation X interviewers (between 30 and 50): Emphasize your creativity and mention how work/life balance contributes to your success. Baby Boomer interviewers (between 5…

Since when are 35 year old in 2021 gen-x?

They aren't. It has the generations all wrong.

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#19
I disagree with this resume advice actually. He for example removes that he was in the military sniper team and won best shot, but keeps high school education? I would totally say the opposite, keep the cool the side thing that's a conversation starter, but remove irrelevant educational experience.

Including the number of stars on the github projects they worked on seems so.... narcissistic? Promotional? Idk but its distasteful and I would probably throw out the resume at that.

I really think all of the resume changes, other than the incoming intern at bytedance were extremely bad changes. It went from someone who is smart, with a breadth of experiences, to someone that is obsessed with social media likes.

Re: Tech Interview Handbook

#20

"GPA does matter" No, it does not, unless you're a recent graduate. Absolutely nobody pays attention to your GPA, if you're more than a few years in your career.

I never put my GPA on any resume. I had a garbage GPA because the only classes I went to were CS classes so I got horrible grades in all my required electives. I was worried someone would ask and no one did.
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