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On Leaving Facebook

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Re: On Leaving Facebook

#341

Post by tuyiown »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #308
voakbasda wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody here on HN recently shared the notion that leetcode tests are a legal way to discriminate by age or lifestyle, as older and well-rounded developers do not have the time or inclination to grind on such things.

As a successful developer well past middle age, I find this to be nonsense. The most common complaint I hear around this is "yeah, that discriminates against people who don't have time to grind to do the preparation." Why is it weird that people should spend time preparing for ask for a new job? I mean, ask an orchestra musician how much time they put into preparing for auditions, or how much time many degreed profes…

> ask an orchestra musician how much time they put into preparing for auditions

Training is basically the main work performer has to do to earn his life, and all training is valuable. You could compare with professional athlete and see how it’s absurd.

> If you don't want to spend time preparing for job interviews, then fine, don't.

The idea is that you have to understand the process. If you don’t see the point of certain exercise, you search for a rationalization, and discrimination looks like a good one. Also, the discrimination is not against people that won’t train for interview, but to give a bias to people that don’t evaluate returns on their invested time

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#342

Post by baby »

gzer0 wrote: post #98
elb0w wrote: post #79

It always blows my mind how most interview in our field. When I first started in tech I was afraid to talk about not knowing leetcode to my peers. 15 years in and I now can confidently say I’ve yet to meet someone who thinks these are a valid metric. Why do we make this the gate keeper to our industry when we know (except for the very specific roles) we will rarely need leet code type problems. When we do we just goo…

The issue is the sheer number of fradulent and stuffed credentials people have begun using, and applying, en masse to job positions. To be clear, I dislike the current way interviewing is, but do you have a better solution to screen out 7,000 applicants? The vast majority will be knocked out by the leetcode style interview, and sure, some brilliant minds might fail because they can't remember linked lists in the mome…

Sure if you have a lot of noise, now if you know the people? If you’ve been working with them for years akready? Even engineers who want to change role within the org have to re-interview and do these silly exercises. I actually find leetcode things more valuable than system design interviews which are more like “let’s see how you can pretend you’ve built things at scale eventhough you’ve never done it”

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#343

Post by skydhash »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #308
voakbasda wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody here on HN recently shared the notion that leetcode tests are a legal way to discriminate by age or lifestyle, as older and well-rounded developers do not have the time or inclination to grind on such things.

As a successful developer well past middle age, I find this to be nonsense. The most common complaint I hear around this is "yeah, that discriminates against people who don't have time to grind to do the preparation." Why is it weird that people should spend time preparing for ask for a new job? I mean, ask an orchestra musician how much time they put into preparing for auditions, or how much time many degreed profes…

A musician put it in time for an audition because that will be the piece he will be performing. But doing leetcode when the job definition is: You will be working on this e-commerce site is not the most motivating things. While algorithms and data structure knowledge are important, most of the time is spent writing code gluing data sources to interfaces. I'm perfectly fine doing an interview on the technologies I'm expected to master, but knowing by heart how to sort strings doesn't help anyone, IMO.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#344

Post by deckard1 »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #238
elb0w wrote: post #79

It always blows my mind how most interview in our field. When I first started in tech I was afraid to talk about not knowing leetcode to my peers. 15 years in and I now can confidently say I’ve yet to meet someone who thinks these are a valid metric. Why do we make this the gate keeper to our industry when we know (except for the very specific roles) we will rarely need leet code type problems. When we do we just goo…

The thought crossed my mind, that they are doing it on purpose: to make the whole experience of switching jobs as unpleasant and traumatic as possible, so that people will stick to their jobs. However a conspiracy is highly unlikely, given that there are so many players involved. More realistic explanation: they try to make an 'American Idol' like process, this gives them the feeling of having chosen 'the best'. Now…

> make the whole experience of switching jobs as unpleasant and traumatic as possible, so that people will stick to their jobs. However a conspiracy is highly unlikely

I've thought this too. Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm were hit with antitrust litigation starting around 2010 because they were all involved in colluding to reduce the ability of devs to switch jobs. Since then we've only seen the rise of leetcode style interviews. We're way way past the days of tree traversing and FizzBuzz. We're asking candidates to recite Dijkstra's but pretend they've never seen it before. It's just way more convenient for tech companies if people don't leave in the first place. I know I've stayed at my job much longer than I should because I hate interviews.

> as it is necessary to maintain the claim of having an objective hiring process

Yeah no one wants to admit they don't know what they are doing. It's bad for FAANG myth-making. A company the size of Google or Facebook is never not hiring. They are a big boat that can't just stop moving like that. They have a constant churn rate, the need to keep interviewers sharp, and a certain target rate they need to hit of applicants in, new employees out. All the process between the in side and out side is Scientology. It's just complete fabricated cultish nonsense. The owners of LeetCode must be enjoying it though.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#345

Post by davedx »

pkdpic wrote: post #11

Glad to see this was about working at FB / Meta rather than being a user. Just for personal interest. Newish dev doing my first attempt at a FAANG interview. Wondering if I should be trying for FaceBook as long as Im bothering to study. Had a very positive-feeling convo with a recruiter there ~6mo ago before "Meta". Sounds like it might be a negative thing to have on your resume now though? Any thoughts?

I do quite a lot of screening/hiring. I’m personally very critical of Meta the company but have no issues hiring people who’ve worked there. The malaise in Meta is obviously a product of its top leadership not the engineering people

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#346

Post by em500 »

vanusa wrote: post #328
em500 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google receives about 3 million applications per year, and hires less than 1% of them. Not all of them for dev positions, but still probably at least a million. Google is probably the most popular, but even the maligned Facebook gets a few hundred thousand applications per year. I concur with the parent's point. HN is perpetually complaining about tech interviews, but nobody ever suggests a viable alternative that ca…

Google (and all the other companies with similar net hiring ratios) use multiple factors to narrow their pre-interview pool; including standard techniques such as resume and phone screening. And then there's in-person interview itself, which involves broader cognitive and personality assessments (apart from in-person LC recitation). The parent poster was literally saying that LC screening by itself will get you your…

Of course, LC-only won't get you there, and all companies with LC use the whole arsenal. But I don't doubt that LC will filter out a very large fraction of applicants (hence the incessant whining on HN). The point is though, with Google-like application volumes, if they drop LC they'll need to substitute it with something that also filters out a very large fraction.

The actual hiring ratio at google is something like 0.2%. They pass over 998 out of 1000 applicants, so no matter what they do, they'll pass over a substantial number of qualified people, and no matter what they do there will be complaints on HN.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#347

Post by closeparen »

rsynnott wrote: post #57
dahdum wrote: post #22

I didn’t see retirement addressed, that would be among my top priorities personally. Unless he’s already financially independent and can retire at will, taking a 30% paycut off FB’s top 5% comp could mean delaying retirement by many years. Given fixed living costs, retirement savings could easily drop by much more than 30%. I’m not disagreeing with his choice, it’s a personal one and he may not want early retirement,…

I find it kind of fascinating how into the idea of early retirement many people on this site are. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it as such, but… I don’t really get it. I don’t think I actually know anyone who has early-retired. What would you do with yourself? Is it not better to work for a longer time at a job you like than a shorter time at a higher paying one that you dislike?

I want to continue being a homeowner in a walkable neighborhood of a major city, without necessarily always making the astronomical wages that calls for.

I won’t stop working, but I might work the kind of jobs that would otherwise require sharing a rental or living in sprawl.

In 3-4 more years at big corporates I think I could get my 1BR condo paid off with some passive income to offset property taxes. The HOA fee is basically a “normal” rent and I could pay that out of any job. I’m not sure what’ll happen if I ever need a 2BR though.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#348

Post by skydhash »

sockgrant wrote: post #202
vmception wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dunno I’ve always felt that the people who can’t leet code are the ones that complain about it. You mean the ones that randomly receive a random problem that they hadn't memorized before.

If you’re struggling I don’t think you should try to memorize leet code problems, you should try to understand how to apply algorithms.

We know how to apply them, it just that algorithms are not fit all solutions for most type of problems you encounter in the real world. I had to write a frequency analysis code. What I did was search for existing methods, found a paper that provides a mathematical procedure, then convert it to code. The data structures came directly from the OS and thankfully, there were no need to convert them to something else.

I'd say a lot of us learn about algorithms and data structures early in their career. But most of them are guidelines, not rules. So, you just remember how to google for them, not learning specific ones by heart. No one has ever told me: You need to work on this string manipulation and be done within 30mns.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#349

Post by pedrosorio »

astura wrote: post #186
rcheu wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty easy to do almost no coding at larger companies as a more senior engineer and become quite rusty. It sounds like he was interviewing for a position which he's actually expected to ship things and code, so it's pretty reasonable to ask him to code in the interview.

Where have you worked where senior engineers do hardly any coding? What else would they do all day?! Are you sure you aren't thinking of project managers? Everywhere I've worked (mostly large companies) the seniors write much more code than the juniors.

Some senior engineers will be “coding machines” whereas others will be much closer to “architects” or “tech leads” where shipping a lot of code is not the most important aspect.

To be fair, most senior engineers should be involved in code reviews regularly, so it’s very unlikely they are incompetent coders.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#350

Post by jokethrowaway »

2457013579 wrote: post #121
fallmonkey wrote: post #94

"A common question I get is about work/life balance. And I view it a little different too now. At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying that it spilled the frustration in the “life” part" This is the golden piece for me. I too recently left a big corp to a smaller place, expecting to sacrifice WLB and my free time - yet I ended up feeling happier and spending less t…

This hit home for me as well. I’m currently at a large company and looking for a smaller one where I can work more hours Thor the same money doing something more meaningful. I have a min/max mindset, probably like most people here, so it took me a long time to come to the realization that working longer hours for the same pay was a good thing.

Eventually you'll figure out it's all meaningless, no matter if it's big or small.

Find something that you enjoy doing, like you would enjoy a nice puzzle.

Purpose is all in your head.

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