321–330 of 336 posts
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Nobody is a "competent engineer" fresh out of university.
They are if they learned how to be an engineer in parallel.
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They are if they learned how to be an engineer in parallel.
That is basically impossible. Becoming a good engineer requires learning from the consequences of decisions you yourself made years ago. Doing internships will not give you that no matter how many you do.
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That article is behind the NYT paywall but the bit of it I could see appears to be saying not that > blind auditions are now a thing of the past but that they should become a thing of the past, so that orchestras can ensure that their makeup (race, gender, etc.) matches that of "the communities they serve". There's a big difference between "one person writing in the New York Times thinks orchestras should stop doing…
It is already happening. For example: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/buffalo-philharmonic-...
It does give one single example of something, namely an orchestra looking to appoint something like an assistant conductor (that isn't the job title; the article claims it's an equivalent post; I haven't attempted to find out whether they're right) specifically from the non-white non-Asian population. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's a bad thing, but it has nothing to do with an alleged end of blind auditions: you literally cannot give an orchestra conductor a blind audition.
(When I say "one single example", I mean it; the article suggests that this sort of thing is becoming common, and for all I know it may be, but it doesn't deign to give any actual evidence other than this one example, along with a link to the same NYTimes article asking for an end to blind auditions.)
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Bingo. It should be telling that there are a number of, usually for-profit, resources for prepping for just the interview process: * leetcode * Cracking the Coding Interview * Elements of Programing Interviews * Interview Kickstart, which costs like $5500, is a bootcamp just for passing interviews * educative.io * algoexpert.io That being said, I might just play along with the DS / Algo interview game. Having an inte…
The hiring rigmarole is just an IQ test in disguise. The only downside, you can prep for IQ tests, and spend unlimited time doing the prep. If only someone would come up with a way to control for how long they prepped for this: one week on hackerrank, or 2 years of courses. I bet those that learn the rigmarole faster, will also pickup k8s and other such fairly ephemeral trivia rather quickly as well.
Do you have any data to back a claim that ridiculous?
I hear this bullshit all the time, yet nothing to back it up.
If you think IQ would be a good hiring signal, then just administer an IQ test instead of LC question.
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I guess the question is, what's the proportion either side? Is it 25% will do it properly, 75% don't? Am I too cynical about tech interviews, or too optimistic? I'd also add, for a couple of companies, Google's approach springs to mind. I think for places where, you know, they do search algorithms, knowing how to print the spanning tree of a graph is probably an important thing to know.
My understanding is that googlers typically don't know/care what role the candidate is applying for (outside of maybe the hiring manager round). There are arguments both for and against their methodology. Personally I think there's a strong correlation between necessity and hiring quality (i.e. if teams really need the help, they typically engage candidates more meaningfully than the Google-style clinically impartial…
Sounds a bit like what my old timer buddy says.
Google's KPI is hiring talent away from competitors who physically live in the San Francisco bay area. And the ads/ML teams that they drench in their 1%ers.
Everyone else is window dressing.
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But this doesn't have anything to do with the topic at hand. Most jobs are easy but interviews filter for something very specific. Algorithms. Algorithm interview skill is largely different from even the details behind compilers and databases. It's like competitive typing. Everyone can type. But interviewers filter for the best.
I think algorithms allow you to pick up all of those other things more quickly. I'm not saying that the interviews are a perfect way to measure this , but a good understanding of algorithms is really useful to understand any software
Think of it this way. Can all theoretical mathematicians do well in a timed math competition? Certainly there are those that will, but certainly there are many great mathematicians who won't do well yet have produced many great papers and discoveries.
These companies are filtering for competitive algorithm skills. Its like only allowing the top competitive typists to work in data entry and paying those data entry people 500k salaries.
Interviewing is broken. When I was at Amazon, it became impossible to hire candidates, and generally the engineers we brought on board were non-US citizens. Typically they're Indians without U.S. residency status, often times U.S. college grads or often even transfers from Amazon's Indian offices. Not only did we pay below other FAANGs, but with these hires, we'd pay them at the low end of our own scale. What are the…
The entire post is about how a specialized course is required to pass a technical interview in companies like Amazon and here you are making a comment that implies desperate Indians are hired with zero qualifications for the job only because they are desperate. I can't comment on the working conditions at Amazon but I have to say that those Indians must be highly qualified to have that job and should be paid fairly.
I’m not implying Indians are desperate. Plenty of Indians work all across the American economy and contribute as much as any other ethnicity. I’m making a claim about Amazon hiring practices, especially with Indian transfers. Amazon pays below other top tech companies, and we paid Indian transfers at the bottom of our own pay scale.
I’m not making any claim on these Indian people’s technical qualifications. Between two different candidates, a corporation goes with the one that they can get away with paying less. That’s the reality.
Based on your name, I assume your Indian. If you’re offended, don’t attack the messenger. Your issue is with corporate America.
Interviewing is broken. When I was at Amazon, it became impossible to hire candidates, and generally the engineers we brought on board were non-US citizens. Typically they're Indians without U.S. residency status, often times U.S. college grads or often even transfers from Amazon's Indian offices. Not only did we pay below other FAANGs, but with these hires, we'd pay them at the low end of our own scale. What are the…
The pay for a new grad (even non US citizens) entering Amazon is 120k+. This not low at all. It should not be mind boggling why someone would choose to interview at Amazon.
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Having just passed Google's algorithmic interviews, and established a leetcode account specifically to prepare for that, I have a good record of how much leetcode I did: 3 easy problems, 4 medium problems, and 3 hard problems. It would make sense to count 2 additional hard problems that I worked on (with pencil and paper) but didn't submit a working solution for. This is more than four hours of work, but it's much le…
> (For example, my recruiter strongly believed that candidates needed a minimum of 5 weeks to prepare for an interview.) Your recruiter believes this for a reason and they have probably seen many candidates go through the process. Not saying you're a liar, but if you got into G with that little prep, I have some follow up questions: * Where did you level when you got your offer? L3 vs L4 vs L5 makes a big difference.…
First off, I didn't get in. I passed the algorithmic interview, I was told to expect a round of "team fit" interviews, and then they notified me that instead of having team fit interviews they were just rejecting me. From what I understand, after passing the algorithm round you're supposed to collect "statements of support" from team leaders at Google, and then your file with the statements of support included goes to a centralized hiring committee. I would guess the difference between passing the algorithm round with no team fit interviews and failing the algorithm round is largely in whether you get rejected before or after that committee sees your file at all.
I can answer the questions anyway:
What level were you applying for?
L3.
How many questions per round?
Well, this depends on what you mean by "round". I had a day consisting of 5 interviews with 5 people. One of those was the behavioral interview; the other four were algorithm questions. Each (non-behavioral) person asked one question, for a total of four questions.
Did you have optimal solutions or were you nudged by the interviewer?
Question by question:
- Near-total failure.
- An interview involving a lot of verbal problem solving verging on system design. But technically not a system design interview. L3s don't get those. The problem was less difficult (which makes sense since the design of the interview allows less time for it) and I didn't need much in the way of help. Preparation was relevant here; one of the things I had done to prepare was to write out a binary search, which came up in this interview.
- A question for which I had a good solution offhand, which the interviewer nudged to a perfect solution.
- A question for which the interviewer did not want an optimal solution. He specifically remarked to me that when he gives this question and the candidate appears to be familiar with the solution, he substitutes a different question. This interviewer spent some time talking to me once my solution was written (and I had taken help from him). I had used a brute force approach. He remarked that my approach was atypical, but that the typical approach was also a brute force solution, and he described the optimal solution for me.
Have you passed any other FAANG / leetcode interviews?
No. I don't do well in interviews. I have worked for Amazon in the past; I got in by winning a programming contest they held at my school. Notably, you do not have to speak to anyone to win a contest. I did not continue to Amazon after graduating for a couple of reasons, but it seems to have been more or less a guarantee for everyone who was hired under that program and chose to continue there.
What's your educational background?
I have a BA in computer science (and in math; double major) from a poorly-regarded school. You might find it relevant that, although I didn't go to a good school, I had good standardized test scores: 36 ACT; 1600 SAT; 800 on each of 3 SAT subject tests.
Did you crush the system design interview?
L3s don't get those.
How do you feel behavioral interviews went?
Iffy.
If you don't think modern interviewing practices are a problem, this should be proof enough. Not only do we have an entire programming book sub-genre dedicated to this nonsense, but now we're also wasting class time on memorizing sorting algorithms. Fantastic. Of course, we're going to see the inevitable arguments that "40% of the people I interview lie on resumes" or "I interviewed this guy once, and he couldn't eve…
> I've interviewed dozens of people and never had that experience, because I check OSS contributions, professional history, and ask for code samples before I even engage with a candidate in a technical discussion. How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a process like that? It seems unlikely there are much more than 100,000 people with significant OSS contributions in total. Published material isn’t go…
That's not a valid question. No single hiring manager hires 50000 people in a year.
If the company is giant enough to hire 50K people a year, the work is distributed among the many many thousands of hiring managers.