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Job Hunting in 2022

mhlakhani.com

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Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#41

Post by mixmastamyk »

mhlakhani wrote: post #14
Ancalagon wrote: post #10

Granted I've only attempted the Amazon interview of the FAANGs, but good job to the OP for cracking the FAANG interviews with only 60ish leetcode questions. I'm at 150 and have yet to crack any.

To be clear, I explicitly chose to not interview at FAANGs since I was previously at a FAANG and wanted to try my hand at a different type of company. I'd probably practice a bit more for FAANGs

Can we just call it BigTech? Silly revolving acronym is probably closer to MAMA now... why is Netflix even a member other than to avoid a slur?

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#42

Post by dirtbag__dad »

mikedelago wrote: post #36
nsxwolf wrote: post #25

On my last job search I found that overloading myself with interviews was very stressful. It's one of the reason I will no longer continue with any process that has take home assignments - at one point I had 4 different assignments with overlapping due dates. Far too much stress (and I was ghosted on all of them). It's also not fun to be waiting to hear from the places you're really interested in while you've multipl…

I don't blame you. Take home assignments are ridiculous, anyway. My personal time is valuable to me and it's unrealistic to expect me to do homework just for the privilege of an interview. In my last job hunt, I flat out declined further interview if I was requested to do a take home assignment.

Would you prefer a take home or a live coding challenge?

I have the total opposite experience. I have rarely done well on a live code problem, I clam up. Tbh it’s humiliating, not representative of my actual skill set, and a waste of everyone’s time.

The amount of time I’d need to study to be good at live coding is less than doing a couple take homes for companies I’m actually interested in.

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#44

Post by ojbyrne »

nvarsj wrote: post #22
sbuccini wrote: post #3

Thanks to the author for taking the time to write this up. I think it is a fairly realistic description of what the process is like for an engineer who has spent several years working in Silicon Valley at a well-known company. The key takeaways, coming from someone with a similar background: * Rely heavily on your personal network to both identify worthwhile opportunities and for referrals which, in the Before Times,…

> They had a _full_ pipeline, interviewing every day for three weeks straight. I honestly think I'd be physically incapable of doing this. I'm on the HSP side and even a single set of interviews is enough to drive me into an insomnia/anxiety cycle for weeks. I can't even imagine what this would be like for me. Albeit I admit it's the best way to get the job you want. Maybe I'm in the wrong industry...

Maybe it's just me, but when I have done that, the first one or two are the hardest, then you get in a groove, and become more aware that its just a numbers game.

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#45

Post by Nextgrid »

dirtbag__dad wrote: post #42
mikedelago wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't blame you. Take home assignments are ridiculous, anyway. My personal time is valuable to me and it's unrealistic to expect me to do homework just for the privilege of an interview. In my last job hunt, I flat out declined further interview if I was requested to do a take home assignment.

Would you prefer a take home or a live coding challenge? I have the total opposite experience. I have rarely done well on a live code problem, I clam up. Tbh it’s humiliating, not representative of my actual skill set, and a waste of everyone’s time. The amount of time I’d need to study to be good at live coding is less than doing a couple take homes for companies I’m actually interested in.

The advantage of live coding challenges is that they require the employer to put skin in the game by allocating 1 hour of their own engineers' time. This encourages them to filter candidates beforehand and discarding bad-fits early rather than wasting every applicant's time even if they have no chance to begin with.

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#46

Post by gymbeaux »

jrockway wrote: post #38
gymbeaux wrote: post #37

Cheat where possible using OpenGPT. Cheat where possible using OpenGPT. Cheat where possible using OpenGPT. We must prove to companies that leetcode is not the way.

I asked ChatGPT one of my company's interview questions (which involves designing a bloom filter). It got it very subtly wrong; when asked to fix things, it made it worse. I would definitely not use it to interview for jobs yet, but I do think it would be good for training interviewers to detect BS and suggest "hints" that lead things in the right direction. Practice interview without wasting any human's time! Meanwh…

It's been working well for me all things considered. The harder the leetcode problem, the more I have to ask it to fit the answer it gives me, but I have always gotten it to arrive at the correct (and most efficient) answer. I'm impressed. You'll have a better time with it if you can tell it what's wrong with the code, even if it's just "given this test case, I expected X but this code gives me Y".

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#47

Post by gymbeaux »

paxys wrote: post #40
gymbeaux wrote: post #37

Cheat where possible using OpenGPT. Cheat where possible using OpenGPT. Cheat where possible using OpenGPT. We must prove to companies that leetcode is not the way.

You don't need OpenGPT (or whatever else) to "cheat" at interviews. Simply copy pasting the prompt in Google is going to get you much better results, most often the exact leetcode page that the question was lifted from (with very useful discussion and solutions). Of course most competent companies will ask a minor follow-up which will stump candidates who are relying on such tools.

"most competent companies" wouldn't rely so heavily on leetcode in the first place.

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#48

Post by dnissley »

yamazakiwi wrote: post #29
blobbers wrote: post #21

[flagged]

If you would be very successful in that role... but the company says no... that is a poor fit and is a reflection of their ability to hire qualified candidates to meet their real needs. I'm confused why this is funny ha ha to you...Care to expound?

Sounds like sour grapes / cope, presumably. I didn't get that vibe reading it though.

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#49

Post by philjohn »

nvarsj wrote: post #22
sbuccini wrote: post #3

Thanks to the author for taking the time to write this up. I think it is a fairly realistic description of what the process is like for an engineer who has spent several years working in Silicon Valley at a well-known company. The key takeaways, coming from someone with a similar background: * Rely heavily on your personal network to both identify worthwhile opportunities and for referrals which, in the Before Times,…

> They had a _full_ pipeline, interviewing every day for three weeks straight. I honestly think I'd be physically incapable of doing this. I'm on the HSP side and even a single set of interviews is enough to drive me into an insomnia/anxiety cycle for weeks. I can't even imagine what this would be like for me. Albeit I admit it's the best way to get the job you want. Maybe I'm in the wrong industry...

I feel you - last time I decided to move jobs, back in 2019, I had a week where I had an onsite every day, and by the end I was just done.

Re: Job Hunting in 2022

#50

Post by [deleted] »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #27
vsareto wrote: post #9

That first impression (and how you tackled it) of system design interviews makes me question their usefulness. Like, how good of a signal can companies really be getting if it's too different from real world systems? Feels like an artificial wall too - many companies don't approach the scale where this stuff matters, so getting that experience is hard.

> Like, how good of a signal can companies really be getting if it's too different from real world systems? There are "layers" to the signal you can get from system design interviews: 1. Are they aware of "big concepts", indexing, sharding, queues, scheduling, etc. 2. Are they comfortable actually using and manipulating these abstractions in an academic sense? e.g. new college grads may have never used an index, but…

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