51–60 of 195 posts
All of the FAANGs are various levels of unethical, or a net negative for society in my estimation. No more interviewing there for me.
I would gladly take a $350K/yr paycheck for a decade, then retire and do social work for free.
I don't know, I've walked into these interviews with zero preparation and succeeded. And I've failed FAANG-ish interviews where no amount of leetcode grinding would have helped me. In my opinion, it's getting rather silly. They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive processes. None of them even cared about my Github repository that's full of code I write for fun. Software developer…
I have a public disclaimer in my LinkedIn profile intro saying that I refuse to do any algorithmic live coding. They’re top employers and whatnot, but one doesn’t need to torture themselves with Leetcode to get a good job in this industry
All of the FAANGs are various levels of unethical, or a net negative for society in my estimation. No more interviewing there for me.
Definitely agree with unethical, although net negative seems a lot harder to quantify. Amazon has a lot of bad practices I disagree with, but are they net negative? I find it difficult to assess. And even if they aren't net negative now, is the 10 year trajectory clearly downward? Soloing out Netflix, is there anything particularly wrong with them? I have significant gripes with all the others but no specifics about…
I think so, yes. It's been that way for a good while.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All jobs I applied for that I interviewed for looked at my GitHub specifically, and my past projects, and that was their main topic of discussion in the interview, apart from usual coding questions and such. Im not victim blaming by saying you may just be applying to the wrong places, am I
I would love to talk about my github projects with an interviewer - hell, I'd also love to talk more about my past systems than their hypothetical ones - but like the parent post, I've found it pretty rare. Past projects maybe 15% of the time at medium-to-large companies (500+ person), and so far am batting 0.000 for "asked about personal projects", including at FAANG interviews.
OTOH, when you are hiring for leaders (directors and above), past experiences and behavior questions are all you talking about.
My pro-tip if you want one of these jobs and are not great at leetcoding, try to get another role at the company and then transfer over. Apply as a data analyst, theres no leetcoding, you just need to demonstrate sql knowledge and experience working with the business. And faang data analysts are paid as much as many non-faang engineers. Once you are in, you will be working with engineers, just do a good job, and expr…
Not only are data analysis jobs given to business grads and are non-tech roles, they also do not work with software engineers at all and I guarantee you you will hate every second of your job in those positions because of how uninteresting it is.
After that, if you do want to switch roles, you will either have to go through a full interview loop and held to the same standard as an external candidate, or you will have to go through an even more grueling job title change process which will take months, with no guarantee of being approved (and to be fair, if you're a data analyst doing a data analyst's job, has no chance of being approved).
I don't know, I've walked into these interviews with zero preparation and succeeded. And I've failed FAANG-ish interviews where no amount of leetcode grinding would have helped me. In my opinion, it's getting rather silly. They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive processes. None of them even cared about my Github repository that's full of code I write for fun. Software developer…
I have a public disclaimer in my LinkedIn profile intro saying that I refuse to do any algorithmic live coding. They’re top employers and whatnot, but one doesn’t need to torture themselves with Leetcode to get a good job in this industry
If you really perceive algorithmic live coding as torture, then it makes all the sense in the world to avoid it. "It's not for you."
But it's important to recognize two things: first that this is subjective. A different person may enjoy something you hate (I don't mind live coding for example) or at least won't consider is bad enough to be called "torture." So just because it's not "for you" doesn't mean it's bad.
The second thing is to recognize that there's a cost to being however we are. In this case, the cost of avoiding opportunities that require such interviews is that you may have fewer opportunities and they may be less lucrative on average. It's possible that (a) you are still able to find good-enough opportunities and (b) the downside is worth avoiding the torture. But you can also decide that this cost isn't worth it, and you have some room to shape what is and isn't for you, over time. For example, if the thing that makes this "torture" for you something like anxiety when being watched? If so, probably something like that shows up in other places in your life and maybe valuable to tackle anyway.
By no means am I suggesting that you need to do something different than what you're doing, just pointing out that these reactions are subjective, can have downsides, and are under our control to some extent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a public disclaimer in my LinkedIn profile intro saying that I refuse to do any algorithmic live coding. They’re top employers and whatnot, but one doesn’t need to torture themselves with Leetcode to get a good job in this industry
Interesting; how has that worked for you?
I don't know, I've walked into these interviews with zero preparation and succeeded. And I've failed FAANG-ish interviews where no amount of leetcode grinding would have helped me. In my opinion, it's getting rather silly. They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive processes. None of them even cared about my Github repository that's full of code I write for fun. Software developer…
The Product Manager interviews are even worse. Google was the shittiest experience I had, all the way to the silly hiring Committee. Three months of my life I'll never get back.
I don't know, I've walked into these interviews with zero preparation and succeeded. And I've failed FAANG-ish interviews where no amount of leetcode grinding would have helped me. In my opinion, it's getting rather silly. They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive processes. None of them even cared about my Github repository that's full of code I write for fun. Software developer…
1. Many (most) engineers are not in positions to be able to meaningfully contribute to OSS (e.g. all the code I write for work is proprietary).
2. It can easily be faked.
3. Personal projects can sometimes be interesting, but often don't showcase usefulness (unless front-end).
4. Many high quality engineers don't like to spend their free time doing more of their job.
Some repos, of course, are more impactful though. And I would probably say that if you are someone who loves to write code 16 hours a day, more power to you, you deserve to be hired! But many quality engineers would get missed if that is the desired bar (which is fine - other companies will just scoop them up).
(edit: OSS engineers extra upset by what I'm saying, but there is a lot more to this world than just what shows up in your GitHub feed)
Companies operate on more than just code monkeys.