My urge to work for FAANG company is faded away. Being in my late 30s I don;t want to grind leetcode anymore. I had interviews in Apple/Google/Facebook and I felt luck played a huge part of that. I got some live coding questions that prepared the day before and I aced them and in some cases I practiced so much and couldn;t even write more than 10 lines of code.
A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
71–80 of 195 posts
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#72It is bewildering to me that there are companies where you don't interview with the team you will join. What if you don't click with them? These are the people you'll spend every day working with.
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would gladly take a $350K/yr paycheck for a decade, then retire and do social work for free.
You and tens of thousands of other smart people who could be doing something other than maximizing attention and shilling trash products. Good luck undoing 3.5MM of damage with social work.
I mean stick with math for everything. Value of a human life is ~10M [1] so it's pretty easy to undo 3.5M of damage if you spend decades helping people.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/23/843310123/how-government-agen...
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#74I skimmed this briefly but I can't reiterate enough the importance of practice that the author mentions. I am the same person when a FAANG hired me as I was 15 years prior when I first interviewed there (I also interviewed a bunch of times in between, for successively more senior roles and did better in the process each time.) When I was young, I had some fixed mindset - I am either good enough or not. They will eith…
And that hits the problem for me; the process often doesn't allow showing what you have to offer, it only allows you to show that you check all boxes in the process.
I don't think that's true -- and I say that as someone who's spent plenty of time on both sides of the proverbial interview desk.
Checking the boxes as you say sounds superficial, it's more like - there are some bars to the role you're interviewing for. A typical eng role probably has bars around programming ability, team work and communication ability, problem solving, etc. By "checking the boxes" you probably mean ability to demonstrate that you can do those things in the context of the interview - that takes practice.
Now it comes to the other stuff beyond the bar that you want to show. There are some attributes about myself that I want to come up in the interviews whether I am asked about them or not. Making sure they get mentioned takes practice too.
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#75I 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…
FAANGs can get literally over a million job applications per year. Any procedure that filters that down to roughly the number of people that they plan to hire (a few 10k) is also going to filter out some excellent candidates, no way around it.
And yet, they still cold email me every 6 months or so.
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#76My 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…
In my experience this is entirely incorrect. Being a strong outside candidate (assuming "strong"=="good at leetcode") is going to make you much more attractive then hoping you're noticed internally.
You're likely to get more bang for your buck by spending your time grinding Leetcode, than learning how to be a data analyst and networking your way into a SWE position.
Context: Was Sr+ at a FAANG, have had offers from 2 others.
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#77I 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 agree that there's a lot that the current hiring process get wrong. I'm not really defending it, but want to clarify a few things. > They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive processes. In my experience this is by design. The cost of a false positive (hiring someone they shouldn't) is far more expensive than a false negative (passing on a good candidate). Since FAANGs usually h…
> The cost of a false positive (hiring someone they shouldn't) is far more expensive than a false negative (passing on a good candidate)
The cost of a false positive is 0 - they always hire the non optimum candidate there is a massive margin of error.
We all like to pretend that without our unique special skills the entire company would dissapear overnight, but it is a fantasy.
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#78Earlier 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. So if I asked you to open up coderpad.io and write a python function to reverse a string, you'd just absolutely refuse? What would you do otherwise to show me that you're a programmer?
I’d refuse, but If the conversation goes in that direction, then I’d probably end the conversation right there, since it’s pretty clear that’s not the kind of role I want to interview for. I managed to accumulate a bit of online presence over the years and I expect my future employer to a) look me up prior to the interview and b) have a direct interest in my Open Source work.
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#79My urge to work for FAANG company is faded away. Being in my late 30s I don;t want to grind leetcode anymore. I had interviews in Apple/Google/Facebook and I felt luck played a huge part of that. I got some live coding questions that prepared the day before and I aced them and in some cases I practiced so much and couldn;t even write more than 10 lines of code.
Luck def plays a big role. That's why you should keep going at it if that's what you want. The financial peace of mind makes it worth it.
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#80I 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…
> In my opinion, it's getting rather silly. It's luck of the draw. That's really how it's always been. If you get bad interviewers, you're in for a bad time. If you get asked questions you know, you're in for a good time. It's possible your odds of getting bad interviewers has increased. But I doubt the increase is that substantial. It's interesting to me how much stock these companies put into hiring, and then let c…
They also don't give any feedback on your interviews other than an eventual "they were hired" or not. So if you are a mediocre interviewer you will never know.