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A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

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Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#111

Post by xyzelement »

mgaunard wrote: post #109
xyzelement wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your question. Plenty of senior people work at (and join) FAANGs with high comp and excitement about the role.

What excitement? You're joining to become one extra cog in a large machine that is past its prime. You will have little agency and impact, and your only opportunity for a decent compensation will be based on internal politics rather than technical merit. Meanwhile, you can join a human-sized company, and be a real enabler and transformer of that business.

Personally, I am deeply excited about being an enabler and transformer at this scale, too.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#112

Post by weeznerps »

claudiulodro wrote: post #3

Tangentially related, is it worth it to do the leetcode grind and all the FAANG-interview preparations if I'm always planning on working remote? Are there remote companies with FAANG-level compensation that would warrant this sort of interview prep?

100% yes. I did this 2.5 years ago, got a remote FAANG job, and more than 3x'd my comp. Remote FAANG-level comp is harder than to get than it was during COVID, but it is still possible.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#113

Post by OkayPhysicist »

nomel wrote: post #94
codr7 wrote: post #9

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…

> None of them even cared about my Github repository that's full of code I write for fun. Context: I've interviewed around 200 people for our current org, and have "settled" on an interview that's used for a certain position. I don't think I'm necessarily good at interviews, and I'm not sure I'm "doing it right". I give the number to show that my sample size is reasonable. We're solving practical problems, with code.…

Personally I wouldn't terribly mind such an interview, but I do know plenty of people who absolutely fall to pieces when having to code while being watched, and it's definitely not particularly pleasant to me, either. I think the best interview I've experienced was one where the "2 hour interview" consisted of me receiving an email with a short, job-related task and then after an hour was up we spoke and discussed my solution. Respected my time, as it wasn't some open-ended take-home test that somebody with too much time on their hands could spend dozens of hours polishing to perfection, while still not being quite so "whiteboard-y".

With regards to Github projects and the like, I do ask about them in interviews, because I think there's a place for them as an early screening. Every engineer worth their salt has some war stories, and that's a good angle to approach their GitHub profile: if they have an interesting sounding project, asking them to talk about any interesting problems they ran into during its creation tends to make it immediately clear whether they're full of shit or not. It's not a great positive signal, but if they're not chomping at the bit to talk about engineering challenges, it's a strong negative signal.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#114

Post by allarm »

dekhn wrote: post #90
mihaitodor wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, I'd look you up and scan your github pages. I've dealt with people who set up fake githubs (copying from various places on the web to make it look like they did real work). Can't help you if you only want to interview people who are interested in your open source work... that sounds very limiting.

In my experience it’s super easy to see that the resume or github or a home project is fake. If not immediately then in like first 10 minutes of the interview. I don’t think that “people lie” is a valid reason to generalize. If anything, that’s the interviewers who are limiting themselves, not the other way around.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#115

Post by michaelt »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #11

If what you want is to be hired quickly and get a big paycheck, go with the higher chaos score. They may be easily impressed by simple interviewing tricks, and since the place is clearly disorganized, you can get away with not doing much work. I should feel bad for giving this advice, but fuck these bloated mega-rich companies if they refuse to get their shit together.

Eh, to me the chaos score seemed pretty opinionated.

After all, if the interview process is highly standardised the jobs must be highly standardised. That's fine if everything is a java web service and you only want to hire java web service folks. But if I'm an expert in machine vision for robotic applications, how are you going to validate the specialist skills that make me so expensive?

And what do I care about the interviews being consistent? I only have to go through the process once. And it's not like I'm relying on getting hints or leaked questions to be able to pass.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#116

Post by rjh29 »

mgaunard wrote: post #109
xyzelement wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your question. Plenty of senior people work at (and join) FAANGs with high comp and excitement about the role.

What excitement? You're joining to become one extra cog in a large machine that is past its prime. You will have little agency and impact, and your only opportunity for a decent compensation will be based on internal politics rather than technical merit. Meanwhile, you can join a human-sized company, and be a real enabler and transformer of that business.

Money > impact for some people.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#117

Post by jedberg »

I've been an interviewer at Netflix and Amazon and both of these feel pretty spot on in the guide.

Not sure if it's still this way, but at Netflix the hiring manager was the only decision-maker. They took in all the feedback from the other interviewers and usually went with the majority, but they had the ultimate choice. You could say they had the Freedom to hire anyone they want and the Responsibility to deal with the consequences of that.

And yes, at Netflix we pretty much all just made up our interviews as we wanted to, although after I while I zeroed in on questions that would give me the best go/no go data and would repeat them often.

And at Amazon, what they say here is very accurate -- the bar raiser is the key person to impress. They and the HM have ultimate say on the results.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#118

Post by majormajor »

liuliu wrote: post #54
majormajor wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The logic is twisted and strange, the justification sums up to this: talking past projects like talking to a PhD student about his research paper, it is all they does and doesn't put them in enough "foreign situation" to see their novel problem-solving abilities. OTOH, when you are hiring for leaders (directors and above), past experiences and behavior questions are all you talking about.

That makes a certain about of sense but I think you can usually get a feel for project-by-project dissimilarities in someone's background and figure out if they've been doing the "1 year of experience for 10 years" or the "continually tackling new challenges and learning from them" path.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#119

Post by michaelt »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #24
codr7 wrote: post #9

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…

> 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…

> You'd think they'd recognize high quality interviewers and get them doing more than 1 interview per week, and not let people interview until passing a pretty high bar in the quality of their interview.

I think you substantially over-estimate the eagerness of software developers to take on unrewarding admin work.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#120

Post by allarm »

blitzar wrote: post #96
dekhn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I'd look you up and scan your github pages. I've dealt with people who set up fake githubs (copying from various places on the web to make it look like they did real work). Can't help you if you only want to interview people who are interested in your open source work... that sounds very limiting.

I've dealt with people whos whole CV was fake. One of the points of the interview is to sniff this out. Diving into a github and then asking questions about it, in the same way as you would ask about stuff on a CV seems like a massive win for the skilled interviewer.

Normally when I’m interviewing people I don’t go much further than asking about the topics they covered in their resume. If they lied in the resume, it’s an instant no-go. And if their resume is on your desk already, that means that their skill set covers most of the requirements for this position already. Simple enough.
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