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A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
121–130 of 195 posts
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#122Earlier 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?
> What would you do otherwise to show me that you're a programmer?
Pretty much every other job in every other industry seems to do OK with education, experience and references.
If I want to hire a guy to tile my bathroom I don't need him to slap some tiles onto a whiteboard to get the job - some photos of the last few jobs he's done would be just fine.
Is the programming profession really so full of inept frauds? Is our industry so unable to regulate university education that qualifications are so worthless?
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you compare candidates that have some code in GitHub and those that don't ?
You can assess the ones that don't have code on GitHub in a different way, but there is no reason to ignore a possibly valuable datapoint.
But faang companies try to objectively compare all candidates. Also they have so many resumes that it doesn't seem feasible to review code on GitHub.
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#124Earlier 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.
Been at two FAANGs, a small startup and a mid sized company.
I cannot overstate how little I care about being an enabler and a transformer of the business, or even care about the business.
You see, as a business ( of one), I'm here to ensure my company (again me) is generating cash flow and profit for my stakeholders ( me + family + dog).
Unless I own the company or have equity >10%, it never made sense why anyone would.
That said, I enjoyed my time at the good large corps. Big and small, they all have their issues internally, but I'll take the boring and well compensated job over the interesting (almost never that interesting) and low pay one.
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> What would you do otherwise to show me that you're a programmer? Pretty much every other job in every other industry seems to do OK with education, experience and references. If I want to hire a guy to tile my bathroom I don't need him to slap some tiles onto a whiteboard to get the job - some photos of the last few jobs he's done would be just fine. Is the programming profession really so full of inept frauds? Is…
Is the bathroom tiling really a fair comparison?
The main reason I hire the way I do is I learned that there are people who have resumes that look like mine (with 30+ years of coding) but they don't actually know how to do any coding, even just "please write out a simple class in python that does nothing". I go out of my way to give every candidate a fair shake and I'm not looking for some fast, set-in-stone rules. Nor am I looking for you to solve any really hard problems. Still it's been depressing just how many coders I interview who can't even explain how a hash table works.
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#126I 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.
Sometimes teams are looking for specific knowledge or experience, then it really does matter. Other times, they are looking for a good developer who can pick up the necessary knowledge, and then it's much more open.
For example, I don't care what programming language you use in your interview. Senior engineer using Python? Sure! Want to implement in low-level C? Sure! I know any good engineer can easily be productive in a new language quickly.
But if I'm hiring someone to build/extend a real-time OS, then you need to check the "has experience working on real-time OS" box, because that's what I'm paying for when I hire you.
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well, hold on. I see a resume that says "Worked on a complex ML problem, training a model that did blah-and-blah". Sounds great, right? Then when you poke further you find out the person just took an online class that involved git cloning a repo and running scikit-learn on some toy examples without even understanding any of it.
Resume inflation is a big thing.
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#128Earlier 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.
This guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude will drive people like myself away instantly and that's fine. So far, I had plenty of options to pick from and, for me at least, culture match is highly important.
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#129I 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…
This goes for just about any developer job.
Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews
#130I'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 t…
> the bar raiser is the key person to impress
Not quite true. The Bar Raiser's job is to ensure the hiring decision is data-driven, bias-free, and is a good hire for Amazon - not just the team (this does create some tension between hiring manager and bar raiser).
I've been on plenty of loops where the bar raiser had a bad experience with the candidate, but the rest of the loop had good data and the candidate was hired.