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A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

interviewing.io

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Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#131

Post by jasonpeacock »

snakewatching wrote: post #23

So the main factor for succeeding those so-called interviews is doing more of them? ie, it has nothing to do with your actual performance on the job. We should think hard as a society on what we want to spend our time on. At some point in my career I drank the koolaid that joining a FAANG was the most prestigious thing you could do. But now I start to see people working at FAANGs as bureaucratic rule-follower that pu…

Interviewing is a skill that needs to be worked on.

Unfortunately, your "portfolio" is not portable between companies and so these tedious interviews are necessary. Similarly for other technical roles like welding - they expect you to do an example weld to show you can really do the work, though there are also certification standards that help which we don't have in the software industry.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#132

Post by fatnoah »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #72

It 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.

> It 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.

There's a very important caveat here. At Facebook and Google (those are the ones I experienced) you have to pass a bar to get into the company. While those initial interviewers won't be the ones you work with you'll either (Google) go through team matching where you'll meet those team members or even better (Facebook) meet them AND work with them on a couple tasks to get to know them and their work BEFORE you join the team.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#133

Post by lapcat »

harshalizee wrote: post #124
mgaunard wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

> Unless I own the company or have equity >10%, it never made sense why anyone would.

This is key. I worked for a small company for 8 years, and in the end I realized that the owners still wanted me to be just a cog, and I would never be anything except a cog in their (small) machine. That's when I quit and started my own company.

The gap between employees and owners is massive and almost always insuperable.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#134

Post by [deleted] »

leeny wrote: post #13

OP and founder of interviewing.io here. We spent hundreds of hours interviewing current & former FAANG interviewers to write this piece. We really wanted to peel back the curtain on what happens during these interviews, what actually matters to them, how these companies train their interviewers (if at all), make hiring decisions, and so on. I'll be around to answer questions, and I'll tag in Kevin, the author, as wel…

[deleted]

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#135

Post by yodsanklai »

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.

You're making a lot of generalizations here.

1. First, there are plenty of roles in these companies. You could be working in a very small specialized team on open source software that is used beyond the company. It doesn't matter if the company is past its prime or not, and you're not more or less a cog that if you work for a startup.

2. I can only speak for my experience, but my compensation isn't based on politics at all. It's purely based on my contributions. Compensation is just like the interview process, highly standardized, no room for politics.

3. A lot of human-sized companies don't produce anything meaningful, with more politics, and you won't have any room for impact because you're blocked by a few stubborn people in power.

Again, just my experience but I found that in my FAANG, there's a critical mass of people with good common sense and less bullshit in general. In the couple of smaller companies where I worked, it wasn't the case. There were good engineers, but also enough annoying people with too much influence that make my day-to-day job less enjoyable.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#136

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

michaelt wrote: post #119
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

Why do you assume it can only be un-rewarding?

If hiring is so important, maybe it's worth paying the best people extra to get it done correctly.

If it's not that important, it'd be nice if they'd stop pretending like it is.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#137

Post by nomel »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #113
nomel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> absolutely fall to pieces when having to code while being watched

Yeah, this is the biggest problem I have with it. I try to be conscious of this, and try to keep things pretty lighthearted. If I notice someone getting nervous, a "you're doing great for time" usually calms them. If not, I do follow up interview, if they did well seeking an understanding the problem, and could explain it verbally. I've had a few people pass with flying colors after a second round.

> and that's a good angle to approach their GitHub profile

I disagree here, with the (probably wrong) assumption that not having a GitHub profile adds a negative bias. Some people put their coding hours into work, with different lives outside of coding. All of the colleagues I've known with impressive GitHub profiles burnt out/left. Battle stories can be within corporate repos.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#138

Post by mihaitodor »

xyzelement wrote: post #56
mihaitodor wrote: post #26

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

There was a great story on HN a few days about the concept of "It wasn't for me"[1] - the distinction between something being "bad" vs "just not for me." Your comment made me think of that. 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…

> the distinction between something being "bad" vs "just not for me." Your comment made me think of that.

> 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."

I wasn't aware of this concept, but I can assure you that I don't have such a mindset. I tend to enjoy finding difficult challenges and complex topics to dig into which are way outside of my comfort zone. Leetcode practice is different though, and yes, it does feel like torture to me and some other developers who tend to be rather quiet in general. While it's really tempting, I don't think I'm the right person to act as a community voice on this topic, although I do chime in sometimes.

When you're just starting this career path, it feels like homework. Heck, it's even exciting to solve problems which are a bit more complicated than whatever you're exposed to in school. However, try to spend several years in a row (8 in my case) trying and failing to pass such interviews (several in-person ones each year) and it will feel like torture. "If you'll spend a little bit more time on Leetcode, surely you'll pass next time..." No thanks! I'm done. The issue is not the lack of training, but the way in which these interviews are conducted by certain people which causes me distress and severe anxiety. I moaned about this before in various HN threads related to interviews and I might bother to blog about it some day.

> 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.

Hasn't been my experience, but I'm not looking to maximise my income. I looked for advice on negotiation strategies and whatnot and felt happy with the offers I got. Others might have a different experience in this regard, but I think asking for less money in exchange for a psychologically-safe interview process is nonsense. At the end of the day, you get what you pay for and there are review sites anyway.

> 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.

I think you're making certain assumptions here. I don't need to "tackle" my perception of what's safe and comfortable. We're all different and that's a good thing.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#139

Post by TrackerFF »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #8
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?

Its the difference between making 400k+ a year and retiring early, versus grinding away on software

How many FAANG engineers do you know that have retired early, compared to the FAANG those that didn't / still work?

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#140

Post by codr7 »

tdudzik wrote: post #123
cinntaile wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

5 hours x 1/2 people checking boxes is energy that could be put to better use.
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