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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

#141

Post by nomel »

codr7 wrote: post #105
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.…

Wouldn't that be an excellent filter? If the candidate is lying, just move on to the next.

Maybe my org is different, but I need to have confidence and justify/document my yes/maybe/no. It's very hard to prove that someone is lying, especially since you can't expect them to remember everything from some years ago. You could claim they should have tried to remember the details of their projects, but that's tricky since most people can't take code or notes with them. If I show that they have a Phd, with experience building whatever, but can't write a for loop, then I have my proof.

Terms like "good thought process", etc aren't allowed in our feedback, unless specific examples are given. Terms like "team fit" will get your feedback outright rejected. No mushiness allowed.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#142

Post by zht »

JohnFen wrote: post #63
zht wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you might net 200K a year if you're lucky, and assuming you live like a miser and save/invest 150K a year, that's really not enough to retire on

Doesn't the depend on where you live and how old you are? In my part of the US, you can live like a king on $200k/yr and such jobs aren't rare. You can live better than 90% of the people here on $100k, and putting 100k/yr away for retirement is genuinely more than enough unless you're in your 40s or so. But I know there are other parts of the US where what you say is 100% true.

and OP was saying that he'd like to work for 10 years and retire. it's not really retirement if you only stop working for 10 years.

I just mean that you need far higher incomes than 350K for 10 years (gross) to be able to stop working entirely

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#143

Post by tester756 »

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 joining to become one extra cog in a large machine that is past its prime.

yada yada

>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.

Yes, you have little impact (unless you go up on the ladder), but you're working on products that serve the whole world.

That's quite a few order of magnitude more than working in yet another startup creating web-shop or niche app.

I'm not even at FAANG level of corpos and I really can say that I'm putting tiny bricks into really interesting products.

The work itself is pretty boring, but products as a whole are impressive as hell.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that corpos are great and startups sucks,

but when you're talking about companies that hire 50k, 100k, 200k or more people and just call them places where you're just "cog" and there's nothing exciting about the job then I think you're just naive

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#144

Post by dekhn »

mihaitodor wrote: post #128
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.

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.

Oh, I understand. However, the problem is that many companies are inundated with low-quality, puffed up resumes, and it's truly hard to find people that are actually qualified, especially if they're not doing any work to make themselves available.

I would add that I don't think you should think of it as "guilty-until-proven-innocent"; it's just the reality that you are competing with large numbers of amoral people who will lie to get a job. This is much less about culture match than you think.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#145

Post by scarface_74 »

jondwillis wrote: post #38
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

Do you work for a non profit?

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#146

Post by Ihateyouall2345 »

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…

[dead]

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#147

Post by Ihateyouall2345 »

codr7 wrote: post #68
em500 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But it's still a very time consuming and expensive process. Typically 5h of interviews with 1/2 people from my experience. Spending that energy more wisely would result in more valuable feedback and better hires. But it takes actual effort to try and understand rather than simply checking boxes.

[dead]

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#149

Post by michaelt »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #136
michaelt wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

It’s an important day for them, so you owe them your full attention. Can’t be browsing the web or replying to emails.

After a decade of interviewing, there is no excitement in watching the thousandth interviewee make the thousandth attempt to count the set bits in an integer.

Hiring is important, it's just very very very boring.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#150

Post by singleshot_ »

xyzelement wrote: post #108
allarm wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there room for reframing how you deal with fails? What would be your advice? How do you personally deal with fails? It feels shitty every time it happens, regardless of the amount of reframing or whatever else I put into my mind.

The unsatisfying answer is - that you have to figure out why it cuts you so deeply to begin with to really make sense and fix it. But I can provide some hopefully actionable things in the process: - Recognize that interviews (and other things, like dating) is a high value endeavor but the failure raise of any given encounter is high. Go in wanting the job and doing your best, but recognize that the answer to any one…

Hello stranger,

I have printed out the last substantive paragraph of your comment and taped it to my monitor.

I don’t know what, if anything you had to go through to learn this. And I figure that in my heart, I probably knew it already. But reading it once every few hours will probably do me some good. Thanks for that.

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