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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

#151

Post by jdenning »

kodah wrote: post #95
xyzelement wrote: post #5

I 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…

It's worth saying I've been subjected to LeetCode interviews for SRE Systems Engineering positions. Though I write application code it doesn't even begin to reflect the problem domain I work in. It's simply a test that you must pass that someone arbitrarily believes does a good job of filtering. From my perspective as a senior engineer, and knowing that many of the people who can pass these tests suck when it comes t…

+1 to this - I’ve had countless interviews for SRE positions that were pure leetcode. If I were applying for SRE roles today, I would take it as a signal and just stop the interview and leave. Leetcode interviews are a big part of the reason why I left my career in tech. I’ve built infrastructures that handled 30,000 requests per second at dozens of datacenters - never once had to implement my own graph search.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#152

Post by JohnFen »

zht wrote: post #142
JohnFen wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh, I missed that part. Yes, if you want to shoot for that goal, it requires a huge sacrifice and a lot of misery.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#153

Post by snakewatching »

jasonpeacock wrote: post #131
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.

Sure, but for a welder there is a correlation between doing well at the test weld and how good you are at your job.

With leetcode interviews there seem to be very little correlation.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#154

Post by potbelly83 »

zug_zug wrote: post #15

Just a heads up to anybody super starry-eyed about fang, I worked 10+ years non-fang, and tried fang, and it was absolutely miserable, one of my least favorite jobs of my career. Yes I made a lot, but I also worked and stressed proportionally more. YMMV.

Speaking from experience working at both FAANG and non-FAANG, the worst part about FAANG is that compared to small-mid sized companies the work just isn't that interesting.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#156

Post by dennis_jeeves1 »

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…

>I suspect that they are implicitly filtering for those engineers that will follow tasks without asking too many questions

As a general rule most educational systems are that way, for example you need to be very conformist if you want to become an MD. Consequently you will not find many MDs who are no-conformist.

In fact I would go so far as to say that even elementary and high school filters for conformist people who are going to be willing cogs for their government and corporate overlords in the future

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#157

Post by dennis_jeeves1 »

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…

>Software developer hiring is definitely ripe for revolution/innovation.

That's like saying that janitor jobs ripe are for revolution/innovation. You would think I'm joking, but most companies really do not care, despite what they say.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#158

Post by bhasi »

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.…

> no compilation, no running code

I recently had an interview where, for the first time, the coding round was Coderpad based, which allowed me to run my code and build my solution bit by bit with instantaneous feedback.

I know for sure that I wouldn't have been able to solve that recursion problem without that live terminal. I now am going to insist on this live terminal in all of my future interviews and refuse to do any that don't employ one.

I think it helps my anxiety immensely.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#159

Post by lisasays »

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…

Aside from compensation - would you want to work at a FAANG?

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#160

Post by PheonixPharts »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #89
PheonixPharts wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> own a house, not worry about money While you absolutely take a huge pay cut to not work at a FAANG, it's not like making 200k+ is living in poverty. Typically non-FAANG also has other perks: many more fully remote options, typically much more chill about working hours, working with niche tech stacks or on new problem spaces, etc. You can enjoy work and still have a house and not have to worry about money at a non-F…

In Canada, where do you find these non-FAANG 200k+ jobs?

Working for a US based startup (and there are still plenty of good Canadian ones as well)?

I've had Canadian coworkers at multiple companies where Senior Engineers made 200k+

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