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Interviewing in Silicon Valley

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Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#11

Post by reikonomusha »

rdl wrote: post #8
krat0sprakhar wrote: post #5

> In most interviews I’ve had, engineers and recruiters I speak to spend a great deal of time gloating about their product, almost as if they are trying to sell me their product. The fact of the matter is, I am not interested in being spoken to as if I would be a potential consumer of your product. I want to be spoken to as if I would be a potential employee working on your product. Spot on!

Actually, as soon as you've decided not to hire someone, it actually makes sense to shift the whole conversation to "selling the product" and otherwise making it likely the person, who takes a job elsewhere, will either refer other (hopefully better) candidates, or use your product.

It's often the first thing (selling the product) companies talk about, not the last, however.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#12

Post by ultimoo »

I am in grad school and live with roommates in the SV. Amongst the six of us, we have interviewed at a cumulative of 20 big SV names in the last month and of course we discuss the interviews frequently with one another.

Companies like Broadcom, Cisco, Juniper, Anritsu, Apple etc. solely rely on the programming problems the OP talked about.

HP focuses on riddles and puzzles to a point where it is ridiculous and mind-numbing (1 hours interview, two interviewers, about 15 riddles :-/)

There is however a marked difference in the way companies in SoMA, SF interview you -- conceptual discussions, chatting about previous projects, finding out about your open source contributions, asking you about what you like about a certain language, talk about editors a little, etc. And I'm also including companies like SCEA, who although a part of larger companies, behave in this way.

Unfortunately none of us interviewed at Google or Facebook, so I have no comments there.

P.S. Most of us have accepted offers at smaller companies in SoMA, SF.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#13

Post by woodchuck64 »

> [ Lots of coding puzzles and vague about that "very difficult problem" they're working on that requires expertise in 20 different technologies ]

I get it now. Silicon Valley job interviewing is white-collar gang initiation: you have to show you can bear the pain and humiliation of getting metaphorically beaten up and humiliated. It's not about getting the questions right anymore than taking a fist in the face qualifies you to be an expert Crip, it's about impressing someone of rank by the way you bleed.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#14

Post by maaaats »

> I am especially bewildered by the fact hard CS questions are given to prospective interviewers who will only be doing boilerplate PHP development for the actual job.

I agree. I think it's fun to solve these puzzles, but often they're of no relevance to the actual job. Better if they asked me questions from their domain or about the technology they're using.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#15

Post by reikonomusha »

dsowers wrote: post #10

Here's the lesson: Don't play the game. Don't spend all of your time studying coding puzzles to answer questions correctly to people who are unlikely to hire you anyway. It's just a ridiculous waste of an intelligent mind. Spend your time building something interesting that actually helps the world. Build fun and interesting projects with this time. These projects might give you a career or a job that is smart enough…

It might not be advantageous to spend all of one's personal time figuring out coding puzzles, but I wouldn't be ignorant of the fact they will be brought up. Unless you develop an open source project which gets love from thousands of people and becomes very popular, few companies are going to use just that as a basis for hiring you.

Unfortunately, this also conflicts with the fact most people do need to make a living in order to survive. Unless it's possible for one to live without income from a job, then relying on "being noticed" will probably not be a fruitful avenue.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#16

Post by stevewilhelm »

dirktheman wrote: post #3

Well written piece that shows what to me is the SV recruiting paradox: there is a massive demand for programmers, yet companies make it really, really hard to get a job. It's easier to start your own company without the interview hassle and condescending attitude of some HR managers. I might be out on a limb here, but it seems it's almost easier to raise money for your startup than to get a job. Of course it gets a l…

>> yet companies make it really, really hard to get a job.

It is much better to filter out some perfectly good candidates than accidentally hire the wrong candidate.

The wrong hire can be very disruptive, and in some cases fatal for a company. Firing the wrong hire is very, very hard.

>> but it seems it's almost easier to raise money for your startup than to get a job

Raising money is like interviewing for three jobs at once: CEO, CFO, and CTO.

[EDIT] removed some platitudes and fixed fatal.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#17

Post by eli_gottlieb »

stevewilhelm wrote: post #16
dirktheman wrote: post #3

Well written piece that shows what to me is the SV recruiting paradox: there is a massive demand for programmers, yet companies make it really, really hard to get a job. It's easier to start your own company without the interview hassle and condescending attitude of some HR managers. I might be out on a limb here, but it seems it's almost easier to raise money for your startup than to get a job. Of course it gets a l…

>> yet companies make it really, really hard to get a job. It is much better to filter out some perfectly good candidates than accidentally hire the wrong candidate. The wrong hire can be very disruptive, and in some cases fatal for a company. Firing the wrong hire is very, very hard. >> but it seems it's almost easier to raise money for your startup than to get a job Raising money is like interviewing for three jobs…

Someone who recites platitudes instead of evidence and can't spell "fatal" wouldn't get a job at any company I run ;-). Rejected.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#18

Post by balloot »

I despise interviewing for software positions. Engineers love to treat interviews like some kind of hazing. They're gonna make you quiver and sweat and if you can still solve their stupid brainteaser maybe they'll give you the honor of working with them. Problem being, this has basically nothing to do with how good you'll be at the job. I spend 0% of a normal day with someone I don't know staring me down and judging every line of code I write in realtime.

I much prefer medium sized offline coding challenges, both for myself and for hiring my team. You give a good engineer a small project to work on, an he should crush it. Because that actually has something to do with what engineers do on a day to day basis. Personally, I get the job pretty much every time if I am told to build a small project, and I crash and burn almost every time if I get the SWAT team of surly technical interviewers.

It's worked fine for me because the small companies I like to work for are more apt to give out the projects, but still I could do without some of the awkward interviews I've gone through with companies who use the Google-like process.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#19

Post by wowoc »

ultimoo wrote: post #12

I am in grad school and live with roommates in the SV. Amongst the six of us, we have interviewed at a cumulative of 20 big SV names in the last month and of course we discuss the interviews frequently with one another. Companies like Broadcom, Cisco, Juniper, Anritsu, Apple etc. solely rely on the programming problems the OP talked about. HP focuses on riddles and puzzles to a point where it is ridiculous and mind-n…

What's SoMA?

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#20

Post by reikonomusha »

wowoc wrote: post #19
ultimoo wrote: post #12

I am in grad school and live with roommates in the SV. Amongst the six of us, we have interviewed at a cumulative of 20 big SV names in the last month and of course we discuss the interviews frequently with one another. Companies like Broadcom, Cisco, Juniper, Anritsu, Apple etc. solely rely on the programming problems the OP talked about. HP focuses on riddles and puzzles to a point where it is ridiculous and mind-n…

What's SoMA?

A neighborhood. "South of Market Street", in San Francisco.
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