For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies
blog.hackerrank.com
For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies
1–10 of 306 posts
Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies
#2"I got into the final interview for an extremely high-growth human resources startup. That was exciting, and I really thought I was going to get an offer. But, eventually, the last round of the interview was super hard. I just failed."
Been through this too many times.
Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies
#3Nearly every silicon valley interview is based on whether or not you are as hipster as the interviewer. Keep your head up and don't subscribe to the culture. You can be excellent and live as different as you want.
Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies
#4Nearly every silicon valley interview is based on whether or not you are as hipster as the interviewer. Keep your head up and don't subscribe to the culture. You can be excellent and live as different as you want.
Yes! Don't settle for the wrong culture, and pretend to be someone you are not.
Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies
#5So, how did you get to where you are today?
I’ve always been passionate about coding, starting from my early days at Olympiad teams in high school and ACM teams in college.
Anyone who's made it onto an Olympiad team[1] of any significant geographical scale, in any category, shouldn't have to deal with this whiteboard nonsense. Maybe a few lightweight-to-medium rounds to verify that they are what they say they are. But that's about it.
[1] We don't know if that's the case with Alibek; the article didn't drill down into that aspect of his background. I'm just talking to the fact that generally, there are plenty of easy ways -- albeit somewhat subjective, and in any case not uniformly applicable to all candidates -- to be at least 87% sure that the candidate isn't a a self-deluded poser, or outright liar about their coding skills (which seems to be the default stance many interview teams take).
And the due diligence one should do to remove that 13% of uncertainty can be made far less time-consuming and grueling than it generally is. Really, if you know how to read the signals, you can much more -- and much more easily, for all concerned -- about someone's coding skills by giving them a single medium-hard, but short-and-sweet exercise... than rounds and rounds (and more rounds) of progressively harder ones, as seems to be the current craze.
EDIT: Overall this is a very heartwarming piece; if a company like Booking -- known for having had several exceptionally talented programers on its staff over the years -- can not only take on someone like Alibek, but apparently consider him to be something of a find -- then that's a pretty damning indictment of the filtering processes used by the 38 of 39 companies that rejected him.
Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies
#6> You don’t get to use to your own IDE, you have an absurdly limited amount of time and you’re in an incredibly high-pressure environment.
Here's a good interview tip that's helped me out with my last two job moves: Whiteboard code almost always comes out looking like crap because once you've fleshed out the idea, you can't easily insert lines. The solution is to bring a laptop with the IDE of your choice ready and say "Hey, I'm not really good at whiteboard coding. Do you mind if I write the code on my laptop here?"
Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies
#7Luckily in my current job search I've only been told there would be a whiteboard once (this Friday!). This article made me nervous though—as a busy student I don't have time to sit down and review/learn all those tree and linked list operations as well as their complexities.
Best interview I've had was pair programming with a team member and fixing a bug.
Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies
#8> You don’t get to use to your own IDE, you have an absurdly limited amount of time and you’re in an incredibly high-pressure environment. Here's a good interview tip that's helped me out with my last two job moves: Whiteboard code almost always comes out looking like crap because once you've fleshed out the idea, you can't easily insert lines. The solution is to bring a laptop with the IDE of your choice ready and s…
If your interviewer really dings you for the appearance of your scrawled code on the wall, they're being self-defeatingly stupid and you'd probably be happier working with other people.
I do lots of tech interviews, and I always make it clear that I don't care how pretty the ink looks. I stick with the whiteboard because it's the best way for candidates to explain their analyses and algorithms before they write the code.
Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies
#9Excelling in an online programming competitions sounds like a fun, exciting way to showcase myself to multiple companies all at once. Way better than white boards, for sure!
Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies
#10Nearly every silicon valley interview is based on whether or not you are as hipster as the interviewer. Keep your head up and don't subscribe to the culture. You can be excellent and live as different as you want.
Full disclosure, I work for HackerRank, but I really wanted to comment for two reasons:
(1) Reading this article and seeing the comments, really helps me see how my daily work helps level the playing field and as Alibek says, change people's lives. Very fulfilling and thankful for that.
(2) Re: exabrial's comment above, where do you think culture fit should be evaluated in the process? Lots of interview processes today deal with culture fit at the end, but should it be item 1 and then coding skill item 2?