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I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

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Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#121

Post by Arubis »

markdoubleyou wrote: post #12

"After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours/day, more on weekends)..." I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.

It may be that your situation and priorities do indeed restrict you from making the time investment to get good at whiteboarding and FAANG-style interview practice. It doesn't necessarily follow that you're stuck hard doing what you are now.

If you're using the term "trapped" to describe where you work, I'm inferring that you want a change. It's hard to get specific without knowing all your priorities, details, and life choices, but it's almost certainly worth taking a step back and evaluating if there's ways to get what you need by an alternative path that doesn't involve slotting yourself into a process that's optimized for smart single twentysomethings.

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#122

Post by randcraw »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #59
ForrestN wrote: post #10

I find it shocking that Facebook would still be considered as a peer to these other companies in terms of desirability as an employer. I would only accept a position at Facebook, which seems to be building a fundamentally destructive product while going out of its way to behave unethically in many dimensions, if it was an absolutely last resort to pay the medical bills of some dying loved one or something. Why would…

Because Facebook makes one of the most useful pieces of software for everyday people. It's not a "destructive" product.

Many in Myanmar and Philippines might disagree.

Facebook Admits It Was Used to Incite Violence in Myanmar https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...

What Happens When the Government Uses Facebook as a Weapon? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodri...

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#123

Post by ojr »

mav3rick wrote: post #109
odorousrex wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot help but think that these big tech companies (FAANG, et. al) are missing out on diversifying and increasing their engineering expertise by passing over developers like you. I often think what would Google/Facebook would be like if they hired in some experienced engineers that may not be able to whiteboard a BFS tree or can tell you Djikstra's algorithm, but have proven business track records of getting proje…

This is just ridiculous. BFS is such a useful building block. If you're stubborn enough to not spend 10 mins on this the best of luck.

The creator of ruby on rails wouldn't pass a whiteboard interview. Ruby on Rails had more of an impact at Twitter, Github, Airbnb than BFS is my guess

DHH's tweet https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1085987159406927872

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#124

Post by andrewla »

odorousrex wrote: post #80
guessmyname wrote: post #9

> If it’s of any use: I was interviewing for my second job out of college with about two and a half years of experience without any particularly notable internships or employers on my resume; I went to a very small school that had zero known software companies at their “career fair”; I started preparing in late April and started applying in June/July; and, lastly, a few months in, my job is everything I could have po…

I cannot help but think that these big tech companies (FAANG, et. al) are missing out on diversifying and increasing their engineering expertise by passing over developers like you. I often think what would Google/Facebook would be like if they hired in some experienced engineers that may not be able to whiteboard a BFS tree or can tell you Djikstra's algorithm, but have proven business track records of getting proje…

The technical interviewing scheme is not great, but I haven't seen another system that works.

> I cannot help but think that these big tech companies (FAANG, et. al) are missing out on diversifying and increasing their engineering expertise by passing over developers like you.

I think this is certainly true.

> I often think what would Google/Facebook would be like if they hired in some experienced engineers that may not be able to whiteboard a BFS tree or can tell you Djikstra's algorithm, but have proven business track records of getting projects done, on budget, and on time.

Well... how do we find these people? By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it? By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates?

Practically speaking, FAANG companies do hire such individuals, they just do it through acqui-hires. If a person works at a company that is good enough to be worth acquiring, then we have a good signal that they are effective employees even absent a direct evaluation of their technical abilities.

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#125

Post by Benjammer »

mav3rick wrote: post #109
odorousrex wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot help but think that these big tech companies (FAANG, et. al) are missing out on diversifying and increasing their engineering expertise by passing over developers like you. I often think what would Google/Facebook would be like if they hired in some experienced engineers that may not be able to whiteboard a BFS tree or can tell you Djikstra's algorithm, but have proven business track records of getting proje…

This is just ridiculous. BFS is such a useful building block. If you're stubborn enough to not spend 10 mins on this the best of luck.

I honestly don't mean this in a snide way.

Can you give a few concrete examples of how a deep understanding of BFS that can't be googled and read in 10 minutes at the time you need it can help you ship profitable software products faster than your competitors?

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#126

Post by quickthrower2 »

mav3rick wrote: post #109
odorousrex wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot help but think that these big tech companies (FAANG, et. al) are missing out on diversifying and increasing their engineering expertise by passing over developers like you. I often think what would Google/Facebook would be like if they hired in some experienced engineers that may not be able to whiteboard a BFS tree or can tell you Djikstra's algorithm, but have proven business track records of getting proje…

This is just ridiculous. BFS is such a useful building block. If you're stubborn enough to not spend 10 mins on this the best of luck.

BFS is common sense. It’s what you use when you’ve lost your car keys for example. Quickly check each room in the house, then if no luck go one layer deeper in each room.

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#127

Post by gfodor »

debatem1 wrote: post #114
ForrestN wrote: post #10

I find it shocking that Facebook would still be considered as a peer to these other companies in terms of desirability as an employer. I would only accept a position at Facebook, which seems to be building a fundamentally destructive product while going out of its way to behave unethically in many dimensions, if it was an absolutely last resort to pay the medical bills of some dying loved one or something. Why would…

I recently considered a role there, on a security team no less. I've never had a Facebook account and agree that the product as-is is fundamentally destructive. However, there's some value in "running towards the fire" so to speak. Facebook does not seem to me to be fundamentally evil, just willfully blind to the problems it causes. It's probably worth a few years of someone's life to try to steer that ship in a bett…

What does it mean for a company to be "fundamentally" evil or not? The "fix things on the inside" argument for going to working at a place that you think is harming people has always struck me as based upon a mostly unfalsifiable assumption: that the organization has the capacity to change and that you can actually bring about that change. This is especially unknowable until you've actually worked at an organization for a long enough period of time to understand all of its internal pathologies and the motivations and character of the people involved in them.

There's no reason to believe that as a job seeker you can have some insight for a given company into how impactful your actions may or may not have on the things they are doing that you consider harmful. An honest assessment I'd argue should assume your impact will be minimal if not zero given a large enough organization, unless you are coming in as a high level manager.

As such it's hard to not take it as a self-rationalization given the incentives to create cognitive dissonance on the part of job seekers in order to take a high paying job working on interesting technical problems despite the potential negative effects it has on others. This doesn't mean there aren't good reasons to go work at such a place, it just means that if you're telling yourself that you're able to look past any ethical concerns you might have since you think you can be an influencer towards correcting them, I think it's worth reflecting on if you're not actually going to be put into a real position of power to do so.

The challenge with Facebook specifically on this front is that power is extremely centralized onto one person, so even if you were joining Facebook as, say, a VP, it's hard to know in advance just how much influence you're going to have over the direction of the company before you've learned where the boundaries of that influence are.

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#128

Post by rdtsc »

> Leetcode Medium, Leetcode Hard, Cracking the Coding Interview ...

I feel like there is something wrong with the industry. Here is a person applying to do mobile development and they need to spend weeks and weeks drilling binary tree inversions and trapping rain water (https://leetcode.com/problems/trapping-rain-water/) etc.

I was interviewing at AWS and I don't think most of the people I talked to even looked at my resume and asked about the projects I worked on, happy customers etc. It was mostly palindromes, buckets of water and various trees, and parroting back Jeff's 14 leadership principles. Now obviously these companies are around and lots of smart people are working there and delivering great products but it just seems so strange.

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#129

Post by goostavos »

m0zg wrote: post #34
markdoubleyou wrote: post #12

"After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours/day, more on weekends)..." I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.

The whole process is a roll of the dice. The more senior the role, the less fair that roll of the dice will be. If you can accept this fact, you don't have to be "trapped". That's how I think of it anyway: I never spend more than 2 weeks (_very_ part time) preparing. I do get rejected sometimes, but I get plenty of good offers too.

I've been in a ton of debriefs at this point. I no longer feel bad about any rejection I've had from any big company. "Dice roll" is a perfect way to describe it. The number of things that someone will raise an arbitrary red flag over is endless and largely down to personal bias / mood of the interviewer.

I've seen people discredited for not setting up some large inheritance hierarchy for their whiteboard design question. What's "Doing it Right" for one person (me: avoid inheritance like the plague), is someone else's "this guy couldn't code his way out of a paper bag".

Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

#130

Post by thanatropism »

yuy910616 wrote: post #69
m0zg wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevertheless, you are a small minority outside the HN bubble.

I agreed...I think net effect of FB on humanity is positive. We all live in the moment, and FB is having a bad moment right now. I mean...HN is pretty Toxic sometimes. HN is amazing sometimes. Is it good? Is it bad?

Have you ever been to the "job rumors" forums like econjobrumors and PSR? It's like HN on steroids. Polite because it's semiprofessional and everyone's pseudonymous but can get easily outed from details (I mean come on how many people have been in strategy consulting and done graduate work on symplectic manifolds?) but also everyone's mean and competitive.

HN is less toxic than PSJR because the field it covers is much larger and positive-sum; academic job rumor forums are much more fish-eat-fish.

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