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All my career rejections

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Re: All my career rejections

#141

Post by shawabawa3 »

120bits wrote: post #117
echelon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a critique, just an observation. I could be totally wrong. > I would encourage XXX to use some coding challenge practice websites to become comfortable with producing quick working code segments contrasts with > I have realized that maybe I'm not a rockstar coder that can come up with high performance code. What's your analytical process like? Do you take a moment to sit back and just think? Don't dive directly i…

Good question. It seems I lack speed implementing an optimal solution. During my initial FAANG interviews, I have had gone totally blank on my thought process and code. After few interviews, I don't actually dive in coding. I spend at least 10minutes about the problem and explain how it can be solved. I have realized that the interviewer is not looking an optimal solution at first. However, they're not satisfied with…

In my experience, to be better than the vast majority of candidates you don't need an "optimal" solution, you need to have written something that actually runs within 20mins or so (even if it's incomplete), then work on improving it afterwards

Re: All my career rejections

#142

Post by nostrebored »

Aeolun wrote: post #132
120bits wrote: post #109

I did something similar last year after getting rejected by FAANGs and few more other tech companies. - Google rejected 3 times. - Facebook 2 times. - Amazon(AWS) 1 times. - Adobe 1 Times. - Twitter, Github, stripe and others won't even consider me good enough for an interview. - Dozens others companies, who do FAANG style interviewing. I fear rejections, no matter how much I "try" to act normal. I was looking forwar…

You think that’s unbelievable? I’ve literally had a company recruiter tell me that I should probably spend a few hours on leetcode and hackerrank before the interview. That turned out to be predictive, because they rejected me mostly based on my inability to do well on those kinds of tests. I got a life people. Between taking care of my son, wife and work, where am I supposed to find ‘a few hours’ to spend on somethi…

Having a life means that you should love a standardized interview format. There's nothing worse than project assignments from companies asking 'for only a few hours' with descriptions that very clearly ask for multiple workdays.

Algorithmic interviews also compensate you better. Being able to prepare for multiple interviews at the same time means that you have a broader range of options to choose from and can play them off of each other.

Re: All my career rejections

#143

Post by Ma8ee »

PunchTornado wrote: post #137
Aeolun wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that’s unbelievable? I’ve literally had a company recruiter tell me that I should probably spend a few hours on leetcode and hackerrank before the interview. That turned out to be predictive, because they rejected me mostly based on my inability to do well on those kinds of tests. I got a life people. Between taking care of my son, wife and work, where am I supposed to find ‘a few hours’ to spend on somethi…

why do you expect to pass an interview without preparing for the interview?

Maybe in the hope that the interview would reflect the actual work that needs to be done, which my education and previous work experience have prepared me very well for.

Then I'm happy to prepare for the interview in the sense that I try to learn as much as possible about the company and the people I'm going to meet.

Re: All my career rejections

#144

Post by neilv »

p1esk wrote: post #139
Aeolun wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that’s unbelievable? I’ve literally had a company recruiter tell me that I should probably spend a few hours on leetcode and hackerrank before the interview. That turned out to be predictive, because they rejected me mostly based on my inability to do well on those kinds of tests. I got a life people. Between taking care of my son, wife and work, where am I supposed to find ‘a few hours’ to spend on somethi…

You think that’s unbelievable? Google and Facebook recruiters told everyone at my university they expected people to spend 2-3 months of several hours a day leetcode type practice before applying. This was said in a panel type "how to get a job at FAANG" seminar for graduating seniors, with actual Google/FB SWEs present, and all nodding in agreement that this is the norm.

That time investment sounds like a tragic loss of open source development and random curious exploration by students.

Maybe also quite a few lost innovative startups, which might've been spun out of students making things they want to make, rather than grinding just to prepare for interview rituals.

Re: All my career rejections

#145

Post by newswasboring »

PunchTornado wrote: post #137
Aeolun wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that’s unbelievable? I’ve literally had a company recruiter tell me that I should probably spend a few hours on leetcode and hackerrank before the interview. That turned out to be predictive, because they rejected me mostly based on my inability to do well on those kinds of tests. I got a life people. Between taking care of my son, wife and work, where am I supposed to find ‘a few hours’ to spend on somethi…

why do you expect to pass an interview without preparing for the interview?

I think you are genuinely curious. The point here is, people are confident that they can do the job, just can't pass the interview. The purpose of the interview is to select someone to do the job, not to pass the interview. "Preparing for the interview" is chasing the wrong KPI for both parties. Companies don't want someone who can pass the interview, they want someone who can do the job, they are not the same things.

Re: All my career rejections

#146

Post by karolist »

Ma8ee wrote: post #143
PunchTornado wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why do you expect to pass an interview without preparing for the interview?

Maybe in the hope that the interview would reflect the actual work that needs to be done, which my education and previous work experience have prepared me very well for. Then I'm happy to prepare for the interview in the sense that I try to learn as much as possible about the company and the people I'm going to meet.

Copying this response from my older comment:

The rampup at FAANG can be brutal and you'd be doing lots of learning even after getting in. The leetcode style interviews are designed to select people capable of studying and materialising broad problems in depth and scope under time constraints. They are also objective and can't really be faked nor you can talk your way in like in most banking/finance IT jobs. I was of similar opinion at some point but these realisations made me change my mind and I've come to like leetcode interviews. But I also think they only make sense in FAANG scoped companies where all the stack is proprietary. Small companies or companies using opensource tools don't really have this rampup and are doing such interviews mostly because others (FAANG) do it.

Re: All my career rejections

#148

Post by Dzugaru »

neilv wrote: post #144
p1esk wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that’s unbelievable? Google and Facebook recruiters told everyone at my university they expected people to spend 2-3 months of several hours a day leetcode type practice before applying. This was said in a panel type "how to get a job at FAANG" seminar for graduating seniors, with actual Google/FB SWEs present, and all nodding in agreement that this is the norm.

That time investment sounds like a tragic loss of open source development and random curious exploration by students. Maybe also quite a few lost innovative startups, which might've been spun out of students making things they want to make, rather than grinding just to prepare for interview rituals.

It can be a massive fun too. Ive never interviewed at FAANG, but solving some leetcode problems (mostly medium-hard though) was so cool for me and some of my friends. We were into olympic math at school, and I don't consider that a waste of time as well.

Re: All my career rejections

#149

Post by CBLT »

Aeolun wrote: post #133
echelon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a critique, just an observation. I could be totally wrong. > I would encourage XXX to use some coding challenge practice websites to become comfortable with producing quick working code segments contrasts with > I have realized that maybe I'm not a rockstar coder that can come up with high performance code. What's your analytical process like? Do you take a moment to sit back and just think? Don't dive directly i…

> You don't have to have an optimal solution first. The problem is that they still want that optimal solution in the 30 minutes given to you. There’s no point in thinking about it unless you already know what they are looking for. Whoever thought up that alghorithm the first time certainly didn’t do it in 30 minutes during an interview.

> The problem is that they still want that optimal solution in the 30 minutes given to you.

This is only half true in my opinion. A lot of the interview questions I've gotten are pretty straightforward, for example given two lists of length M and N, brute force searching their product space is O(M*N), but if you sort one list the complexity reduces to O(NlogN + MlogN). I get the impression that the interviewer did expect me to sort, and writing code to do that was good enough.

On the other hand everyone shares stories about the really hard "gotcha" problems with clever optimal solutions. I've only been given one of those[0], and I did not come up with the optimal solution but I still passed the interview. I wrote a halfway solution that was better than bruteforce and I explained why any attempt I'd make to remove terms from the big O expression wouldn't work (obviously I could remove more if I was clever enough or given unlimited time).

So I would sum up my experience with they expect you to do better than brute force within 30 minutes, and to give them an intelligent conversation. I don't think this is easy, but it's not as impossible as you make it out to be.

[0] https://techdevguide.withgoogle.com/resources/former-intervi...

Re: All my career rejections

#150

Post by oytis »

rramadass wrote: post #101

I wouldn't do this and keep it around. We have all had rejections, particularly in these highly competitive times but the trick is to forget about them after doing a quick postmortem and learning any lessons. The reason is that psychologically we are wired to focus on the negatives and ruminate endlessly on it leading to self-doubt and a sapping of self-confidence. This is absolutely not good for long-term psychologi…

> People also tend to make biased snap judgements if you display your failures/faults rather openly. Always project your strengths and don't advertise your faults.

I believe one of the ideas behind this list is to help overcome the culture where you are supposed to hide your failures. Not a bad thing for a self-confident person, as the author probably is.

Of course for someone who feels so much depressed by their failures that they can't stop thinking about them over and over doing that might not be the best therapy.

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