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The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

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Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#151

Post by metalgearsolid »

_4ziu wrote: post #96
mullingitover wrote: post #32

I honestly don't know why anyone gives FAANG recruiters the time of day anymore. I have yet to meet anyone who feels good about the prospect of working for them, anyone who works there who's super proud of their mission, and the competitors who are looking to hire at that level of talent pay roughly similar wages from what I've seen. My advice for this poor kid is to look around at startups and do more networking. FA…

I don't know what kind of selective bargaining power you guys have, but i would kill just to get my foot in the door of a FAANG.

It's nice working on any well known product really. I spent 3 years with a tiny startup doing enterprise software, and I can hardly even explain it to other employers, because hell, not even my own boss knew what he was trying to sell. We just had some kind of survey builder platform with a mess of features that was starting to stick with people.

Finding my 2nd job is just as hard as getting the first one, as the product I helped develop is just not that interesting. It would be so much easier to just say I worked at Google, Airbnb, Apple, whatever. I'd be upset, but I don't want to work for a FAANG regardless.

Good luck!

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#152

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

ummonk wrote: post #144
throwlaplace wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having just recently (in the last 2 weeks) completed >100 problems on leetcode i can affirmatively tell you that it's not actually that difficult to game this system. i read elements of programming interviews (took about a month of a couple of hours a day) and then just blitzgrieged leetcode. this was all in prep for a FAANG internship tech screen i had yesterday. it went well (not perfect but well). but it is true t…

The people complaining are usually the ones who can't just prep for algorithmic interviews with a couple hours a day of effort for a month. Which makes the algorithmic interview a relatively good filter - ability to learn something difficult quickly is a very important skill at high performance software companies.

When you're paying someone to solve problems for 40 hours a week, assessing them based off if they're willing to do that in their free time seems naive. It's surely a safe option, but you'll miss a ton of qualified talent, and potentially not grow fast enough because of your hyper-idealistic expectations for what it means to be a software engineer.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#153

Post by [deleted] »

codingslave wrote: post #55
parsimo2010 wrote: post #33

Comedian Daniel Tosh had a bit about people that claimed to be smart, it's just that they were just bad at taking tests. He said, "oh, so you struggle with the part where we find out what you actually know?" I hear a lot of complaints about the "typical" software engineering hiring process, and it usually comes from the people that don't do well within the current system. Could the process be improved? Almost certain…

People are completing 500+ problems on leetcode before heading into interviews at google. Don't believe me? Go read the teamblind forums. People might spend six months studying, after which they pass a bunch of interviews and get good comp. Getting just one offer from a FAANG company often doesnt pay well enough, you need multiple competing ones. If you think this has anything to do with incompetent people complainin…

[deleted]

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#154

Post by newfeatureok »

starpilot wrote: post #138
MAGZine wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google might not need you to code some efficient algorithm to search a b-tree every day, but they pay top dollar and can rightly expect that their software engineers can come up with efficient and creative solutions to hard problems without dragging the rest of their team down. This is a non-sequitur. Being able to write good software has nothing to do with reading cracking the coding interview and practicing leetc…

Google has strong data that it does predict job performance, better than GPA, college degree and so on. What are your aggregate data showing that Google is wrong on this?

I’d be curious to see this data. Have a link?

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#155

Post by inertiatic »

starpilot wrote: post #138
MAGZine wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google might not need you to code some efficient algorithm to search a b-tree every day, but they pay top dollar and can rightly expect that their software engineers can come up with efficient and creative solutions to hard problems without dragging the rest of their team down. This is a non-sequitur. Being able to write good software has nothing to do with reading cracking the coding interview and practicing leetc…

Google has strong data that it does predict job performance, better than GPA, college degree and so on. What are your aggregate data showing that Google is wrong on this?

The poster you're responding to is arguing that their process has poor recall, not poor precision necessarily.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#156

Post by jayd16 »

parsimo2010 wrote: post #114
kyllo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ability to acquire and apply technical knowledge, and ability to demonstrate random technical knowledge under time pressure, in a foreign environment, while other people are watching and judging you, are orthogonal skills and many engineers are great at the former and terrible at the latter. There's also a ton of opinion and taste involved in software engineering, which can bias the interviewer's view of someone'…

Time pressure, foreign environments, and people watching/judging your work are all exactly the things that happen when you're developing stuff that hasn't been done. You run into problems. You find out that requirements or an API spec weren't perfectly written and have to deal with change. You have to work with other people, and they will judge you. Hard coding exercises with a time limit that have an answer that can…

But the questions are not "stuff that hasn't been done." They just test whether you've memorized the answer that took someone far more than 15 minutes to find.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#157

Post by hobs »

minimaxir wrote: post #97
glofish wrote: post #45

In my personal experience, having interviewed dozens of candidates (data science), I believe that asking "easy" and "simple" questions is the most effective way to probe the problem-solving skills of a candidate. Fun and interesting solutions to easy questions are hallmarks of great individuals. The question would go like this: Suppose I have a column-oriented file and I want to print out a column in a reverse-sorted…

As someone who has had bad data science interviews before getting my current data science job, the process is highly variable. I've had interviews where the interviewer is looking for a specific right answer, with the answer being a binary you-know-it-or-you-don't thing that can't be talked through or worked out in a dialogue with the interviewer. An example was a whiteboard problem requiring the BETWEEN syntax for S…

My favorite iteration of this is also when the interviewer has a suboptimal answer to this question, and expects you to parrot the wrong thing back to them.

I could tell I annoyed my interviewer when they told me I was wrong and I demurred, and politely asked them to look it up since there was some question about the facts. They did not look it up.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#158

Post by gentleman11 »

ideal0227 wrote: post #90

When my classmates were preparing interview coding questions, I was working on a mini TCP implementation and a toy kernel. AWS rejected me since I failed to write prefect code to traverse a tree in level order. Google did not even give me an interview since I told the campus recruiter I have not prepared for the coding questions. Then I ended up with an internship at CoreOS and created etcd. I am glad that they did n…

I spent my time learning instead of drilling too and don’t regret it. My bank balance does though :(

I want to work for myself however in the long run and I think the skills are more important for that

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#159

Post by fourmyle »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #148
codingslave wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are completing 500+ problems on leetcode before heading into interviews at google. Don't believe me? Go read the teamblind forums. People might spend six months studying, after which they pass a bunch of interviews and get good comp. Getting just one offer from a FAANG company often doesnt pay well enough, you need multiple competing ones. If you think this has anything to do with incompetent people complainin…

I'm imagining it's going to bite these people on the backend later in life when they sacrificed everything for their careers and potentially missed other major life milestones: cultivating a relationship, starting a family, etc. I know not everyone spends 6 months getting into Google, but there are so many other companies that will take you without 6 months of preparation. If career is the only thing that gives you m…

I used to think that until I heard of people with far less experience than me getting paid $400k total comp at these places because they can ace the interview and get competing options. That's worth putting 6 months of work in.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#160

Post by alexfromapex »

The best part is they might hire someone that knows the answers by chance when someone with much better technical skills doesn’t know the answers to the particular set of questions and then the new hire might be technically savvy but often have very poor interpersonal skills
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