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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

#161

Post by Scarblac »

gok wrote: post #58
hunter23 wrote: post #37

The candidate's experience shows how flawed Bay Area recruiting is. This candidate was clearly strong, as they had a 100% offer rate on companies that they interviewed at and almost all of those companies are top tier(Apple, LinkedIn, Amazon, Facebook, Google). Yet 70% of the companies didn't even give the candidate a chance to interview. It's incredibly sad that a candidate that is able to get offers at Google, Face…

It's possible the candidate was overqualified and some of those 70% knew it wasn't worth their time if there was a 99% chance they were going to Google or similar.

With 2.5 years of experience and nothing that special on his resume? Sounds hard to believe.

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

#162

Post by watwut »

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…

Experienced engineers can BFS the tree. They may not remember djikstra.

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

#163

Post by xfer »

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…

These processes are optimized to reduce false positives not false negatives. So they already know that they might be missing on some great developers.

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

#164

Post by mav3rick »

Benjammer wrote: post #125
mav3rick wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No problem will present in such an easy way as "oh just apply BFS". As part of a big project you often have to use many different algorithms for sub parts, often modify them to suit constraints.

I think the HN crowd is heavily inclined to web apps and also front end. I can't tell you how important fundamental CS knowledge is for backend. I bet you can't use a library or API for how caches work or when paging happens. Knowing these things makes you a well rounded engineer ready to tackle different problems. I can trust you to write a mobile app or work on some part of a self driving car because you have the building blocks to do so. Most of the comments in such threads have no interest in interesting and diverse jobs because "why bother, when will I use this". To any new grad, yes the interviews can be better but please spend time on these things at school. They are an investment in your career's stock.

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

#165

Post by Scarblac »

wesleytodd wrote: post #99

IMHO, this is the worst possible approach to finding a job. The opportunity cost of doing this over working on interesting problems and letting that guide you to pay seems extremely high. Also, the focus on "top bay area companies" seems misguided at best. If you work more on identifying what type of work you want to be doing you might find there are GREAT opportunities in other regions or at smaller scale companies.…

It's early in his carreer. I think getting some years of solid experience at a company like this will probably improve his skills a lot, and then he still has plenty of time left to find the really interesting problems.

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

#166

Post by watwut »

Benjammer wrote: post #125
mav3rick wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You won't be able to Google it, because you never ever asked to BFS by name.

You will be asked to find the biggest file in folder structure, find largest modúle in dependency tree or the person in data structure that has no department and thus caused null pointer exception.

You also won't google it, because it is simple and ylnormal programer don't need google for this.

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

#167

Post by kcmastrpc »

rdtsc wrote: post #128

> 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…

No, these tests are carefully devised to target young college graduates who will excel at these types of interviews because the material is still fresh and they have the free time to study.

This is age discrimination disguised as "technical proficiency" exercises.

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

#168

Post by sigstoat »

andrewla wrote: post #124
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…

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…

> Practically speaking, FAANG companies do hire such individuals, they just do it through acqui-hires.

there's a huge pool of employees that are in companies which aren't potential acquisition targets.

> Well... how do we find these people? By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it?

internal references? if you've got a couple of internal folks who are doing good work, and they all worked with and vouch for old bob, maybe that's better than anything you're going to find out from > By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates?

even the faintest whiff of implication that FAANG interviews might not be subjective is hilarious.

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

#169

Post by matz1 »

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…

These company simply want the best of the best. They want people who can whiteboard BFS tree AND also have proven business track records, yada yada. Not just either one of this.

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

#170

Post by mav3rick »

andrewla wrote: post #124
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…

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…

Many acqui hires get interviewed again. Most acqui hires are a business deal for the company's business.
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