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Interview advice that got me offers

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Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#171

Post by st1x7 »

drchopchop wrote: post #130
MattGaiser wrote: post #28

> Keeping those skills sharp even when you’re not job hunting. Can I just add "Leetcoder" as a part time job on my resume? It is amusing how in this industry, your ability to interview will not at all be improved by spending time doing your job unless it is algo heavy. It is a separate job entirely.

We need to band together and stop rewarding companies who pull this shit in interviews. Leetcode problems are not applicable to 99% of the actual work in most software engineering roles. There are other, gentler ways to find out if someone knows what binary trees, dynamic programming, sorting, and big O notation are.

Not being directly relevant to the role also has its benefits. It means that you can interview for a job without necessarily having experience in the company's exact problem domain or with the framework that they happen to be using this quarter.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#172

Post by geuis »

klenwell wrote: post #16

One additional tip on recruiters: have a cheat sheet ready (web page or public Google doc) that answers the basic questions they'll have for you and makes clear your expectations. Here's the info I ask them to provide: - Job Title and Salary - Job Description - Company Overview and Location - Steps in Hiring Process Whenever I'm emailed by a recruiter, I politely thank them for reaching out, paste the link to the che…

We need to clarify: Sounds like you’re talking about the third party recruiters who play the numbers game and email anyone and everyone they can keyword match.

In the article, the author is referring to internal recruiters who are employed by the company itself.

Two very different experiences there.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#173

Post by valarauko »

xondono wrote: post #153
valarauko wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play Devil's Advocate, and I ask as someone not in the industry (I'm in academia) - is the difference between expectations really that large? I would imagine (perhaps unreasonably) that a relatively seasoned person on the job market would have a reasonable understanding of their market value within a few percentage points - so the recruiter might be willing to pay up to $105/hour, while you low balled it at $100/h…

You’d be surprised. Specially in small/medium companies, a lot of the times businesses don’t know what they are looking for. I know of a place that was looking for a “hardware engineer with 10y experience”. The average salary for this kind of job posting is not that high, they offered way more, but that’s because the actual position was “we’re looking for someone to become COO, and we need him to understand hardware…

I understand that this sort of situation might arise, especially in smaller companies that are still building institutional wisdom and are out of sync with the market. That said, is this really the case most of the time, to justify developing your entire strategy around it? As the sibling comments suggest, the greater the delta between expectations of the two parties, the less worthwhile the whole endeavor is. The parent comments suggest that the strategy to never disclose expectations pays off precisely because there could be a wide delta between the expectations, AND you're underselling yourself. I don't know enough about the industry to know how often these happen, to justify this approach.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#175

Post by draw_down »

hnrodey wrote: post #131

Has anyone here pivoted from software engineer to software engineering recruiter? Curious or yours (or anyones for that matter) thoughts on this topic. It's a move I've considered just to keep my career interesting.

Those are very different skill sets, I'd be surprised if that happened often. Not to mention the difference in pay...

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#176

Post by [deleted] »

frongpik wrote: post #98
tootie wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I interviewed with Amazon twice and it's like a 10-hour meat grinder. No offer either time and I have no idea what I did wrong. I absolutely don't get those wide open questions like "How would you design 1-hour delivery?" (real question btw). As someone who has done a lot of consulting work, my instincts are never, ever try to answer such a ridiculously broad question on your own with no context. The answer to…

Your interviewers rarely have real world consulting experience, meeting with clients and solving real problems tied to real money. What they mean by that "1 hour delivery" is a system design question that must be answered along the standard system design template, which is completely detached from reality. You should lookup up those system design interviews on youtube, ala "design a tinyurl service".

[deleted]

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#177

Post by LASR »

angarg12 wrote: post #169

> When you're in a real interview the world changes: You're locked in a cage with a lion. I got into interviewing this last year as an interviewer. I used to think (as most people do) that the interview is a confrontation between interviewer and candidate. However my biggest breakthrough happened when I changed my perspective. Now I see interviewers as detectives, gathering evidence of whether the candidate would be…

I mentor interviewers at my job. Pretty much, every junior (The interviewers are people too. They get nervous too sometimes. They too don’t want to look stupid when they’re having a conversation with the candidate.

The first learning of interviewer training I try to solidify is that the interviewer is not intended to be the person who “knows the answers”. Candidates have specialized, deep knowledge in the specific areas they’ve worked on. How can an interviewer expect to know more than them?

Experienced interviewers will know that they are there simply to facilitate the candidate in arriving at solutions to the problem.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#178

Post by akdas »

redisman wrote: post #123
akdas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge +1 on explicitly setting expectations. I've written on this topic[0], and there are a lot of different ways interviewers don't set expectations: - Is the interviewer looking for syntactically correct code, or general algorithmic skills? - For a warmup, is the interviewer looking for a basic solution, or an optimal solution? - For architecture walkthroughs, what level of detail is expected? The extra pressure is…

I've found you can somewhat mitigate it by asking questions yourself. For example in one tech screen once I had the algorithm pretty much done I asked if I should look to optimize and to add test cases/handle odd input and the interviewer said it's fine as is and let's talk more about other topics like architecture in the real world.

Absolutely, that's something I pointed out in my writing: if the interviewer doesn't explain their expectations, you can and should ask. Interviews work best when both parties are engaged heavily in the success of the interview.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#179

Post by decafninja »

vincentmarle wrote: post #9

The hardest part about interviewing is that there is no feedback loop; I once interviewed at 10 companies within 2 weeks and got rejected from all of them, but to this day I still don't know what part I need to improve upon.

Personal anectdote, so YMMV.

Interviewed at a FAANG last year, failed the onsite. I got called by the (internal) recruiter a few weeks ago asking if I wanted to retry, and he offered feedback he had from my previous attempt. I was shocked - both that he provided feedback, and because my own evaluation of how I did differed from the actual feedback (did better at a round I thought I bombed in). More on this later.

Interviewed at another FAANG, and got rejected there too. Here, the hiring manager immediately gave me feedback before sending me home. Again, surprising.

So are things changing in regards to giving feedback? Usually FAANG leads the charge, and other companies play copycat.

Getting back to the first FAANG, I wanted to punch myself because according to the recruiter, I might actually have been able to get in if I had asked to be considered for a lower level than what they had originally pegged me for. I would have hands down, no hesitation, jumped for joy to be brought in at a lower level. Sucked that no one told me at the time of the actual rejection.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#180

Post by speedgoose »

st1x7 wrote: post #171
drchopchop wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to band together and stop rewarding companies who pull this shit in interviews. Leetcode problems are not applicable to 99% of the actual work in most software engineering roles. There are other, gentler ways to find out if someone knows what binary trees, dynamic programming, sorting, and big O notation are.

Not being directly relevant to the role also has its benefits. It means that you can interview for a job without necessarily having experience in the company's exact problem domain or with the framework that they happen to be using this quarter.

True, but the algorithms challenges are not very representative of the actual work we do in our industry. They are a nice way to filter people who are not willing to spend a lot of time studying challenges to have job interviews though.
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