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A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

interviewing.io

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Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#171

Post by Balgair »

leeny wrote: post #13

OP and founder of interviewing.io here. We spent hundreds of hours interviewing current & former FAANG interviewers to write this piece. We really wanted to peel back the curtain on what happens during these interviews, what actually matters to them, how these companies train their interviewers (if at all), make hiring decisions, and so on. I'll be around to answer questions, and I'll tag in Kevin, the author, as wel…

May be a dumb question, but why do I only see, like, every 20th letter when I visit the page? Is this some anti-ad-blocker thing?

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#172

Post by allarm »

dekhn wrote: post #127
allarm wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally when I’m interviewing people I don’t go much further than asking about the topics they covered in their resume. If they lied in the resume, it’s an instant no-go. And if their resume is on your desk already, that means that their skill set covers most of the requirements for this position already. Simple enough.

Well, hold on. I see a resume that says "Worked on a complex ML problem, training a model that did blah-and-blah". Sounds great, right? Then when you poke further you find out the person just took an online class that involved git cloning a repo and running scikit-learn on some toy examples without even understanding any of it. Resume inflation is a big thing.

I think you misunderstood, I didn’t mean that the resume alone is enough to pass the interview.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#173

Post by blitzar »

allarm wrote: post #172
dekhn wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, hold on. I see a resume that says "Worked on a complex ML problem, training a model that did blah-and-blah". Sounds great, right? Then when you poke further you find out the person just took an online class that involved git cloning a repo and running scikit-learn on some toy examples without even understanding any of it. Resume inflation is a big thing.

I think you misunderstood, I didn’t mean that the resume alone is enough to pass the interview.

Normally when I’m interviewing people I do go much further than asking about the topics they covered in their resume.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#174

Post by papito »

I've succeeded with interviews looking for three things:

* Find a candidate who takes apart with ease a couple of rather rudimentary programming problems. NOTHING crazy. Something practical and easy to understand the purpose of.

* Look for passion in technology and coding. Ask them what they would learn or do if they didn't have to work for a year.

* Look for rapid upward trajectory (potential). Someone doing the same thing for 5 years, meh. Someone going from data entry to automating a gnarly task with Go in a year - give me a ticket on that rocket ship.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#175

Post by papito »

mgaunard wrote: post #109
xyzelement wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your question. Plenty of senior people work at (and join) FAANGs with high comp and excitement about the role.

What excitement? You're joining to become one extra cog in a large machine that is past its prime. You will have little agency and impact, and your only opportunity for a decent compensation will be based on internal politics rather than technical merit. Meanwhile, you can join a human-sized company, and be a real enabler and transformer of that business.

Enabling FEELS great, but you are still just making (less) money - you are a work for hire no matter what. And it's a lot of work - making someone ELSE rich.

Now, if you are entrepreneurial and aiming to start something of your own, a smaller company will force you to wear many hats and become the jack of all trades, learning tons.

I say, do it when you are younger - you will have more time, more energy, and you will need to be learning a lot. And later on - be a mercenary for money.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#176

Post by mgaunard »

harshalizee wrote: post #124
mgaunard wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What excitement? You're joining to become one extra cog in a large machine that is past its prime. You will have little agency and impact, and your only opportunity for a decent compensation will be based on internal politics rather than technical merit. Meanwhile, you can join a human-sized company, and be a real enabler and transformer of that business.

Been at two FAANGs, a small startup and a mid sized company. I cannot overstate how little I care about being an enabler and a transformer of the business, or even care about the business. You see, as a business ( of one), I'm here to ensure my company (again me) is generating cash flow and profit for my stakeholders ( me + family + dog). Unless I own the company or have equity >10%, it never made sense why anyone wo…

You will never achieve great things if you're not dedicated.

Settling for a cushy job where you don't have to care and can focus on your family, yes, that's what FAANG is for. That's what I meant by retirement.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#177

Post by mgaunard »

lapcat wrote: post #133
harshalizee wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been at two FAANGs, a small startup and a mid sized company. I cannot overstate how little I care about being an enabler and a transformer of the business, or even care about the business. You see, as a business ( of one), I'm here to ensure my company (again me) is generating cash flow and profit for my stakeholders ( me + family + dog). Unless I own the company or have equity >10%, it never made sense why anyone wo…

> Unless I own the company or have equity >10%, it never made sense why anyone would. This is key. I worked for a small company for 8 years, and in the end I realized that the owners still wanted me to be just a cog, and I would never be anything except a cog in their (small) machine. That's when I quit and started my own company. The gap between employees and owners is massive and almost always insuperable.

A good company will reward key people with equity.

Either you were not a key person or you badly picked the company you worked for.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#178

Post by mgaunard »

yodsanklai wrote: post #135
mgaunard wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What excitement? You're joining to become one extra cog in a large machine that is past its prime. You will have little agency and impact, and your only opportunity for a decent compensation will be based on internal politics rather than technical merit. Meanwhile, you can join a human-sized company, and be a real enabler and transformer of that business.

You're making a lot of generalizations here. 1. First, there are plenty of roles in these companies. You could be working in a very small specialized team on open source software that is used beyond the company. It doesn't matter if the company is past its prime or not, and you're not more or less a cog that if you work for a startup. 2. I can only speak for my experience, but my compensation isn't based on politics…

1. In a start-up, you being good at what you do is what separates the company failing from it succeeding. In FAANG, none of what you do matters. There are thousands of initiatives and redundancies.

2. Highly standardized is exactly what leads to politics. Everyone's circumstances are different but somehow you need to fit everything to the same ill-fitted mold, so everyone is trying to exploit the game. The standardized interview is also the worse thing about Google/Facebook leading to dumbing things down, lack of purpose, and bad targeting of specialized skills. At least Google is backtracking from it.

3. A small company has vision and enables a few people to have genuine impact, this is what leads to doing something different and innovating. Those few people in power are stubborn, they need to. You don't innovate through design by committee. If you don't like the vision you shouldn't have joined that company.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#179

Post by blitzar »

dekhn wrote: post #127
allarm wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally when I’m interviewing people I don’t go much further than asking about the topics they covered in their resume. If they lied in the resume, it’s an instant no-go. And if their resume is on your desk already, that means that their skill set covers most of the requirements for this position already. Simple enough.

Well, hold on. I see a resume that says "Worked on a complex ML problem, training a model that did blah-and-blah". Sounds great, right? Then when you poke further you find out the person just took an online class that involved git cloning a repo and running scikit-learn on some toy examples without even understanding any of it. Resume inflation is a big thing.

This might be too cynical ... but those that engage in resume inflation and all the other games get the interviews and get the jobs and become the interviewer. Thus git cloning a repo and running scikit-learn on some toy examples without even understanding any of it == Worked on a complex ML problem.

As for the CV that says took an online class that involved git cloning a repo and running scikit-learn on some toy examples is a CV you should discard as they probably just went for a cup of coffee and looked at the clouds for an hour.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#180

Post by lapcat »

mgaunard wrote: post #177
lapcat wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless I own the company or have equity >10%, it never made sense why anyone would. This is key. I worked for a small company for 8 years, and in the end I realized that the owners still wanted me to be just a cog, and I would never be anything except a cog in their (small) machine. That's when I quit and started my own company. The gap between employees and owners is massive and almost always insuperable.

A good company will reward key people with equity. Either you were not a key person or you badly picked the company you worked for.

> Either you were not a key person or you badly picked the company you worked for.

This is a really uninformed and insulting reply. You speculate without having any knowledge or details about the situation.

First of all, I didn't join the company with the intention of staying 8 years or rising to management; I joined because they offered a big pay raise from my previous job. So no, I didn't badly pick the company I worked for.

Second, I personally wasn't looking for equity, I was looking for power, the ability to make independent decisions.

Third, a more general point: BigCo engineers get equity in the company, but they're still just cogs in the machine.

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