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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

#181

Post by bryan_w »

ForrestN wrote: post #94
m0zg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> fundamentally destructive product That's just, like, your opinion, a random HN reader. And the vast majority of FB users do not share it.

If you do some quick research, you'll find that the harmful nature of Facebook is the subject of a vast public discourse in the United States and Europe. Lots of academics and public health professionals continue to research the negative consequences of facebook use. It's not an opinion, but I suppose it could still be considered a subject of some controversy. The best evidence I've seen, and that the commentators I…

> Destroying journalism’s business model is bad

At least this article is upfront that it has a vested interest in demonizing FB

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

#182

Post by Benjammer »

mav3rick wrote: post #164
Benjammer wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I mean, I've built and released multiple mobile apps (commercial and enterprise) on both platforms for multiple companies. They've all been mostly successful at doing what the company needed them to do. They look fairly nice as well.

And I don't have this kind of fundamental, "what do you mean 'google it' are you a complete and total fucking moron!?" attitude about anything in software. I routinely browse through google results (mostly SO/Medium) about very basic concepts just to read the words again and re-warm those caches in my brain.

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

#183

Post by docker_up »

Cookingboy wrote: post #61

As someone who has interviewed with 3 of those 6 companies and gotten offers from all 3, I think the best way to approach these interviews is to not walk in with the mentality that it's a one sided "test" where you are put on a spot to defend yourself. In reality it's more often than not a role-playing exercise where you are pretending to be coworkers trying to solve problems together. Sure you'd be the one leading t…

Except it's well known that Facebook asks you 2 coding questions in 45 mins and if you don't solve them it's an automatic fail.

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

#184

Post by bargl »

markdoubleyou wrote: post #12

"After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours/day, more on weekends)..." I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.

Hey man I feel your pain. Wife, two kids and not a ton of time.

I don't know your specifics, I only know mine.

I've recently started volunteering / D&D 2 nights a week. It's been good for me and the family. This spurred some interest from me in doing work when I'm sitting in the kids room waiting for them to fall asleep.

This came after I switched jobs and started working on the bus, which cut down on my total amount of time away from home.

He also did this for a month, you might have to do 30 min to 1 hr for 3 months. Set a goal and go for it. The important distinction for me was that my goal board now includes being a good dad. Part of that was realizing I wanted my kids to see someone reaching for goals and doing it.

Anyway, good luck and don't hold yourself to others ideals, shoot for your own goals. I had a short term goal to re-center myself and let some mental baggage go. It meant a lot of video-games. But now I'm onto the next goal.

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

#185

Post by rhizome »

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…

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.

There is still so much stupid money out there that it doesn't pay to do this. Literally immaterial, and it's more cost-effective to hire for a narrow-but-consistent set of requirements.

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

#186

Post by donaldknuth123 »

gamblor956 wrote: post #23
ForrestN wrote: post #10

I find it shocking that Facebook would still be considered as a peer to these other companies in terms of desirability as an employer. I would only accept a position at Facebook, which seems to be building a fundamentally destructive product while going out of its way to behave unethically in many dimensions, if it was an absolutely last resort to pay the medical bills of some dying loved one or something. Why would…

There are plenty of people who feel the same way about all the useless startups in SV that exist solely to take VC money. At least Facebook actually provides something of value to the hundreds of millions people who use it.

Maybe, but the 10th dog walking app startup in SV isn't actively damaging Democracy across the world and that's not even mentioning the insane levels of social media addiction that is actively perpetuated by FB.

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

mav3rick wrote: post #164
Benjammer wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

[deleted]

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

#188

Post by Jach »

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?

Do you spend 5-10 minutes googling and reading about the Linear Search algorithm[0] every time you iterate through a list and have a conditional to do something if an element matches some criterion? BFS, or a generic graph search (could be BFS, DFS...), is essentially just linear search except each element can have 0-n direct next elements, instead of 0 or 1. It's not this hard thing that never comes up...

Indirection is great in this trade, a lot of what I "know" is just an index key/search strategy to go look it up again. But a lot of what I "know" I know directly. According to this old paper[1], for many fields including software you need to directly know about 70k±20k random things in the field to be in the running for expert status. Proficiency is also related to how many things you know directly. Thus you can't do an index lookup for everything unless you have no constraints on time and/or don't care about improving your level of expertise.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_search

[1] https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a219064.pdf

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

#189

Post by watwut »

dimgl wrote: post #24
markdoubleyou wrote: post #12

"After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours/day, more on weekends)..." I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.

You're not trapped literally. This is all a mental game. Everything you just listed is an excuse.

I am not doing work around kids and I am not at home at all because my career is more fun is an excuse.

Not to be confused with "we are struggling and I do what have to do" which is different thing.

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

#190

Post by chrshawkes »

TheHegemon wrote: post #56
markdoubleyou wrote: post #12

"After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours/day, more on weekends)..." I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.

I have a wife, three boys (one who doesn't sleep through the night), and a full-time job as well. Usually I just practice after putting the kids to bed. It's possible you just need to carve out some time even if it's an hour or two a night.

I have an IT YouTube channel where I discuss being a self-taught developer. I studied for years each night after getting home from my full-time non-IT job. Wife, 2 kids and mortgage as well.

Now, twenty million people have watched me and I have been in the industry for 10 years as a senior software engineer. I wouldn't pass Google's interview either I bet, but they invited me to an educational convention last year.

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