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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

#221

Post by cbron »

sun_har wrote: post #26
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 think these sorts of posts give people a warped view of interviewing for SWE positions. Most companies don't ask whiteboarding questions of the difficulty discussed here. If you want to work at one of the biggest corporations in the world, thats one thing - but there are plenty of good jobs out there for people like you and me who don't want to put in this sort of time commitment to interviewing.

Of that difficulty no, but I've been asked plenty of whiteboard questions from small and mid-size companies outside of the west coast.

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

#222

Post by Const-me »

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 but I can give a few examples where I refactored code from these antique pointer-based trees (inspired by classic CS books, half century old now) towards something more cache friendly, and improved performance by an order of magnitude.

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

#223

Post by rossdavidh »

CydeWeys wrote: post #214
fokinsean wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Out of these companies Google felt most impersonal and "test like" I had this same experience too. I went through the 4 technical interviews onsite which were all whiteboard problems. Not once did we actually talk about my past experience or rather anything software engineering related. Unfortunately(?) I didn't receive an offer despite making it to the hiring committee. Two weeks later they called me back and want…

I've found that I get a lot more signal out of asking people to actually solve a problem by writing a program than by asking them about past experience. Hence I spend most of the interview time on the former. It's surprisingly common for people to be able to talk about something in a way that sounds impressive, but then after seeing their actual coding skills you realize they were likely not a star performer on the t…

I have the opposite experience. I get more out of talking to them about past experience, mostly by asking them what they would do differently if they were approaching the problem today. This way, I know they are familiar with the problem space (they've worked on it), and I get to see how they thought about it and what lessons they learned from it. This also gives an opportunity to talk about how they think about software (discussions of failure or at least what could have been better are much more informative that successfully demonstrating some algorithm).

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

#224

Post by blobbers »

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…

Don't you think you're taking a bit of a fatalistic approach to things? I applaud the linked article's can-do attitude and pro-active approach to studying for what to be honest is a slightly silly interview process.

I'm not arguing that it shouldn't be the way it is, and I'm also not arguing against.

Claiming "Finally, I realized my brain needs more time than the average programmer to find patterns in this type of problems." feels a little bit like you've given up and that in itself strikes me as the worst sign.

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

#225

Post by blub »

debatem1 wrote: post #114
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…

I recently considered a role there, on a security team no less. I've never had a Facebook account and agree that the product as-is is fundamentally destructive. However, there's some value in "running towards the fire" so to speak. Facebook does not seem to me to be fundamentally evil, just willfully blind to the problems it causes. It's probably worth a few years of someone's life to try to steer that ship in a bett…

Unless you're CxO, or joining a 5 person startup, you're not influencing anything.

The WhatsApp founders had more influence that an engineering plebe would ever hope to have and still failed to change facebook's wicked ways.

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

#226

Post by magicalhippo »

mav3rick wrote: post #109
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…

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 didn't know about "BFS trees", do you have any references? I tried Googling but I could only find breadth-first searching (which I do know well, though apparently not the acronym BFS), but that's just a traversal algorithm.

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

#227

Post by j1elo »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #126
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.

BFS is common sense. It’s what you use when you’ve lost your car keys for example. Quickly check each room in the house, then if no luck go one layer deeper in each room.

I'd use an indexed search and remote activate the beeper in the key chain

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

#228

Post by dymk »

ryandvm wrote: post #51
azhenley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have some really interesting projects going on. For example, they have recruited some top researchers in program analysis and compilers (among many other areas).

I think his point wasn't that Facebook isn't doing neat stuff, just that at the end of the day, the result of everything they do is objectively horrifying. It boils down to: "Give people just the right amount of dopamine and fiddle with their psyche in all the right ways in order to maximize the amount of time they spend staring at their phones."

> the result of everything they do is objectively horrifying

you don't know what the word "objective" means

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

#229

Post by perl4ever »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #126
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.

BFS is common sense. It’s what you use when you’ve lost your car keys for example. Quickly check each room in the house, then if no luck go one layer deeper in each room.

This is actually not how I search. After the first search, if I am getting frustrated, I do what I was told when I was a child: "start picking up stuff until you find it". So I guess that's kind of a depth first search after going over the top layer.

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

#230

Post by blobbers »

aphextron wrote: post #216
rachelbythebay wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmer distillation. Companies need to admit that only trying to hire a single type of person is not going to work. It's just like with petroleum: there's nothing wrong with the other products you get from the mix. You just have to appreciate what there is and make the most of it. I bet you're quite good at something (perhaps multiple things), but they don't value it. Their loss. I'm glad you found something that…

>Programmer distillation. That's a great way of putting it. Hard to see any other explanation.

How many people have gone through the full regiment of training for interviews described by the original linked author and failed at every major tech company?
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