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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

#231

Post by hocuspocus »

40acres wrote: post #32
avitzurel wrote: post #8

I really dislike the fact that you need to study for weeks with specific questions that really have no hold in real life. I've been doing this for 16+ years and I have never asked the type of questions you encounter in these books. Not even once.

The specific questions don't have a hold in real life but the patterns behind them do. Most problems to be solved in computer science, with enough abstraction, have already been solved. I joined a new software development scrum at work and have been helping optimize how long our application takes (it can be thought of as an encoding engine) we've seen huge leaps in improvement with very simple solutions, 75% of the t…

> The specific questions don't have a hold in real life but the patterns behind them do.

At many companies, successfully recognizing the pattern isn't going to be enough to pass the interview. You have to implement a working solution.

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

#232

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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…

I disagree. I've been out of college several decades, and if I wanted to go back into a programming job I would need several months to study these problems.

Which is one of the things these problems really test: determination and effort. Look at the author of this piece - they said they studied a lot and did a ton of interviews over months. That alone is a huge positive signal that they would be someone I would want to work with.

Also, it's not like these types of problems are irrelevant. Being able to understand things at a lower level (data structures, algorithms, etc.) means that there is a very high likelihood you'll be able to "dig deep" when encountering tricky technical problems on the job.

I'm not saying these technical interviews are the end all/be all for what is needed to succeed on the job, but in light of how in vogue it's become to bash technical interviews (often without a viable alternative), I think it's important to point out they have a useful purpose.

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

#233

Post by goostavos »

honkycat wrote: post #78
avitzurel wrote: post #8

I really dislike the fact that you need to study for weeks with specific questions that really have no hold in real life. I've been doing this for 16+ years and I have never asked the type of questions you encounter in these books. Not even once.

Getting a computer science degree from a fancy university would prepare you for these types of questions. They are a ( maybe unintentional ) dog-whistle for coming a wealthy background which means you will fit right into the cultures at these sorts of places. Learning to program takes a lot of privilege. Look up the stats for how many google SWE's do not have degrees / where they come from.

>Learning to program takes a lot of privilege.

Whaa? It takes a computer. Beyond that hurdle, I dunno what privilege is involved. It'd say it takes persistence more than privilege. I grew up quite poor, bad family, dropped out of college (due to bad family), learned cs on the internet, now work at a FANG corp.

Thinking there's some wealthy background bias is bizarre to me. When you've got 300k+ people in an organization, you acquire people from all walks of life / countries / backgrounds.

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

#234

Post by jopsen »

behringer wrote: post #206
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…

If you want my opinion, these companies aren't looking for awesome talent. They're looking for people who will put up with their schedules, demands, management. They don't want creative thinkers with experience in multiple fields. They're looking for one-trick ponies that will do what their told and will be happy to get stabled by 40. You're better off following your own path and making your own things happen.

I work at Google some of my co-workers work reasonable hours, quite a few have been there for 10 years.

The same was the case when I worked at Mozilla..

But I've always felt the interview process at these places extremely arbitrary.

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

#235

Post by matz1 »

avitzurel wrote: post #8

I really dislike the fact that you need to study for weeks with specific questions that really have no hold in real life. I've been doing this for 16+ years and I have never asked the type of questions you encounter in these books. Not even once.

Change your mindset, instead think of it as convenient way to get a job for a multiple different company using basically the one generic approach. It doesn't really matter whether it has no hold in real life, in fact well I argue it does have a hold in real life, which is to get you that job.

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

#236

Post by reggieband »

magicalhippo wrote: post #226
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 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.

BFS is "Breadth first search". One tree you would do this on is a BST or "Binary Search Tree". Probably OP got the acronyms mixed up.

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

#237

Post by dcre »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #232
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…

I disagree. I've been out of college several decades, and if I wanted to go back into a programming job I would need several months to study these problems. Which is one of the things these problems really test: determination and effort. Look at the author of this piece - they said they studied a lot and did a ton of interviews over months. That alone is a huge positive signal that they would be someone I would want…

They really are irrelevant to the vast majority of software jobs. It's nice to be able to go deep when necessary, but that is very different from knowing a bunch of algorithms off the top of your head that you'll never have to implement.

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

#238

Post by seppin »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #153
randcraw wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many in Myanmar and Philippines might disagree. Facebook Admits It Was Used to Incite Violence in Myanmar https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo... What Happens When the Government Uses Facebook as a Weapon? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodri...

It's a communication platform. You want a censored internet.

> It's a communication platform. You want a censored internet.

It's a communication platform designed to enflame and enrage, because outrage gets the higher engagement metrics therefore higher AD revenues. Facebook designed themselves out of any legitimate argument they are merely a benign platform.

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

#239

Post by gbear605 »

deegles wrote: post #174
drugme wrote: post #70

It is critical, in my opinion, to either whiteboard problems with someone or mock a phone interview with someone. Not critical as in “very important”, but critical as in you should consider it an absolute requirement when studying. Which would seem to further substantiate the observation that the modern interview process seems to be (strongly) calibrated not towards finding folks who are good at real-life problem-sol…

Isn't the author doing the rational thing though? If I knew ahead of time that BigTechCo's final interview would be a test of my juggling skills, I would definitely spend hours honing my juggling. Whether or not it's an appropriate measure of my skill as an engineer is irrelevant to my goal of "getting a job at BigTechCo"

The author’s doing the rational thing, but BigTechCo that requires juggling certainly isn’t. It is left to the reader to decide whether this is relevant to the industry’s interviewing practices.

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

#240

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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