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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

#251

Post by wolco »

scarejunba wrote: post #201
sigstoat wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Practically speaking, FAANG companies do hire such individuals, they just do it through acqui-hires. there's a huge pool of employees that are in companies which aren't potential acquisition targets. > Well... how do we find these people? By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it? internal references? if you've got a couple of internal folks who are doing good…

> internal references? if you've got a couple of internal folks who are doing good work, and they all worked with and vouch for old bob, maybe that's better than anything you're going to find out from At big companies this is hard to scale because you have to protect against nepotism at the top layer. This forces policies protecting against the bad outcome. At small companies this does happen.

Provided references are at the core the worst way to judge if someone can do the job and the laziest way. If you want to rely on references you have to get them yourself through background check or the risk of gamification is huge.

Get a sense of the projects they have worked on if those skills relate to the position. Make a decision based on that.

Random coding tests, whiteboarding, buzzword dropping are only helpful to a point.

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

#252

Post by nfRfqX5n »

sigfubar wrote: post #175

Whenever I read job search war stories such as this article, I keep wondering if these are sent from a parallel universe of some kind. Six job offers? That's incredible! I mean that literally: I have a very difficult time believing such stories because they never jive with my own experience. The below is taken directly from my "Job search - 2017" Trello board. (I always use Trello to organize a job search because wit…

this person is clearly very smart and capable, but i think the role of iOS developer contributed to the take rate. super high demand.

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

#253

Post by hocuspocus »

bcbrown wrote: post #102
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.

Do you have any resources or suggestions for better types of questions to ask, especially for individual interviewers without control over the overall process? I try to avoid those sorts of questions, but it's hard for me to come up with better alternatives.

Even among textbook questions from the infamous leetcode and the likes, there are a few good ones. For instance I was once asked this one: https://leetcode.com/problems/flatten-nested-list-iterator/

- it's not too short or too long

- there's no trick, it's just a matter of being thorough

- it's pretty concrete (modern languages have that in their standard lib) and/or might actually come up someday in your day-to-day job

And in my opinion, what matters even more is that your full round of interviews shouldn't be just 5 slots of algo questions. One or two should be enough. I like combinations of a take-home challenge (keep it short!), pair programming sessions and architecture / systems design discussions.

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

#254

Post by pradn »

Cookingboy wrote: post #177
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…

>Not once did we actually talk about my past experience or rather anything software engineering related. I had 5 rounds instead of 4 because I skipped phone screen, but I was pretty sure at least 3 of my interviewers didn't even look at my resume before the interviews haha. I also did a lot of interviews for Google when I was there, and I can totally see why that's the way it is, but at least I tried to see each inte…

I interview at Google and I never look at resumes - to avoid bias. I don't want to be biased by whether you went to Yale or UT Austin. My question is always a standard algo/DS question anyway.

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

#255

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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.

FB is the censored Internet.

Covert user activity tracking, links to outfits like Cambridge Analytica, troll farms, "disappeared" groups, and all under the pretext of targeted ads - in what sense is any of that a clean, free-range Internet?

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

#256

Post by jenscow »

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.

> If you're stubborn enough to not spend 10 mins on this the best of luck

I know. These people are expecting to be paid way above the average salary - I'd expect them to know the fundamentals, or (more importantly) be able to figure it out.

"BFS?? I'd use a library for that" - well, thanks for that... instead of hiring you I'll just download some libraries instead.

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

#257

Post by J2K »

honkycat wrote: post #104

I've always been curious about working at one of these companies. I believe if I set the goal of getting hired at one of these places, I would probably be able to get a job: - 10 years professional programming experience - half-life, Quake, Starcraft, Warcraft II modding experience growing up - Avid reader ( ~50+ books/yr ) - tons of self practice and continuing education. I just like learning new things and find pro…

I work at a medium sized public sv company that’s competitive with the ones discussed here and work life balance is amazing, things are very relaxed and definitely don’t feel burnt out at all.

People very regularly wfh for all sorts of reasons, time off whenever you want that people actually take, probably a little bit less then a 40 hour work week and every sprint my manager is usually making the case for how we don’t want to take on too much or over commit ourselves.

I’m thinking about leaving because frankly it’s maybe a little too slow and relaxed, I sort of think I work well in a more intense environment, but if that’s what you’re looking for I can pass your resume on to recruiting haha

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

#259

Post by Bahamut »

docker_up wrote: post #183
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.

My understanding is this is true for their frontend group, not fullstack.

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

#260

Post by zeroonetwothree »

jahaja wrote: post #195

It's interesting that software interviews have degenerated into literal auditions. Just as with auditions, you need to train specifically for them. Is there really a reason why software jobs can't hire in a blue-collar fashion where there's a background/experience + sanity check and a subsequent trial period? Even looking beyond that, is there any similar profession where interviews like these take place? I'm startin…

Why would anyone with an existing job ever take another job with a "trial period"? You are basically excluding your most desirable hires with this system.
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