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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

#261

Post by noonespecial »

Permit wrote: post #131
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…

> Companies need to admit that only trying to hire a single type of person is not going to work. Why? It's not so clear to me that it's not working right now. These companies seem to be doing completely fine. If hiring programmers who aren't good at programming puzzles is a competitive edge, I would expect to see other companies hiring these programmers and succeeding. It seems more likely to me that there is (at mos…

What we're probably seeing is that the FAANG's have acquired so much fame and wealth that they can afford an enormous false negative rate in hiring that would sink a smaller company.

Its the difference between fracking the shale for every precious drop because that's all you've got where you are vs. being able to just sink a short pipe in the ground and stick the sweet crude that gushes out into barrels.

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

#262

Post by vishnugupta »

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.

That's definitely now how I do it. I go deeper into each room, the depth (as well as the order) being decided by (roughly) how much time I spend in each room every day. E.g., Go waay deeper in living room, less so in bedroom, lesser still in bath room and so on :-). This I'd imagine is "more" common sense than than an un-informed BFS?

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

#263

Post by president »

kcmastrpc wrote: post #167
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…

No, these tests are carefully devised to target young college graduates who will excel at these types of interviews because the material is still fresh and they have the free time to study. This is age discrimination disguised as "technical proficiency" exercises.

This is the only industry that punishes senior and more experienced workers. I don't get the impression that this happens in other industries like healthcare and banking.

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

#264

Post by Zimahl »

wesleytodd wrote: post #99

IMHO, this is the worst possible approach to finding a job. The opportunity cost of doing this over working on interesting problems and letting that guide you to pay seems extremely high. Also, the focus on "top bay area companies" seems misguided at best. If you work more on identifying what type of work you want to be doing you might find there are GREAT opportunities in other regions or at smaller scale companies.…

I'm with you. I get that people chase the resume builder companies, even years later it'll be a highlight on a resume that HR folks salivate over.

Outside of a handful of the big well-known bay area tech companies, I can't really see what many of them do that other non-illustrious companies do as well. If you are simply a web services developer I don't think I'd waste my time - there's not much you are going to build at Facebook that you aren't going to build at no-name company X.

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

#265

Post by Jach »

djcapelis wrote: post #40
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).

That’s a really bad take. You can work on interesting problems in organizations that aren’t causing harm. And should, if you have the option.

> And should, if you have the option.

There's the kicker, no? A lot of human technological progress was made under unfortunate (to put it mildly) harm-filled circumstances, and a lot of that wouldn't have been made at all otherwise because the option to make it with a cleaner conscience simply wasn't there. However if you do ever take such a role, despite its context, even if you have a clear conscience, I'd ask to try to have your work expand and live beyond the patron so that it can one day benefit all humanity. There is so much still buried behind the walls of corporate research that's worthwhile to a much broader group, but efforts need to be made to bring it out. Even more so if there aren't many other vertices of the company trying to pull in a better direction. (Ed: And I'd like to add that despite everything, Facebook engineers seem to be doing remarkably well at this. I won't ever join them but I'm not going to blacklist any interactions with them or worse aggressively target them.)

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

#266

Post by nategri »

andrewla wrote: post #124
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…

The technical interviewing scheme is not great, but I haven't seen another system that works. > 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 think this is certainly true. > I often think what would Google/Facebook would be like if they hired in some experienced engineers that may…

>By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it? By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates?

I mean... Yes?

This system, backed by "trusted recommenders" is exactly what academia uses, and they seem perfectly capable of discovering Higgs Bosons and whatnot.

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

#267

Post by Cookingboy »

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.

I don't think that's even true, let alone well known. Unless you are talking about phone screens.

I've interviewed at FB twice and got offers both time, and I'm pretty sure I've not gotten the final answer to at least a couple questions.

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

#268

Post by samstave »

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…

In my short contract stint at facebook, my experience was that everyone I interacted with was overly territorial and wanted to be the "big swinging dick" as it were - their unwritten ethos on how to manage projects was bullshit, and after following my managers requirements to a tee - I was let go "because I was to engaged in the social events" (I literally played dogeball once. Never went to any other events) -- but I caught a VP in a baldface lie inadvertantly - and when I reported that his office project status was behind schedule he flipped his lid, and I believe had me fired.

He wanted to ONLY have all project status come from him - but he went on vacation, and I was required to get project status from the team involved - and when I did, I factually represented what I was told - that they were behind schedule - and I was let go.

Showing any interest in any area outside of my primary role was frowned upon heavily.

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

#269

Post by jorblumesea »

The problem is actually that due to the plethora of tools, languages, dev stacks and other variability, it's hard to diagnose software engineering skills effectively. So it makes sense to go back to basics and use things that everyone should know like data structures.

The issue is that this is taken to the extreme.

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

#270

Post by mav3rick »

vishnugupta wrote: post #262
quickthrower2 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's definitely now how I do it. I go deeper into each room, the depth (as well as the order) being decided by (roughly) how much time I spend in each room every day. E.g., Go waay deeper in living room, less so in bedroom, lesser still in bath room and so on :-). This I'd imagine is "more" common sense than than an un-informed BFS?

If you just go depth, it is well depth first :)
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