261–270 of 295 posts
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Well, it doesn't sound like the author is out on the street, desperate for work. He accounts for his time at 400 pounds sterling per hour.
That's his day rate, not hourly rate. It's pretty standard for senior, competent contractors in London.
My point was that he's not hurting for work in general, so this story doesn't really have bearing on the talent shortage.
Some examples:
>I personally don’t see money as a measure of worth, but as a freelancer and well, running my business, should not and cannot ignore it.
>Calls are 30 minute-long, informal, you’re explained how the process works and what to expect next.
>The first call was with an internal Technical Recruiter, given my interest, I had a call with one other team lead before being redirected to the Developer Publications lead.
(I have no idea what this last sentence actually means).
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How long ago were you doing these interviews? Currently, a company like Google/Facebook/Apple will hire all the good people they can find.
While that may be true on the whole, it doesn't mean each team is allowed to just hire as many people as they can find. Of course, it's possible that you could interview with more than one team at a given company, but that depends on the company policies as well as other teams being interested.
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Not for Apple or Google, but I've literally been asked impossible questions during some interviews at other big-names. Maybe I should have recognized they were impossible and addressed the interviewer. They were usually very number-theory heavy problems. After a bit of research, I determined that it wasn't really answerable, and people have done PHD work at MIT, CMU, etc.. to investigate the question I was given 30 m…
One of my Google interviewers asked me to implement the AdWords analysis backend from scratch: an online, high volume (high enough to need to partition the data across some kind of distributed storage) streaming dataset with a query load that the interviewer refused to define, even when pushed. I was a bit non-plussed at that one. Still don’t know what he was really trying to get at.
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Maybe they intentionally asked you an impossible question that is not obviously unsolveable to see how you react when given and how you approach hard problems.
Here are your options: 1. You either know immediately that it is impossible and you say so, which means you've encountered the problem and its related research before. 2. You are a savant, like Kim Peek, and work out the solution to a PHd level research problem in your head in a few minutes, giving the answer that it is impossible. 3. Pretend to be (2) by already knowing (1), but having a good poker face and then fak…
I did hit walls, understandably, which ultimately ended the interview with a lot of "hmmm, not really sure. Maybe this? No? Oh... Hm... [..]"
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Not for Apple or Google, but I've literally been asked impossible questions during some interviews at other big-names. Maybe I should have recognized they were impossible and addressed the interviewer. They were usually very number-theory heavy problems. After a bit of research, I determined that it wasn't really answerable, and people have done PHD work at MIT, CMU, etc.. to investigate the question I was given 30 m…
How you react to the impossible questions is what's valuable.
They didn't move forward. Oh well!
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I feel the same way. Every time I think about applying to, e.g. Google, and start looking at how I need to prepare, I realize it's going to take around 40hrs of algorithm prep followed by a gruelling interview process. And at the end, I may fail due to interview nerves or whatever. It's hard to justify so much time. Then again, maybe working at these big companies is really worth it (many people seem to think so!). N…
This deters me from interviewing as well. I keep my data structures and algorithms book on the shelf - it was printed 15 years ago and uses Java, but it's easy enough to implement in something else. I used to restudy it every few years, for interviews. You need to be ready to do tree traversal, detect cycles in lists, sort and search, create a hash, find shortest paths in graphs. I go back and forth on whether I'd do…
Maybe it's because my focus is web, but I have never had to do any of these. My eyes typically glaze over any time someone mentions algorithms. Not because of lack of interest, but because I'm self-taught, have only had one or two academic CS classes, and have never taken a course on algorithms.
When we're hiring developers we do have a "take-home" test of sorts but you can do it in an hour or less. This is prior to our in-person general job/fit interview (my boss) and the technical interview/review (me).
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On a whim, I recently updated my LinkedIn picture to a photo of myself in a multi-coloured clown wig. This put an immediate end to all messages from recruiters.
Here is the evidence: https://twitter.com/wundercounter/status/570454045099307008
I find that ranting about a company's hiring procedures is a quick way for their HR department to quickly strike your name from the "Future Followup" file. Apple is the richest company on Earth. Criticize their means and methods when they're in Chapter 11.
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While that may be true on the whole, it doesn't mean each team is allowed to just hire as many people as they can find. Of course, it's possible that you could interview with more than one team at a given company, but that depends on the company policies as well as other teams being interested.
I was under the impression that software engineer interviews at Google were for generalists, since they want employees to be able to move on to other projects in the future. Is there any reason to suggest that Google/Amazon/Facebook is currently saying "no" to exceptional generalists?
However, each team has head counts for positions, and it's more or less up to them to hire for their own teams. It's certainly true that they may want exceptional generalists, but companies don't just hire people and then find a way to put them on a team. This wouldn't make sense for both the company or for the person involved, as someone who's more senior would generally have some sort of preference on what they want to work on.
My experience with interviewing at Microsoft and Google and working at Amazon is that basically a recruiter will try to find teams that might be interested in you and vice versa, and then you will interview with those teams. That being the case, you could get rejected by one team but then get accepted by another team. Or, even if you seem awesome, if none of the managers are interested, it's a no go. This also means that your success depends on how well your recruiter can sell you and find positions for you.