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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

#271

Post by mav3rick »

kamarg wrote: post #208
hungryhobo wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i mean if had to choose between no graph theory vs no ruby on rails...i would probably go with no ruby on rails

What if you had to choose between someone with a proven track record of building high quality software used by millions of people who has also shown they're capable of leading groups of people in successful projects but hasn't memorized the specific algorithm you asked about and another candidate who doesn't have as good of a track record but can totally nail that easy algorithm you asked for? Edit: Typos.

You think every candidate who comes in is like this. There are anomalies and outliers. The truth is resume padding is so common in the valley. Everyone can just say all these things. It's very hard to hire like this.

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

#272

Post by dom96 »

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…

> Well... how do we find these people? 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?

While not perfect I wonder if a person's projects are a good signal for this. There certainly are those who have developed a significant open source project but who get rejected by the FAANG companies, the author of Homebrew being a recent infamous example.

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

#273

Post by mav3rick »

jenscow wrote: post #256
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.

> 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.

Watch me get downvoted to hell though :)

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

#274

Post by imetatroll »

The interviews are certainly difficult. I tried a few times years ago and never made it anywhere in the process, which was frustrating to say the least. I was working at a startup doing everything under the sun to keep the technical side of things going, but found that I was using so many different programming languages in my day to day job, that I couldn't whiteboard a reasonable solution to anything. It was shocking.

Congrats to the author for their success!

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

#275

Post by Cookingboy »

pradn wrote: post #254
Cookingboy wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

That is a good way to eliminate bias, but in the end, is that a good way to make sure each position is staffed by the best candidate possible?

I always pondered about that when I was at Google. We had mostly smart people, but I argue not all of them were the perfect fit for the position/skills needed.

Sure some bias are best eliminated such as what school they went to, but if work experience in general should not be discarded completely in my opinion and you can only get so much out of standard algo/DS questions, especially considering these days everyone is studying for those like standardized tests.

I literally know some CS students who just did hundreds and hundreds of practice problems and they'd ace most big company algo interviews but that doesn't really tell me if they'd be good engineers in practice at all.

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

#276

Post by jahaja »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #260
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.

So the idea is that a current job makes one more desirable, but we'll then discard that fact and still put you through an elaborate audition?

Anyway, almost all jobs where I live comes with a trial period of max 6 months, albeit negotiable. So it seems to work.

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

#277

Post by JimboOmega »

swozey wrote: post #198
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…

I've had internal referrals at a few FAANG myself, I have one of the "unique" (no degree, some high school, ops/coding since 12 so about 15 years on/off) backgrounds and the people who referred me would be on the team that I'd be joining and all seemed incredibly excited to get me on board. I work on FOSS projects with them already. At each place it was people from other teams completely unrelated to that team who in…

One of my recent FAANG interviews was ENTIRELY whiteboarding. It kind of shocked me.

It's weird that it's that skill, and only that skill, that gets evaluated. I did another interview at a different one where there was at least a design interview (though I flubbed it and wound up being incoherent).

It really feels like they aren't even trying to evaluate anything other than whiteboard coding. Accepting that it's not a great signal and yet fully investing in it.

It's such a weird skill and it's so easy to perform badly; I'd be kind of shocked if the test/retest validity wasn't very low.

Also... I mentioned that working on teams with other women was important to me... but every technical onsite I've had has been given by a man. They've pitched teams led by women, and my HR/recruiting contacts have been nearly all women. But for the interview itself? All men.

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

#278

Post by mav3rick »

nategri wrote: post #266
andrewla wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates"

This is inherently biased and proven to be the worst way to hire people.

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

#279

Post by mav3rick »

donaldknuth123 wrote: post #178
andrewla wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>The technical interviewing scheme is not great, but I haven't seen another system that works. I would argue that pair programming or take home projects do a far better job than the standard Whiteboard Algo interviews. In fact I don't think it's even close but SV engineers have been captured by this Whiteboard Interview Stockholm Syndrome/Hazing and continue to perpetuate the insane idea that there is no better way.

Many people on HN also complain about "I don't have time for pair programming, take home". They don't like interviews. People just expect to be paid top dollar on their word.

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

#280

Post by theptip »

xfer wrote: post #163
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…

These processes are optimized to reduce false positives not false negatives. So they already know that they might be missing on some great developers.

This is the correct explanation; false positives are so much more expensive than the opportunity cost of a false negative.
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