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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

#291

Post by rossdavidh »

When I was a new college grad, I felt trapped by the fact that everywhere I looked they wanted several years of experience, and I had none yet. How can I get experience if it's required to get the job?

Now that I am 51, I feel annoyed that all of these stories of interviews involve asking questions about algorithms that rarely come up in real coding, and if they do you should NOT be rolling your own code, you should use the established, battle-tested solution that is out there on the internet if you spend 60 seconds looking for it. Much more important is to have the experience of how code complexity accumulates, and how to mitigate that. I cannot spend hours and hours studying up on these algorithms, there are much more important things (real coding-related things) which I need to learn about, to the extent I have time to do that. What should I choose, pytorch or keras? React or Vue? Go? Kubernetes? Spark? All much more important questions than how to do a breadth-first search.

So, was I wrong then? Or am I wrong now? Perhaps both.

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

#292

Post by Axsuul »

bogomipz wrote: post #219
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...

And the violence in Sri Lanka last spring is also worth mentioning. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/05/facebo...

"The assertion from senior government officials, therefore, that the ban on Facebook put a stop to the violence is inaccurate. Data scientists and researchers have flagged that the block on social media did little to deter the mobs, who found their way around it with ease. While not entirely blameless, Facebook also became an easy scapegoat."

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

#293

Post by lhorie »

toephu2 wrote: post #283
lhorie wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the same as you (wife+kids, full-time job and rusty whiteboarding skills), PLUS I lived in Canada, PLUS I have no CS degree. I landed a job at Uber's San Francisco office 1.5 year ago. Here are a few of things to be aware of that may make you feel better: - tech companies in the bay area have extremely high churn rates (2-4 yrs is not uncommon) - unicorns often hire constantly and in high volume (e.g. Facebook in…

>not all roles have algorithm-centric interviews But the company you interviewed for and got into.. does..right? Uber whiteboarded you.

I did have one whiteboard session on my onsite, but it was about high level web architecture, no code, no algorithms. None of the sessions were specifically about classic algorithms, although there was an "algorithm" session that was about writing some fairly realistic asynchronous code (which for web is something I myself consider required knowledge).

Since I've started participating in the hiring process myself, I'm not aware of people doing whiteboarding (AFAIK it's strongly discouraged because it leaves no digital record), and only the bar raiser session might ask something algorithmic-ish at their discretion (but most do coding exercises to gauge meta stuff like communication skills or methodical approach rather than things like algorithmic complexity).

Training material for tech hiring discourages looking for rote memorization of specifics and instead recommends looking for signals via an open ended exercise.

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

#294

Post by toephu2 »

martin1975 wrote: post #218

Way to go young'un! My advice would be, though it may seem attractive to work at the large behemoths, I'd advise you to go to a startup or a medium size company for greater satisfaction and less bureaucracy/politics.

Except FANG on your resume will do wonders for your career down the road..

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

#295

Post by opportune »

m0zg wrote: post #137
ForrestN wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do some quick research, you'll find that the harmful nature of Facebook is the subject of a vast public discourse in the United States and Europe. Lots of academics and public health professionals continue to research the negative consequences of facebook use. It's not an opinion, but I suppose it could still be considered a subject of some controversy. The best evidence I've seen, and that the commentators I…

Facebook's only real "fault" is that the "wrong" person got elected president in the US. The rest is just a politically motivated pile-on with tenuous evidence IMO, which wouldn't even be a subject of "vast public discourse" if someone else won. >> negative consequences of facebook use Do those "academics" also research the positive consequences as well? I'm in touch with my high school and university friends to this…

plenty of people have been talking about the negatives of facebook long before the 2016 election w.r.t privacy, mental health, and whether we actually benefit from having this kind of tool as part of our culture

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

#296

Post by erik_seaberg »

dom96 wrote: post #272
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…

> 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…

In Howell's own words from https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...:

> I wrote a simple package manager. Anyone could write one. And in fact mine is pretty bad. It doesn't do dependency management properly. It doesn’t handle edge case behavior well. It isn’t well tested.

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

#297

Post by vishnugupta »

reggieband wrote: post #236
magicalhippo wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's actually a thing called BFS tree. It's a tree that depicts the order of node expansion/visitation when a graph is traversed BFS. Even I wasn't aware of it until I recently read Peter Norvig's AI book. However, I'm not sure if the author referring this.

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

#298

Post by Jach »

vishnugupta wrote: post #284
mav3rick wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I actually thought this through a bit :-) Neither is it a DFS, unlike in DFS I'm expanding nodes at different depths. E.g., I'm shallow expanding bathroom/kitchen compared to living room. Only when I've exhausted living do I return to kitchen again to do a deeper search. I wonder if this kind of search has any other use. Debugging seems like a similar activity. Go deeper into logs, if nothing turns up then examine me…

Heuristically guided search. :) For some nodes you go wide, for some deep, sometimes you retreat back up a few levels instead of exhausting a subtree (but you might come back to that subtree later), all depending on what the heuristic says is more likely to get you to your goal the quickest. A* is a well-known base algorithm for this, widely used in game programming to efficiently find the shortest path from A to B in the presence of obstacles etc.

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

#299

Post by TheHegemon »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #63
TheHegemon wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a wife, three boys (one who doesn't sleep through the night), and a full-time job as well. Usually I just practice after putting the kids to bed. It's possible you just need to carve out some time even if it's an hour or two a night.

What kind of things do you practice?

Generally it's algorithms that I find interesting. Recently spent a couple of days trying to figure out how HyperLogLog works.

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

#300

Post by lozaning »

telotortium wrote: post #247
lozaning wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started an 'exercise' on my fitbit right before my last onsight started. Fitbit claimed that I burned ~6K calories that day. My 3 week running average is somewhere around 4K.

4K daily average? What do you do, pull sleds all day when you're not working?

Im a recovering chunk monster. Im down 80lbs in 6 months and now I've got pretty decent cardio (6 miles in an hour on the treadmill 5 times a week), but still weigh 250lbs. If you're fat but move a lot you can burn some massive calories, or at least my fitbit says so.
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