I wonder if he feels like he's a better programmer after all that studying.
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
#32I 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.
The specific questions don't have a hold in real life but the patterns behind them do. Most problems to be solved in computer science, with enough abstraction, have already been solved. I joined a new software development scrum at work and have been helping optimize how long our application takes (it can be thought of as an encoding engine) we've seen huge leaps in improvement with very simple solutions, 75% of the time the way we're seeing that the best way to solve a problem is via a hash table. That's also an incredibly common core solution to most interview problems.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#33"After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours/day, more on weekends)..." I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.
You're not trapped literally. This is all a mental game. Everything you just listed is an excuse.
Wife and kids are (top) priorities, not excuses.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#34"After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours/day, more on weekends)..." I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.
The whole process is a roll of the dice. The more senior the role, the less fair that roll of the dice will be. If you can accept this fact, you don't have to be "trapped". That's how I think of it anyway: I never spend more than 2 weeks (_very_ part time) preparing. I do get rejected sometimes, but I get plenty of good offers too.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#35Would love to see specific numeric information on offer packages, negotiations, counter-offers, and final accepted offer, if the author feels comfortable disclosing such information.
I bet you can get a really nice offer when you get six big tech companies to bid over you.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#36"After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours/day, more on weekends)..." I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.
You're not trapped literally. This is all a mental game. Everything you just listed is an excuse.
"Preparing for an interview of this nature would have a detrimental impact on my family" is a perfectly legitimate reason to opt-out.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#37The candidate's experience shows how flawed Bay Area recruiting is. This candidate was clearly strong, as they had a 100% offer rate on companies that they interviewed at and almost all of those companies are top tier(Apple, LinkedIn, Amazon, Facebook, Google).
Yet 70% of the companies didn't even give the candidate a chance to interview. It's incredibly sad that a candidate that is able to get offers at Google, Facebook, and Apple can't even get 70% of the companies to let them in the door to interview. Interviewing is clearly broken.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> fundamentally destructive product That's just, like, your opinion, a random HN reader. And the vast majority of FB users do not share it.
Ex FB user here checking in. FB free since `11. There's a ton of us.
Nevertheless, you are a small minority outside the HN bubble.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#39"After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours/day, more on weekends)..." I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.
> I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills
yeah, well these companies don't want you. I mean they do but they need to make sure you have the same availability as a college hire. One way of checking that is to have you block time like that for a while.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#40I 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…
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.