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A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

interviewing.io

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Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#31

Post by codr7 »

xyzelement wrote: post #5

I skimmed this briefly but I can't reiterate enough the importance of practice that the author mentions. I am the same person when a FAANG hired me as I was 15 years prior when I first interviewed there (I also interviewed a bunch of times in between, for successively more senior roles and did better in the process each time.) When I was young, I had some fixed mindset - I am either good enough or not. They will eith…

And that hits the problem for me; the process often doesn't allow showing what you have to offer, it only allows you to show that you check all boxes in the process.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#32

Post by hebleb »

Man, I've coded a fair amount in my free time, and have even created a couple of money making side-projects, but I just can't grind leetcode no matter how often I try. That plus the rejection after doing long on-sites drains me for days afterwards. I've come to the conclusion that even though I may be missing out on those top salaries, FAANG just probably isn't for me

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#33

Post by francisofascii »

zug_zug wrote: post #15

Just a heads up to anybody super starry-eyed about fang, I worked 10+ years non-fang, and tried fang, and it was absolutely miserable, one of my least favorite jobs of my career. Yes I made a lot, but I also worked and stressed proportionally more. YMMV.

The stressfulness of the interview tends to be correlated with the stressfulness of the job.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#34

Post by jondwillis »

ryangs wrote: post #16
jondwillis wrote: post #12

All of the FAANGs are various levels of unethical, or a net negative for society in my estimation. No more interviewing there for me.

Definitely agree with unethical, although net negative seems a lot harder to quantify. Amazon has a lot of bad practices I disagree with, but are they net negative? I find it difficult to assess. And even if they aren't net negative now, is the 10 year trajectory clearly downward? Soloing out Netflix, is there anything particularly wrong with them? I have significant gripes with all the others but no specifics about…

Netflix: exploitative true crime docs and algorithmic recommendations with no way to opt out, auto-play, reality TV.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#35

Post by kulikalov »

codr7 wrote: post #9

I don't know, I've walked into these interviews with zero preparation and succeeded. And I've failed FAANG-ish interviews where no amount of leetcode grinding would have helped me. In my opinion, it's getting rather silly. They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive processes. None of them even cared about my Github repository that's full of code I write for fun. Software developer…

Not a recruiter, but I imagine there are at least 3 reasons for your repo to be ignored or deprioritized in favor of typical interview: - not everyone contributes to OSS - it’s easy to fake - it’s hard to assess within a short period of time

This it seems to be hard to standardize and streamline candidates validation based on their oss repos.

Also, afaik the goal of interview is to assess candidates thinking patterns, it’s hard to do quickly based on an arbitrary piece of code.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#37

Post by TheBigSalad »

codr7 wrote: post #9

I don't know, I've walked into these interviews with zero preparation and succeeded. And I've failed FAANG-ish interviews where no amount of leetcode grinding would have helped me. In my opinion, it's getting rather silly. They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive processes. None of them even cared about my Github repository that's full of code I write for fun. Software developer…

"They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive processes." I don't see myself ever applying to any of these whacky interview companies. I like money and all, but idk. It's such a turn off. Maybe if I truly felt they were actually measuring company value.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#38

Post by jondwillis »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #17
jondwillis wrote: post #12

All of the FAANGs are various levels of unethical, or a net negative for society in my estimation. No more interviewing there for me.

I would gladly take a $350K/yr paycheck for a decade, then retire and do social work for free.

You and tens of thousands of other smart people who could be doing something other than maximizing attention and shilling trash products. Good luck undoing 3.5MM of damage with social work.

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#39

Post by majormajor »

kerblang wrote: post #22
codr7 wrote: post #9

I don't know, I've walked into these interviews with zero preparation and succeeded. And I've failed FAANG-ish interviews where no amount of leetcode grinding would have helped me. In my opinion, it's getting rather silly. They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive processes. None of them even cared about my Github repository that's full of code I write for fun. Software developer…

I tend to put it this way: If you are entrepreneurially/leadership- minded and can develop a talent for identifying talent, you can be 10x, even 100x more valuable than any engineer because you become a force multiplier who recognizes real talent and empowers it - and the best part is that everyone else is dragging their knuckles on the ground and obsessed with pretentious gate-keeping. The opportunity level is wide-…

If you want to make money off of being better at hiring than Google et al you need two things:

1) the product idea for something to build that you can sell profitably

2) the hiring skill

Neither of those are trivial to develop.

I do tend the think the second isn't that hard to develop for specific situations (FAANG interviews are really aimed at hiring people who they could swap around to large different sorts of teams or roles and get along with, and be productive with, a huge swath of the company, though IME in practice that doesn't happen terribly often these days). But if you're doing it for someone else's company, your upside is capped by the upside of the company you're working for. And your reward is too - you're not going to command 10x the pay from a CEO you report to who doesn't themselves understand the difficulty of the hiring you're doing compared to "just copy Google" (or why they wouldn't have good results with the latter).

Re: A Senior Engineer’s Guide to FAANG Interviews

#40

Post by codr7 »

kulikalov wrote: post #35
codr7 wrote: post #9

I don't know, I've walked into these interviews with zero preparation and succeeded. And I've failed FAANG-ish interviews where no amount of leetcode grinding would have helped me. In my opinion, it's getting rather silly. They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive processes. None of them even cared about my Github repository that's full of code I write for fun. Software developer…

Not a recruiter, but I imagine there are at least 3 reasons for your repo to be ignored or deprioritized in favor of typical interview: - not everyone contributes to OSS - it’s easy to fake - it’s hard to assess within a short period of time This it seems to be hard to standardize and streamline candidates validation based on their oss repos. Also, afaik the goal of interview is to assess candidates thinking patterns…

Sure, it would take some more effort to dig into than checking boxes.

But it would also provide more valuable feedback.

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