Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.usejournal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 740 posts

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

#341

Post by jedberg »

idontpost wrote: post #306
mav3rick wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> People just expect to be paid top dollar on their word. And their education, previous employment, etc. No one makes a neuro-surgeon perform a surgery before hiring them.

> No one makes a neuro-surgeon perform a surgery before hiring them.

True, but I also know that a neurosurgeon graduated from an accredited school, did an internship at an accredited hospital, and then passed a standardized licensing exam.

If we had that for engineers we wouldn't need to test their skills either.

When I was doing hiring, I would see resumes of people with 10+ years of experience who couldn't write a simple loop in their favorite language. If you've been coding for 10 years, you should be able to write a simple loop. That's the problem we're solving for here.

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

#342

Post by rock_hard »

rossdavidh wrote: post #291

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…

This all comes down to what the company is optimizing for.

Everybody here seems to assume they are trying to filter for the good candidates...but what they are actually trying to do with these kind of interviews is filter out the bad ones!

Because the damage when hiring a bad candidate is much higher than the damage from missing out on a good one!

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

#343

Post by rifung »

ashelmire wrote: post #308
theptip wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You think people that pass technical interviews can’t be false positives? I think they weed out a few, but completely ignore practical development skills, work ethic, soft skills, design and architecture skills, etc. Of course maybe this explains why most of the big tech companies have seemed pretty stagnant for the last decade, largely failing with products and decisions that have poor execution and market fit outsi…

> Has anyone actually studied the best way to hire devs? Like a real, independent study that measured and compared results across, perhaps, a wide array of metrics?

I don't know how you would ever strive to do such a thing when people can't even agree how to measure productivity.

> Of course maybe this explains why most of the big tech companies have seemed pretty stagnant for the last decade, largely failing with products and decisions that have poor execution and market fit outside of the products that made them big in the first place.

In most large companies these things have nothing to do with programmers; the decisions are made by management and products are designed by PMs. Hell, you can't even necessarily blame buggy products on programmers: I've been on projects where everyone realizes things suck but if you don't get funding or agreement to work on infrastructure projects what can you do?

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

#344

Post by diminoten »

guessmyname wrote: post #9

> If it’s of any use: I was interviewing for my second job out of college with about two and a half years of experience without any particularly notable internships or employers on my resume; I went to a very small school that had zero known software companies at their “career fair”; I started preparing in late April and started applying in June/July; and, lastly, a few months in, my job is everything I could have po…

I bet a contributing factor in this is that you think other people are "faster". They're not, we're not. The only difference between you and someone who's good at these interviews is that the good ones accept that uncertainty and are willing to work through it and you aren't.

Nobody aces those interviews in the way you probably think; by just magically knowing every detail.

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

#345

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

dacur wrote: post #335
yuchi wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll share my process: 1. The first interview must not be a technical assessment — identify shared interests, look for collaboration opportunities. You need to understand if the person in front of you will be someone you would work with for the next 10 years, their current technical skills have little to do with this. 2. At the end of the first interview, right before the logistic questions, assess how they position…

Search for young people? So discriminate?

I read that charitably as "give newbies a chance"

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

#346

Post by heptathorp »

vishnugupta wrote: post #262
quickthrower2 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BFS is common sense. It’s what you use when you’ve lost your car keys for example. Quickly check each room in the house, then if no luck go one layer deeper in each room.

That's definitely now how I do it. I go deeper into each room, the depth (as well as the order) being decided by (roughly) how much time I spend in each room every day. E.g., Go waay deeper in living room, less so in bedroom, lesser still in bath room and so on :-). This I'd imagine is "more" common sense than than an un-informed BFS?

A DFS would be you check your living room, you check under the cushions of the sofa, you tear open the cushions and comb through the insides... all before glancing at your bedroom when you didn't quickly see the keys in the living room.

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

#347

Post by saagarjha »

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…

> 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.

It’s always possible that Google felt he wasn’t what they needed. And keep in mind that Howell ended up being hired by Apple and working there for a while.

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

#348

Post by jammygit »

lowdest wrote: post #319
ergothus wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share both of your concerns (while I was very lucky in getting initial experience, I know of other beginners that haven't/arent, so I'm very sympathetic.) . Started coding for work in '95. > was I wrong then? Or am I wrong now? Perhaps both. Neither, I think. The Algorithm interviews are bad for 90% of the positions out there, and experience matters much more than trivia, so you were right then. And today, everyone…

As I see it, the difficult algorithm interviews screen for people who are motivated enough to spend 100s of hours studying for an interview, or know this stuff for some other uncommon reason. Both types are acceptable hires.

Wouldn't it be better to hire somebody who thought that was lame and who spent 100s of hours learning performance testing, new libraries, design patterns, or just working on projects?

Personally, I'd rather not work somewhere that hired based on drilling fringe information - what will the job be like? Maybe I'll feel differently in 10 or 20 years

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

#350

Post by jedberg »

Xeronate wrote: post #337
Benjammer wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't mean this in a snide way. Can you give a few concrete examples of how a deep understanding of BFS that can't be googled and read in 10 minutes at the time you need it can help you ship profitable software products faster than your competitors?

I was recently asked to identify pages in our 10 million line application that use a certain piece of business logic. It involved parsing the page and their nested subcontrols into a tree with by doing a modified BFS on the linked files, doing a modifed BFS on the tree to identify the related code behinds, parsing the C# from the codebehinds into a tree, and traversing the C# tree (again with a modified BFS) to find…

Right, but you used libraries to do it, right? You didn't actually need to know how BFS works, did you?

10 million lines of code fits in RAM pretty easily. You could use the worst algorithm in the world and still complete that whole task with just a few seconds of compute time.

I think that's the point. You don't really need to know about BFS in most cases, because in most cases you can solve the problem with any old search in just a few seconds.

Post reply on HN