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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

#351

Post by ForrestN »

citrablue wrote: post #310
ForrestN wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a robust debate about whether or not facebook provides negative value to its users. In my opinion, it's charitable to say that the question of whether Facebook harms its users is open to debate. There seems to be a clear correlation between use of facebook and negative mental health outcomes. The fact that people use a product is absolutely not evidence that it provides value to its consumers, especially whe…

This assumes that FB is harmful to everyone, instead of a subset of people. I don't think that's very well proven. The mental health studies also have a bit of a correlation issue, similar to drug use. I think sugar is a more apt analogy than smoking. Facebook, like sugars, provides a source of a required human input. (Calories/human connection). Overdone, both are harmful. Tobacco is a much more charged analogy, and…

The degree of harm is correlated with the degree of use, just like cigarettes. If you smoke a handful of cigarettes a year, it probably won't affect you much at all. But if you use cigarettes multiple times a day for years, you'll do real harm to yourself. That's exactly true of Facebook. Yes, if you occasionally check in and are diligent about how you use facebook, you might escape harm. But unlike sugar, this slight-of-hand language they use of "human connection" doesn't prove that any facebook use is beneficial.

Sure, candy technically has calories. But the fact that human beings need calories isn't a good argument for eating candy. You can also get calories from healthy foods, and you can get "human connection" from, you know, talking to people, or sending text messages, or reading reputable news sources. Not coincidentally, the idea of a "social connection" was and is also a big part of apologizing for smoking as a habit.

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

#352

Post by jsmeaton »

acpetrov wrote: post #321
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…

I just graduated, so I'm not dealing with constant internship interviews anymore, but at the time I absolutely hated it. My frustration isn't exactly like yours (my time is probably a lot less valuable). I feel that the questions are all geared at puzzle solvers. If you're a puzzle solver, you love answers. You love digging into the details. You love finding out the basic components of a system. I think these are the…

Honestly, it sounds like you may be geared more towards software architecture rather than software development. If you like the sound of the bigger picture more than the details, it might be something you could look into.

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

#353

Post by ryanwaggoner »

ForrestN wrote: post #94
m0zg wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

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…

Yglesias, a very smart writer focused on public policy

Agree to disagree.

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

#355

Post by rossdavidh »

cornellwright wrote: post #320
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…

Is BFS really that hard, especially if the interviewer is willing to talk it out with you and doesn't care a lot about finding the most efficient solution possible? I've been out of college more than 10 years now, do a mix of hardware and software (so am not coding all day everyday) and I can hack together algorithms like BFS if I spend a couple of minutes thinking about it. I get that there are many awful interviewe…

If the interviewer is willing to talk it out with you, then it is totally a different situation. But, it came up in a recent other HN discussion on tech interviews, and it is an example of something that, if you memorized it, would have a vanishingly small improvement in your ability to get the job done.

But, if you explain what it is in words, and have them whiteboard how to turn those words into pseudocode or somesuch, then it could be a appropriate, sure.

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

#356

Post by saagarjha »

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.

They physics communinity does not seem to have the issue of being able to judge merit from resumes. When you see a physics PhD with a list of academic references, chances are that the person knows what they are doing; with computer science it’s somehow likely that the person might not know their way around the command line or when using an array might be a bad idea…

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

#357

Post by eximius »

So people are complaining that whiteboarding is the wrong way to interview. That we don't discover if they can write and maintain complex software system, instead focusing on 'trivia'. I don't disagree (I think that the trivia being tested can be important - a team with no one that has deep knowledge of data structures of algorithms is lost), but I also don't know a good way to interview that finds out what we need to know.

How do you find out if someone can make good long term decisions in a short amount of time? It seems inherently contradictory. Some people say by giving homework problems. They're not wrong, that might give valuable insight, but I know that I would hate that, so others might too.

Can there be a good answer?

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

#358

Post by rossdavidh »

rock_hard wrote: post #342
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!

Truth, and also especially so for a company like FB or Google where they probably have an abundance of qualified applicants, for a variety of reasons. For most companies, copying what FB or Google (or Microsoft or whoever) is doing, is probably a bad idea, in tech interviewing or many other things.

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

#359

Post by saagarjha »

jd20 wrote: post #304
dom96 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

One unfortunate side effect of being at a FAANG company is that most of your best work is probably proprietary and you will never have the chance to show it to anyone outside the company, nor will you have much free time for personal projects. As an interviewer, I can definitely say that GitHub has become a bigger part of helping to evaluate people.

> As an interviewer, I can definitely say that GitHub has become a bigger part of helping to evaluate people.

Many people can’t work on open source, either due to a lack of time or corporate policy.

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

#360

Post by thisisweirdok »

thisisweirdok wrote: post #138
OxO4 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those companies are problematic to a certain degree. Personally, whether I'd have an issue with working for one of those companies also depends on what I am working on. Let's say that one of those companies pays you to work on an open source project. Would that really be that bad ethically? What if you worked on Facebook's security team securing the users' data? Is that really worse than working for LinkedIn i…

Facebook is very clearly ethically bad from the top down. It's less clear with the others.

Lots of downvotes but no one wants to tell me why that the social network started by some angry teenager who wanted to rate women isn't ethically bad?
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