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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

#381

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

People always say this, but is it true? It’s easy to fire someone. It’s really hard to find someone who can ship (something you won’t get from a whiteboarding challenge).

Seems costly to fire, not just because of HR and management process overhead. People are trying to build successful teams, and regular firings distract from goals, ruin morale, and create an unsafe environment.

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

#382

> 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 don't get some peoples fascination with working for FAANG anyway. As you said yourself, you've had some amazing jobs outside of FAANG. People seem to hold such prestige for working at a household named software house but that doesn't mean the work is going to be any more interesting than at any of the countless other technology companies out there that are on the bleeding edge.

It’s the same reason high school students apply to Stanford and MIT; there are amazing programs everywhere but top-level universities carry prestige and may have higher quality opportunities.

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

#383
post #197

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I think it’s exactly that, willingness to conform, and a very effective filter on age. I know Google does a lot of metrics on hiring. Have they correlated their practice with IQ anywhere? Guessing nothing public as that would trigger a firestorm. At the end of the day it’s just the cognitive elite trying to hire the cognitive elite.

They used to interview using the kind of brainteasers found in books like the ones Mensa used to make. The algorithms approach, I suspect, is just a CS proxy for an IQ test just like their old approach was. It would also filter for youth, which they semi-openly advertise as well (see chess literature on brain age for what I mean). Conformance too (due to the prep time)

This is because it's actually not allowed to use IQ tests as a screening mechanism for most jobs (you need a valid reason and "software engineer" probably isn't good enough to justify the liability). By using algo questions they can select for something that might correlate very well with IQ, that also makes sure the candidate has real coding knowledge, and which has much less liability

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

#384

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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.

Is it possible to even get into software architecture without pretty significant experience? From my experience in the workplace anybody making purely architectural decisions without having to implement them is a team lead or higher in the organizational architecture.

Which makes sense right? Same reason a military general doesn’t start as a general. Architecture takes experience in the weeds to give a breadth you can leverage as you reason through architecture. Architecture isn’t aslways black and white decision making based on some specs which is where experience can help a ton.

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

#385

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This is just ridiculous. BFS is such a useful building block. If you're stubborn enough to not spend 10 mins on this the best of luck.

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.

I don't think I've ever lost my car keys so does that make me a NULL pointer!

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

#386
post #127

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I recently considered a role there, on a security team no less. I've never had a Facebook account and agree that the product as-is is fundamentally destructive. However, there's some value in "running towards the fire" so to speak. Facebook does not seem to me to be fundamentally evil, just willfully blind to the problems it causes. It's probably worth a few years of someone's life to try to steer that ship in a bett…

What does it mean for a company to be "fundamentally" evil or not? The "fix things on the inside" argument for going to working at a place that you think is harming people has always struck me as based upon a mostly unfalsifiable assumption: that the organization has the capacity to change and that you can actually bring about that change. This is especially unknowable until you've actually worked at an organization…

I think these are all good questions. They're certainly things I mulled over when considering whether to take the job.

Regarding being fundamentally evil or not, I've worked around groups which were constitutionally amoral or immoral-- the mandate of the group was simply incompatible with common-sense notions of good and little effort was made to reconcile the two. Facebook does not seem to belong in that camp, but does belong in the grey wasteland of groups that are well paid to develop a peculiarly self-serving sense of ethics. The reason that's important is because amoral groups will simply not accept ethical arguments as valid arguments to make, while groups with peculiar ethics are responsive to them but sometimes their logical toolkit is filled with double-ended hammers and crescent screwdrivers. I've found that to be an important distinction in previous roles.

As you point out, there is an ethical hazard here. If I worked there for five years would I find their ethical blind spots so obvious? Is the environment corrosive in a spiritual sense? No idea, but early indications both during my interviews and speaking to current employees were mixed. It was definitely something that gave me pause.

In terms of whether you can actually have the requisite influence, I probably would have taken the job if I could have come to confidence on this. In the end I don't think I could have and I didn't take the role.

Of course, it's difficult to disentangle the compensation from the levelling, so I may just be lying to myself and saying that if they'd paid me more I would have pretended. To attempt to guard against that I asked friends and former colleagues who I thought knew both me and something about the dilemma and listened to their thoughts. It's not a perfect system but I think it yielded a set of thought experiments that were useful to me in making sure I didn't fall into that trap.

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

#387
post #202
post #84

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Not sure why you're being downvoted. You're right. These companies like workers who have no other responsibilities in their lives except their jobs. Edit: single men and exceptions to the rule, please keep downvoting me.

Eh, that's borderline conspiratory. I work at one of those companies and know for a fact that many coworkers have kids and sometimes have to leave early or get in late due to kids' doctor appointments and whatnot. Besides, in addition for it being illegal to discriminate candidates based on marital status, in my experience nobody that does interviews ever thinks of considering that as a hiring criteria.

It happens all over the place all the time, if you don't stay late you're "not a team player". Of course your employer isn't going to say you're fired because you're a parent, unless their attorneys are bored. That doesn't make it any more moral to discriminate based on proxy metrics, like how much of your life you're willing to donate to an entity that cares about you only to the extent you're making them profit.

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

#388
post #202
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. You're right. These companies like workers who have no other responsibilities in their lives except their jobs. Edit: single men and exceptions to the rule, please keep downvoting me.

Eh, that's borderline conspiratory. I work at one of those companies and know for a fact that many coworkers have kids and sometimes have to leave early or get in late due to kids' doctor appointments and whatnot. Besides, in addition for it being illegal to discriminate candidates based on marital status, in my experience nobody that does interviews ever thinks of considering that as a hiring criteria.

GP and GGP are not saying there is an overt conspiracy especially among interviewers; they are attempting to point out that the interview process itself is discriminating.

I'm sure the people that perform interviews are not discriminating and I'm certain a number of bright, older, time-squeezed people make it through. But maybe I would imply conspiracy since I'd imagine the people at the upper levels, that designed the process, have at least noticed that it's biased in favor of young, recent graduates able to give extra time to the company.

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

#389
post #241

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Why? So you don't get to work at a big name tech company, big whoop. Go find one of the myriad of companies that are still doing great work, pay well, and where overtime isn't expected. There are literally thousands of them, you just won't get any name recognition from them.

You're unlikely to hit $300-400k+ TC at those though. Pay is a huge reason why people join them. The pay scale is completely different and (practically) necessary to compete in the bay area housing market. Checkout levels.fyi.

> necessary to compete in the bay area housing market

I think there might be another solution to that problem then...

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you can't handle simple data structures problems you need to stay far, far away from software architecture.

In the real world software architecture is rarely about “data structures”. Software architecture is about teasing out the needs of the customer - whether that be internal or external - and knowing how to design systems that are maintainable, scalable, fault tolerant, etc.
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