I interview programmers. I would love to see a candidate who prepared like this, but it seems like everyone I talk to hasn’t done any practice at all.
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
#422Earlier 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.
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.
It’s the best way to get into it anyway. Making architectural decisions without experience implementing them sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Generals often start out as lieutenants though (e.g. officer academy drops you in on a higher rank).
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bfs is just one of examples. I can ask you a question you will not be able to answer without knowing the answer. There is a reason it took researchers years to find those optimal solutions
This is such a cop out. It took millennia to invent 0. That doesn't mean that 0 is an exceedingly difficult concept to grasp.
BFS as a name isn’t a difficult concept to grasp either.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#425I had 4 onsite interviews in 5 days once. It was brutal, so exhausting. I felt like a machine though. A lot of the questions were recycled (behavioral), and so were some of the tech questions.
I don’t know how they managed to do 6 in 6 days, that’s almost hard to believe. Most companies aren’t so flexible on the days they can host you.
It would have been very interesting to see how the offers compared and which company they went with. I’d also be interested to see what the negotiations did for their final TC.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#426Earlier 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…
> I think they weed out a few, but completely ignore practical development skills, work ethic, soft skills, design and architecture skills, etc.
Tech interviews are not solely whiteboarding. Even at FAANGs there are system design and hiring manager interviews designed to ask about those sorts of things.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bfs is just one of examples. I can ask you a question you will not be able to answer without knowing the answer. There is a reason it took researchers years to find those optimal solutions
This is such a cop out. It took millennia to invent 0. That doesn't mean that 0 is an exceedingly difficult concept to grasp.
I don't understand your comment. Was the parent suggesting BFS (or the like) is an exceedingly difficult concept to grasp? And if we're going to claim understanding BFS is like understanding zero, then wouldn't that just mean it's just as silly to complain about a question on BFS as it is to complain about a question on zero?
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Potentially two things here: 1) Gathering requirements. 2) Turning those requirements into data structures. I think a lot of companies will separate those into different roles, but I strongly believe that's a costly mistake in most situations. There's a feedback loop. Requirements inform your data structures, but your data structures help you contextualize (not pollute) your requirements. If you're working with an ex…
But still “data structures” in the context of most businesses are more Domain Driven Design “Domain Contexts”, “Aggregate Roots”, type structures than any type of complicated CS type data structures.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is such a cop out. It took millennia to invent 0. That doesn't mean that 0 is an exceedingly difficult concept to grasp.
BFS as a name isn’t a difficult concept to grasp either.
Neither BFS the concept, nor 0, the concept are particularly hard to understand. That's why I used the word "concept". If you disagree with that, I'd be interested in what you feel is exceedingly difficult about the breadth-first search algorithm to understand, or if you prefer, to explain why the time it takes to discover or first write down a concept is strongly correlated with its age.
Consider that BFS was first published in 1945, while the turing machine was published almost 10 years prior. Is BFS an implicitly more complex concept than a turing machine? That seems like a strange argument to make, but I'm certainly interested.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#430As someone who has interviewed with 3 of those 6 companies and gotten offers from all 3, I think the best way to approach these interviews is to not walk in with the mentality that it's a one sided "test" where you are put on a spot to defend yourself. In reality it's more often than not a role-playing exercise where you are pretending to be coworkers trying to solve problems together. Sure you'd be the one leading t…
> In reality it's more often than not a role-playing exercise where you are pretending to be coworkers trying to solve problems together. Sure you'd be the one leading the problem solving, but being capable to explain your thought process effectively, having the ability to exchange ideas with the interviewer, and just being able to come across as a good teammate is probably more important than getting that last 5% of…
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