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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

#451

Post by [deleted] »

rifung wrote: post #339
swozey wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had internal referrals at a few FAANG myself, I have one of the "unique" (no degree, some high school, ops/coding since 12 so about 15 years on/off) backgrounds and the people who referred me would be on the team that I'd be joining and all seemed incredibly excited to get me on board. I work on FOSS projects with them already. At each place it was people from other teams completely unrelated to that team who in…

I work for Google, opinions are my own. First of all it sounds like your interview experience was unpleasant so if this was at Google I apologize. Secondly, I can totally relate to feeling like I don't belong having also come from a nontraditional background (No college degree). > At each place it was people from other teams completely unrelated to that team who interviewed (or would interview) me and eventually turn…

[deleted]

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

#452

Post by vonmoltke »

mav3rick wrote: post #279
donaldknuth123 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The technical interviewing scheme is not great, but I haven't seen another system that works. I would argue that pair programming or take home projects do a far better job than the standard Whiteboard Algo interviews. In fact I don't think it's even close but SV engineers have been captured by this Whiteboard Interview Stockholm Syndrome/Hazing and continue to perpetuate the insane idea that there is no better way.

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.

> Many people on HN also complain about "I don't have time for pair programming

How does one not have time for pair programming? It's the exact same time commitment, from both the interviewer and interviewee, as a whiteboarding session. It's just a different format for the interview.

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

#453

Post by QML »

ForrestN wrote: post #10

I find it shocking that Facebook would still be considered as a peer to these other companies in terms of desirability as an employer. I would only accept a position at Facebook, which seems to be building a fundamentally destructive product while going out of its way to behave unethically in many dimensions, if it was an absolutely last resort to pay the medical bills of some dying loved one or something. Why would…

No offense, but that’s because you lack perspective — and maybe that’s because of the bubble that entrapped HN and SV alike. There are tons of people who would take a six-figure job at FB, people who make less and people who others wouldn’t take chances on.

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

#454

Post by Reedx »

ceejayoz wrote: post #193
Reedx wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Most people who say they "don't have time" are spending hours/day watching TV, on social media, etc. https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2018/time-flies-...

It's not necessarily fair to read those charts that way. The radio time could be while commuting to/from work. Quite a few folks have TV on in the kitchen while they prepare dinner. Social media time is frequently a minute or two at a time scattered throughout the day. etc. etc. etc. The chart even indicates "Some amount of simultaneous usage may occur across devices".

Right, there are exceptions, but let's be real. "I don't have time" usually means "It's not a priority over TV/games/social media".

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

#455

Post by vonmoltke »

jedberg wrote: post #341
idontpost wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

We have that for "real" engineers. Doesn't stop many of them from being atrocious at their job. Doesn't stop doctors either, for that matter.

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

#456

Post by alasdair_ »

autokad wrote: post #367
cornellwright wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm a data scientist, and google asked me to sum all values of nodes at each height of a tree. I had to implement the tree, bfs, and the algo (which was easy once you have bfs) in a 25 minutes, minus any talky time. BFS is not something I thought about much in the last 5 years, and quite frankly could care less about. I got stuck when I knew I needed 'something' to finish implementing BFS, but couldn't remember and t…

>I'm a data scientist, and google asked me to sum all values of nodes at each height of a tree. I had to implement the tree, bfs, and the algo (which was easy once you have bfs) in a 25 minutes, minus any talky time.

THIS is the problem. The (unreasonably) timed nature of the exercise means that the only people that will do well are the people that prep heavily for this specific skill, in much the same way that people about to take the LSAT are likely to do better than it than actual fucking lawyers with proven experience.

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

#457

Post by rossdavidh »

slimshady94 wrote: post #431
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…

Reiterating my view, I feel like the interviewing grind has become akin to gymming - you go to your mental gym, build up your 'muscles' by doing pointless repetitive tasks AKA algorithms you'd never use in real life (probably like how bodybuilders would never need to deadlift 125kgs in their daily life). It doesn't directly help you do your job but you know bodybuilders have higher than average fitness levels. So in…

But, if I'm a scout for a football team, I don't want to see you in the gym, I want to see you play football. Maybe, ideally, I'd like to see both, but seeing you play football is by far the more important thing.

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

#458

Post by pishpash »

cornellwright wrote: post #394
spyspy wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and a lot of other commenters are getting hung up on the BFS example. It's just that - an example. There are dozens of algorithms that are "common" enough to be asked about and diminishing returns to having them all memorized.

Sure, but that's my point. So long as the interviewer is telling you what they'd actually like you to do, you should be able to just derive the algorithm you need to do it. At some point the algorithms become difficult enough (particularly if you add lots of constraints like efficiency) that it's pretty unreasonable to expect that in an interview though, and at that point it's a bad question. Rather than memorizing a…

You're still not getting it. Even for BFS, which is not a hard problem, the current state of the market is that enough people have memorized the BFS recipe so that the interview doesn't allocate much of any time to it. You're not going to have/be given time to "just derive the algorithm" or "solve problems simply, quickly, and elegantly." You're competing against rote speed, which, if you don't implement BFS all day or haven't recently done interview prep, you don't have and you're definitely going to fail.

I've heard people actually defend these useless interviews on correlation grounds, like people who are docile, follow the herd, and "prepare" are good hard-working workers who also tend to have done well in school or look polished in other aspects of life. That's what these interviews are really looking for. So, if you're not a well known expert, suck it up, be a servile cog and follow the script.

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

#459

Post by rossdavidh »

alasdair_ wrote: post #456
autokad wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a data scientist, and google asked me to sum all values of nodes at each height of a tree. I had to implement the tree, bfs, and the algo (which was easy once you have bfs) in a 25 minutes, minus any talky time. BFS is not something I thought about much in the last 5 years, and quite frankly could care less about. I got stuck when I knew I needed 'something' to finish implementing BFS, but couldn't remember and t…

>I'm a data scientist, and google asked me to sum all values of nodes at each height of a tree. I had to implement the tree, bfs, and the algo (which was easy once you have bfs) in a 25 minutes, minus any talky time. THIS is the problem. The (unreasonably) timed nature of the exercise means that the only people that will do well are the people that prep heavily for this specific skill, in much the same way that peopl…

Time (and being watched) do make it very unrealistic, but the other thing missing is that programming now is not like in the 1970's, you don't need to memorize much of anything. If you forget something, you look it up, it takes 30 seconds to remind yourself, "oh, yeah, the queue", and then you go. Testing if you can do it without looking it up is not testing the skills you actually need in order to code well.

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

#460

Post by shashasha »

BurningFrog wrote: post #443
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'm in a similar situation. I think the counterargument might be that at our age, you should have a network of people who will hire you just based on your stellar performance on previous jobs, if you're that experienced and sophisticated. If you somehow don't, well, maybe you need to brush up on your tree balancing skills...

I believe for older engineers who regularly read these threads, this is the comment. Wish it weren’t true, but it is.
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