51–60 of 524 posts
Ten+ years ago, but I received an email minutes before my second phone interview with Facebook that they were passing on me for not being adept enough with JavaScript.
I was supposed to be going over a take home project with the team on that call. They never even saw the project I’d spent the entire weekend on, and I’m still salty.
You'd think the CS knowledge would be prized more than the application, but I suppose that's not what these roles are for...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On your second point, that's the reality for many established tech companies. I know many solid senior engineers that can't pass the entrance bar to FANG. That doesn't mean that they are "bad" engineers. Overall I think you can replace Facebook with Google/Apple/Microsoft/Netflix/... in the blog post and the end result would be the same.
I worked at a company, not a FANG, but had interviews like a FANG. We had a solid team. But some of us believed we wouldn't be able to pass our own interviews.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>in most cases doctors have many, many thousands of hours under their belt in training before still needing to study a ton to pass their boards The difference is that what the doctors put so much time into learning can actually be quite useful for their job. The vast majority of competitive coding stuff isn't. Interview procedures based around it completely fail to assess some of the most important abilities in softw…
Is that true? I don’t know anything about medical licensing, but after having a few friends take the California bar exam, I’ve heard endless complaints about having to study things like divorce law in order to become a privacy advocate.
> I went to school to learn the law. After school I had to teach myself how to be a lawyer.
Every time I read these posts I find them very depressing. Crunch through an enormous bunch of algorithm problems in order to perform well on some unrealistic whiteboard programming (I think the system engineering problems are actually more useful though) - as usual we've focused on the easy to measure metric rather than anything actually useful. Maybe these things are meant to be a proxy for how good you are at othe…
One 'slightly' shameful things I noted about myself reading that list of system design interview questions is that I actually don't use most of those systems or know their features well enough. Other than YT of course.
I feel like the simpler interview process would be to just take a person and do a hand wavy system design interview. Then if they pass, hire em on probation for 2 months and slam them with work. They get paid, you maybe get a feel for them.
They sink or swim. You keep em' or toss em' away at the end of the two months.
Every time I read these posts I find them very depressing. Crunch through an enormous bunch of algorithm problems in order to perform well on some unrealistic whiteboard programming (I think the system engineering problems are actually more useful though) - as usual we've focused on the easy to measure metric rather than anything actually useful. Maybe these things are meant to be a proxy for how good you are at othe…
> The big tech companies will not get pedantic on the language that you decide to use in your interviews. Ten+ years ago, but I received an email minutes before my second phone interview with Facebook that they were passing on me for not being adept enough with JavaScript. I was supposed to be going over a take home project with the team on that call. They never even saw the project I’d spent the entire weekend on, a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On your second point, that's the reality for many established tech companies. I know many solid senior engineers that can't pass the entrance bar to FANG. That doesn't mean that they are "bad" engineers. Overall I think you can replace Facebook with Google/Apple/Microsoft/Netflix/... in the blog post and the end result would be the same.
These days I honestly think that a developer who is marginally above average but plays well as part of the team is much more valuable than someone super smart who isn't a team player. We rarely need to solve complex algorithmic problems these days, just plug some components together and work out why they aren't working.
Tongue in cheek analysis aside:
- A phone interview to weed out timewasters.
- A RELEVANT technical take-home task that could be done feasibly in a few hours.
- A long, informal, in-person chat to determine "culture fit" and personality.
- Actually checking references.
That's all you need, anything more is just self-importance - or worse - time wasting.
Facebook have been contacting me for years on linkedin and email asking me to interview. This is exactly why I have never responded.
This may not sound like much to anyone who is established in the industry or happened to be in the right places for a good career head-start, but for people coming from non-traditional backgrounds, industries and especially places where there's no tech - being able to study-up and land a job at some of the most well known names in the industry can be life-changing. I think this is a very under-appreciated side effect of the "recruiter spam" from FAANG that everyone seems to dislike if they can afford to.