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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

#511

Post by username90 »

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…

You don't need bfs to do that, you can solve it with any kind of tree traversal by just keeping track of which level you currently are on and passing a pointer to the result vector. If you can't write a tree traversal implementation within 25 minutes then I don't really know what to say.

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

#512

Post by skybrian »

pishpash wrote: post #458
cornellwright wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It seems like there might be a middle ground, like being willing to play the game, that doesn't imply being "a servile cog?"

The trick seems to be knowing when the game is worth playing. There are certainly situations where competition is too fierce and requires too much preparation, so it's not worth doing if you don't really enjoy the game.

I'm not sure getting hired at a large tech firm is quite that competitive, though? They do hire lots of people all the time.

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

#513

Post by barry-cotter »

existencebox wrote: post #317
pradn wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interview at Google and I never look at resumes - to avoid bias. I don't want to be biased by whether you went to Yale or UT Austin. My question is always a standard algo/DS question anyway.

I say the following having worked at multiple "big-5" including G. Do you not feel any of the twist in your stomach that I feel when reading your post? That we're discarding any vestige of track record and accomplishment (that I pragmatically see as having correlated better than any other variable with effective coworkers in the past) for a readily gamable trivia question that I take some perverse pride in not having…

> To be clear, this is not some defense of bias. This is a statement that your stated approach seems to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It is impossible to give every candidate an unbiased fair chance without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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

#514

Post by whiddershins »

I see so many people talking about how irrelevant algorithm skills are for real world coding, and lots of allegations of age discrimination.

I see the validity of both points, and I’m sure they are true.

But people, please, some perspective.

The author spent a couple of months studying and practicing material in their spare time and got offers from top companies in the comfortable 6 figures.

That happens in no other industry, ever.

Look at what lawyers, structural engineers, accountants, and most especially architects ... not to mention the obvious one: doctors, go through to be qualified to make good money.

The author presumably graduated with a bs, worked for pay for 2.5 years, did some online learning, and makes a great living?

A doctor would still be in (very expensive) school.

I suspect there’s an element of IQ-ish testing with these puzzles and it sucks if your brain doesn’t work that way and you are permanently excluded as a result of that.

But if you have the capacity but can’t be bothered to learn a bunch of material over a fairly short time frame to handle an interview, why should these companies want you? You obviously just don’t care that much, because the investment is tiny.

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

#515

Post by freyr »

woolvalley wrote: post #87
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…

Love, you just don't realize how the other tech companies are like. They are all about equal if you dig in. Not as bad as media makes you think, and in some ways not as good as the media totally misses the mark on other things. As far as pay, interesting things to work on and work environment, FB is in the top 3 of the world.

You don’t need to follow the media or read the headlines to know that Facebook is net destructive.

I’m sure the pay and work environment make it easier to ignore that.

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

#516

Post by fma »

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…

An engineer that did 4 years of college at an accredited engineering school isn't enough?

What you are asking for, is a surgeon to retake the boards every time they change hospitals. Or a licensed professional engineer to retake the PE exam everytime they change jobs.

The algorithms asked in interviews are rarely implemented in a job. All they prove is how much you studied and the author of the article proves that.

What our industry is missing, IMHO is required certification and training. Doctors and nurses have yearly training and related exams to keep their certification. That's why a hospital can hire staff based on a license...Not becsuse the items you mentioned. But our industry would never go that route, which is a longer rant.

Also if peope who can't write for loops are passing your phone screen... You might want to update your phone screen.

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

#517

Post by pishpash »

lowdest wrote: post #319
ergothus wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share both of your concerns (while I was very lucky in getting initial experience, I know of other beginners that haven't/arent, so I'm very sympathetic.) . Started coding for work in '95. > was I wrong then? Or am I wrong now? Perhaps both. Neither, I think. The Algorithm interviews are bad for 90% of the positions out there, and experience matters much more than trivia, so you were right then. And today, everyone…

As I see it, the difficult algorithm interviews screen for people who are motivated enough to spend 100s of hours studying for an interview, or know this stuff for some other uncommon reason. Both types are acceptable hires.

Yes you get drones and autistic savants. Great!

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

#518

Post by freyr »

gamma-male wrote: post #62
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…

Pretty much because for most people who are not on HN facebook is a cool company.

Or maybe it’s not? It’s an uncool company, an uncool eponymous social network, and a cool photo sharing app.

https://engineering.berkeley.edu/2018/11/i-dont-really-want-...

https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/comment/is-facebook-...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/16/parents-k...

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

#519

Post by [deleted] »

joshuamorton wrote: post #477
pishpash wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also use 0 every day. Do you use the BFS every day?

Absolutely! I don't write the algorithm every day, but I interact graphs, trees, and other such structures on a daily basis in my job, and traversing them is something that I work on. Every time I run `rm -r` for example! I'm not asked to implement BFS every day, but the concept of a tree traversal is incredibly common. Even more explicitly, a lot of my recent work has been involving automated refactoring tooling, so…

[deleted]

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

#520

Post by ummonk »

dom96 wrote: post #272
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…

> 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…

The author of Homebrew was rejected for software engineering at Google, which was perfectly reasonable given what he has said about his own skills. He has demonstrated very good product management aptitude on the other hand; it would be far more concerning if he were rejected from a PM role.
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