Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.usejournal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 740 posts

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

#521

Post by learc83 »

skh wrote: post #501
Aeolun wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generals often start out as lieutenants though (e.g. officer academy drops you in on a higher rank).

In the U.S. military this is not true. People graduating from OCS, ROTC, or one of the academies start off at O-1 (2nd Lieutenant).

What's your disagreement? 1st Lieutenant vs 2nd Lieutenant? Lieutenant is commonly used to refer to both.

Or are you saying that you start of at O-1 and not a higher paygrade? If that's the case, the OP was pointing out that you start off outranking enlisted service members, not that you start out above O-1.

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

#522

Post by kkarakk »

bytematic wrote: post #325
kcmastrpc wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, these tests are carefully devised to target young college graduates who will excel at these types of interviews because the material is still fresh and they have the free time to study. This is age discrimination disguised as "technical proficiency" exercises.

News to me students have the free time to study considering the hiring season is mid-semester during some of the hardest classes. Not to mention if they are working too

haha guess what, the second piece of the puzzle is that you have to be rich enough to have time to study AND a place that is close enough that commuting to college and work doesn't mentally wipe you out everyday. why do you think silicon valley isn't seen as a place with actual opportunity for everyone even though everyone inside it thinks it's wonderful?

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

#524

Post by kkarakk »

lhorie wrote: post #485
huebnerob wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, nobody goes to an interview and asks "hey how late do you work in your current job?", so I don't understand how it is possible to discriminate by proxy metrics at that point in the process. Maybe you're arguing that people leave their jobs after the fact due to thinly disguised rationalizations of these proxy metrics affecting raises, but that's a huge stretch. I've seen plenty of cases of bosses and coworker…

they don't need to - your github/ side projects tell them all they need to know & you're probably required to submit them to even be considered. you think someone with a full time family is going to have the same output in code as a single person with nothing but their career going on?

discriminating is trivial if they just have your name

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

#525

Post by ummonk »

theptip wrote: post #280
xfer wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These processes are optimized to reduce false positives not false negatives. So they already know that they might be missing on some great developers.

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

Sure, but then they shouldn't turn around and constantly keep complaining about a shortage of tech talent.

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

#526

Post by stale2002 »

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…

That is a good question!

And the answer to your question is that Facebook pays a whole lot of money.

They pay at the top end of all of the top tech companies, and this is impressive.

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

#527

Post by rudolph9 »

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…

Have you considered that they aren’t necessarily looking for a particular answer or even a correct answer but rather your thought process while working through problems and how you engage with a peer?

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

#528

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> 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.

...and meets ongoing continuing education requirements.

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

We do have that for professional engineers.

We don't have it for people working in software whose job titles have become (but largely weren't for similar roles a few decades ago) "engineer".

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

#529

Post by pseudalopex »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #434
theoh wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on what is meant by software architecture. If you mean the structuring of a system to achieve good or (particularly) consistent worst-case performance, maybe you are right. But if architecture is used to mean the design of a system to satisfy users (and present a clean, extensible, meaningful interface) then it's really a conceptual job that has more to do with design skills than optimized algorithms.

Being able to make a clean interface, as in a clean API, or useful one, is a data structures/algorithms problem and often a distributed systems problem. Many API's are technically impossible to use correctly. For example they might not let you do two things atomically that need to be. Or they might suffer enormously because they don't version their information properly, resulting in client/server disagreements over t…

In my experience, architecture requires broad but not deep knowledge of data structures and algorithms. The best architects have both, but even very good architects struggle to remember algorithmic tricks on the spot and write detailed code without tools or references. People who can do that easily are often the last to think of things like fault tolerance.

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

#530

Post by dlp211 »

fiblye wrote: post #486
joshuamorton wrote: post #418

Earlier 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.

Cakes have existed for centuries and I'm sure most people on HN have made cakes at least once in their life. But put them in a room and say "Make us a 2 layer red velvet cake" with no access to a recipe, and you're not going to get a red velvet cake. It's an easy recipe that most people easily recognize with just a glance, and anyone could make it if they have a recipe on-hand or make red velvet cakes with abnormally…

There are literally tv shows and contests where they do exactly this.
Post reply on HN