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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

#531

Post by Lt_Riza_Hawkeye »

docker_up wrote: post #183
Cookingboy wrote: post #61

As 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…

Except it's well known that Facebook asks you 2 coding questions in 45 mins and if you don't solve them it's an automatic fail.

Thank god. I interviewed with FB, moved through the first question in 15 minutes, and assumed that it was 3 questions with 15 minutes allotted each. When he didn't give me a third one after another 15, I assumed I had spent too much time struggling with the second and he had just given up. I got the job though, just wish I had known then. I start in a few months.

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

#532

Post by mav3rick »

yowlingcat wrote: post #498
mav3rick wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is probably the only part I'll give you as far as your comments on this thread, but even this is inane and you're projecting. First of all, the problems with take home tests are the time commitment, which I can understand with the caveat that you do a lengthy pair programming exercise in person. I haven't heard that many complaints about pair programming, but I'm sure I exist so I'll give you that. I don't think…

Please provide a rebuttal on the comments individually if you care to disagree. This comment was just alluding that any technique is ever good enough for HN. People just want word of mouth and their resumes to be enough. That doesn't work when resumes lie.

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

#533

Post by james_s_tayler »

bradleyjg wrote: post #439
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…

It turns out that interviewing is hard, and we don't know what works well. Most of us think "we" are the ones that can obviously see what's wrong and everyone else is interviewing poorly. Most of us are wrong. Cowen’s Second Law: There is a literature on everything. Hiring is no different. Why do so many of us that say “of course you shouldn’t reimplement timsort, stand on the shoulder of giants” either make up an in…

Because of Cowen's First Law: there's something wrong with everything.

So no matter if you've read the literature and implemented a process, there is something wrong with it.

That's why there threads persist. Every process has something wrong with it depending on who you are. Funnily enough everyone eventually manages to sort themselves into the right category.

The system isn't broken any more than armed conflict is broken as a way of settling disputes. It's works, it's just a little terrifying and awful.

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

#534

Post by tzjmetron »

Aeolun wrote: post #422
opportune wrote: post #378

Earlier 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.

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.

Yup.

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

#536

Post by pseudalopex »

Reedx wrote: post #98
southphillyman wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The time commitment is not as bad as people make it seem. You don't have two hours to yourself every night? How about 1 hour during the week and doing 2-3 on weekends? You just have to sacrifice other leisures like tv and video games to make it work.

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-...

The median adult has much less free time than the mean. A parent with a full-time job has even less.

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

#537

Post by tzjmetron »

joshuamorton wrote: post #438
mehrdadn wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, my understanding is that the parent comment is complaining that since it took people with phds years to derive an algorithm for the first time, that we should never expect anyone to implement one in an interview. But, as with a concept like 0, making the cognitive leap to understanding that there should be a way to represent the lack of something is counterintuitive (indeed, consider Tony Hoare's billion dollar…

Try and stop being an idiot. If you can.

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

#539

Post by SamReidHughes »

pseudalopex wrote: post #529
SamReidHughes wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't have to be some string algorithms weenie, but the kind of people who "absolutely hated" algorithms problems in my experience, some of it personal and some of it vicarious, are bad at making architectural decisions with far-reaching consequences. It's overlapping subject matter which uses the same kind of aptitude. It's not that to be good at architectural decision-making you need to be prepped for an emergency Google Code Jam.

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

#540

Post by grdyhrdy »

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…

They didn't let you "Google" it at Google? Something wrong there.
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