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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

#551

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#552

Post by solipsism »

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…

This strikes me as an analogy that does not work in your favor.

To know how to make a novel cake (not a recipe you've memorized), you need to have a good understanding of how the different ingredients interact. You probably even have a good sense of why they're there.

Those seem like exactly the qualities you'd want to look for in a cake maker. Sure, they'll probably be going from recipes in their day to day job. But they'll be able to tweak them intelligently too.

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

#553

Post by barry-cotter »

busterarm wrote: post #395
alkibiades wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

right but then you’ve made your choice and you live with it.

It's only in the tech industry that having a family isn't a regular, normal thing people do. Maybe it being a choice with a negative association is more of a cover for the fact that most of us who choose this industry are extremely poor communicators and that an out-sized number of us _will not_ get married or have kids (and not by our own choice). And I say that as someone without such attachments myself. Or maybe w…

> It's only in the tech industry that having a family isn't a regular, normal thing people do.

Getting divorced, again, is an occupational hazard of getting to the top in law firms or in finance as well. There are plenty of people with really good jobs that sacrificed family for it. I doubt it’s actuallu the norm but it’s hardky unusual.

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

#554

Post by [deleted] »

dragonwriter wrote: post #528
jedberg wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#555

Post by ttiurani »

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 think the hidden agenda here might be that big corps also test for the candidate's a) motivation and b) obedience. Are you the sort of person who's willing to learn whiteboard programming on your spare time, and then tolerate abuse from the interviewers? The type of unethical business most of the big corps do works best with subservient, diligent code slingers.

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

#556

Post by pikma »

ttiurani wrote: post #555
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 think the hidden agenda here might be that big corps also test for the candidate's a) motivation and b) obedience. Are you the sort of person who's willing to learn whiteboard programming on your spare time, and then tolerate abuse from the interviewers? The type of unethical business most of the big corps do works best with subservient, diligent code slingers.

Is your experience that interviewers "abuse" candidates? I interview candidates about once a week, and I always try to make them feel at ease and comfortable, no matter if they are doing well or not. I would be curious to learn about other people's experiences.

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

#557

Post by pmorici »

whiddershins wrote: post #514

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…

"got offers from top companies in the comfortable 6 figures."

Maybe I missed it but I didn't see where he discussed what the offers were like compensation wise.

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

#558

Post by Justsignedup »

guessmyname wrote: post #9

> If it’s of any use: I was interviewing for my second job out of college with about two and a half years of experience without any particularly notable internships or employers on my resume; I went to a very small school that had zero known software companies at their “career fair”; I started preparing in late April and started applying in June/July; and, lastly, a few months in, my job is everything I could have po…

The truth is that it is a tough problem. Everyone wants to figure out if you're smart and can figure problems out. I have, however, seen 10 year engineers have trouble reading a small data structure and writing 2 nested loops. So I think the biggest issue is just nervousness.

I mean yes, some engineers are going to be better at interviews than others but we gotta go by some signals. We had to flunk a few because it was "we see the depth of knowledge the person describes, but we have to go by the signals we saw, otherwise we're just randomly picking people".

Point is it is tough. However it does say something that our interviews are just a bunch of quizzes and studying for a month will make a huge difference. When hiring the goal is to find out if the person is good, not if they crammed, but cramming does work quite well.

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

#559

Post by Gigablah »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #255
SamReidHughes wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a communication platform. You want a censored internet.

FB is the censored Internet. Covert user activity tracking, links to outfits like Cambridge Analytica, troll farms, "disappeared" groups, and all under the pretext of targeted ads - in what sense is any of that a clean, free-range Internet?

3 out of your 4 examples don’t have anything to do with censorship, not even remotely. You’re being disingenuous.

Not to mention “clean” and “free-range” are diametrically opposite.

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

#560

Post by LaserToy »

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…

Ok, here is the question for you. I’m from gaming company, so it is relevant: given a matrix of 0s and 1s where 0 is a wall and 1 is an empty space, write function that finds path between provided coordinates. It should be suitable for real time game, no gooogling. Go
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