I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days • Hacker News Board

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

#561

Post by ttiurani » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 6:56 AM UTC

pikma wrote: post #556

ttiurani wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I personally have only anecdotal evidence, but I've read now many stories where the interviewers of these giants refuse to engage in a two-way, human-to-human conversation with the candidate but instead make the ordeal deliberately prolonged, stressful and unconfortable. I'd call that abuse.

Even though I'm sure there is a lot of variance between interviewers, I can't help but think that the abusive style of whiteboard grilling must "work" in that it results in able workforce, and that might be because of the reason I suggested.

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

#562

Post by austincheney » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 6:57 AM UTC

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 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

I completely disagree with you, because how do you define rare. In my case as a JavaScript developer many cases commonly considered rare are in fact exceedingly common and important, but considered rare due to tooling and people hiding from them. When the reality is invented here syndrome every problem is either a configuration or rare. I make it an important point to attempt to discover this distinction when I am interviewing for a new position or interviewing new candidates.

I have often seen weak developers promoted to senior because they are good with tools, trends, and configurations only to struggle in the face of an original problem. You can't simply hope to download your way out of every development problem and hope to be taken seriously as a senior. That reality is something many people are unwilling to accept at great emotional peril.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here

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

#563

Post by LaserToy » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 6:59 AM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #418

LaserToy wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bfs is just one of examples. I can ask you a question you will not be able to answer without knowing the answer. There is a reason it took researchers years to find those optimal solutions

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.

I hope you are not going to be asked to implement consensus alg on the whiteboard. Took less time to invent than 0, but good luck writing it.

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

#564

Post by krisoft » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 7:08 AM UTC

solipsism wrote: post #546

bg24 wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "What I do enjoy, however, is building up. I like modeling and being about to think at greater and greater levels of abstraction to solve problems that aren't puzzles, but instead open ended questions." In my opinion, you will do well if you focus on building your own business sooner or later.

What an odd thing to suggest. Owning a business isn't for everyone. Not by a long shot.

No, it is not. But grand parent comment was giving this advice based on the quoted specifics and not for everyone.

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

#565

Post by fiblye » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 7:13 AM UTC

solipsism wrote: post #552

fiblye wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most tech companies aren't looking for people to reimplement a dozen new variations of quicksort everyday. I mean, some companies really do need people who have countless algorithms ready to go in the back of their mind and the ability to apply them to new and interesting situations all the time, just like some people do need bakers who never need to consult a recipe and can devise new cakes for important events on a whim.

But most restaurants are looking for someone who knows how to cook and use the tools in the kitchen. A chef who doesn't specialize in cakes will still probably be fine if you give them 5 minutes to look up a recipe and make one. In the same way, the overwhelming majority of tech job openings are in need of programmers with some degree of specialization and the ability to know how to look up what they don't know and the experience/knowledge to know how to put that info to use.

The state of programming interviews for the past few decades has been to find people who've memorized all the "recipes" of CS. Most of the jobs, though, are about using some Javascript flavor of the month library and making it work with some other popular library and writing a bunch of interface code. Someone on the team might have to write an implementation of breadth-first search in their toy language, in which case they look up "bfs" on wikipedia and just rewrite the algo given.

Companies are testing employees on how to make cakes when their job will be all about making burgers to order.

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

#566

Post by sanedigital » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 7:15 AM UTC

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…

> That we're discarding any vestige of track record and accomplishment...

It's not your job as one of the five interviewers at Google to evaluate anything except the candidate's performance in your interview. The Hiring Committee (HC) then takes the feedback received from all the interviewers and combines it with the interviewee's résumé, any recommendations they've received, etc.

Source: gave over 100 interviews at Google.

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

#567

Post by hello_moto » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 7:23 AM UTC

rudolph9 wrote: post #527

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?

Sadly they are looking for the most precise and optimum answer (at least at FB they do)

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

#568

Post by hello_moto » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 7:24 AM UTC

opportune wrote: post #413

LearnerHerzog wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Field of Dreams approach. "If you build it, they will come"

Really, that's not far from the truth. If you've worked at other well known "good" companies and worked on hot/important stuff, and that info is on linkedin, you will probably get approached by a google recruiter at some point. And unless you fuck up your call with them to make sure you're interested and a real person, that basically guarantees you a first round technical phone screen, which is the hardest part of ge…

Unless someone inside Google wants you that _bad_, you can't by-pass the interview session.

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

#569

Post by hello_moto » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 7:27 AM UTC

ummonk wrote: post #520

dom96 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> he has demonstrated very good product management aptitude on the other hand

Not to diminish his accomplishment... he could be a good candidate for PM but his tool is more of a dev-tool (so I suppose this is a niche-ish?)

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

#570

Post by anticensor » Sat, Jan 19, 2019, 7:34 AM UTC

fma wrote: post #516

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…

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. W…

> Or a licensed professional engineer to retake the PE exam everytime they change jobs.

Yes, just as you retake your driving exams every five years, you should retake your engineering exams (unless you are an accredited engineering instructor, in which case the license becomes permanent) every ten years.