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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

#581

Post by joshuamorton »

fiblye wrote: post #565
solipsism wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But an algorithm or more generally algorithmic thinking is not a collection of rote memories. It's concepts that can be applied broadly. Much in the same way that I'd expect a pastry chef to be able to cook a 2 layer red velvet cake because they know that a red velvet cake is just chocolate, and a 2 later cake is just 2 one layer sheets with icing between. Someone who understands a relatively small set of fundamentals well will be able to perform as well or better than someone who spends weeks memorizing every cake in the dictionary.

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

#582

Post by busterarm »

barry-cotter wrote: post #553
busterarm wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's honestly mostly a myth. The number one factor in divorce rates is income.

Don't believe me?

https://qz.com/1069806/the-highest-and-lowest-divorce-rates-...

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

#583

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

mercutio2 wrote: post #472
mav3rick wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many acqui hires get interviewed again. Most acqui hires are a business deal for the company's business.

Does any other company than Google interview acqui-hires? I’ve never heard of any other company doing this, but I haven’t been looking especially carefully.

Every company I've worked for interviews acquihires.

From FAANG, to start ups, to established traditional engineering companies.

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

#584

Post by joshuamorton »

LaserToy wrote: post #560
joshuamorton wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not clear what your point is. Sure you can come up with questions that are difficult or obscure.

Yes I can probably implement a sufficiently fast maze solving algorithm, depending on exactly the environmental constraints (for ezple, given the problem as stated I'd assume something like a* using a precomputed mat heuristic would be fast for most mazes of reasonable size, I promise either didn't google that).

But I wouldn't expect someone to answer that in an interview. Hell, I don't ask dynamic programming questions because I think they're too obscure and tricky (in the riddle way). My most common interview question involves a problem I've faced multiple times at work, has multiple valid solutions, and which I had to implement myself in various flavors before eventually coming across a relatively obscure standard library implemention.

Although before I was able to identify that implementation, I had to solve the problem 2 or 3 times, see the different flavors, and identify the common themes and the theoretical underpinnings.

I don't expect a candidate to do that without help, and most don't. But it sure sounds like you think that I'm somehow a bad engineer for asking a question that tests on the job skills I've needed, and the ability to break a problem down into component parts and implement them cleanly.

But oh no, it uses an algorithm. It's a terrible question and I should just ask a question about software engineering that doesn't use any algorithms. Because obviously people will always be able to identify the standard library implemention (no candidate I've interviewed ever has, in fact). So colore dubious of this whole argument about whiteboarding questions being a bad test.

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

#585

Post by Xeronate »

Xeronate wrote: post #549
aprdm wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are essentially looking for patterns in text, your solutions looks not ideal and it takes a lot of time to develop vs just using some linux tools and piping output from one another. 10 millions line is nothing... (commenting based in your gist) would go even further and say that you could easily have installed something like https://oracle.github.io/opengrok/ in three commands for your organization and extract a…

It feels like OpenGrok should be able to do this, but I'm not seeing it. How do you search for a method call in a code path? E.g how do determine i function A calls function C? function file1.A(){file2.B();}, function file2.B(){file3.C();}

Heard back from the OpenGrok developers and they said they don't support the use case I needed. My gist was just a very small part of the overall process (and yes, for that small piece it was trivial to use a linux util instead of csharp).

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

#587

Post by anticensor »

anxman wrote: post #68
decebalus1 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would anyone be willing to work there if they had offers from companies that make products that help people and don't treat society with contempt? I have someone who just went there. Because of money, basically.

You own someone?

He missed the main verb.

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

#588

Post by LanceH »

nitrogen wrote: post #577
calf wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're better suited for research which is about working long term on open problems.

I think the opposite would be true; research might benefit from puzzle solving, and software engineering is precisely the discipline of building up and reasoning about layers of abstraction and components of a system.

Research is a grind when it's not about writing grant proposals and then it's a different grind.

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

#589

Post by lhorie »

kkarakk wrote: post #524
lhorie wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No offense but there's a lot wrong with this comment...

While having a github presence can help recruiters find you, you aren't required to have such presence at all; the vast majority of people I interview don't (and the same goes for coworkers).

Measuring lines of code written is another fallacy that gets thrown around easily, but that any engineer worth their salt knows is a stupid metric (1MLOC of shit code is a pile of shit). One only needs to look at their most recent perf evaluation to realize that absolute code output doesn't actually factor in - it's high level impact perception that does, if anything.

Being single doesn't in any way correlate to more dedication; plenty of singles clock 9-5 and spend free time on non-coding activities (games, TV, exercise, etc), and plenty of family people work late by choice. It's not even an either-or proposition either: there are married people w/ no kids, single people that need to pick up their dogs at daycare, people that work so late so often that they become unproductive due to fatigue, etc.

The idea that someone will take your name and go dig up all your personal info and discriminate you and cackle maniacally is just flat out absurd. As someone who's been both an outsider and an insider to bay area tech, I honestly don't see evidence of discrimination, deliberate or otherwise. I feel like the occam's razor in this discussion is that armchair speculators seal themselves in an echo chamber of delusional conspiracy theory out of self pity or to feel smug. I also noticed that there are people who have had asshat bosses/coworkers at companies w/ dysfunctional cultures and think that experience translates to there being asshats everywhere.

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

#590

Post by graphenus »

krisoft wrote: post #564
solipsism wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And most importantly, the commenter gave one's suggestion based on representiveness, which are not facts. The rest follows from here.
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