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

611–620 of 740 posts

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

#611

Post by hello_moto »

rossdavidh wrote: post #457
slimshady94 wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reiterating my view, I feel like the interviewing grind has become akin to gymming - you go to your mental gym, build up your 'muscles' by doing pointless repetitive tasks AKA algorithms you'd never use in real life (probably like how bodybuilders would never need to deadlift 125kgs in their daily life). It doesn't directly help you do your job but you know bodybuilders have higher than average fitness levels. So in…

But, if I'm a scout for a football team, I don't want to see you in the gym, I want to see you play football. Maybe, ideally, I'd like to see both, but seeing you play football is by far the more important thing.

So tons of open source contribution in relevant areas with quick high-quality, low-bug-count, beautiful code check-in and demonstrated knowledge in breaking down problems into sub-problems and come up with elegant algorithsm? (something you can see in the field?)

Some analogies make sense, some probably don't map well.

Google prefers to hire Devs with strong CS foundations because they assume these Devs can contribute in many areas.

If they were only to hire someone based off something that they've done before and excel only in that area, they'd be like other companies who only hire selectively based on specific skill-set (e.g.: Java Dev, or 3D/game devs).

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

#612

Post by brabel »

molodec wrote: post #470
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 wrote a custom HashMap for Java, used BFS and DBS on graphs, wrote a top down custom parser, custom string searching algorithms to solve real business problems. I would rather work with someone who knows how neural networks really work rather than who knows pytorch or keras, because they can be learned rather easily. In some industries knowledge of algorithms can be more valuable than knowing a myriad of frameworks…

> In some industries knowledge of algorithms can be more valuable than knowing a myriad of frameworks that change every few years any way.

This is exceedingly rare... so you wrote a HashMap implementation in Java?? None of the custom maps discussed [here](http://java-performance.info/hashmap-overview-jdk-fastutil-g...) were enough? It must be a really rare problem you're working on if there's no library that provides an acceptable solution for it in Java.

> I would rather work with someone who knows how neural networks really work rather than who knows pytorch or keras

I would rather work with someone who knows general programming (which is not the same as algorithms - there's so much more to it!) and software design... but if working on a product that uses a framework heavily, good knowledge of that framework can be the difference between getting things done in minutes VS weeks (of painful and time-consuming battling with the framework to do thing the way you think they should be done, rather than how it's done within the framework).

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

#613

Post by monort »

idontpost wrote: post #306
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.

> 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.

Actually it seems like motor skills are a part of neuro-surgeon evaluation - https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i5976

There is also an experimental virtual surgery simulator for objective evaluation - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26153114

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

#614

Post by BossingAround »

jammygit wrote: post #348
lowdest wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I see it, the difficult algorithm interviews screen for people who are motivated enough to spend 100s of hours studying for an interview, or know this stuff for some other uncommon reason. Both types are acceptable hires.

Wouldn't it be better to hire somebody who thought that was lame and who spent 100s of hours learning performance testing, new libraries, design patterns, or just working on projects? Personally, I'd rather not work somewhere that hired based on drilling fringe information - what will the job be like? Maybe I'll feel differently in 10 or 20 years

It's interesting to me how many people value personal projects. From my personal experience, a confusing Github account with a number of small, questionable projects pushed in one commit half a year ago hurts you more than helps you. Personal projects are fine, but I think many people have the mentality of "getting a TODO app in Angular will help me waay more than implementing algorithms in C, that's useless!" which may not necessarily be true.

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

#615

Post by barry-cotter »

busterarm wrote: post #582
barry-cotter wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-...

Your source does not support your thesis. All of the professions with the lowest rates of divorce require high levels of intelligence but they’re not all very well paid. Clergy certainly aren’t and veterinarians generally have other, much better paid options. Looking at the low end of divorce professions it looks more like a combination of intelligence and systematic thinking being protective against divorce. The only people on the list that might not have degrees are Military Enlisted Tactical Operations and Air/Weapons Specialists and Crew Members and Graders and Sorters, Agricultural Products. I’ve no clue about the second but the first seem very likely to be the kind of people who do very well on the ASVAB and get assigned to nuke tech or aircraft mechanic.

The highest divorce rate professions aren’t particularly well paid by any measure but there are plenty of other professions with lower pay and lower divorce rates.

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

#616

Post by BossingAround »

brabel wrote: post #609
jammygit wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be better to hire somebody who thought that was lame and who spent 100s of hours learning performance testing, new libraries, design patterns, or just working on projects? Personally, I'd rather not work somewhere that hired based on drilling fringe information - what will the job be like? Maybe I'll feel differently in 10 or 20 years

> Wouldn't it be better to hire somebody who thought that was lame and who spent 100s of hours learning performance testing, new libraries, design patterns, or just working on projects? I would hope so, because I do all those things and, after over a decade writing software, find the ability to solve puzzles almost completely useless for most coding I've ever done. But reality doesn't need to make sense. So, if you w…

I really think it depends on the quality of the project. If I'm looking at a candidate, and see 3 projects, each pushed in one commit, each project has 3 classes in one package, and I see pushed compiled classes as well as source classes, that's a clear sign that this person doesn't know what he or she's doing.

That may not be necessarily a bad thing, depending on the position of course. But projects are not the be all end all, at least not in my company, and where I interviewed.

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

#617

Post by world32 »

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…

Are algorithm puzzles really that ubiquitous in the US?

In the UK I've interviewed at dozens of companies and never once been asked to code a breadth first search or something like that. Nor have I ever heard of a developer being asked to solve such things in interviews over here.

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

#618

Post by opportune »

hello_moto wrote: post #568
opportune wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yes, bypasssing the int4erview is hard, what I'm saying is that you can go directly to the first round of technicals without hazards if you play it well

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

#619

Post by ex_amazon_sde »

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…

Ex Amazon here. We never asked silly puzzle questions, but asking questions about algorithmic complexity paid off when hiring strong, senior engineers.

> Much more important is to have the experience of how code complexity accumulates, and how to mitigate that

That's part of the reason. The average developer knows how to pick a popular library and throw code at it until it works. When entire teams do that you end up with endless complexity.

That's why Google and Amazon are known for [re]inventing their own solutions.

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

#620

Post by nathan_f77 »

odorousrex wrote: post #80
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…

I cannot help but think that these big tech companies (FAANG, et. al) are missing out on diversifying and increasing their engineering expertise by passing over developers like you. I often think what would Google/Facebook would be like if they hired in some experienced engineers that may not be able to whiteboard a BFS tree or can tell you Djikstra's algorithm, but have proven business track records of getting proje…

These interviews do filter out any engineers that can't solve these algorithm problems on a whiteboard, but they don't necessarily filter out people who have a proven business track record and can get projects done on time and under budget.

I think the phrase "jack of all trades, master of none" is overused and doesn't hold a lot of truth. It's very possible to have a lot of experience and skill in many different areas. Maybe there's even a positive correlation between being a very good programmer that can pass whiteboard interviews, and being a pragmatic, get-it-done type of engineer.

Post reply on HN