“I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews” • Hacker News Board

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#611

Post by LolWolf » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

pb7 wrote: post #585

LolWolf wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would describe FAANG (in my and many friends' experiences) as "adult daycare." Not in a bad way, mind you, but very much "get your homework done and go have your free time after." (This excludes higher management and architects, etc., of course. I mean this as a middle-of-the-road SWE on a decent team.) I'm not quite sure where the GP got stressful, but it is soul-sucking if you expect your work to be interesting,…

I fully agree. It is soul-sucking at times, but nowhere near as soul-sucking as the life I came from and I will never stop being grateful for that. If I want more excitement from working, I can always pick up the exact work of my personal interest on the side (but I don't, because there are so many other interesting things to do outside of software). I'd rather have great security and quality of life from the work th…

Absolutely! There's a kind of beautiful freedom about it, too.

A number of people (myself included) seek to align work and passion all in one, which is fine, except it's certainly not the only (or, indeed, even close to "best") way to live and work. I've been lucky because my passion is in a field that now actually has applications in both theory and practice, after 50-or-so years of lying in relative academic obscurity.

The point is: if you care primarily about things that aren't your work (and this is true for literally 99.9% of people in the world, and is probably much healthier than the alternative) then FAANG is phenomenal in every possible way. The perks, compensation, and freedom to do pretty much anything are incredible. Quant (which nets around the same, if not slightly more profit) certainly does not fall in this category, due to its insane hours, and most other jobs with sane hours and good work-life balance don't pay nearly (read: really even close to) as much, or aren't as secure, or have anywhere close to the perks. It really is about the best gig you can get, if you can swing it.

On the other hand, for the weird, obsessive .1% of people (e.g., me) who would be happy to work all day in their mother's basement so long as it's interesting work, then FAANG (or, at least, many teams within it) can feel almost beside the point. Which is also fine!

I guess the point is that it all depends on what you want out of work and out of, well, not-work!

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#612

Post by arwhatever » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

If you and I and everyone else knows that we can write valuable software without the need for all of this tangential puzzle practice, it seems a very suitable response would be to do everything in our collective power to sidestep the puzzle lovers altogether.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#613

Post by pb7 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:26 PM UTC

jolux wrote: post #608

pb7 wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's why the standard interview loop consists of at least 5-6 45 minute sessions that intentionally do not overlap in subject matter done by separate people. If the signal is not strong enough, then more interviews are done. Works pretty well I think.

Do you have any empirical data demonstrating that this “works well” or are you just assuming? What is your definition of “works well?” Low false positive? Low false negative?

Empirical data that it works pretty well? I think the fact that this has been the de facto way of interviewing at the top tech companies during the time that tech has absolutely exploded in ways never seen before, I'd say yeah, it's working pretty well. I think you're seeking an explanation where one is not owed. If it wasn't working well, it would be changed, just like the brain teaser questions of the early 2000s pioneered by Google.

And look, I get it, it's frustrating. I share in that frustration as someone that wants to switch companies but knows that I will have to put in the effort outside of work to prepare for that. But I still think the process is much more meritocratic and predictable than virtually every other industry.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#614

Post by ip26 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:26 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #216

ip26 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are trying to hire more outside of California in order to lower wages across the board This could turn out to be a very good thing for the country. It's a social & economic problem if all the money & opportunity are squeezed into just one metro.

> This could turn out to be a very good thing for the country. Once you cross the hump to not seeking physical proximity when seeking to minimize labor costs, there's very little reason to go to the rest of the US once you leave the SFBA. The country it's good for isn't the US.

Have you ever looked at the map of US HP campuses in their heyday? Dispersed across the country, with regionally clumped physical proximity, a foot in numerous labor markets and all tidily within a couple timezones.

You might think of HP as a California company but they had large engineering hubs all over the country.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#615

Post by dasil003 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

yodsanklai wrote: post #359

I've just landed a job at a FAANG company. Some random subjective comments based on my experience: - it was hard work - there was no way I could have passed these interviews without all the work. - my past experience and education barely helped me for the interview - it's not enough to be able to solve the problems, you need to be able to solve them on the spot, without much thinking, in an interview context - I pass…

> The whole process is very random

This is a key insight that people need to understand.

In a 20 year career I've only ever been on the market once (in 2017), and I saw it as a huge opportunity to join the best possible company. I did over a dozen on-sites, and every single one of them was 5 hours plus, sometimes multiple, w/ take homes or phone screens additionally. The results were shockingly random in terms of many different factors ranging from familiarity and fluency with the class of problem, to the style of the interviewer, to the order of the interviews and how exhausted I was by the end. The outcomes in terms of offer/no-offer also bore little relation to my perception of how the interview went.

I think this doesn't sit well with people (especially technical people) because they want things objective and fair. However standardizing process and addressing biases only gets you so far because at the end of the day interviewers and candidates are all unique. Success in a role is highly dependent on context that one operates in.

Honestly I don't think the hand-wringing helps anyone. At the end of the day you have to just play the game. Hopefully companies continue to employee a variety of different interview techniques, because they all have different biases and so the best thing is just to ensure a diversity of techniques so everyone can find their place.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#616

Post by pseudalopex » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

FlaSheridn wrote: post #527

snarf21 wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This process is all theater. We really need some kind of certification process instead. I'm a while out of school and one interview I went on had a requirement for a live coding session. The ask was to implement red/black trees from scratch despite the fact that they have an Angular app with MySQL on the backend. I took this as a blessing. I don't want to work at a place where they think this is a good way to hire pe…

A certification exam wouldn’t survive a disparate impact challenge. Google stopped asking for SAT/ACT scores long before universities did. And long before that (according to my father, who actually used them), telegram companies had to stop giving spelling tests to telegraph operator applicants. Add to that difficulties with preventing cheating during a pandemic, and I see no alternative to rolling your own live exam…

Other fields have certification exams. Why haven't they fallen to disparate impact challenges? Are you sure LeetCode would survive one?

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#617

Post by andybak » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:41 PM UTC

mdpopescu wrote: post #596

andybak wrote: post #589

We've been trying to hire a part-time contract dev recently and we hate the process so we've been a little half-assed about it. As a result I think we've stumbled across a fairly effective approach. We ask them to do a half day to day coding task based on a real requirement. We pay them for this as we have few enough applicants that we want to test that we can afford to. We give them the requirement as if it came dir…

Huh. On three separate jobs (small tasks, few hours to couple of days) I was told, after asking some questions, "stop bugging me and just write the damn thing". I would probably not ask any questions on any new task of that sort and just randomly pick something. To be honest, that might not even be intrinsically bad - the client can always change their mind even if I write exactly what they wanted, so "write somethin…

Yeah. We would have accepted that. We did explicity say several times "ask questions. we're here".

Our desired outcomes were (in order of preference:

1. Ask and figure out the task was easier than it might have seemed

2. Don't ask but make the right judgement call

3. Don't ask and overcomplicate things because you've assumed the worst.

(For example - the task could have been done with no UI and just a CLI interface. We never said it needed any user facing elements. We wanted to see if they jumped to conclusions. So far everyone has assumed it needed a web UI)

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#618

Post by tuxpenguine » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:41 PM UTC

I think this interview process is not perfect, but it gives candidates like me, someone without a CS background, a pathway to enter the industry of software engineering and succeed in it. I learned programming mostly on my own, and by studying the for the interview, I learned so much about software engineering. In the end, that process of learning for the interview is very similar to the processing of learning on your day to day job and solve problems. Some of the answers to those problems might be quite obvious to a seasoned engineer or someone with a solid CS background, but I felt that being able to solve those problems puts me on par with those with more experience and CS background. I am currently at FANNG and doing as well as the other people on the team. If the interview process is all about the past experience, I would not stand a chance to get to where I am today.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#619

Post by itronitron » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

zcw100 wrote: post #358

echelon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our industry feels like it's in the decline of the Roman Empire right now. Our craft is becoming arcane: Microsoft is building VSCode for the cloud. Few people own desktop computers anymore. Apple is locking down MacOS to signed binaries. Soon we'll all have thin clients and will write software in the cloud for the cloud. Few will be able to learn how to engineer at home anymore - you'll have to go to a university or…

This is the result of a war that was fought two decades ago and the hackers/coders/sysadmins, the people to built things, lost and lost big. It was the dot-com crash. Looking back it's absurd. Everyone was convinced there was this big bubble and everyone got caught up in the irrational exuberance of the future of computing. But was it really? The real financial damage was done by the likes of Enron and Anderson consu…

I feel a common thread in the events and behaviors you describe is the prioritization of decisions by valuation, IP, and boundaries over execution, progress, and flow.

Maybe the only way out of this mess is for business schools to start teaching new metrics for the latter category.

Re: “I've had to relearn coding to get through the new interviews”

#620

Post by kingnothing » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:44 PM UTC

pdovy wrote: post #586

yodsanklai wrote: post #359

I've just landed a job at a FAANG company. Some random subjective comments based on my experience: - it was hard work - there was no way I could have passed these interviews without all the work. - my past experience and education barely helped me for the interview - it's not enough to be able to solve the problems, you need to be able to solve them on the spot, without much thinking, in an interview context - I pass…

Curious if any FAANG employees know if this kind of thing is still standard above a certain level, or does say "staff" level and above tend to be internal promotions only? I guess the pay is phenomenal but I have a hard time imagining that this kind of algorithmic trivia approach makes any sense at all for hiring into senior roles. Especially if someone was trying to move laterally between FAANGs.

Google, at least, does the same style of interview for Senior and Staff positions as they do for entry level. It's just that the expectations are obviously different.