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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

#631

Post by nathan_f77 »

laumars wrote: post #628
nathan_f77 wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The prestige is misguided (in the case of FAANG) I strongly disagree, and I'm not sure why you would say that. I've heard that working at Google is a golden stamp on your resume, and you will be able to easily get a job at any other company. You'll probably even be able to skip the coding challenges in any future interviews.

> You'll probably even be able to skip the coding challenges in any future interviews. Is this speculative or does this actually happen? As a team leader I'm involved in hiring and I certainly wouldn't treat one applicant any different from another regardless of their previous postings nor experience (except when I'm headhunting someone I've previously worked with). My own experience interviewing has taught me it's e…

Purely speculative, but I would hope that it is true. I think it would also depend on your role at Google.

I think it would be pretty rude and unnecessary if you asked a high-level Google employee to do a whiteboard algorithm puzzle, or a take-home assignment where they have to build a little todo list app. Especially if they are a Distinguished Engineer or a Google Fellow. I don't know where the cutoff is exactly, but at a certain point no-one should ask you to do any more coding puzzles. You'll still go through interviews, but they shouldn't need to test your basic programming skills.

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

#632

Post by nvarsj »

jedberg wrote: post #341
idontpost wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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…

> When I was doing hiring, I would see resumes of people with 10+ years of experience who couldn't write a simple loop in their favorite language. If you've been coding for 10 years, you should be able to write a simple loop. That's the problem we're solving for here.

While I agree with this, the FAANG interviews take it too far. Simple fizzbuzz is enough to weed out these completely incompetent engineers. If they pass that, accomplishments and experience are going to be a much better indicator of engineering ability imo.

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

#633

Post by nvarsj »

decebalus1 wrote: post #39
markdoubleyou wrote: post #12

"After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours/day, more on weekends)..." I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.

> I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills yeah, well these companies don't want you. I mean they do but they need to make sure you have the same availability as a college hire. One way of checking that is to have you block time like that for a while.

I think Occam's razor applies here. I don't think it's intentional, but this is the effect. I think what started off as a way of screening out completely incompetent people just turned into this arms race to be more and more selective without considering the fundamentals of the selection process.

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

#634

Post by laumars »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #631
laumars wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'll probably even be able to skip the coding challenges in any future interviews. Is this speculative or does this actually happen? As a team leader I'm involved in hiring and I certainly wouldn't treat one applicant any different from another regardless of their previous postings nor experience (except when I'm headhunting someone I've previously worked with). My own experience interviewing has taught me it's e…

Purely speculative, but I would hope that it is true. I think it would also depend on your role at Google. I think it would be pretty rude and unnecessary if you asked a high-level Google employee to do a whiteboard algorithm puzzle, or a take-home assignment where they have to build a little todo list app. Especially if they are a Distinguished Engineer or a Google Fellow. I don't know where the cutoff is exactly, b…

I agree if you're hiring someone with a notable reputation then you wouldn't run them through the same kind of coding challenges but I'd expect that would be the case regardless of whether they had worked at FAANG, open source, start ups or wherever else. Thus we come back to my point that a decent engineer shouldn't have any problems getting hired regardless of having FAANG on their CV. What I was wondering was whether having FAANG (rather than reputation) allowed an applicant to shortcut parts of the interview process.

To be honest, judging from your last post I suspect our opinions aren't that far apart. :)

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

#635

Post by nvarsj »

gdy wrote: post #621
world32 wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do they ask in the UK?

It's not much different in the UK if you apply to FAANG, hedge fund, or a cargo culting startup.

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

#636

Post by michael_leachim »

The way I see it, there are several reasons for such an interview process:

1) [Leverage]. The interviewer can negotiate down salary expectations based on the performance of the interview. You can ramp up requirements until the candidate breaks. Then, you get the upper hand in the negotiation process.

2) [Responsibility]. Nobody wants to take responsibility for the bad decision. In the formalized interview you can blame the metric. If the metric is external (Google/Facebook/Amazon do it), then there is nobody to assign the blame, so, no responsibility gets redistributed.

3) [Effort]. Treating people as they are different is hard. Reading their CV or learning more about their projects requires time effort and expertise in the field. This is expensive. Much easier is assessing people through a generic process.

4) [Loyality]. Someone, who spends their free time for a year preparing for the interview is bound to be more loyal than somebody who prepares only for a week.

5) [Initiation]. People who go through a difficult initiation process tend to value their group more. That builds tightly knit teams.

Overall, I think that the process is difficult, somewhat irrational and inhumane. But I have no idea how to really fix it.

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

#637

Post by Matumio »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #604
turtlecloud wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. The puzzle solver ABSOLUTELY hate it if you somehow say that the question is flawed. Ie if you think outside the box and render their hypothetical situation flawed. It’s as if they didn’t spend enough time to realize that they are missing the forest for the trees.

To be fair, almost everyone hates it when you show them they are wrong. Especially in the setting where they are supposed to be judging you , remember? And even in normal settings it pays to think about how some critique will be received by the other side. It's a slippery slope in the interview... For me it would raise red flags if the flaw was pointed out in an inappropriate manner. After all, this is the person who…

> they are supposed to be judging you, remember?

It's actually supposed to be mutual judgement. But I agree: be respectful if you decide to drop a remark about the relevance of the question. There are enough reasons to treat people with respect even if you can afford to turn them down.

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

#638

Post by AsyncAwait »

gdy wrote: post #621
world32 wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do they ask in the UK?

I have interviewed in the UK and did algorithm whiteboarding, so I'd say it's company-specific, rather than country-specific.

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

#639

Post by rock_hard »

pishpash wrote: post #592
vonmoltke wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because the damage when hiring a bad candidate is much higher than the damage from missing out on a good one! I get that this is the conventional wisdom in a subset of this industry, but in my experience this "truth" does not have as much objective support as the people who keep repeating it think it does.

In at least one aspect, the adage becomes facially untrue -- you can fire bad employees, but you cannot get back good candidates rejected by means of a degrading exercise. You probably lose them forever. In companies where opportunity cost and hidden losses are nobody's responsibility, this sort of mediocrity is well accepted.

At FANG good candidates tend to apply again a year or so later

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

#640

Post by sethammons »

pishpash wrote: post #592
vonmoltke wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because the damage when hiring a bad candidate is much higher than the damage from missing out on a good one! I get that this is the conventional wisdom in a subset of this industry, but in my experience this "truth" does not have as much objective support as the people who keep repeating it think it does.

In at least one aspect, the adage becomes facially untrue -- you can fire bad employees, but you cannot get back good candidates rejected by means of a degrading exercise. You probably lose them forever. In companies where opportunity cost and hidden losses are nobody's responsibility, this sort of mediocrity is well accepted.

You can fire the bad ones, sure. After you document everything and cross i's and dot t's. Even if you don't CYA, you still lost team productivity while they onboarded the new person, and that time is lost. Plus the hit to team moral, and possible negative affects to team culture of dealing with an under performer or toxic individual.
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