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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

#651

Post by vehementi »

lhorie wrote: post #589
kkarakk wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah there is a huge amount of armchair conspiracy invention in this thread.

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

#652

Post by vehementi »

whiddershins wrote: post #514

I see so many people talking about how irrelevant algorithm skills are for real world coding, and lots of allegations of age discrimination. I see the validity of both points, and I’m sure they are true. But people, please, some perspective. The author spent a couple of months studying and practicing material in their spare time and got offers from top companies in the comfortable 6 figures. That happens in no other…

It's more that the unfortunate reality is that programming is so amazingly powerful and relatively easy to do (i.e. compared to becoming a doctor or lawyer) and is so scalable that companies make so much money off developers that it's not a big deal to pay them six figures.

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

#653

Post by jogjayr »

donaldknuth123 wrote: post #178
andrewla wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technical interviewing scheme is not great, but I haven't seen another system that works. > 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 think this is certainly true. > I often think what would Google/Facebook would be like if they hired in some experienced engineers that may…

>The technical interviewing scheme is not great, but I haven't seen another system that works. I would argue that pair programming or take home projects do a far better job than the standard Whiteboard Algo interviews. In fact I don't think it's even close but SV engineers have been captured by this Whiteboard Interview Stockholm Syndrome/Hazing and continue to perpetuate the insane idea that there is no better way.

> I would argue that pair programming

Google allows you to write code on a Chromebook instead of a whiteboard (don't know if it's for everyone or some people). Is that pair programming? Or do you mean actually working with your preferred IDE/text editor, terminal, browser to look stuff up?

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

#654

Post by Apocryphon »

joshuamorton wrote: post #581
fiblye wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fundamental…

Maybe there’s a problem with which computer science is being taught if it’s so difficult for so many people to derive those solutions from fundamentals, and instead have to resort to brute force pattern memorization through Cracking the Coding Interview and Leetcoding.

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

#656

Post by Datsundere »

Vel0cityX wrote: post #479
spyspy wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and a lot of other commenters are getting hung up on the BFS example. It's just that - an example. There are dozens of algorithms that are "common" enough to be asked about and diminishing returns to having them all memorized.

Except you don't need to have them _memorized_. You shouldn't. That's not the point.

Except all of these questions can be grouped into a category of the same kinds of problem and it is in fact spending time to find out that pattern and which category from sliding window, nested intervals, recursion and dynamic programming it belongs to

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

#657

Post by whiskyant »

ljm wrote: post #627
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…

This is my main beef with tech interviews: you get given a test, or an algorithm, or put under the spotlight in a pairing session to solve a problem in essentially the least efficient way possible. It's usually under the guise of seeing how you think, but it's pretty damn hard to do that without also judging how the code looks and how much you were able to write. This then becomes representative of your experience in…

>This then becomes representative of your experience... Whatever's on your CV, and whatever you can say about what you've learned over the years, becomes totally irrelevant in the face of that.

Don't think this is true. At most tech interviews, the algorithms portion is more of a technical bar. It's usually the CV, years of relevant experience, and performance on the architecture/system design interview that determines what leveling you are.

>To that extent I'd much rather see the formation of a professional body that offers a trustworthy credential

Every company values different things from their candidates, so I don't think a formal interview process will ever go away. That said, there are companies like Triplebyte that try and standardize the interview process - they usually don't ask algorithm questions either. It's not quite a certification, but they'll fast-forward you through the interview process at companies that use them.

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

#658

Post by halbritt »

mancerayder wrote: post #322
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…

Honestly, there are so many posts like yours on HN, it's a surprise companies don't change this ridiculous algorithms thing. Hiring managers here complain that candidates all lie and they need to weed them out. However, algorithms bias towards younger people, recently out of college, math hobbyists and people with a lot of free time. Me, I tell them in the first phone screen, "I'm a Systems/DevOps guy, I don't do alg…

There's really no need to screen for liars. Generally speaking, I'll try to ascertain how the candidate represents the skills on their resume. Some represent their skills well and can describe in detail their approach to solving a problem or some such. From there, it's not hard to assess things like passion, determination, etc.

Usually, I'm just looking for one thing the candidate does well. There's really not much room for lying and if they claim to have some crucial skill and then I discover after the fact that they don't, that's grounds for dismissal.

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

#659

Post by halbritt »

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.

Ever heard of the combine?

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

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

#660

Post by whiskyant »

world32 wrote: post #617
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.

Usually larger tech companies that are flooded with applicants tend to ask these more.
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