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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

#661

Post by Apocryphon »

vehementi wrote: post #650
gamblor956 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of people who feel the same way about all the useless startups in SV that exist solely to take VC money. At least Facebook actually provides something of value to the hundreds of millions people who use it.

Really? There are people who feel the same way about extracting money from rich VCs as they feel about the harm Facebook does worldwide? Seriously? Who and where are these people? Where can I see their widespread and articulated stance on the equivalence of those things?

Disrupted by Dan Lyons is a recent book that goes into the flim-flam nature of many startups.

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

#662

Post by Apocryphon »

manfredo wrote: post #404
rhizome wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's an argument against anything social-network-like in general, because there's nothing that makes FB uniquely suitable. Then why did they choose FB when there are so many other group-chat type websites out there? I mean, Friendster is still around, or LinkedIn, or...

Probably because it simply has the biggest userbase.

Doesn’t that provide a rationale to promote many different social media networks instead of one big one that could be used for such nefarious purposes?

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

#663

Post by skh »

learc83 wrote: post #521
skh wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the U.S. military this is not true. People graduating from OCS, ROTC, or one of the academies start off at O-1 (2nd Lieutenant).

What's your disagreement? 1st Lieutenant vs 2nd Lieutenant? Lieutenant is commonly used to refer to both. Or are you saying that you start of at O-1 and not a higher paygrade? If that's the case, the OP was pointing out that you start off outranking enlisted service members, not that you start out above O-1.

Well, I misread the comment I responded to. I thought they said that academy graduates don’t start off at lieutenant and start off at a higher rate.

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

#664

Post by audience_mem »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #649
Matumio wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> It's actually supposed to be mutual judgement. Agreed, I was being sarcastic.

It didn't come across as sarcastic to me, btw

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

#665

Post by nnd »

abecedarius wrote: post #338
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…

You're not wrong, but that one time you see a place for a new algorithm for a specialized problem can make a big enough difference to be worth it. If nobody in your group has the range, it's not likely you'll know when it'll pay to call in the research department with the PhDs exactly when they're needed, either. There's no bright line between coding and invention. More mundanely, when I was starting out at a small s…

How would you go about mastering the principles rather than practicing random algorithmic challenges?

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

#666

Post by minderasure »

theoh wrote: post #478
SamReidHughes wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to make a clean interface, as in a clean API, or useful one, is a data structures/algorithms problem and often a distributed systems problem. Many API's are technically impossible to use correctly. For example they might not let you do two things atomically that need to be. Or they might suffer enormously because they don't version their information properly, resulting in client/server disagreements over t…

Designing something on an architectural level really isn't always a data structures and algorithms problem. Take the web, for example. REST isn't complicated, but it does the job and it opened up more possibilities than any other invention since timesharing. As other commenters have noted, choosing an architecture for a system may have more to do with vision, common sense, and even imagination. And the web is such a…

>t feels problematic to me that you are saying to someone that they "need to stay far, far away" from some aspect of computing. It's a kind of gatekeeping. Sure, an outfit like NASA needs to make sure that they don't have amateurs writing their systems software. But in the industry more broadly, people have to be given permission to pursue whatever interests them. It's important, for diversity and the invention of new applications, that "differently able" coders aren't told, by intimidating stereotypical computer science types, that they don't have the aptitude to architect a useful system, or that it's "a rule" that people with their skills will just create problems.

I really needed to hear this thanks.

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

#667

Post by whiskyant »

laumars wrote: post #242
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 don't get some peoples fascination with working for FAANG anyway. As you said yourself, you've had some amazing jobs outside of FAANG. People seem to hold such prestige for working at a household named software house but that doesn't mean the work is going to be any more interesting than at any of the countless other technology companies out there that are on the bleeding edge.

Don't forget a lot of it comes down to compensation as well. It's not unusual for FAANG company to pay 2x more compared to another public company for example.

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

#668

Post by vonmoltke »

halbritt wrote: post #659
rossdavidh wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No competent team makes decisions based solely on the Combine. It's a data point that gets combined with college game tape, private workouts, and some other special events like the Senior Bowl. Also, a significant number of players who end up getting drafted or signed as Undrafted Free Agents don't go to the Combine.

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

#669

Post by world32 »

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?

In my experience they typically ask you questions about the experience you've listed on your CV. If you say you have experience working with AWS, then they might ask you something like "explain what a VPC is and why is it useful?". Other more general questions are usually along the lines of "tell me about a solution to a problem you solved and how you designed the solution to that problem".

The few times that I've been asked very specific technical questions they have always been related to the job I was applying for. Example: a ruby on rails job interview I was shown a few ActiveRecord models and asked what is wrong with them and how I would improve them - the answer was that they were all really polymorphic models but that was not how they were implemented in the code. Or for a frontend role, they might ask you "explain the javascript prototype chain to me".

Again, in my experience, its always seemed like the interview was more of a personal test rather than a technical one. Will the person be easy to work with? Will they be communicative or will they bottle up their issues and resent the team for it. Are they willing to learn? Will they be able to hande occasional pressure and stress? I think its generally accepted that its extremely difficult to accurately gauge a person's technical abilities in an interview. Also employees always start on a probationary contract in which they can be fired with 1-2 weeks notice, this usually lasts between 3-6 months, so if it turns out the employee was blagging it in the interview then it will become apparent pretty quickly and they will likely not make it past the probation period.

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

#670

Post by vonmoltke »

sethammons wrote: post #640
pishpash wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the cost to team morale when the team members have to put in extra time to meet deadlines because the team is shorthanded? What's the cost to the company when the team doesn't have the bandwidth to take on work and projects start slipping? How does team culture fare when someone on the team always finds some reason to reject every candidate they see, and this continues for weeks or months on end? What is the loss of productivity from having to conduct all these extra interviews until just the right person walks through the door?

The answers to both sets of questions are very situational, yet some people treat them as if they have universal answers.

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