I wonder if it's possible to get a job at "FAANG" with just studying interview questions !? It would however be a proof that you are dedicated and willing to learn, kinda like a engineer degree, but one year instead of five.
I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
691–700 of 740 posts
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#692Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 onl…
Clergy are such an obvious and well-understood exception that it's intellectually dishonest to use them as a counter-example.
Also veterinarians make extremely good money. Nearly all of those low-rate professions are well paid and virtually none of the high-rate professions are.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#693Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a data scientist, and google asked me to sum all values of nodes at each height of a tree. I had to implement the tree, bfs, and the algo (which was easy once you have bfs) in a 25 minutes, minus any talky time. BFS is not something I thought about much in the last 5 years, and quite frankly could care less about. I got stuck when I knew I needed 'something' to finish implementing BFS, but couldn't remember and t…
You don't need bfs to do that, you can solve it with any kind of tree traversal by just keeping track of which level you currently are on and passing a pointer to the result vector. If you can't write a tree traversal implementation within 25 minutes then I don't really know what to say.
you are right about any tree traversal would have done, but its not a lot of time and if you end up stuck you dont have a lot of time to backtrack.
a lot of great data scientists dont even know how to use python, let alone implement a tree and tree traversal. there is so much more interesting and pertinent stuff I spend my cycles on learning / keeping in my head than undergrad cs bs.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#694Earlier quoted context omitted.
BFS is common sense. It’s what you use when you’ve lost your car keys for example. Quickly check each room in the house, then if no luck go one layer deeper in each room.
I would certainly probe deeper if given that as evidence for a strong grasp on the utility of BFS.
So you’d do a DFS on a BFS
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#695Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I disagree. I don’t know based on what you are making claims, but based on my anecdotical experience knowing fundamentals help low level coders to pass interview but has little to do with performing well. Based on my experience (currently responsible for a huge chunk of a major gaming platform, with hundreds millions users), inflexibility, emotional immaturity, inability to think outside of the box, inability to list…
>Especially given the fact that we have higher profits per employee than google (we know what we are doing)
I'm dubious of this claim. Google/Alphabet has a PPE of ~$150,000. Activision-Blizzard has a PPE of ~$33,000, EA had ~$95,000, and Ubisoft ~$15000. I think the only possible major game studios who could meet your claim are Epic or maybe Valve. Unfortunately, those numbers aren't public. So I'm going to assume you work on Steam, since Epic's new platform is likely too recent to have lots of users, and also I don't think it was competently designed.
(the other thing is that this metric isn't particularly meaningful. Google invests a huge amount in unprofitable things with the goal of profits 5 or 10 years down the line. Google devotes thousands of engineers and billions of dollars to things it knows aren't profitable. That doesn't make Google more or less competent, it just implies different priorities than one that's entirely driven by immediate returns).
>Based on my experience (currently responsible for a huge chunk of a major gaming platform, with hundreds millions users), inflexibility, emotional immaturity, inability to think outside of the box, inability to listen and admit failures, lack of emphaty, not understanding basics of sales(to sell own ideas) are major things that contribute to a bad performance reviews.
All of these are important, but they only become important once you have the baseline level of competence. If you have two equally competent people, then yes indeed the softer skills like flexibility, creativity, humility, and communication skills start to matter, and eventually they matter a lot. But those are only good things if you assume a baseline level of competence.
Consider two options. One is that you screen solely for competence. You get only competent engineers along a wide range of interpersonal/soft skills. Some can grow into leadership roles, some can't (or at least it takes longer). But even the most convincing, best "salesperson" has great engineering talent. Then the alternative: that great salesperson is a bad engineer. The ideas they promote aren't always good ones, sometimes they're bad. That's not just "not good", its actively harmful.
>Our strongest engineers will not pass google interview without preparation (me included) and it is telling.
What does it tell? You seem to be suggesting that Google is optimizing badly, and that's possible. But that is by no means the only conclusion. Here's an alternative: "The most profitable things are not always the most technically challenging". Every once in a while you'll see people on HN commenting about how they wired up a shopify store that provides some significant passive income. That's not challenging. It would take an average engineer a week to do, if that. It's still profitable. But that doesn't make you qualified to work at Google (or Valve).
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#696Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
If they're not federated, I don't see how they are useful as "social networks". If they are federated, I don't see how having many of them would solve the problem.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#697Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no such thing as "our" culture as a homogenous, averaged mass. I benefit from FB. If you don't, that's fine, don't use it. But don't tell me what's best for _me_.
Cultures aren't homogenous, but there are things that are bad for communities but good for individuals. Successful thieves, for example. Pretty much any tragedy of the commons, really. Is it so hard to extend those ideas from there?
>> there are things that are bad for communities but good for individuals
Non-sequitur. I don't agree that FB is necessarily "bad for communities" in the first place. Besides, _which_ communities specifically do you claim it is bad for, and do you have any supporting evidence? Vox and Buzzfeed are not evidence.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#698Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of the old phrase, re: academia: "The competition is so high because the stakes are so low." There is something really weird, at least to me, in working so extraordinarily hard to prove yourself worthy of serving someone/some company. But that's just me.
Money and prestige my friend.
Money, I can understand. Under bayesian analysis, your better off going into medical studies, though. Prestige...well... In my dads day, working at IBM would've earned great prestige. On graduation day for me, working at Microsoft would have earned prestige the same year Google incorporated. So...fuck prestige.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#699Earlier 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.
Isn't that a quality that makes them "uniquely suitable?" I was trying to unwind GP's statement.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#700Earlier quoted context omitted.
That really depends on your basis for comparison because there will be a lot of variation between wages for different jobs within the same company; let alone different jobs in competing companies. It can even vary depending on how good your recruiter is, how generous the management for the vacant position are, the type of job that's on off and how important that position is to that company (are they desperate? Is it…
I've seen total compensation packages of $100k for senior engineers in SF/SV before (really low side), FAANG comparatively would pay $350k+. There are plenty of public companies in SF/SV that pay senior engineers $175k total compensation. I also want to clarify that I didn't mean they always pay 2x over the competition, I meant that it's not unusual for them to. Also when I say FAANG - I kind of included similar larg…
> Also when I say FAANG - I kind of included similar large companies (Microsoft, LinkedIn, Salesforce, etc).
Ahhh I was including those sort of companies (baring Microsoft) as part of my counterexample. If the discussion was "any large / reputable organisation" then my comments would have differed a little.
In any case it sounds like London is very different to SV. It's very common for senior engineers to contracting and that's precisely because the difference in pay between permanent and contracting is night and day (the polar opposite to what you were describing in SV)