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

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

#691

Post by tpoacher »

a_square_peg wrote: post #327
tpoacher wrote: post #323

> "In the past, when I was interviewing myself, I would come across large numbers of really smart candidates all the time. Once in a while, though, I'd find someone exceptional who could approach problems differently, and those people would always turn out to be the best hires. They would have been filtered out by these systems." This reminded me of a quote I once heard (on Slashdot if I'm not mistaken). "There is of…

On the other hand, I've seen well-managed organizations that allow a team of competent but not necessarily exceptional group of engineers to accomplish exceptional feats and also the opposite, where a team of exceptional individuals but without any coherent structure led to dismal results.

Indeed. In fact, I would think this is in fact supportive, rather than contrarian evidence for that quote, since both are arguments for good management practices that prioritise individual humans and their complex abilities and personalities (whether as individuals or as team players) over abstracted metrics and automated processes.

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

#692

Post by pragmatic »

neverminder wrote: post #477
vsareto wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NGL, I'd jump through hoops for 250k + other compensation Part of why this has stuck around for so long is that so many people are willing to do that because it's a life-altering amount of money

Well, there are also counter-examples to your thinking. Brian Acton was rejected by Facebook, then went on founding WhatsApp and eventually selling it to the same Facebook for $19B. "Life altering amount of money", wouldn't you agree? Probably one of the most expensive rejections in history.

Yes, but he would have to work on something else. It’s not like he would have built WhatsApp at FB.

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

#693

Post by alain94040 »

drchopchop wrote: post #414
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…

One big problem is that companies (especially FAANG) are wasting time having very senior devs do Leetcode-style shit, which is a false negative for people that don't balance binary trees and manually regex strings all day. This especially penalizes more experienced / older devs who don't have time to LC grind (of which I'm also one), and introduces unconscious selection bias. Certainly there are other ways to verify…

Re-posting a suggestion I made here a few weeks back:

Here's a radical idea (read to the end before you object). The inspiration is a blend of how open source projects recruit developers, and how the 20% Google side-projects used to work.

I work for company A, I'm starting to get slightly bored or interested in doing something else. Without quitting my job, I contribute a few days of code to company B, whose project I find interesting. As I contribute more to company B, I eventually quit company A and join company B full-time.

Benefits of this approach: no interviews. Know what you are getting into. Try different things and what works for you. How can we make this work: legal framework. California, if you are listening, pass a safe-harbor law that prevents companies from exclusive work arrangements, so I can always do a side-gig with company B even if they are competitors. Have company B compensate me, so we don't end up in a situation where company B is abusing job seekers by getting free work done. Maybe a law could say that I'm safe as long as my work for company B while employed by company A doesn't exceed 5% of my salary or so (so I worked for company B for a few days or weeks, not months). Would that work?

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

#694

Post by _9omd »

gofreddygo wrote: post #651
_9omd wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree about leetcode lacking a technique map/graph/tree. This would be immensely useful. In my studies I found that I naturally gravitated to classes of problems I was already good at, because that way I could avoid the mental pain of learning new techniques. I really needed a roadmap that lead me to what I actually needed to study, and that showed me where I was strong and weak. But as you said, they ne…

Well thanks for your comments. Feels assuring knowing I'm not alone (although clearly in the minority) waving my hands at how crude and ineffective the common advice to "do leetcode" really is. That training site idea sounds exciting, much better than what exists today. The key perspective shift from me was from - "I need to solve 200 leetcode problems before I can approach interviews with confidence" to - "Here are…

Yeah, it's really easy to get overwhelmed by the raw amount of stuff to study. I found I just needed to be consistent, and get through 3-5 leetcode problems a day, while trying to force myself to hit the problems in areas I was weaker. If I tried to enumerate everything, I quickly became very overwhelmed like you describe.

I think if you hit a balance of problems that touch on arrays, strings, linked lists, trees, graphs, stacks, queues, heaps, and also some dynamic programming you'll be good to go. I found that companies really love to ask graph problems in disguise, and once you know how to recognize them and the basic DFS/BFS implementations you're golden. And if you get good at graph problems, trees and linked lists are simple, so I think it's a great area to put extra focus.

I found the dynamic programming problems particularly hard for my brain to grasp, and I had to spend a lot of time repeating the basic problems and slowly building up my skillset. A ton of practice, and I never even got asked a single DP question in all the interviews!

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

#695

Post by cratermoon »

jdreaver wrote: post #668
cratermoon wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my ~40 hours of interview-specific coding prep. Where did you find time to do 40 hours of prep, and how many weeks did it take?

I did it over 4 weeks. I have two kids, so I spent about 1-2 hours per day. I usually did some reading or a couple leetcode problems in the morning before starting work, and a couple in the evening. Honestly, once you do about 20-30 problems, they start to feel the same. I found that if I treated each problem like an interview and slowly walked through a solution (versus just diving into code and mashing Compile over…

OK, so taking the usual programmer's working hours then add 10 hours a week to that. That's some opportunity cost there, just to be able to jump through a hoop that has little to no bearing on a real world programming career past the intern/junior developer level.

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

#696

Post by cratermoon »

SeriousM wrote: post #677
mywittyname wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus the prestige of being able to walk into your next job and captain the ship. I've been at a few places that hired former Googlers, and they were all treated like gods.

This is such a glorified and Heroes statement which just tells that some faang guys has such a skewed view of the world because of faang. All I see is that faang is a term for expert code monkey.

And really only an expert in the things that FAANG companies do. Granted for a place like Amazon that's potentially a very broad space, but it's still a small slice of skills compared to the world where software is ubiquitous. Among other things, zero preparation for safety-critical software. An attitude like "move fast and break things" would end up being "move fast and kill people", and that's kind of a drag on your career. (Insert long discussion about trolly problem and how self-driving car researchers are justifying their crappy algorithms)

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

#697

Post by davidjnelson »

jdreaver wrote: post #669
davidjnelson wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this faang / levels.fyi pay range?

Absolutely. I work at Stripe now. In fact, I wish I only interviewed at Stripe (hindsight is 20/20), because I would have done zero leetcode prep. It is well known that Stripe interviews are much more practical than FAANG interviews. The leetcode prep was definitely necessary for some of the FAANG interviews I did.

Wow that’s fascinating and insightful! Stripe sounds like such an awesome company. Congratulations on getting an offer from them, psyched for you!!!

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

#698

Post by cratermoon »

bradlys wrote: post #525
cratermoon wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my ~40 hours of interview-specific coding prep. Where did you find time to do 40 hours of prep, and how many weeks did it take?

40 hours seems low to me if one wants to enter FAANG. Even if you’re familiar with the process and have prepped before. I’d expect 100 hours minimum for most candidates. Only exception would be those who interview regularly, do competitive programming regularly, and those who have to do algorithmic work regularly. Most people I know spend nights and weekends prepping for at least a month to a quarter.

I'm obviously biased because I don't consider FAANG to be a goal at all, either as a stepping stone or end game. There are much better things in life than a lot of money.

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

#699

Post by kingnothing »

mosdave wrote: post #654
kingnothing wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is dumbfounding. Kinda tells you what kind of shit-eating devs they're looking for. What staff-level engineer possessing even a modicum of self respect would willingly subject themselves to this?

Probably a highly talented one who's interested in earning $500k / year.

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

#700

Post by gofreddygo »

_9omd wrote: post #694
gofreddygo wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well thanks for your comments. Feels assuring knowing I'm not alone (although clearly in the minority) waving my hands at how crude and ineffective the common advice to "do leetcode" really is. That training site idea sounds exciting, much better than what exists today. The key perspective shift from me was from - "I need to solve 200 leetcode problems before I can approach interviews with confidence" to - "Here are…

Yeah, it's really easy to get overwhelmed by the raw amount of stuff to study. I found I just needed to be consistent, and get through 3-5 leetcode problems a day, while trying to force myself to hit the problems in areas I was weaker. If I tried to enumerate everything, I quickly became very overwhelmed like you describe. I think if you hit a balance of problems that touch on arrays, strings, linked lists, trees, gr…

Thanks that's solid advice.

I imagine that strategy ( focus on weaker areas and be consistent) to work more reliably than making it a numbers game.

Appreciate your comments and hope you can see that training website through to a real product. Would benefit a lot of people like me.

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