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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

#701

Post by rhizome »

chris11 wrote: post #464
rhizome wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's contextual. I've worked at a big, cool company before, and the things I had to be good at to survive (mostly non-technical) simply were not important to me, nor very useful outside of work. They were core requirements for long-term success there, though.

I'm interested in hearing more about that. What were the non-technical requirements that you didn't like?

Mostly the highly-significant role that social relations play, far beyond what I have experienced at <100ppl companies. This was also in vidya, so it was extra...I don't know if I'd say "vicious," but competitive for sure.

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

#702

Post by mav3rick »

vonmoltke wrote: post #673
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every company I've worked for interviews acquihires. From FAANG, to start ups, to established traditional engineering companies.

How is it an acquihire if the company is interviewing all the talent they acquired anyway?

Not all of it, but some of the force does to ensure that they meet the bar of the hiring company and also to get calibrated in the eng ladder.

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

#703

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

vonmoltke wrote: post #673
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every company I've worked for interviews acquihires. From FAANG, to start ups, to established traditional engineering companies.

How is it an acquihire if the company is interviewing all the talent they acquired anyway?

- You are getting paid to interview

- If they decline, you usually get a very generous severence package

- While sometimes technical, there is usually significantly evidence of your abilities from the acquired company's records.

- In my experience it's usually a cultural test more than any other.

- Interviewing is part of the evaluation. If the hiring company thinks everyone is grossly incompetent they can reevaluate the acquisition or call it off entirely.

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

#704

Post by dragonwriter »

vonmoltke wrote: post #678
dragonwriter wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. ...and meets ongoing continuing education requirements. > If we had that for engineers we wouldn't need to test their skills either. We do have that for professional engineers. We don't have it for people working in software whose job titles have…

> ...and meets ongoing continuing education requirements. Which are a joke. Attending conferences and weekend workshops take care of this.

> Which are a joke

Sure, professional licensing provides fairly weak guarantees, but it's more than exist in software, hence FizzBuzz.

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

#705

Post by gdy »

turtlecloud wrote: post #494
acpetrov wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just graduated, so I'm not dealing with constant internship interviews anymore, but at the time I absolutely hated it. My frustration isn't exactly like yours (my time is probably a lot less valuable). I feel that the questions are all geared at puzzle solvers. If you're a puzzle solver, you love answers. You love digging into the details. You love finding out the basic components of a system. I think these are the…

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.

"It’s as if they didn’t spend enough time to realize that they are missing the forest for the trees."

In their eyes, they have given you a problem involving a tree from the graph theory and you are insisting on an "out of the box" solution involving woodpeckers.

Let me elaborate.

Usually hypothetical situation is just a way to talk about an abstract problem.

It's easier to visualize and to talk about an egg falling and breaking (or not) than abstract measurements.

Now what you call 'thinking outside the box' is just attacking the irrelevant details of an imaginary situation which is there purely for convinience and can be replaced with another hypothetical situation corresponding to the same abstract problem.

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

#706

Post by mikelyons »

ForrestN wrote: post #10

I find it shocking that Facebook would still be considered as a peer to these other companies in terms of desirability as an employer. I would only accept a position at Facebook, which seems to be building a fundamentally destructive product while going out of its way to behave unethically in many dimensions, if it was an absolutely last resort to pay the medical bills of some dying loved one or something. Why would…

If it shocks you, then you haven't been paying attention. How do you think the USA behaves in general to the rest of the world. Have you seen who's president?

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

#707

Post by lucb1e »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #260
jahaja wrote: post #195

It's interesting that software interviews have degenerated into literal auditions. Just as with auditions, you need to train specifically for them. Is there really a reason why software jobs can't hire in a blue-collar fashion where there's a background/experience + sanity check and a subsequent trial period? Even looking beyond that, is there any similar profession where interviews like these take place? I'm startin…

Why would anyone with an existing job ever take another job with a "trial period"? You are basically excluding your most desirable hires with this system.

If I were looking to leave my job, I'd not sign with another employer if I wasn't quite sure I'd want to stay with them, trial period or not.

Is it different outside of western Europe in terms of trial periods? We (afaik) always have a trial period: in the Netherlands it's typically 1-2 months, in Germany it's typically 3-6 months; either way, there is always a period where both parties can fire the other with zero to two weeks notice. It is not the norm to be fired in that time, but it happens (from my limited anecdotal evidence, I'd estimate one in 10-30 hires, and most of the time both parties agree it's not a good fit).

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

#708

Post by abecedarius »

nnd wrote: post #665
abecedarius wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Udi Manber's Algorithms: A Creative Approach looks like a promising book to work through. There are lots of great resources that didn't exist when I was an undergrad.

But how do you approach them? What prompted my comment was all the times people comment online about "memorizing algorithms" to prepare for interviews -- learning about algorithms will include a lot of them sticking in memory, yes, but approaching it as cramming a textbook into memory the way students cram for a final exam seems... disappointing.

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

#709

Post by stale2002 »

vonmoltke wrote: post #670
sethammons wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> What's the cost to team morale when the team members have to put in extra time to

Less than the cost of being perpetually afraid of being fired.

If an engineer on my team got fired, no matter how much they deserved it, I'd probably start looking for a new job or team immediately.

The fear of being let go isnt something I'd ever want to deal with.

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

#710

Post by stale2002 »

warp_factor wrote: post #641
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.

outside of Silicon valley... maybe. In Silicon Valley, everyone knows that it is fake prestige and the fact that you worked for a FAANG doesn't really mean anything. I both know excellent and mediocre candidates coming out of FAANGs. It literally carry no information besides the fact that you are probably more attracted to prestige.

I mean, money is money.

It still makes sense to work at one of these places that pay twice as much as everyone else.

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