I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days • Hacker News Board

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

#711

Post by SamReidHughes » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 3:47 AM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #438

mehrdadn wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your comment. Was the parent suggesting BFS (or the like) is an exceedingly difficult concept to grasp? And if we're going to claim understanding BFS is like understanding zero, then wouldn't that just mean it's just as silly to complain about a question on BFS as it is to complain about a question on zero?

Yes, my understanding is that the parent comment is complaining that since it took people with phds years to derive an algorithm for the first time, that we should never expect anyone to implement one in an interview. But, as with a concept like 0, making the cognitive leap to understanding that there should be a way to represent the lack of something is counterintuitive (indeed, consider Tony Hoare's billion dollar…

And it's not like it took people with PhD's years to come up with BFS. You see people make a similar argument about Dijkstra's algorithm, when he picked it as an example of a particularly easy problem to solve.

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

#712

Post by TrinaryWorksToo » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 4:27 AM UTC

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.

If you memorize them you appear more competent

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

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Post by kamarg » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 4:41 AM UTC

hello_moto wrote: post #596

kamarg wrote: post #544

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Total cop out answer but if DHH and people like Jeff Dean are both interviewing for a position with me you can be sure I'm doing everything I can to hire all of them. Even if it means starting entirely new departments. I'd totally fanboy and hire Jeff though if it came down to just one though.

I don't mean to diminish/belittle DHH. What he's done (web framework, productivity SaaS, self-help books, sales/marketing, conference speakers, racing) it's not what Google does (web-browser, OS, AI, maps, search, scale, etc). I also don't get why people like DHH is assumed to be a "miss" for not being hired by some of these company... DHH is a unique individual with his own way of thinking. He wouldn't be DHH if he…

You don't generally hire people like that to work for you on something specific. You hire them with a very broad goal and give them the resources to accomplish the task how they see fit. With a bit of nudging here and there you should end up with a very marketable outcome wether it's a product or a prestigious research division or widely used piece of software that everyone knows is associated with your company.

What DHH does could absolutely be incorporated by Google. Angular => RoR, GCE => Saas, conference speakers => conference speakers.

Anyway the point is that even at a company like Google there's plenty of room for people that haven't memorized algorithms and data structures but companies that only interview on these sorts of things are missing out on them because they seemingly don't care or haven't figured out how to interview someone substantially different from what they normally hire.

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

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Post by hello_moto » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 5:34 AM UTC

kamarg wrote: post #713

hello_moto wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to diminish/belittle DHH. What he's done (web framework, productivity SaaS, self-help books, sales/marketing, conference speakers, racing) it's not what Google does (web-browser, OS, AI, maps, search, scale, etc). I also don't get why people like DHH is assumed to be a "miss" for not being hired by some of these company... DHH is a unique individual with his own way of thinking. He wouldn't be DHH if he…

You don't generally hire people like that to work for you on something specific. You hire them with a very broad goal and give them the resources to accomplish the task how they see fit. With a bit of nudging here and there you should end up with a very marketable outcome wether it's a product or a prestigious research division or widely used piece of software that everyone knows is associated with your company. What…

SaaS != GCE.

I find the skillset required to build Basecamp differs greatly with building AWS/GCE portfolio (with over hundred different services that can be combined to deliver solutions for multiple ranges of companies...)

I don't think Google was looking for someone to build RoR or Angular. Those were merely side projects that came out once every few years. No offense but some of the key components of RoR were implementation of Martin Fowler's Enterprise Application Architecture patterns.

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

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Post by barry-cotter » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 6:14 AM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #692

barry-cotter wrote: post #615

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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.

Everyone who chose to become a veterinarian could have made more money, by going to med school, law school, pharmacy school, getting an MBA, etc. No comment on the non-degreed, not particularly well paid group that’s highly selected for high intelligence with very low rates of divorce?

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

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Post by creato » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 6:21 AM UTC

nnd wrote: post #680

creato wrote: post #603

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> I often think what would Google/Facebook would be like if they hired in some experienced engineers that may not be able to whiteboard a BFS tree or can tell you Djikstra's algorithm I think this happens less than people think. I've been at two big tech companies and interviewed people while at both (and obviously was interviewed myself). I think what trips people up is that many questions have solutions that are gi…

But you are expected to find the most optimal solution to a problem, and not just a brute force one. And usually an optimal approach would require advanced knowledge of algorithms and data structures.

> But you are expected to find the most optimal solution to a problem, and not just a brute force one.

I'm not talking about brute force solutions. For many problems, there are things in between and brute force. Some problems offer simplifications over more general problems where is strictly worse than a simpler, more customized solution (same efficiency, but simpler to write and understand).

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

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Post by rblion » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 7:11 AM UTC

Feels good to know I am on the right track. Mindset is a major difference maker.

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

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Post by gdy » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 8:30 AM UTC

world32 wrote: post #669

gdy wrote: post #621

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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 be…

This sounds similar to Russia, at least to me with my limited experience as an interviewer and even more limited as an interviewee.

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

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Post by absc » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 10:03 AM UTC

cableshaft wrote: post #436

perl4ever wrote: post #245

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"If hiring programmers who aren't good at programming puzzles is a competitive edge, I would expect to see other companies hiring these programmers and succeeding." You're begging the question. Other companies do hire people who are excluded by a certain class of employer, and that's exactly why some get outraged by the types of quizzes that are used. The difference between the standards creates cognitive dissonance…

> If, by analogy, you deal in second hand cars, it's a reasonable business model to buy virtually any car so long as the price is right and you know who to sell it to.a Very good analogy. And true. My dad used to own a used car dealership back in the day. He bought pretty much anything he could get for a good price that was in decent shape. If he only bought cars that were in perfect shape, he'd have pretty much no c…

Been there. At my actual job (a small IT firm in Europe), my boss spent almost half a year searching for somebody to hire. All the times it was like "they are too old", or "don't know enough", or just for a different POV.

In the meantime, collegues are leaving the gig, making my level of stress go up.

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

#720

Post by rock_hard » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 2:58 PM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #670

sethammons wrote: post #640

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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…

Just to be clear the kind of strategy we discuss here only works at FANG like companies that have enough candidates applying so that missing a good one doesn’t hurt their hiring goals.

Of course it sucks for the individual...but such is life