Try interviewing for 2 years. 50 plus major San francisco companies most go to onsite within a month of interview stages. None hire you because of bad references / political correctness justifying hatred and total dsicrimination. This is why I choose to become a suicide terrorist. It's time to make the worthless cancer scum pay. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XrEkBT4nGc
I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
731–740 of 740 posts
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#732Nice
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#733Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> "What I do enjoy, however, is building up. I like modeling and being about to think at greater and greater levels of abstraction to solve problems that aren't puzzles, but instead open ended questions." In my opinion, you will do well if you focus on building your own business sooner or later.
What an odd thing to suggest. Owning a business isn't for everyone. Not by a long shot.
But building something from scratch, even if non-profit, is the easiest way to get a job you really want. And at the same time you can find out that you like doing actual business and smoothly transition. It's a win-win IMO.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#734Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had internal referrals at a few FAANG myself, I have one of the "unique" (no degree, some high school, ops/coding since 12 so about 15 years on/off) backgrounds and the people who referred me would be on the team that I'd be joining and all seemed incredibly excited to get me on board. I work on FOSS projects with them already. At each place it was people from other teams completely unrelated to that team who in…
One of my recent FAANG interviews was ENTIRELY whiteboarding. It kind of shocked me. It's weird that it's that skill, and only that skill, that gets evaluated. I did another interview at a different one where there was at least a design interview (though I flubbed it and wound up being incoherent). It really feels like they aren't even trying to evaluate anything other than whiteboard coding. Accepting that it's not…
>I'd be kind of shocked if the test/retest validity wasn't very low.
It's absolutely very low, and they're okay with that. One of the things recruiters at these companies will tell you if you get rejected is some variant of, "Don't worry, you can always try next year." These companies fully understand that they're rejecting good engineers. They don't care, because, historically, the number of engineers applying has been so high that they could reject 75% of the good engineers and still have enough to fill their headcount.
We'll see how that attitude towards interviewing changes when high Bay Area/Seattle housing prices make it more difficult for them to recruit.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#735Does studying CLRS improve odds of succeeding at these interviews?
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#736Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What's vidya?
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#737Earlier 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…
> FAANG - I kind of included similar large companies (Microsoft, LinkedIn, Salesforce, etc)
FAMLANGS
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#738When 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…
> What should I choose, pytorch or keras? I know this is off-topic, but you can't go wrong with Keras. "Deep Learning with Python" by Francois Chollet (the creator of Keras) is a Kernighan-level book. A book like this comes around once a decade (or two). If you decide to go for it though, make sure you don't follow its instructions about the amazon cloud deep learning VM's; you'll end up paying $10 per day, even if y…
Somewhat late question:
What would you recommend as the alternative for someone without nvidia gpu? Google colab?
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#739Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What should I choose, pytorch or keras? I know this is off-topic, but you can't go wrong with Keras. "Deep Learning with Python" by Francois Chollet (the creator of Keras) is a Kernighan-level book. A book like this comes around once a decade (or two). If you decide to go for it though, make sure you don't follow its instructions about the amazon cloud deep learning VM's; you'll end up paying $10 per day, even if y…
Somewhat late question: What would you recommend as the alternative for someone without nvidia gpu? Google colab?
I don't have a good answer to that (i.e. that I personally checked). However, FastAI lists some solutions in their latest version of the "practical deep learning for coders" course [1]. The google cloud version for example [2] was calculated to cost only about $40-$50 for the duration of their course (2 months), which is way, way better than the $10/day on AWS that I tried.
[1] https://www.fast.ai/2019/01/24/course-v3/ [2] https://course.fast.ai/start_gcp.html#budget-compute
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#740Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somewhat late question: What would you recommend as the alternative for someone without nvidia gpu? Google colab?
I don't have a good answer to that (i.e. that I personally checked). However, FastAI lists some solutions in their latest version of the "practical deep learning for coders" course [1]. The google cloud version for example [2] was calculated to cost only about $40-$50 for the duration of their course (2 months), which is way, way better than the $10/day on AWS that I tried. [1] https://www.fast.ai/2019/01/24/course-v…
I was aware of the fast.ai course, but not those guides.
Thank you.