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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

#81

Post by groby_b »

markdoubleyou wrote: post #12

"After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours/day, more on weekends)..." I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.

It depends on what you know before, as well. When I interviewed the last time, I read "Cracking the Coding Interview" on the flight up to the Bay Area, just to be sure - and that was that. (And I did get an offer)

And no, I'm far from a genius programmer - it's just that I spent ~30 years working in this field, and reading a lot along the way.

If you can, go out and interview. Just to see what it's like. If you really want to find a job, start with companies you're less interested in and use their interviews as free whiteboard training.

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

#82

Post by southphillyman »

markdoubleyou wrote: post #12

"After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours/day, more on weekends)..." I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.

The time commitment is not as bad as people make it seem. You don't have two hours to yourself every night? How about 1 hour during the week and doing 2-3 on weekends? You just have to sacrifice other leisures like tv and video games to make it work.

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

#83

Post by crowdpleaser »

hunter23 wrote: post #37

The candidate's experience shows how flawed Bay Area recruiting is. This candidate was clearly strong, as they had a 100% offer rate on companies that they interviewed at and almost all of those companies are top tier(Apple, LinkedIn, Amazon, Facebook, Google). Yet 70% of the companies didn't even give the candidate a chance to interview. It's incredibly sad that a candidate that is able to get offers at Google, Face…

Agree with the caveat that it's a recruiting problem not an interviewing problem.

I'm a data scientist and every firm I've ever interviewed with has told me about how important analytics is to them, how they take it seriously, how they're investing so much in it, etc. But the recruiters are amazingly incompetent and shockingly bad at getting their details right - I know there's a reason that the recruiters aren't data scientists themselves but I've terminated my candidacy at places off of phone screens because of such poor experiences with the recruiter.

My favorite vignette comes from interviewing for a machine learning position. The recruiter asked me what software I used, I told her that I was more familiar with tensorflow than PyTorch but was familiar with both and prefered to use Keras as the interface to both when dealing with structured data. She wasn't familiar with any of those packages and went on to quiz me about the SAS procedures I was familiar with.

I sometimes think of quitting my job and becoming a head hunter / recruiter. I don't think I'd be good at it, but willingness to use emails rather than phone calls and familiarity with the tech stack has to be a major differentiator, right?

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

#84

Post by x220 »

decebalus1 wrote: post #39
markdoubleyou wrote: post #12

"After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours/day, more on weekends)..." I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.

> I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills yeah, well these companies don't want you. I mean they do but they need to make sure you have the same availability as a college hire. One way of checking that is to have you block time like that for a while.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. You're right. These companies like workers who have no other responsibilities in their lives except their jobs.

Edit: single men and exceptions to the rule, please keep downvoting me.

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

#85

Post by gamma-male »

azhenley wrote: post #7

The heart rate info that he provides for the onsite interviews is a funny and interesting thing to include (around 100-122 during interviews, with a resting of 60). Does an elevated heart rate during an interview count towards one's daily fitness goals? :)

Since it's stress, I don't think it's good for your health.

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

#86

Post by learc83 »

gok wrote: post #58
hunter23 wrote: post #37

The candidate's experience shows how flawed Bay Area recruiting is. This candidate was clearly strong, as they had a 100% offer rate on companies that they interviewed at and almost all of those companies are top tier(Apple, LinkedIn, Amazon, Facebook, Google). Yet 70% of the companies didn't even give the candidate a chance to interview. It's incredibly sad that a candidate that is able to get offers at Google, Face…

It's possible the candidate was overqualified and some of those 70% knew it wasn't worth their time if there was a 99% chance they were going to Google or similar.

The article said they went to a small no name school, had no impressive companies on their resume, and had only a few years of experience. I don't know what would make them think they were overqualified.

Also almost all of the companies were top tier.

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

#87

Post by woolvalley »

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…

Love, you just don't realize how the other tech companies are like. They are all about equal if you dig in. Not as bad as media makes you think, and in some ways not as good as the media totally misses the mark on other things.

As far as pay, interesting things to work on and work environment, FB is in the top 3 of the world.

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

#88

Post by fokinsean »

Cookingboy wrote: post #61

As someone who has interviewed with 3 of those 6 companies and gotten offers from all 3, I think the best way to approach these interviews is to not walk in with the mentality that it's a one sided "test" where you are put on a spot to defend yourself. In reality it's more often than not a role-playing exercise where you are pretending to be coworkers trying to solve problems together. Sure you'd be the one leading t…

> Out of these companies Google felt most impersonal and "test like"

I had this same experience too. I went through the 4 technical interviews onsite which were all whiteboard problems. Not once did we actually talk about my past experience or rather anything software engineering related.

Unfortunately(?) I didn't receive an offer despite making it to the hiring committee. Two weeks later they called me back and wanted me to fly back out for another full round of interviews for their internal applications team! I was so burned out from studying and had a wedding coming up so I passed.

I felt a little insulted I was being asked to go through the gauntlet again when I _just_ interviewed.

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

#89

Post by ForrestN »

gamblor956 wrote: post #23
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…

There are plenty of people who feel the same way about all the useless startups in SV that exist solely to take VC money. At least Facebook actually provides something of value to the hundreds of millions people who use it.

There is a robust debate about whether or not facebook provides negative value to its users. In my opinion, it's charitable to say that the question of whether Facebook harms its users is open to debate. There seems to be a clear correlation between use of facebook and negative mental health outcomes. The fact that people use a product is absolutely not evidence that it provides value to its consumers, especially when addiction is involved. Whatever "value" someone got out of cigarettes when they first started smoking, most addicts wouldn't say they smoke because they get something out of it beyond the assuaging of cravings.
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