[HN Gopher] A Senior Engineer's Guide to FAANG Interviews
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A Senior Engineer's Guide to FAANG Interviews
Author : leeny
Score : 125 points
Date : 2023-06-26 16:43 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (interviewing.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (interviewing.io)
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I'm not sure what to think of the whole guide when there is
| blatantly wrong information about the basics of the interview
| process for some companies (for example, Amazon does NOT have a
| team-dependent hiring process)...
| jedberg wrote:
| I've been an interviewer at Netflix and Amazon and both of these
| feel pretty spot on in the guide.
|
| Not sure if it's still this way, but at Netflix the hiring
| manager was the only decision-maker. They took in all the
| feedback from the other interviewers and usually went with the
| majority, but they had the ultimate choice. You could say they
| had the Freedom to hire anyone they want and the Responsibility
| to deal with the consequences of that.
|
| And yes, at Netflix we pretty much all just made up our
| interviews as we wanted to, although after I while I zeroed in on
| questions that would give me the best go/no go data and would
| repeat them often.
|
| And at Amazon, what they say here is very accurate -- the bar
| raiser is the key person to impress. They and the HM have
| ultimate say on the results.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| > the bar raiser is the key person to impress
|
| Not quite true. The Bar Raiser's job is to ensure the hiring
| decision is data-driven, bias-free, and is a good hire for
| Amazon - not just the team (this does create some tension
| between hiring manager and bar raiser).
|
| I've been on plenty of loops where the bar raiser had a bad
| experience with the candidate, but the rest of the loop had
| good data and the candidate was hired.
| zht wrote:
| sorry this may be a dumb question but I am curious
|
| is FANG still hiring? or are they generally in hiring freeze?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I interviewed at AWS for an application security engineer
| position years ago, and I was surprised about the questions I was
| asked.
|
| I did the recruiter call, then phone screen, then a series of 4
| hour-long interviews. Since it was AppSec, not coding, I expected
| 3 interviews asking me technical questions about AppSec and a
| behavioral interview. Instead, all I got 3 hours of
| behavioral/leadership principles questions (With a lot of
| repeated questions between them), and 1 coding exercise.
|
| I got rejected while feeling like I never actually got a chance
| to show my technical ability to do the job. I know how much they
| value leadership principles, so I probably wasn't going to get
| the job anyways, but it still made me feel a bit disgruntled.
| codr7 wrote:
| I don't know, I've walked into these interviews with zero
| preparation and succeeded.
|
| And I've failed FAANG-ish interviews where no amount of leetcode
| grinding would have helped me.
|
| In my opinion, it's getting rather silly. They're scaring off and
| filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive
| processes. None of them even cared about my Github repository
| that's full of code I write for fun.
|
| Software developer hiring is definitely ripe for
| revolution/innovation.
| ulfw wrote:
| The Product Manager interviews are even worse. Google was the
| shittiest experience I had, all the way to the silly hiring
| Committee. Three months of my life I'll never get back.
| passwordoops wrote:
| Ooh do provide more detail! In general I've found PM
| interviews at hardware companies much more useful (?) than
| software.
| nomel wrote:
| > None of them even cared about my Github repository that's
| full of code I write for fun.
|
| Context: I've interviewed around 200 people for our current
| org, and have "settled" on an interview that's used for a
| certain position. I don't think I'm necessarily good at
| interviews, and I'm not sure I'm "doing it right". I give the
| number to show that my sample size is reasonable. We're solving
| practical problems, with code. Our interview sessions are 45
| minutes for each person (which is the fundamental limitation).
|
| _I don 't look at GitHub projects, or really ask about
| previous work._
|
| I used to, but I very quickly found that the vast majority of
| people _lie_ on their resumes. Generally, the more senior, the
| more lies. Most people put bullet points of "achieved x" which
| end up really being "kinda helped those people who were
| achieving x". For GitHub, in most cases, it was obvious the
| person was not the author of the Github repo they gave me. They
| could answer questions about the code, but couldn't go into any
| depth about it.
|
| I found that going over previous work, or Github repos, ended
| up taking a huge chunk of the 45 minutes, that put each person
| on a different standard, somewhat of their own crafting,
| leaving no time to find out if they were _actually_ able to
| write a for loop or not, which I 've had Phd candidates, with
| "15 years of experience", fail to do. For feedback of the
| candidate, I need a tangible justification, and clear
| _demonstration_ of why I say yes /maybe/no. There are no "gut
| feelings" allowed from the panel; you need reasons.
|
| So, I give the candidate a _simple_ , practical, work relevant,
| problem to solve during the interview. No compilation, no
| running code, no worries about perfect syntax, and no esoteric
| knowledge/libraries required. They're free to use whatever
| language they want. It's an interview where they have to
| demonstrate their _thought process_ , how they
| question/navigate the requirements, and ability to see
| _consequences_ (which I think is 90% of programming).
|
| Maybe a few percent have finished within 10 minutes. For these
| people, we had fun talking about their other work, and they
| showed great knowledge, as expected. But, as desired, that
| wasn't required to do first. The interview itself proved that
| they would already.
|
| I would _love_ feedback about this approach, even though it
| seems to be working well for our orgs needs. Ideally, I would
| take the Jim Keller approach, and have a nerd out session, but,
| I have a feeling people are more properly filtered before they
| would get to him.
| codr7 wrote:
| Wouldn't that be an excellent filter?
|
| If the candidate is lying, just move on to the next.
| nomel wrote:
| Maybe my org is different, but I need to have confidence
| and justify/document my yes/maybe/no. It's very hard to
| prove that someone is lying, especially since you can't
| expect them to remember everything from some years ago. You
| could claim they should have tried to remember the details
| of their projects, but that's tricky since most people
| can't take code or notes with them. If I show that they
| have a Phd, with experience building whatever, but can't
| write a for loop, then I have my proof.
|
| Terms like "good thought process", etc aren't allowed in
| our feedback, unless specific examples are given. Terms
| like "team fit" will get your feedback outright rejected.
| No mushiness allowed.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Personally I wouldn't terribly mind such an interview, but I
| do know plenty of people who absolutely fall to pieces when
| having to code while being watched, and it's definitely not
| particularly pleasant to me, either. I think the best
| interview I've experienced was one where the "2 hour
| interview" consisted of me receiving an email with a short,
| job-related task and then after an hour was up we spoke and
| discussed my solution. Respected my time, as it wasn't some
| open-ended take-home test that somebody with too much time on
| their hands could spend dozens of hours polishing to
| perfection, while still not being quite so "whiteboard-y".
|
| With regards to Github projects and the like, I do ask about
| them in interviews, because I think there's a place for them
| as an early screening. Every engineer worth their salt has
| some war stories, and that's a good angle to approach their
| GitHub profile: if they have an interesting sounding project,
| asking them to talk about any interesting problems they ran
| into during its creation tends to make it immediately clear
| whether they're full of shit or not. It's not a great
| positive signal, but if they're not chomping at the bit to
| talk about engineering challenges, it's a strong negative
| signal.
| nomel wrote:
| > absolutely fall to pieces when having to code while being
| watched
|
| Yeah, this is the biggest problem I have with it. I try to
| be conscious of this, and try to keep things pretty
| lighthearted. If I notice someone getting nervous, a
| "you're doing great for time" usually calms them. If not, I
| do follow up interview, if they did well seeking an
| understanding the problem, and could explain it verbally.
| I've had a few people pass with flying colors after a
| second round.
|
| > and that's a good angle to approach their GitHub profile
|
| I disagree here, with the (probably wrong) assumption that
| not having a GitHub profile adds a negative bias. Some
| people put their coding hours into work, with different
| lives outside of coding. All of the colleagues I've known
| with impressive GitHub profiles burnt out/left. Battle
| stories can be within corporate repos.
| em500 wrote:
| FAANGs can get literally over a million job applications per
| year. Any procedure that filters that down to roughly the
| number of people that they plan to hire (a few 10k) is also
| going to filter out some excellent candidates, no way around
| it.
| codr7 wrote:
| But it's still a very time consuming and expensive process.
| Typically 5h of interviews with 1/2 people from my
| experience. Spending that energy more wisely would result in
| more valuable feedback and better hires. But it takes actual
| effort to try and understand rather than simply checking
| boxes.
| Ihateyouall2345 wrote:
| [dead]
| RandallBrown wrote:
| And yet, they still cold email me every 6 months or so.
| ar_lan wrote:
| GitHub is not the best metric, though.
|
| 1. Many (most) engineers are not in positions to be able to
| meaningfully contribute to OSS (e.g. all the code I write for
| work is proprietary).
|
| 2. It can easily be faked.
|
| 3. Personal projects can sometimes be interesting, but often
| don't showcase usefulness (unless front-end).
|
| 4. Many high quality engineers don't like to spend their free
| time doing more of their job.
|
| Some repos, of course, are more impactful though. And I would
| probably say that if you are someone who loves to write code 16
| hours a day, more power to you, you deserve to be hired! But
| many quality engineers would get missed if that is the desired
| bar (which is fine - other companies will just scoop them up).
|
| (edit: OSS engineers extra upset by what I'm saying, but there
| is a lot more to this world than just what shows up in your
| GitHub feed)
| codr7 wrote:
| The fact that a candidate loves problem solving / coding so
| much that they'd do it for fun is a pretty strong signal.
|
| Like I said, it would take more effort from the interviewers
| to dig into.
|
| But it would also provide more valuable feedback and result
| in better hires.
| superfrank wrote:
| I agree that there's a lot that the current hiring process get
| wrong. I'm not really defending it, but want to clarify a few
| things.
|
| > They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates
| with these excessive processes.
|
| In my experience this is by design. The cost of a false
| positive (hiring someone they shouldn't) is far more expensive
| than a false negative (passing on a good candidate). Since
| FAANGs usually have a healthy pipeline of candidates and many
| who fail will eventually reapply they're okay with passing on
| possibly qualified candidates.
|
| > None of them even cared about my Github repository that's
| full of code I write for fun.
|
| As an EM at a mid to large tech company who has hired plenty of
| engineers I think ignoring people's Github is the right call
| and I don't even bother looking at candidate's Github unless
| it's for something like an intern role. Ignoring the fact that
| I don't know where the code on Github came from (did someone
| else write it? Is this just following a tutorial?), the code
| you write and the skills you use when you're writing code at
| home alone on a passion project is VERY different than the
| skills you need to be successful in a large, slow moving,
| bureaucratic corporation.
| blitzar wrote:
| > The cost of a false positive (hiring someone they
| shouldn't) is far more expensive than a false negative
| (passing on a good candidate)
|
| The cost of a false positive is 0 - they always hire the non
| optimum candidate there is a massive margin of error.
|
| We all like to pretend that without our unique special skills
| the entire company would dissapear overnight, but it is a
| fantasy.
| liuliu wrote:
| When you are hiring in volume, you are hiring for additive
| value, not for transformative value (nor multiplicative value).
| For additive value, conformance is essential.
|
| Most of the semi-successful companies don't need to be "the
| innovation machine".
| snakewatching wrote:
| I will agree with this. Leetcode style interviews identify
| the "rule-followers", "not-going to rock the boat" type of
| engineers. That's what FAANGs need, not innovators and
| leaders.
| lionkor wrote:
| All jobs I applied for that I interviewed for looked at my
| GitHub specifically, and my past projects, and that was their
| main topic of discussion in the interview, apart from usual
| coding questions and such.
|
| Im not victim blaming by saying you may just be applying to the
| wrong places, am I
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| Unfortunately this also means you have to be open to a
| potential 50% cut in TC as well.
|
| Personally, I find enjoying the 8+ hours I spend at work each
| day more important than raw TC, so have made the tradeoff
| (and still have a reasonably high TC) which works for me.
|
| That said, I would love a more laid back research programming
| job in academia, but that requires an additional 50% cut from
| where I am now.
|
| It's still understandably frustrating that knowing how to
| write software seems largely irrelevant to getting a job at a
| FAANG.
| majormajor wrote:
| I would love to talk about my github projects with an
| interviewer - hell, I'd also love to talk more about _my_
| past systems than their hypothetical ones - but like the
| parent post, I 've found it pretty rare. Past projects maybe
| 15% of the time at medium-to-large companies (500+ person),
| and so far am batting 0.000 for "asked about personal
| projects", including at FAANG interviews.
| liuliu wrote:
| The logic is twisted and strange, the justification sums up
| to this: talking past projects like talking to a PhD
| student about his research paper, it is all they does and
| doesn't put them in enough "foreign situation" to see their
| novel problem-solving abilities.
|
| OTOH, when you are hiring for leaders (directors and
| above), past experiences and behavior questions are all you
| talking about.
| majormajor wrote:
| That makes a certain about of sense but I think you can
| usually get a feel for project-by-project dissimilarities
| in someone's background and figure out if they've been
| doing the "1 year of experience for 10 years" or the
| "continually tackling new challenges and learning from
| them" path.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| What kills me is that the developers they are hiring based on
| their encyclopedic knowledge of language minutiae and mad
| leetcode skillz are _exactly_ the ones who will be first in
| line for replacement with ML-based solutions.
|
| The fitness function used by these companies is so broken it's
| not even funny. The ability to get things done and ship product
| doesn't even seem to be on their radar. They are optimizing for
| dead weight, which is how they end up with these periodic
| 1000+-person layoffs.
| kerblang wrote:
| I tend to put it this way: If you are
| entrepreneurially/leadership- minded and can develop a talent
| for _identifying_ talent, you can be 10x, even 100x more
| valuable than any engineer because you become a force
| multiplier who recognizes real talent and empowers it - and the
| best part is that everyone else is dragging their knuckles on
| the ground and obsessed with pretentious gate-keeping. The
| opportunity level is wide-open.
| borroka wrote:
| A talent for identifying talent needs to be supported with
| numbers and effect sizes.
|
| The relative absence of numbers from the conversation is what
| allows many directors of football/soccer (those who recommend
| the purchase or sell of players) to boast about their stature
| as talent scouts.
|
| Indeed, it is not surprising that directors of soccer focus
| on successes and tend to gloss over the many blunders made.
| Which makes it difficult, as in many other fields, to
| distinguish the role of luck and ability in successes and
| failures. Almost always, in my experience, those with the
| most money and at least an average "eye" succeed in doing the
| best that can be done: everything else is a game of chance.
|
| A more sophisticated and technically oriented person would
| say that the most that can be done is to increase the odds of
| success, but then we are all left to the whims of fate: the
| young soccer player who many thought would be a sure bet will
| turn out to be one among many, and the average player at age
| 16 will have the growth spurt in the next two years that will
| make his body more conducive to stellar success (but was the
| growth spurt predictable?).
|
| What I can say is that there have been several attempts to
| create a special agency for the identification and management
| of talent in the technology industry, but none has turned out
| to be more than a higher-level contracting firm.
| majormajor wrote:
| If you want to make money off of being better at hiring than
| Google et al you need two things:
|
| 1) the product idea for something to build that you can sell
| profitably
|
| 2) the hiring skill
|
| Neither of those are trivial to develop.
|
| I do tend the think the second isn't _that_ hard to develop
| _for specific situations_ (FAANG interviews are really aimed
| at hiring people who they could swap around to large
| different sorts of teams or roles and get along with, and be
| productive with, a huge swath of the company, though IME in
| practice that doesn 't happen terribly often these days). But
| if you're doing it for someone else's company, your upside is
| capped by the upside of the company you're working for. And
| your reward is too - you're not going to command 10x the pay
| from a CEO you report to who doesn't themselves understand
| the difficulty of the hiring you're doing compared to "just
| copy Google" (or why they wouldn't have good results with the
| latter).
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > In my opinion, it's getting rather silly.
|
| It's luck of the draw. That's really how it's always been.
|
| If you get bad interviewers, you're in for a bad time.
|
| If you get asked questions you know, you're in for a good time.
|
| It's possible your odds of getting bad interviewers has
| increased. But I doubt the increase is _that_ substantial.
|
| It's interesting to me how much stock these companies put into
| hiring, and then let countless terrible interviewers continue
| to interview.
|
| You'd think they'd recognize high quality interviewers and get
| them doing more than 1 interview per week, and not let people
| interview until passing a pretty high bar in the quality of
| their interview.
|
| Instead, they pretty much let anyone interview (as long as
| they've been at the company for N months and gone to some
| training).
| michaelt wrote:
| _> You 'd think they'd recognize high quality interviewers
| and get them doing more than 1 interview per week, and not
| let people interview until passing a pretty high bar in the
| quality of their interview._
|
| I think you substantially over-estimate the eagerness of
| software developers to take on unrewarding admin work.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > I think you substantially over-estimate the eagerness of
| software developers to take on unrewarding admin work.
|
| Why do you assume it can only be un-rewarding?
|
| If hiring is so important, maybe it's worth paying the best
| people extra to get it done correctly.
|
| If it's not that important, it'd be nice if they'd stop
| pretending like it is.
| Ihateyouall2345 wrote:
| [dead]
| Tyr42 wrote:
| They also don't give any feedback on your interviews other
| than an eventual "they were hired" or not. So if you are a
| mediocre interviewer you will never know.
| mihaitodor wrote:
| I have a public disclaimer in my LinkedIn profile intro saying
| that I refuse to do any algorithmic live coding. They're top
| employers and whatnot, but one doesn't need to torture
| themselves with Leetcode to get a good job in this industry
| dekhn wrote:
| Interesting. So if I asked you to open up coderpad.io and
| write a python function to reverse a string, you'd just
| absolutely refuse? What would you do otherwise to show me
| that you're a programmer?
| michaelt wrote:
| _> What would you do otherwise to show me that you 're a
| programmer?_
|
| Pretty much every other job in every other industry seems
| to do OK with education, experience and references.
|
| If I want to hire a guy to tile my bathroom I don't need
| him to slap some tiles onto a whiteboard to get the job -
| some photos of the last few jobs he's done would be just
| fine.
|
| Is the programming profession really so full of inept
| frauds? Is our industry so unable to regulate university
| education that qualifications are so worthless?
| dekhn wrote:
| Is the bathroom tiling really a fair comparison?
|
| The main reason I hire the way I do is I learned that
| there are people who have resumes that look like mine
| (with 30+ years of coding) but they don't actually know
| how to do any coding, even just "please write out a
| simple class in python that does nothing". I go out of my
| way to give every candidate a fair shake and I'm not
| looking for some fast, set-in-stone rules. Nor am I
| looking for you to solve any really hard problems. Still
| it's been depressing just how many coders I interview who
| can't even explain how a hash table works.
| Ihateyouall2345 wrote:
| [dead]
| mihaitodor wrote:
| I'd refuse, but If the conversation goes in that direction,
| then I'd probably end the conversation right there, since
| it's pretty clear that's not the kind of role I want to
| interview for. I managed to accumulate a bit of online
| presence over the years and I expect my future employer to
| a) look me up prior to the interview and b) have a direct
| interest in my Open Source work.
| dekhn wrote:
| Sure, I'd look you up and scan your github pages. I've
| dealt with people who set up fake githubs (copying from
| various places on the web to make it look like they did
| real work). Can't help you if you only want to interview
| people who are interested in your open source work...
| that sounds very limiting.
| blitzar wrote:
| I've dealt with people whos whole CV was fake. One of the
| points of the interview is to sniff this out.
|
| Diving into a github and then asking questions about it,
| in the same way as you would ask about stuff on a CV
| seems like a massive win for the skilled interviewer.
| allarm wrote:
| Normally when I'm interviewing people I don't go much
| further than asking about the topics they covered in
| their resume. If they lied in the resume, it's an instant
| no-go. And if their resume is on your desk already, that
| means that their skill set covers most of the
| requirements for this position already. Simple enough.
| dekhn wrote:
| Well, hold on. I see a resume that says "Worked on a
| complex ML problem, training a model that did blah-and-
| blah". Sounds great, right? Then when you poke further
| you find out the person just took an online class that
| involved git cloning a repo and running scikit-learn on
| some toy examples without even understanding any of it.
|
| Resume inflation is a big thing.
| mihaitodor wrote:
| This guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude will drive
| people like myself away instantly and that's fine. So
| far, I had plenty of options to pick from and, for me at
| least, culture match is highly important.
| dekhn wrote:
| Oh, I understand. However, the problem is that many
| companies are inundated with low-quality, puffed up
| resumes, and it's truly hard to find people that are
| actually qualified, especially if they're not doing any
| work to make themselves available.
|
| I would add that I don't think you should think of it as
| "guilty-until-proven-innocent"; it's just the reality
| that you are competing with large numbers of amoral
| people who will lie to get a job. This is much less about
| culture match than you think.
| allarm wrote:
| In my experience it's super easy to see that the resume
| or github or a home project is fake. If not immediately
| then in like first 10 minutes of the interview. I don't
| think that "people lie" is a valid reason to generalize.
| If anything, that's the interviewers who are limiting
| themselves, not the other way around.
| xyzelement wrote:
| There was a great story on HN a few days about the concept of
| "It wasn't for me"[1] - the distinction between something
| being "bad" vs "just not for me." Your comment made me think
| of that.
|
| If you really perceive algorithmic live coding as torture,
| then it makes all the sense in the world to avoid it. "It's
| not for you."
|
| But it's important to recognize two things: first that this
| is subjective. A different person may enjoy something you
| hate (I don't mind live coding for example) or at least won't
| consider is bad enough to be called "torture." So just
| because it's not "for you" doesn't mean it's bad.
|
| The second thing is to recognize that there's a cost to being
| however we are. In this case, the cost of avoiding
| opportunities that require such interviews is that you may
| have fewer opportunities and they may be less lucrative on
| average. It's possible that (a) you are still able to find
| good-enough opportunities and (b) the downside is worth
| avoiding the torture. But you can also decide that this cost
| _isn 't_ worth it, and you have some room to shape what is
| and isn't for you, over time. For example, if the thing that
| makes this "torture" for you something like anxiety when
| being watched? If so, probably something like that shows up
| in other places in your life and maybe valuable to tackle
| anyway.
|
| By no means am I suggesting that _you_ need to do something
| different than what you 're doing, just pointing out that
| these reactions are subjective, can have downsides, and are
| under our control to some extent.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36452067
| mihaitodor wrote:
| > the distinction between something being "bad" vs "just
| not for me." Your comment made me think of that.
|
| > If you really perceive algorithmic live coding as
| torture, then it makes all the sense in the world to avoid
| it. "It's not for you."
|
| I wasn't aware of this concept, but I can assure you that I
| don't have such a mindset. I tend to enjoy finding
| difficult challenges and complex topics to dig into which
| are way outside of my comfort zone. Leetcode practice is
| different though, and yes, it does feel like torture to me
| and some other developers who tend to be rather quiet in
| general. While it's really tempting, I don't think I'm the
| right person to act as a community voice on this topic,
| although I do chime in sometimes.
|
| When you're just starting this career path, it feels like
| homework. Heck, it's even exciting to solve problems which
| are a bit more complicated than whatever you're exposed to
| in school. However, try to spend several years in a row (8
| in my case) trying and failing to pass such interviews
| (several in-person ones each year) and it will feel like
| torture. "If you'll spend a little bit more time on
| Leetcode, surely you'll pass next time..." No thanks! I'm
| done. The issue is not the lack of training, but the way in
| which these interviews are conducted by certain people
| which causes me distress and severe anxiety. I moaned about
| this before in various HN threads related to interviews and
| I might bother to blog about it some day.
|
| > In this case, the cost of avoiding opportunities that
| require such interviews is that you may have fewer
| opportunities and they may be less lucrative on average.
|
| Hasn't been my experience, but I'm not looking to maximise
| my income. I looked for advice on negotiation strategies
| and whatnot and felt happy with the offers I got. Others
| might have a different experience in this regard, but I
| think asking for less money in exchange for a
| psychologically-safe interview process is nonsense. At the
| end of the day, you get what you pay for and there are
| review sites anyway.
|
| > For example, if the thing that makes this "torture" for
| you something like anxiety when being watched? If so,
| probably something like that shows up in other places in
| your life and maybe valuable to tackle anyway.
|
| I think you're making certain assumptions here. I don't
| need to "tackle" my perception of what's safe and
| comfortable. We're all different and that's a good thing.
| dpe82 wrote:
| Interesting; how has that worked for you?
| mihaitodor wrote:
| It felt quite empowering, actually. I ended up having to
| point it out to some recruiters who kept pestering me even
| though I already knew what their employer's interview
| process is like. It also helped me avoid wasting time to
| hop on the first intro call with HR to get details about
| the next steps. Also, I got a few people reaching out
| specifically because they resonated with it, which was
| great!
| kulikalov wrote:
| Not a recruiter, but I imagine there are at least 3 reasons for
| your repo to be ignored or deprioritized in favor of typical
| interview: - not everyone contributes to OSS - it's easy to
| fake - it's hard to assess within a short period of time
|
| This it seems to be hard to standardize and streamline
| candidates validation based on their oss repos.
|
| Also, afaik the goal of interview is to assess candidates
| thinking patterns, it's hard to do quickly based on an
| arbitrary piece of code.
| codr7 wrote:
| Sure, it would take some more effort to dig into than
| checking boxes.
|
| But it would also provide more valuable feedback.
| tdudzik wrote:
| How would you compare candidates that have some code in
| GitHub and those that don't ?
| cinntaile wrote:
| You can assess the ones that don't have code on GitHub in
| a different way, but there is no reason to ignore a
| possibly valuable datapoint.
| tdudzik wrote:
| But faang companies try to objectively compare all
| candidates. Also they have so many resumes that it
| doesn't seem feasible to review code on GitHub.
| codr7 wrote:
| 5 hours x 1/2 people checking boxes is energy that could
| be put to better use.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| "They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates
| with these excessive processes." I don't see myself ever
| applying to any of these whacky interview companies. I like
| money and all, but idk. It's such a turn off. Maybe if I truly
| felt they were actually measuring company value.
| ar_lan wrote:
| Where do you find other valuable companies to interview at?
| Genuine question, I've been entrenched in the Silicon Valley
| bubble for well over a decade that I don't even know
| how/where to find meaningful (remote) companies.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| If what you want is to be hired quickly and get a big paycheck,
| go with the higher chaos score. They may be easily impressed by
| simple interviewing tricks, and since the place is clearly
| disorganized, you can get away with not doing much work.
|
| I should feel bad for giving this advice, but fuck these bloated
| mega-rich companies if they refuse to get their shit together.
| Yujf wrote:
| I don't think this is necessarily true. Big chaos score means
| that the hiring manager is basically free to hire whoever they
| want with no verification, but that does not mean that they do
| not keep their engineers in check. Google has low chaos score,
| but you can essentially get hired without a job that you should
| do so that could also indicate you may get away with doing not
| a lot of work
| michaelt wrote:
| Eh, to me the chaos score seemed pretty opinionated.
|
| After all, if the interview process is highly standardised the
| _jobs_ must be highly standardised. That 's fine if everything
| is a java web service and you only want to hire java web
| service folks. But if I'm an expert in machine vision for
| robotic applications, how are you going to validate the
| specialist skills that make me so expensive?
|
| And what do I care about the interviews being consistent? I
| only have to go through the process once. And it's not like I'm
| relying on getting hints or leaked questions to be able to
| pass.
| jondwillis wrote:
| All of the FAANGs are various levels of unethical, or a net
| negative for society in my estimation. No more interviewing there
| for me.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Is the company you are working for using any of the cloud
| providers? Are you using computers built by low wage workers?
| Do you use Amazon? Google? Microsoft?
|
| Or does it make you feel better that you aren't working for
| them directly?
| jondwillis wrote:
| Yeah, of course I use them. It's practically impossible to
| use the internet without them. No ethical consumption and
| all.
|
| It makes me feel better that I am not directly working for
| them in the same way that putting plastic in my recycling bin
| makes me feel better about having no choice but to have
| plastic waste follow me around everywhere.
|
| edit) have you tried eating food without having plastic
| involved?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I find it difficult to take people seriously who
| continuously clutch their pearls about the evil of BigTech
| yet and still benefit from it.
|
| I bet you dollars to donuts that you're making a higher
| than median wage working in tech instead of being a
| teacher, working at a non profit etc.
|
| The tech industry is a net negative on society. Yet it's a
| net positive _for you_. It's the other people that it
| hurts.
|
| > in the same way that putting plastic in my recycling bin
| makes me feel better about having no choice but to have
| plastic waste follow me around everywhere.
|
| I bet most Mormons use very little plastic when they eat -
| they have the courage of their convictions.
|
| I hate to break it to you. But most things you separate for
| recycling isn't actually recycled.
| ryangs wrote:
| Definitely agree with unethical, although net negative seems a
| lot harder to quantify. Amazon has a lot of bad practices I
| disagree with, but are they net negative? I find it difficult
| to assess. And even if they aren't net negative now, is the 10
| year trajectory clearly downward?
|
| Soloing out Netflix, is there anything particularly wrong with
| them? I have significant gripes with all the others but no
| specifics about Netflix.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > is the 10 year trajectory clearly downward?
|
| I think so, yes. It's been that way for a good while.
| mike00632 wrote:
| The writers who are currently striking have a lot of things
| to say about Netflix being negative.
| jondwillis wrote:
| Netflix: exploitative true crime docs and algorithmic
| recommendations with no way to opt out, auto-play, reality
| TV.
| [deleted]
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I would gladly take a $350K/yr paycheck for a decade, then
| retire and do social work for free.
| zht wrote:
| you might net 200K a year if you're lucky, and assuming you
| live like a miser and save/invest 150K a year, that's really
| not enough to retire on
| JohnFen wrote:
| Doesn't the depend on where you live and how old you are?
|
| In my part of the US, you can live like a king on $200k/yr
| and such jobs aren't rare. You can live better than 90% of
| the people here on $100k, and putting 100k/yr away for
| retirement is genuinely more than enough unless you're in
| your 40s or so.
|
| But I know there are other parts of the US where what you
| say is 100% true.
| zht wrote:
| and OP was saying that he'd like to work for 10 years and
| retire. it's not really retirement if you only stop
| working for 10 years.
|
| I just mean that you need far higher incomes than 350K
| for 10 years (gross) to be able to stop working entirely
| a_and wrote:
| [dead]
| jondwillis wrote:
| You and tens of thousands of other smart people who could be
| doing something other than maximizing attention and shilling
| trash products. Good luck undoing 3.5MM of damage with social
| work.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Do you work for a non profit?
| lesuorac wrote:
| I mean stick with math for everything. Value of a human
| life is ~10M [1] so it's pretty easy to undo 3.5M of damage
| if you spend decades helping people.
|
| [1]: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/23/843310123/how-
| government-agen...
| taway234 wrote:
| >> All of the FAANGs are various levels of unethical, or a net
| negative for society in my estimation. No more interviewing
| there for me.
|
| Feel the same way, until you realize you've cut out half the
| jobs in the process. Also, wait till you see how much it sucks
| when loser startups offer you 90kbase + XYZ illiquid options.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| Grinding leetcode for a month or two to get a 400k+ TC is
| definitely worth the effort up front. It's probably the easiest
| way to earn that much money short of going to medical school or
| getting your JD.
| [deleted]
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| They buried the important info in the middle of the first page:
| "Moreover, this guide is written for experienced, back-end
| leaning engineers - interview processes are usually different for
| juniors, but we won't be getting into those differences." There
| are multiple jobs out there are very technical positions pay 6
| figures with no coding required. It's not interviewed for. It's
| not required at work. In fact, I can't give code to customers
| even if I wanted to.
|
| Companies operate on more than just code monkeys.
| leeny wrote:
| OP and founder of interviewing.io here. We spent hundreds of
| hours interviewing current & former FAANG interviewers to write
| this piece. We really wanted to peel back the curtain on what
| happens during these interviews, what actually matters to them,
| how these companies train their interviewers (if at all), make
| hiring decisions, and so on.
|
| I'll be around to answer questions, and I'll tag in Kevin, the
| author, as well (I just edited it).
| [deleted]
| zug_zug wrote:
| Just a heads up to anybody super starry-eyed about fang, I worked
| 10+ years non-fang, and tried fang, and it was absolutely
| miserable, one of my least favorite jobs of my career. Yes I made
| a lot, but I also worked and stressed proportionally more. YMMV.
| [deleted]
| rockemsockem wrote:
| The FAANG, or MANGA, all vary a ton. It really doesn't make
| sense to compare them all as if they're remotely the same. They
| all have a similar hiring process and they're all big (which
| does wind up causing similar problems), and the similarities
| usually end there. Even between teams in these companies things
| can be totally different.
|
| TL;DR don't throw out a basket of companies because you think
| they're the same
| taway234 wrote:
| >> Just a heads up to anybody super starry-eyed about fang, I
| worked 10+ years non-fang, and tried fang, and it was
| absolutely miserable, one of my least favorite jobs of my
| career.
|
| Most people I know say the same, but they stay. You can be at a
| non-FAANG and work for half the pay (and often be just as
| miserable) or you can work at FAANG, own a house, not worry
| about money, and often do not much work. Misery is part of the
| package.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Misery is part of the package.
|
| But isn't that a bug? It's not that hard to find a non-FAANG
| job that pays well, lets you own a house, and not worry about
| money _without_ having every working day be a misery.
| PheonixPharts wrote:
| > own a house, not worry about money
|
| While you absolutely take a huge pay cut to not work at a
| FAANG, it's not like making 200k+ is living in poverty.
|
| Typically non-FAANG also has other perks: many more fully
| remote options, typically much more chill about working
| hours, working with niche tech stacks or on new problem
| spaces, etc.
|
| You can enjoy work and still have a house and not have to
| worry about money at a non-FAANG, just not as aggressively
| much as you do at one.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| In Canada, where do you find these non-FAANG 200k+ jobs?
| sorokod wrote:
| On the other hand they don't need to warn away their family
| and friends from the products they develop so there is that.
| amhenk wrote:
| Not that I know, but in my experience, the stress for me came
| from the increased level of expectations at faang vs non-faang.
| I recently moved to a faang-tier company and the most jarring
| thing to me was how much the expectations around the quality of
| what I produced grew. Not just in terms of code but like
| artifacts, documents, and discussions that needed to happen.
| Another aspect is how overwhelming a large organization can be
| for people. Going from a 10-50 person startup to an engineering
| org of 5k people is pretty different. The sheer scale can be
| stressful in and of itself as you try to figure out what's
| important to your section of the org.
|
| Not saying non-faang can't have that stress, more just that
| sometimes the expectations are drastically different and that
| can feel like a sink or swim thing for people. I'd also say it
| depends on where you get placed in a faang company, some teams
| are more dynamic and free wheeling than others which I'm sure
| plays into it.
| francisofascii wrote:
| The stressfulness of the interview tends to be correlated with
| the stressfulness of the job.
| extr wrote:
| Yes, identical story here. I was over the moon when I got the
| job. Within 6 months was basically just waiting until I had
| been there long enough that leaving wouldn't look bad.
| 120bits wrote:
| My urge to work for FAANG company is faded away. Being in my late
| 30s I don;t want to grind leetcode anymore. I had interviews in
| Apple/Google/Facebook and I felt luck played a huge part of that.
| I got some live coding questions that prepared the day before and
| I aced them and in some cases I practiced so much and couldn;t
| even write more than 10 lines of code.
| dudus wrote:
| Luck def plays a big role. That's why you should keep going at
| it if that's what you want. The financial peace of mind makes
| it worth it.
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| It is bewildering to me that there are companies where you don't
| interview with the team you will join. What if you don't click
| with them? These are the people you'll spend every day working
| with.
| shagie wrote:
| What if you were at a company that had 100 teams with open
| spots to fill. They all need the same basic skill set and with
| some onboarding it will fill in gaps in the domain knowledge.
|
| Do you want to do 100 interviews? An interview with 100 people
| asking you questions? If you interview with the "wrong" team or
| someone else accepts a position with that team before you do,
| do you want to be dropped from consideration?
|
| That structure for interviewing is set up to try to find as
| many people who are {this good} as possible to hire. Once you
| get hired, then they'll try to figure out where you fit in.
| Trying to fit each person to their exactly right and best fit
| spot as part of the interview process makes it even more time
| consuming.
| fatnoah wrote:
| > It is bewildering to me that there are companies where you
| don't interview with the team you will join. What if you don't
| click with them? These are the people you'll spend every day
| working with.
|
| There's a very important caveat here. At Facebook and Google
| (those are the ones I experienced) you have to pass a bar to
| get into the company. While those initial interviewers won't be
| the ones you work with you'll either (Google) go through team
| matching where you'll meet those team members or even better
| (Facebook) meet them AND work with them on a couple tasks to
| get to know them and their work BEFORE you join the team.
| snakewatching wrote:
| So the main factor for succeeding those so-called interviews is
| doing more of them? ie, it has nothing to do with your actual
| performance on the job.
|
| We should think hard as a society on what we want to spend our
| time on. At some point in my career I drank the koolaid that
| joining a FAANG was the most prestigious thing you could do. But
| now I start to see people working at FAANGs as bureaucratic rule-
| follower that put their 50 hours of leetcode-grinding (I suspect
| that they are implicitly filtering for those engineers that will
| follow tasks without asking too many questions)
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| Interviewing is a skill that needs to be worked on.
|
| Unfortunately, your "portfolio" is not portable between
| companies and so these tedious interviews are necessary.
| Similarly for other technical roles like welding - they expect
| you to do an example weld to show you can really do the work,
| though there are also certification standards that help which
| we don't have in the software industry.
| oofta-boofta wrote:
| [dead]
| rel2thr wrote:
| My pro-tip if you want one of these jobs and are not great at
| leetcoding, try to get another role at the company and then
| transfer over.
|
| Apply as a data analyst, theres no leetcoding, you just need to
| demonstrate sql knowledge and experience working with the
| business. And faang data analysts are paid as much as many non-
| faang engineers.
|
| Once you are in, you will be working with engineers, just do a
| good job, and express interest in working on the software team.
| The bar will be much much lower than an external candidate.
|
| I would say 20-25% of engineers at these companies come from a
| non-traditional route like this.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| This is absolutely wrong, at least for the FAANG where I work
| (Amazon).
|
| Not only are data analysis jobs given to business grads and are
| non-tech roles, they also do not work with software engineers
| at all and I guarantee you you will hate every second of your
| job in those positions because of how uninteresting it is.
|
| After that, if you do want to switch roles, you will either
| have to go through a full interview loop and held to the same
| standard as an external candidate, or you will have to go
| through an even more grueling job title change process which
| will take months, with no guarantee of being approved (and to
| be fair, if you're a data analyst doing a data analyst's job,
| has no chance of being approved).
| [deleted]
| a_and wrote:
| [dead]
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| Not sure if this would work at a big tech company, but I've def
| seen it at mid sized companies
| hebleb wrote:
| Man, I've coded a fair amount in my free time, and have even
| created a couple of money making side-projects, but I just can't
| grind leetcode no matter how often I try. That plus the rejection
| after doing long on-sites drains me for days afterwards. I've
| come to the conclusion that even though I may be missing out on
| those top salaries, FAANG just probably isn't for me
| xyzelement wrote:
| I think recognizing that "something isn't for me" (vs is bad)
| is a great and mature point of view, I deeply respect that.
| Some thoughts beyond that:
|
| By the time you frame something as "grinding" - it's going to
| suck. If I were you, I'd ask why does it feel that way? For
| example, is it because you don't have a good foundation in
| algorithms fundamentals -- if so, would it help your career to
| learn those, anyway? Is it because you don't enjoy problem
| solving or aren't a structured problem solver -- if so, is
| there something to learn there? Or is it because you framed
| something that could potentially be fun as an adversarial grind
| to begin? (BTW, I am not saying any of the above is true or
| likely - I am just suggesting one "next step" type thing since
| this question seems interesting to you)
|
| Similarly, being deeply impacted by rejection -- is that a
| thing that would serve you to evolve over time? As you become
| more senior and ambitious, you are likely going after harder
| opportunities and your rejection / fail rate will go up and
| that's normal and good. Is there room for reframing how you
| deal with fails?
| allarm wrote:
| > Is there room for reframing how you deal with fails?
|
| What would be your advice? How do you personally deal with
| fails? It feels shitty every time it happens, regardless of
| the amount of reframing or whatever else I put into my mind.
| xyzelement wrote:
| The unsatisfying answer is - that you have to figure out
| why it cuts you so deeply to begin with to really make
| sense and fix it. But I can provide some hopefully
| actionable things in the process:
|
| - Recognize that interviews (and other things, like dating)
| is a high value endeavor but the failure raise of any given
| encounter is high. Go in wanting the job and doing your
| best, but recognize that the answer to any one of them is
| likely "no" for many reasons external to you as well as
| your actual match for the job. This is what they mean by
| "it's a numbers game."
|
| - Especially if you already have a job and are just
| interviewing looking to grow, treat it like an experiment.
| "What can I learn by preparing for and doing the interview?
| How can I make it more enjoyable for myself? Is there a way
| to think of it as an interesting challenge/puzzle rather
| than adversarial?"
|
| - Recognize that the feeling of failure is different than
| the reality of failure (eg: you are feeling like shit but
| in reality everything is fine, you're no worse off than if
| you hadn't tried, and in fact you're better off because you
| did try.) This is a thing in general - recognizing that our
| feelings are "louder" than reality allows us to tone down
| those feelings.
|
| Does that help?
| claudiulodro wrote:
| Tangentially related, is it worth it to do the leetcode grind and
| all the FAANG-interview preparations if I'm always planning on
| working remote? Are there remote companies with FAANG-level
| compensation that would warrant this sort of interview prep?
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Its the difference between making 400k+ a year and retiring
| early, versus grinding away on software
| TrackerFF wrote:
| How many FAANG engineers do you know that have retired early,
| compared to the FAANG those that didn't / still work?
| [deleted]
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Netflix still hires remote. I'm guessing for the right team and
| with the right resume you can get remote at Amazon, Google or
| Meta right now if you have enough seniority.
|
| Finally, I think most companies are using some LC type
| questions. Asking if you should practice leetcode is like
| someone asking if they should get in shape. Vehemently the
| answer is 'yes to some degree', and the rest just depends on
| your goals.
| weeznerps wrote:
| 100% yes. I did this 2.5 years ago, got a remote FAANG job, and
| more than 3x'd my comp. Remote FAANG-level comp is harder than
| to get than it was during COVID, but it is still possible.
| thomaslangston wrote:
| Yes
| actualwill wrote:
| I imagine a FAANG salary allowing fully remote would be a very
| competitive position.
| xyzelement wrote:
| There are a ton of remote roles at every FAANG too. If you are
| good and they want you, you can negotiate for those.
|
| Being able to interview and get good offers helps your story.
| Even if your story ends up using those offers as leverage
| elsewhere.
| twayt wrote:
| Sounds like an FB shill
| yodsanklai wrote:
| There is always a lot of bitterness on the topic of FAANG
| interviews, and also a lot of bashing of engineers working there.
|
| It's difficult to hire large number of people globally without
| some level of standardization. What I like with FAANG is that the
| interview process is fair. The rules are explicit and they give a
| chance to quite a lot of people (including people with slightly
| unconventional profile).
|
| Another myth is that FAANG engineers are just leetcode grinders
| and are useless beyond that. What struck me is how diverse the
| people working there are. In term of educational background,
| origin, professional experience, age... I find it pretty
| remarkable. It's hard to make any general statement about this
| population considering how diverse it is.
| xyzelement wrote:
| I skimmed this briefly but I can't reiterate enough the
| importance of practice that the author mentions.
|
| I am the same person when a FAANG hired me as I was 15 years
| prior when I first interviewed there (I also interviewed a bunch
| of times in between, for successively more senior roles and did
| better in the process each time.)
|
| When I was young, I had some fixed mindset - I am either good
| enough or not. They will either see that I am good or they won't.
| Nowadays, it's obvious to me that it's my responsibility to make
| it _easy_ for them to see that I am good. That 's what practice
| is - it's you working on your ability to articulate your fit for
| the role. That could be your ability to solve problems at the
| whiteboard, honing your career story, etc - the point is that if
| you ultimately don't have something to offer, no amount of
| practice will help - but if you have the potential but don't know
| how to let it show, you won't get the job either.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| This goes for just about any developer job.
| kodah wrote:
| It's worth saying I've been subjected to LeetCode interviews
| for SRE Systems Engineering positions. Though I write
| application code it doesn't even begin to reflect the problem
| domain I work in. It's simply a test that you must pass that
| someone arbitrarily believes does a good job of filtering. From
| my perspective as a senior engineer, and knowing that many of
| the people who can pass these tests _suck_ when it comes to
| practical skills, the only thing it filters for is how bad you
| want the role.
| mgaunard wrote:
| FAANG are a good place to get a high salary as someone who just
| graduated.
|
| What are you doing applying there with 15 years of experience?
| Are you looking to retire already?
| xyzelement wrote:
| I don't understand your question. Plenty of senior people
| work at (and join) FAANGs with high comp and excitement about
| the role.
| mgaunard wrote:
| What excitement? You're joining to become one extra cog in
| a large machine that is past its prime.
|
| You will have little agency and impact, and your only
| opportunity for a decent compensation will be based on
| internal politics rather than technical merit.
|
| Meanwhile, you can join a human-sized company, and be a
| real enabler and transformer of that business.
| rjh29 wrote:
| Money > impact for some people.
| tester756 wrote:
| >You're joining to become one extra cog in a large
| machine that is past its prime.
|
| yada yada
|
| >You will have little agency and impact, and your only
| opportunity for a decent compensation will be based on
| internal politics rather than technical merit.
|
| Yes, you have little impact (unless you go up on the
| ladder), but you're working on products that serve the
| whole world.
|
| That's quite a few order of magnitude more than working
| in yet another startup creating web-shop or niche app.
|
| I'm not even at FAANG level of corpos and I really can
| say that I'm putting tiny bricks into really interesting
| products.
|
| The work itself is pretty boring, but products as a whole
| are impressive as hell.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that corpos are great
| and startups sucks,
|
| but when you're talking about companies that hire 50k,
| 100k, 200k or more people and just call them places where
| you're just "cog" and there's nothing exciting about the
| job then I think you're just naive
| harshalizee wrote:
| Been at two FAANGs, a small startup and a mid sized
| company. I cannot overstate how little I care about being
| an enabler and a transformer of the business, or even
| care about the business.
|
| You see, as a business ( of one), I'm here to ensure my
| company (again me) is generating cash flow and profit for
| my stakeholders ( me + family + dog).
|
| Unless I own the company or have equity >10%, it never
| made sense why anyone would.
|
| That said, I enjoyed my time at the good large corps. Big
| and small, they all have their issues internally, but
| I'll take the boring and well compensated job over the
| interesting (almost never that interesting) and low pay
| one.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Unless I own the company or have equity >10%, it never
| made sense why anyone would.
|
| This is key. I worked for a small company for 8 years,
| and in the end I realized that the owners still wanted me
| to be just a cog, and I would never be anything except a
| cog in their (small) machine. That's when I quit and
| started my own company.
|
| The gap between employees and owners is massive and
| almost always insuperable.
| xyzelement wrote:
| Personally, I am deeply excited about being an enabler
| and transformer at _this_ scale, too.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| You're making a lot of generalizations here.
|
| 1. First, there are plenty of roles in these companies.
| You could be working in a very small specialized team on
| open source software that is used beyond the company. It
| doesn't matter if the company is past its prime or not,
| and you're not more or less a cog that if you work for a
| startup.
|
| 2. I can only speak for my experience, but my
| compensation isn't based on politics at all. It's purely
| based on my contributions. Compensation is just like the
| interview process, highly standardized, no room for
| politics.
|
| 3. A lot of human-sized companies don't produce anything
| meaningful, with more politics, and you won't have any
| room for impact because you're blocked by a few stubborn
| people in power.
|
| Again, just my experience but I found that in my FAANG,
| there's a critical mass of people with good common sense
| and less bullshit in general. In the couple of smaller
| companies where I worked, it wasn't the case. There were
| good engineers, but also enough annoying people with too
| much influence that make my day-to-day job less
| enjoyable.
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| Good place to get a great salary as a senior
| chris11 wrote:
| > Nowadays, it's obvious to me that it's my responsibility to
| make it easy for them to see that I am good. That's what
| practice is - it's you working on your ability to articulate
| your fit for the role
|
| I second that. As an interviewer it's much easier to pass
| someone if they directly articulate how they meet the question
| rubrik. For coding interviews that can mean explicitly
| communicating a methodical approach and covering edge cases.
| For behavioral that can mean clearly communicating a situation
| and it's impact. This does take practice.
| codr7 wrote:
| And that hits the problem for me; the process often doesn't
| allow showing what you have to offer, it only allows you to
| show that you check all boxes in the process.
| xyzelement wrote:
| I don't think that's true -- and I say that as someone who's
| spent plenty of time on both sides of the proverbial
| interview desk.
|
| Checking the boxes as you say sounds superficial, it's more
| like - there are some bars to the role you're interviewing
| for. A typical eng role probably has bars around programming
| ability, team work and communication ability, problem
| solving, etc. By "checking the boxes" you probably mean
| ability to demonstrate that you can do those things in the
| context of the interview - that takes practice.
|
| Now it comes to the other stuff beyond the bar that you want
| to show. There are some attributes about myself that I want
| to come up in the interviews whether I am asked about them or
| not. Making sure they get mentioned takes practice too.
| codr7 wrote:
| No, it's not that general, at all.
|
| Either you say the specific words that are in their script,
| or highlight the stuff they're really into, or you fail.
|
| Replying here because of wacky thread depth limitations in
| HN:
|
| Often personal preferences. And there's no discussion, just
| failure because you didn't say the right thing. Especially
| if you have more experience than the interviewer. Arguing
| that someone shouldn't get hired because they didn't check
| whatever box is something you would never get fired for. My
| last example was using GET instead of POST for a login
| endpoint, which is a perfectly fine thing to do.
| xyzelement wrote:
| Can you give me an example of what you mean?
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| Sometimes teams are looking for specific knowledge or
| experience, then it really does matter. Other times, they are
| looking for a good developer who can pick up the necessary
| knowledge, and then it's much more open.
|
| For example, I don't care what programming language you use
| in your interview. Senior engineer using Python? Sure! Want
| to implement in low-level C? Sure! I know any good engineer
| can easily be productive in a new language quickly.
|
| But if I'm hiring someone to build/extend a real-time OS,
| then you need to check the "has experience working on real-
| time OS" box, because that's what I'm paying for when I hire
| you.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Now I just need a guide on how to actually get a FAANG interview
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