[HN Gopher] Show HN: Onsites.fyi - Curated Big Tech Interview Ex...
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Show HN: Onsites.fyi - Curated Big Tech Interview Experiences
Hi HN! While Glassdoor and other employment discussion boards
offer valuable interview experience data, navigating it to prepare
for interviews can be difficult. Onsites.fyi curates interview
experiences and insights from Big Tech hiring across various
positions and levels. Our collection currently includes interview
experiences from top-tier companies like Apple, Google, Meta,
Microsoft, and Amazon. Reviewing real interview experiences
(rounds, questions, format) of others could be an invaluable
preparation tool for interviews. Try it out and please share any
feedback!
Author : nisowa
Score : 144 points
Date : 2023-12-03 13:29 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.onsites.fyi)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.onsites.fyi)
| nik5 wrote:
| Thanks a lot for this
| AMCMneCy wrote:
| I still dont see how its any different from glassdoor
| Dudester230602 wrote:
| For developers it's best to focus on top 5 tech companies that
| everyone else mimics.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| This is only one of a lot of strategies though, essentially
| playing the lottery.
| forward1 wrote:
| Back/forward navigation is broken. Lots of "Application error: a
| server-side exception has occurred (see the server logs for more
| information)." No footnote describing who owns the site, what the
| terms of use and privacy are, so I would frankly never trust it
| with any of my personal data.
| vitus wrote:
| Do note that these interview slates will vary depending on level
| of candidate experience.
|
| At Google, we generally do not ask system design interviews of
| new grads / entry-level candidates. It's pretty rare for mid-
| level candidates (L4), and expected for senior and up (L5+).
|
| Also, there are situations where candidates may have an extra
| interview added to their slate. One common reason for this: the
| hiring committee doesn't have enough signal because the
| interviewers don't coordinate appropriately, and end up asking
| heavily overlapping questions (e.g. 3 questions that basically
| reduce to "use DFS").
| eieio wrote:
| > One common reason for this: the hiring committee doesn't have
| enough signal because the interviewers don't coordinate
| appropriately, and end up asking heavily overlapping questions
| (e.g. 3 questions that basically reduce to "use DFS").
|
| I'm curious - how much up-front coordination is mandated?
| Plenty of the interview loops I've done agree in advance to the
| exact set of questions we'll ask during an onsite specifically
| to avoid problems like this (which of course causes other
| problems...)
| idank wrote:
| Not very much. There's an interview lead that is supposed to
| make sure no question overlaps happen. They will sometimes
| comment on the chosen question (e.g. asking an unrelated
| question to someone interviewing for a research position). In
| general I think this is pretty rare as it requires folks to
| care about their interview before it starts. :)
| lesuorac wrote:
| > I'm curious - how much up-front coordination is mandated?
|
| None is mandated.
|
| It's incredibly rare (maybe 5%) to also be requested to put
| your question into a spreadsheet (that all the interviewers
| can see) to avoid any overlap pre-interview. Post-interview
| you have to submit what question you asked into the official
| (not a spreadsheet) tool.
| DanAtC wrote:
| Nice, make your problem the interviewee's problem and waste
| more of everyone's time.
| mnd999 wrote:
| The arrogance of these companies makes me never want to work
| there. I did go through the Apple process once though and it
| was pretty much as described.
| superchink wrote:
| ideally things go perfectly all the time, but people
| sometimes make mistakes. what would you rather they do? pass
| on the candidate because they didn't get enough data to
| support a hire? or give them more chances to demonstrate
| their capabilities?
| hexis wrote:
| I think the candidate should pass on the company. It's
| always good to provide a cost for their mistake. There is
| no job worth getting jerked around before they even start
| paying you.
| brandall10 wrote:
| They should do the right thing and if the candidate hit the
| bar on what was asked, however repetitive, they should get
| the offer.
|
| As to "not enough data"... how exactly? If there is a list
| of things to check off that is to be distributed amongst
| the interviewing team, there should never be an issue. If
| people are winging it and just happen to ask repetitive
| questions then everyone asked what they needed to know and
| signal should be there.
|
| It sounds like Google's process is fundamentally buggy.
| They should fix that.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Now you know, and you don't have to ever apply/interview
| there!
| jrockway wrote:
| Google gets away with this because they pay so well. An hour
| of extra interviewing gets you an extra $400,000 a year. Show
| up to a 1 hour zoom meeting instead of having a long lunch,
| then put the money in your savings account (or in the stock
| market when savings accounts stop being so good) and retire
| at 35.
|
| I left Google for a startup and got basically half the total
| compensation. 6 years after leaving, I am making about what I
| did at Google 5 years ago and 2 "levels" lower. If I stayed
| at Google, I'd be making about $800,000 a year.
|
| You should really really ignore the distasteful feeling about
| being grilled by a bunch of strangers and just do it. (I
| actually really enjoyed my Google interviews. Problems I
| hadn't seen before that I came up with interesting solutions
| to.)
| ipaddr wrote:
| But you left?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| The Google interview has degraded in the last few years. When I
| interviewed 6 years ago as a fresh grad they flew me out to
| Seattle. Now I don't believe you can go in person even if you
| want to on your own dime - at least not for the level I
| interviewed at when I got in a couple years ago (this was after
| Google's supposed return-to-office).
| mattnewton wrote:
| Does a couple years ago = early 2021 during the pandemic?
| lesuorac wrote:
| Kinda of; that's why it changed but it never changed back.
|
| I'm kind of surprised that its impossible to do it locally
| at all. I know one time I was interviewing at FaceBook and
| I asked to do the phone screen in-person and they let me (I
| lived near the office).
| Dudester230602 wrote:
| Finally, the actual AAMMG, not some weird companies.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| (They needed Netflix so it wasn't a slur)
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| I think this is valuable, but at least for Google and Netflix
| they were extremely straightforward about their interview process
| and were even happy to give tips on how to prep.
| popey wrote:
| Looks like we killed it. I clicked apple and got "Application
| error: a server-side exception has occurred (see the server logs
| for more information). Digest: 2825624865"
| pimlottc wrote:
| The title is misleading. When someone says they offer "curated
| experiences" I assume they actually host and run activities.
| Like, if a company advertised "curated travel experiences", I'd
| expect to be able to book a trip with them.
| Etheryte wrote:
| It seems like you might have a misunderstanding of what
| "curated" means. To quote the dictionary: "selected, organized,
| and presented using professional or expert knowledge." A museum
| is curated not because someone guides you through it and talks
| about things, it's curated because someone specifically took
| the time and effort to decide what to put out on display and
| what to omit.
| avarun wrote:
| How many of these companies actually conduct in-person "onsites"
| anymore? I would guess most of these are still remote -- granted,
| I haven't done the interview circuit in a couple years now. It
| would be cool to have some kind of indicator for which companies
| are doing in-person and which ones remote.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| Horrible. I've been doing software engineering for 12+ years and
| I've never had to pass leetcode questions. I have worked for 5
| companies in total, and I think I have been in around 15-20 tech
| interviews in total as well. The interviews I passed didn't ask
| me leetcode questions (I had to do take home assignments and
| system design). In my last interview they finally stop asking
| coding questions (staff position). No Faang companies, but tier 2
| I'd say. Western Europe.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| To expand.
|
| I guess it depends on the company, as well. I have no idea what
| engineers at faang do. I can tell you what I have been doing
| the last decade:
|
| - decide what kind of db we should use for our next product.
| Usually a relational one is good enough, although sometimes
| document or graph ones are needed
|
| - DDD. Or at least I try. Our engineers are able to understand
| the business and relate terms of the problem domain with ones
| in the solution domain
|
| - identify race conditions. Phantom reads? Those suck, but I
| keep them out of my codebases
|
| - maintenance of public APIs. From authN, to authZ, and keeping
| backwards compatibility as much as possible
|
| - observability, monitoring, slas, slos, slis
|
| - debugging distributed systems and distributed monoliths
|
| - splitting monoliths into microservices because "why not", and
| later regret and start with monoliths again for fresh products
|
| - decoupling services by using tools like kafka and debezium
|
| - mentoring and couching
|
| - helping PMs, POs and business people to build products on
| time
|
| - a large etc
|
| You know what I have never done? Invert a binary tree. I have
| read the Cormen book; it's just that if the company I'm going
| to work on is all about the things I have mentioned above, then
| asking leetcode questions is a red flag.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| I'm glad that you have had this experience! However, passing
| leetcode questions will typically open up new job opportunities
| and increase total compensation.
|
| Anecdotally, I actually find it a good filtering signal for top
| talent. That is, all the best engineers I've worked with have
| always been able to crush leetcode interview questions, even if
| they find the questions annoying.
|
| I think it is probably only a good filter if truly trying to
| hire the top 1% of engineers. Almost nobody is though, as is
| evident from their undifferentiated pay scale.
| neilv wrote:
| Leetcode interviews are for people who studied and practiced
| for Leetcode interviews specifically.
|
| It doesn't have much to do with programming, and has almost
| zero to do with software engineering.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Lists, sets, graph traversals, parsing, knowing when to use
| hashmaps, using recursion, knowing when to use a priority
| queue don't have much to do with programming or software
| engineering?
| neilv wrote:
| CS101 algorithms and data structures of course are
| relevant to programming.
|
| But Leetcode interviews in practice aren't about knowing
| those.
|
| If they were, people would not prep for months
| specifically for Leetcode, and FAANG recruiters wouldn't
| advise spending months rehearsing for those (for everyone
| from undergrads with CS101 fresh in mind, to senior
| engineers who routinely use those in real-world
| situations).
|
| Prep with titles like "Cracking the Coding Interview"
| aren't about understanding or practicing software
| engineering. They're about passing fratbro pledge hazing
| rituals.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| >But Leetcode interviews in practice aren't about knowing
| those.
|
| I'm going to guess about 85% of leetcode questions that
| are asked by top copmanies fall into the CS101 algorithms
| and data structures bucket. Seriously you can go to
| leetcode right now and look at Meta's most common
| interview questions and almost all of them are basic data
| structure questions.
|
| I'm not saying passing the interviews are easy. You
| definitely have to practice coding _fast_ (at least, I
| did!).
|
| Sure the questions may have a twist, but most of the time
| there's no esoteric weird algorithms.
| angarg12 wrote:
| I'm interviewing for Staff level positions and this came in the
| email of one of the recruiters
|
| > For the technical interview, visit leetcode.com and do
| practice questions at a medium/hard difficulty in Algorithm,
| Data Structures, and Object-Oriented categories to help
| prepare.
|
| I guess for some of us there is no escaping leetcode.
| frozenport wrote:
| You're probably making 3x less
| itronitron wrote:
| and yet their quality of life is likely 5X higher
| satvikpendem wrote:
| That is unknown, as people at FAANG in the US have a
| comparable quality of life as those in Western Europe,
| because the things people tout as European advantages like
| free healthcare and long paid vacations, FAANG workers in
| the US essentially already have. They are getting paid much
| more for a similar standard of living, which in turn
| decreases their retirement age, if they so choose.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Ultra mega cope. Many FAANG engineers are testing and
| vesting, doing almost no work while taking that money in
| jackblemming wrote:
| So it looks like all big tech interview pipelines are more or the
| less the same? Fascinating and also probably indicative of
| something weird. If you are building a hiring pipeline, please do
| NOT copy this awful approach. These companies can get away with
| it due to their prestige, top percentage compensation, and need
| to easily filter hundreds of thousands of applicants. You should
| instead treat your applicants like humans, look at their past
| work, and actually express genuine interest in them and have a
| real conversation.
| buildbot wrote:
| This is basically only valid for software engineering FYI - a
| Data Science/Applied science interview is going to be very
| different. And probably differ from team to team with much higher
| variance!
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| To reiterate:
|
| Ignore all study materials. Go to leetcode.com and literally
| memorize the most common questions for the company you are
| interviewing at. This is what your competition is doing. DO NOT
| LEARN THE MATERIAL. Just memorize it
|
| Do the same thing for system design. Memorize the answers word
| for word. DO NOT LEARN THE MATERIAL.
|
| The highest paid tech jobs go to candidates that regurgitate
| perfect answers to interview questions. Anyone claiming otherwise
| is lying or doesnt understand whats going on.
| CalRobert wrote:
| This is true. And it's a bit frustrating because I have to take
| care of two young children when I'm off work, not grind
| leetcode. But maybe that's the point.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Its not as bad once you accept its memorization, and treat it
| like that.
| airstrike wrote:
| Sadly not everyone is equally adept at memorization, so if
| you're solving for that as a hiring manager, you will only
| (mostly) appeal to this subset of people
| otteromkram wrote:
| Then they're probably not a good candidate for a high-
| paying, high-expectations job.
|
| Thank you for pointing that out.
| airstrike wrote:
| > Then they're probably not a good candidate for a high-
| paying, high-expectations job.
|
| _[Citation needed]_
|
| Memorization isn't the one variable we should be solving
| for. God forbid people take notes in meetings as opposed
| to remembering every word that was said
| khzw8yyy wrote:
| This is absolutely the point. All these interviews are
| checking is "does this person spend all of their free time on
| a task we assign to them, no matter how boring". Or, "do they
| go above and beyond".
| Palmik wrote:
| For many, it's much easier to understand than it is to
| memorize.
| neilv wrote:
| Is it too much to hope that those companies will all go out of
| business, and every person who was a part of creating this
| ridiculous theatre will be bankrupted?
| paulddraper wrote:
| Someone is going to take you seriously.
|
| Don't memorize it, learn it, become good at it.
|
| _No matter how much you memorize, there 's going to be
| something you don't._ But I think you know that.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| People need to know the truth that these "genius" engineers
| at Meta/FAANG are mostly getting in by memorizing. They try
| interviewing at five top companies. One of those interviews
| they will absolutely crush, and then will get an offer at
| 400k+.
| paulddraper wrote:
| When you say "memorize" what do you mean?
|
| You mean that they remember common patterns to solve
| problems? Or they memorize questions verbatim?
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| People are going on leetcode.com, they find the company
| they are interviewing for, they remove all questions more
| than a year or two old, then they sort by frequency. They
| start memorizing the most frequent questions first. Then
| they pass the interview. There are other forums with
| question banks, but I wont get into that
| michaelt wrote:
| For example, if asked "how would you detect a cycle in a
| linked list?" you might memorise "Tortoise and hare
| algorithm, two pointers one slow and one fast, fast
| overtaking slow indicates the presence of a cycle"
|
| A person with a deep passion for algorithms might be
| tempted to try to solve it themselves before checking the
| answer - which can be a time consuming business. Time
| your competitors have used to memorised the answers to 25
| more questions.
|
| ldjkfkdsjnv has exaggerated a bit, to be provocative -
| but I've certainly had interviewers ask me questions that
| stumped the greatest minds in computer science for 25+
| years; I don't know what they were expecting if not
| memorisation.
| paulddraper wrote:
| That's a funny example, because once in an interview I
| had exactly that question and the week before I saw
| tortoise and hair.
|
| But that wasn't FAANG that's pretty exceptional.... Most
| stuff is DFS, memorization, etc... Things that are good
| principles and don't have "this one weird trick"
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Lol wtf are you talking about. There is no way you can
| memorize 2000 Leetcode questions.
|
| When I interviewed at a google and netflix, not one of the
| coding questions were on any site (leetcode or hackerrank).
| After the interviews I wanted to look at the solutions
| afterwords so I searched for them, couldn't find anything.
|
| It was only microsoft that would ask the common canned
| questions.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| People are going on leetcode.com, they find the company
| they are interviewing for, they remove all questions more
| than a year or two old, then they sort by frequency. They
| start memorizing the most frequent questions first. Then
| they pass the interview. There are other forums with
| question banks (airbnb's whole question bank is leaked),
| but I wont get into that
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| But i passed both of those interviews without having seen
| a single question before.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Congratulations, doesnt change the approach for people
| that are struggling to pass
| otteromkram wrote:
| Can we not advertise that cesspool of a company?
|
| They are a pile of trash who are more than happy to place
| travelers in dangerous scenarios, while moving refund
| goalposts down the infinitely+long field.
|
| Any mention of the company is advertising, whether you
| want to believe it or not.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| What's the context of this? Placing travelers in
| dangerous scenarios?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| They mostly get in by cheating. A lot of people, even
| before ChatGPT cheated in college, cheated on their FAANg
| interview, and then still get promoted later since none of
| that shit matters and their promotion criteria is on if the
| button is moved 3CM correctly or not in some app that will
| be killed in 5 months anyway
| otteromkram wrote:
| OP didn't say to never learn it. They said just cram it in
| for the interview.
|
| Once you get the job, sure learn it. Unless your job doesn't
| require it or you're not that interested.
|
| But, online we need to be pedantic. That's rule 1.
| guessmyname wrote:
| The interviews I had at Apple were surprisingly straightforward
| compared to those at many other tech companies. I didn't find
| the need to memorize anything, in part because I knew the
| concepts they were questioning me about after putting them in
| practice during the last decade of work, but also because the
| questions were quite straightforward, almost akin to general
| knowledge, for example:
|
| * What is an SSL certificate? Follow up question: What is
| inside them?
|
| * How would you go about designing a modern NTP to sync a fleet
| of local-first systems?
|
| * Do you see a security problem with this code? If yes, what is
| it and how would you fix it?
|
| * Same question as above but with twelve different pieces of
| code, each one more complicated than the previous one.
|
| * What would you consider Personal Identifying Information
| (PII) in a food delivery app?
|
| * Explain XSS, SQL, XSRF...
|
| * Hashing vs. Encryption
|
| * How to protect customers from phishing attacks?
|
| * Say you discover a data leak, for example, a backup in a
| public S3 bucket. Communicate leak or not? If yes, who will you
| communicate with? How will you communicate?
|
| * Improve event processing logic and performance of the
| following Java application. Our company revolves around
| processing events, quickly. Implement the alarm system to
| monitor incoming events for any delays in processing events by
| other event processors. _(If you find it surprising that Apple
| uses Java, I share that sentiment. Interestingly, I opted for
| Go instead of Java to solve the problem during the interview,
| and the interviewers were pleased to explore a new programming
| language. I believe this aspect earned me some additional
| points.)_
|
| * Design a table booking system for a restaurant (database, API
| endpoints, etc.)
|
| * A continuous integration (CI) build step fails (in tests),
| what do you do?
|
| * What is your ideal Developer-Customer feedback loop?
| Realistically, what would a bad one look like?
|
| * How would you design macOS Photos.app? _(The best part of the
| interview was a discussion about what to do with content that
| is out of view and the performance implications of different
| solutions.)_
|
| * Third-party company wants Apple's data to show ads. What do
| you do? _(The obvious answer is you don't give the raw data to
| them, but if you have to, how do you anonymize it?)_
|
| * so on and so forth.
|
| There was this interviewer who appeared to be commited to ask
| me one hundred questions in the span of an hour, and while I
| didn't count, I think we got pretty close to a hundred. The
| questions started at an easy level, for example, what is HTML,
| and increased in complexity every five minutes or so.
| Fortunately, I realize what type of interview this was and
| proceeded to give very one-sentence answers, sometimes just 2-3
| words before jumping to the next question. One of the funniest,
| craziest, most exhausting, but somehow rewarding interviews I
| have ever had in my whole career. At times I thought the
| interviewer was some sort of artificial intelligence and the
| webcam was fake. Later, I met the interviewer in person and we
| became friends.
|
| Now, having become an insider, I can attest that it's
| acceptable to some extent to memorize responses for coding
| exercises and rehearse answers for behavioral questions. As you
| rightly point out, many other candidates engage in these
| practices as well. However, if a candidate's proficiency is
| limited to merely regurgitating code without a genuine
| understanding and, consequently, an ability to articulate the
| underlying concepts in both the programming and behavioral
| interviews, that candidate is likely to face failure.
|
| Before landing the job at Apple, I was also in the interview
| process for a position at Microsoft. The nature of the work
| appeared to be significantly more fulfilling than what I
| currently have. The level of technical expertise required
| during the interviews was remarkable, with the two medium and
| hard level LeetCode-style questions being the relatively easier
| segment. Memorizing answers was technically impossible based on
| the interviewing style. I would have unquestionably accepted
| that job if it weren't for the fact that I needed additional
| income to continue providing for my extended family and
| covering my mortgage.
|
| In conclusion, if you decide to memorize LeetCode problems,
| ensure that you also grasp the underlying concepts. Unless all
| your interviewers are gullible, it will become quite apparent
| if you're just mechanically writing code without a genuine
| understanding of the problem or the interview's objectives.
| khzw8yyy wrote:
| This simply doesn't work without grinding, and grinding
| happens to be sufficient (whereas understanding is not).
|
| You aren't just supposed to solve a problem (and can't think
| back to your college years, pull out your copy of CLRS, or
| whatever). You are supposed to rapidly pattern-match to a
| specific problem type, and implement. You only have 20-30
| minutes (because the rest of the hour gets eaten up by small
| talk) and this includes testing. Anyone who thinks they can
| do this with just their knowledge of algorithms without any
| grinding is in for a shock.
| krooj wrote:
| If you do this and I am the one interviewing you, I will fail
| you. I will figure out what you actually do/don't know and if
| you are incapable of performing at the applied level, I will
| fail you.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Thats fine, but the majority of engineers at Meta/Google will
| be impressed
| davely wrote:
| This needs a [citation needed] sort of flag.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think the strategy they are describing is to just memorize
| a bunch of stuff, and then interview until an interviewer
| happens to not catch on. Either they'll get someone less
| prudent than you, or, I mean, you can't possibly test
| everything, right?
|
| I have no idea if this really works though, it seems insanely
| tedious and also there aren't _that many_ companies to roll
| the dice at.
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| I recently stumbled upon an interviewer that asks "what will
| happen to this algorithm if I delete these 2 lines of code?"
| (the interviewee is the author) and deletes happen on simple
| if-else condition that maintains useful invariants and the
| interviewer said it eliminates most candidates.
|
| I guess that's how memorization works.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| I'm telling you, most candidates at Meta that got in and are
| making 400k+ sat in a room and memorized question by
| question. People need to know how they are getting hired.
| They are MEMORIZING the question bank.
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| This happened to me for meta. Saw the qs on Glassdoor,
| memorized, and passed with flying colors. Did not take the
| job. I was astounded that they asked the same question,
| word for word.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Yeah its appalling the general software engineering
| population doesnt know this yet
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Most of them cheated, they didn't actually memorize all
| that leetcode. Ive personally witnessed candidates at my
| own university successfully cheat on FAANg interviews which
| later landed them successful jobs/internehips
| Denzel wrote:
| While this advice may work for some FAANG companies, I can
| assure you this won't work for Google, especially at higher
| levels. You won't find their questions in any public test bank
| online (trust me, I searched after my interviews).
|
| Also, a good system design interview isn't about designing a
| "perfect" system (hint: there isn't one), it's about defending
| a reasonably considered design.
|
| Google's system design interview very closely approximates my
| day-to-day experience designing solutions with my teammates.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Google I have heard is a bit tougher. No worries, theres ten
| other companies that just want memorization that pay better
| than google.
| robbyt wrote:
| At most of the companies I've interviewed at (except Google
| as you note), the hiring manager and principal engineer
| didn't understand system design themselves. They only
| understood how to pattern match against a regurgitated
| answer.
|
| Case in point, when asked how I'd build Slack, I spent most
| of the time on data persistence because slack stores all data
| forever even on the free plan. I got rejected because, "we
| don't care how they store data."
|
| Ok, but that's still a key part of the system design...
| nostrebored wrote:
| Very open ended question that requires clarification.
| Interviewing is about asking questions too.
| oooyay wrote:
| I don't think this is very good advice. Enough of the companies
| that believe in testing by algorithms are smart enough to
| change their questions slightly for each candidate.
|
| I'm not sure, however, what if anything testing by algorithms
| proves. Sure, you should know how and when to use them like I
| know how and when to use different blades of a saw. Nobody has
| ever asked me to tell them how the saw gets made though. The
| things that matter to me as a Senior+ engineer these days are:
|
| - Do you know how and when to use various algorithms
|
| - Are you going to conform to a given code bases styling and
| standards
|
| - Do you know how to properly test a given piece of
| functionality
|
| - Do you know how to interrogate the debugger to find answers
| to your own questions
|
| - Do you know commonly accepted standards and where to find
| them
|
| - Are you going to over engineer and completely pollute the
| code base with unmaintainable code or infrastructure
|
| Algorithms and systems design test for only one of the above.
| If we ever get a tech union algorithm interviews are on a top
| five of things I'd like them to do away with.
| synaesthesisx wrote:
| A former colleague of mine is at Meta thanks to this exact
| strategy. There are also apparently leaked question banks
| available to facilitate the process!
| 6stringronin wrote:
| For anyone in hiring, for new grads how important are internships
| ?
|
| Seems like its practically required at this point
| esafak wrote:
| Do it for your own good. You will get an idea of what working
| in industry is like, and perhaps the name of a reputable
| company on your resume.
|
| I am not going to reject a qualified student out of hand for
| not having done an internship.
| constantly wrote:
| My observation has essentially been all the random complaining
| you see online where "entry level requires experience," which
| seems counterintuitive at first, is not counterintuitive if you
| consider than internships are really that pre-experience that
| "entry level" requires. So my unpopular opinion, and what I've
| observed in real life as being on the hiring committee or panel
| at top companies has been that for new grads top internships
| are an even more important signal than top schools.
|
| That is, when hiring a new grad for an L3 spot or whatever,
| assuming they met the bar for the interview and in fact did an
| interview, first we look at interview performance, then
| internships (with an internship at our company with a
| successful outcome being the best), then school, then
| recommendations from current employees. Typically someone needs
| to have a good interview and one or more of the other things,
| more if less good at interview, potentially only one if
| outstanding at interview.
| taw1516 wrote:
| I am very comfortable with algorithmic and system design
| questions. However, what I am struggling with is articulating
| past experiences. Throughout my last 5 years at my previous
| employer, I didn't jot down in my personal notes any
| accomplishments or technical designs. And my memory is so rusty
| now that I have a hard time reciting them. I understand this is
| squarely my fault. Wondering if you have any advice on
| approaching my next job? (senior / manager role)
| inhumantsar wrote:
| write them down before you start interviewing. flesh them out
| over time as you remember more details. focus on the most
| valuable experiences, ie the ones that had the most challenges
| (organizational > technical for senior/management roles) or
| were the best learning experiences.
|
| taking the time to do this ahead of your job search will help
| you surface those memories when you need to talk about them,
| much like the leetcode grinding people talk about.
| janosdebugs wrote:
| The filter seems to be broken. I searched for L5 system design
| and got L4 in the results, which was actually an L3 at the time
| of hire.
| nvarsj wrote:
| Don't candidates have to sign NDAs to not reveal problems? How do
| you get away with posting potential IP violation, especially
| system design questions. Genuinely curious on this - is it
| legally allowed?
| brailsafe wrote:
| Why just the big tech companies? Quite a lot of smaller companies
| and startups have 4-6 step interview chains that burn just as
| much time. Although they're less commonly centered specifically
| around leetcode, they're often even more offensively stretched
| out and laborious.
| aleks5678 wrote:
| How valuble
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