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> If it’s of any use: I was interviewing for my second job out of college with about two and a half years of experience without any particularly notable interns

> If it’s of any use: I was interviewing for my second job out of college with about two and a half years of experience without any particularly notable internships or employers on my resume; I went to a very small school that had zero known software companies at their “career fair”; I started preparing in late April and started applying in June/July; and, lastly, a few months in, my job is everything I could have possibly dreamed of. Wow, that’s amazing! Congratulations to the author because this demonstrates they have genuine talent. In contrast, I’ve been a programmer for 10+ years, and I cannot pass the technical interviews in the companies mentioned above. At first, I thought the reason behind my failures was a lack of formal education in Computer Science, so I started reading more books. Then I thought, maybe it’s the fact that I spend more of my “productive” hours in my job just doing lumberjack web development, so I started participating in competitive programming (LeetCode, Code Golf, HackerRank, Code Wars, among many others). Finally, I realized my brain needs more time than the average programmer to find patterns in this type of problems. I gave up on my goal to land a job in one of these big corporations. However, I don’t feel bad about giving up, in fact, thanks to all these books and competitive coding exercises, I was able to find two of the most exciting jobs I ever thought I would have, for 4+ years I worked in the software security industry doing Malware Research and building infrastructure tools for other security researchers. Most recently, I entered the game industry, and finally, I can use my algorithms and data structures for non-trivial projects. Interestingly, I’ve been recently getting more messages by recruiters who want me to work for some of these companies. I politely decline the invitations because I know I cannot pass the technical interviews, but I promptly refer to some of my colleagues because I can see my younger self reflected in them, and I want them to have the experience that I couldn’t have to work for one of these companies. Even if they work only for a few months, as many people burn out, having the company’s name in their resume will grant them dozens of new opportunities.

zerr 8y ago
How did you enter the game industry?
- guessmyname 8y ago
  I joined a game studio as a Generalist Programmer, I started writing infrastructure tools and doing things that nowadays people refer to as “Development Operations (aka. DevOps)”. Then, I continued collaborating to game-specific projects, improving bits and pieces here and there. Thanks to my background in C++ I was able to make significant contributions. I also have built a few mobile games for my children to play with, but I’m not a game designer and don’t have artistic skills, so I try to stick to the algorithmic part of the projects.
alkibiades 8y ago
have you tried lately? it seems like it’s gotten a lot easier lately since the market has been heating up. Source: tried a few months ago and got all the offers also
- guessmyname 8y ago
  Congratulations on getting the offers. I haven’t applied lately. Working in one of these big companies was a dream of my younger self. Nowadays, I prefer companies where I can work at my own pace. Moreover, while the salaries at these companies are exaggeratedly high, especially in San Francisco, I feel that my current compensation package is good enough to live a kind and peaceful life.
cheez 8y ago
It's because you're old, come on.
- commonsense1234 8y ago
  its an open forum. you can get away with whatever shit you come up with.
vinhboy 8y ago
I am just leaving a comment to commiserate with you. This is exactly how I felt. And I have a similar story. It was a depressing time. > Finally, I realized my brain needs more time than the average programmer I also came to this conclusion. I accept it and focus on my strengths as a team lead instead.
RHSeeger 8y ago
> Finally, I realized my brain needs more time than the average programmer to find patterns in this type of problems. I'm the same way. I'm really good a identifying solutions to a problem. I'm really good at identifying the costs/benefits/issues with each of the problems. However, I take a while to get there. I may figure out one (suboptimal) solution quickly, but it takes me a while to pick out a variety of them and identify the one I think is the right one for the current situation.
- spiritcat 8y ago
  Story of my life, watching everyone else quickly come up with the wrong answers. :P In school would usually (ok, often) get highest score, but took the longest to finish.
  - GoodJokes 8y ago
    yea, speed is very overrated in a lot of cases. Too bad big companies don’t understand this or refuse to admit it.
rachelbythebay 8y ago
Programmer distillation. Companies need to admit that only trying to hire a single type of person is not going to work. It's just like with petroleum: there's nothing wrong with the other products you get from the mix. You just have to appreciate what there is and make the most of it. I bet you're quite good at something (perhaps multiple things), but they don't value it. Their loss. I'm glad you found something that works for you.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Permit 8y ago
  > Companies need to admit that only trying to hire a single type of person is not going to work. Why? It's not so clear to me that it's not working right now. These companies seem to be doing completely fine. If hiring programmers who aren't good at programming puzzles is a competitive edge, I would expect to see other companies hiring these programmers and succeeding. It seems more likely to me that there is (at most) a very marginal loss from hiring this way. It's not the fairest way to hire, it's not the most equitable way to hire but the evidence doesn't suggest to me that it's not working for these companies.
  - Jach 8y ago
    It's really hard to argue with money printing machines that anything they're doing now is wrong. I don't even want to bother much myself if I can help it... Sure, maybe if they changed some things they could print money a tiny bit faster, or set themselves up to survive the next phase of the economy in some years when it's no longer so easy to print money (lots of companies die over ~15 years, which also corresponds to the global economy's doubling rate...). But also any change has an element of risk, so the money printing could slow down or put it in a worse long-term position. When something is working great right now, you're reasonably going to be more risk-adverse about changing things. We do see other companies hiring differently, and being rewarded in the market, in part, for it. Most of the time it's a marginal reward. Sometimes though we get a new FAANG, staffed by people who wouldn't have made it through FAANG's ringers.
zerohp 8y ago
I was a programmer for 10+ years and I couldn't pass the technical interviews for these companies either. I started down the path of trying to self-learn Computer Science but reading books wasn't enough for me so I wen't back to school for it. Around the end of my CS bachelors I pivoted to hardware and stuck around for a masters in ECE. Now I work at one of the companies mentioned. It is much harder to learn CS on your own than it is in a structured environment. Your experience allowed you to move toward doing work that excites you. Even though you didn't meet your goal, you still had great success.
odorousrex 8y ago
I cannot help but think that these big tech companies (FAANG, et. al) are missing out on diversifying and increasing their engineering expertise by passing over developers like you. I often think what would Google/Facebook would be like if they hired in some experienced engineers that may not be able to whiteboard a BFS tree or can tell you Djikstra's algorithm, but have proven business track records of getting projects done, on budget, and on time. Real, pragmatic, get-it-done types of engineers. (That's not to say whiteboard expert engineers can't also be this way - it's just that whiteboard interviews don't hire for this in particular - technical expertise comes first) There was an excellent comment on another thread yesterday (that I can't find) that basically said something along the lines of "If I'm asked about BFS trees in an interview I'm going to tell them I'm just going to google a library that can handle it - I've got more important work to get done"
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mav3rick 8y ago
  This is just ridiculous. BFS is such a useful building block. If you're stubborn enough to not spend 10 mins on this the best of luck.
  - ojr 8y ago
    The creator of ruby on rails wouldn't pass a whiteboard interview. Ruby on Rails had more of an impact at Twitter, Github, Airbnb than BFS is my guess DHH's tweet https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1085987159406927872 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1085987159406927872
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - hungryhobo 8y ago
      i mean if had to choose between no graph theory vs no ruby on rails...i would probably go with no ruby on rails
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
I call this "slow coding". Taking time to understand a problem, try out solutions, take a walk, come back to it, no pressure, no marathons. Just progress an inch at a time.
noncoml 8y ago
> Finally, I realized my brain needs more time than the average programmer to find patterns in this type of problems. > I gave up on my goal to land a job in one of these big corporations. Maybe we are just not good enough.. And maybe it's sour grapes for having been rejected by them, but honestly I don't feel I would be a good fit for Google or FB ideologically. I value user privacy and freedom too much. In my eyes they are both evil-corps.
- rhizome 8y ago
  It's contextual. I've worked at a big, cool company before, and the things I had to be good at to survive (mostly non-technical) simply were not important to me, nor very useful outside of work. They were core requirements for long-term success there, though.
  - chris11 8y ago
    I'm interested in hearing more about that. What were the non-technical requirements that you didn't like?
    - rhizome 8y ago
      Mostly the highly-significant role that social relations play, far beyond what I have experienced at <100ppl companies. This was also in vidya, so it was extra...I don't know if I'd say "vicious," but competitive for sure.
      - AlexCoventry 8y ago
        What's vidya?
commandlinefan 8y ago
> my brain needs more time than the average programmer Well, maybe not even the "average" programmer, but just the elite of the elite Google-tier programmers ; ) I feel the same way. When I was young, I thought that absolute mastery was within my grasp but after 25 years, tons of self-study, a couple of college degrees and yet still a lot of surprising rejections, I have to concede that while I may actually be very good at what I do (I'm among the most respected and most sought after everywhere I've ever worked), there are still people out there WAY better than I am, and that's OK.
anth_anm 8y ago
2.5 years out of college sounds like it's still in that sweet spot where you can just grind Leetcode and pass interviews.
JimboOmega 8y ago
How did you find the jobs through those books and competitive programming exercises?
behringer 8y ago
If you want my opinion, these companies aren't looking for awesome talent. They're looking for people who will put up with their schedules, demands, management. They don't want creative thinkers with experience in multiple fields. They're looking for one-trick ponies that will do what their told and will be happy to get stabled by 40. You're better off following your own path and making your own things happen.
- jopsen 8y ago
  I work at Google some of my co-workers work reasonable hours, quite a few have been there for 10 years. The same was the case when I worked at Mozilla.. But I've always felt the interview process at these places extremely arbitrary.
- mav3rick 8y ago
  "They don't want creative thinkers with experience in multiple fields" You have no idea how diverse people are in terms of talent at big companies. This is a myth peddled here at HN that FAANG employees write CRUD apps and are one dimensional. The best perk of my job is the random lunch scheduler where I've met a former Olympian, someone who is on the Rust core API team and a professional ballerina + software person.
blobbers 8y ago
Don't you think you're taking a bit of a fatalistic approach to things? I applaud the linked article's can-do attitude and pro-active approach to studying for what to be honest is a slightly silly interview process. I'm not arguing that it shouldn't be the way it is, and I'm also not arguing against. Claiming "Finally, I realized my brain needs more time than the average programmer to find patterns in this type of problems." feels a little bit like you've given up and that in itself strikes me as the worst sign.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
laumars 8y ago
I don't get some peoples fascination with working for FAANG anyway. As you said yourself, you've had some amazing jobs outside of FAANG. People seem to hold such prestige for working at a household named software house but that doesn't mean the work is going to be any more interesting than at any of the countless other technology companies out there that are on the bleeding edge.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  It’s the same reason high school students apply to Stanford and MIT; there are amazing programs everywhere but top-level universities carry prestige and may have higher quality opportunities.
  - laumars 8y ago
    I did cover those points. As I said, the prestige is misguided (in the case of FAANG) and you don't need to go down the FAANG route to have access to higher quality opportunities. Those companies sure want you to believe what you're claiming because it means they get the first bite of the cherry but the reality is very different (from my experience anyway).
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      You can have higher quality opportunities everywhere; it’s just that it’s often easier at those companies. Just like going to certain universities means it’s easier to find professors who lead their field, recruiters from better companies, and more access to be with smart people.
      - laumars 8y ago
        But is it actually any easier given you have to also factor in going through their painful recruitment process and actually getting employed by them in the first place? Maybe my things are different in London than they are in SV but I've never had any issues. Quite the opposite in fact; I've been turning awesome jobs down.
diminoten 8y ago
I bet a contributing factor in this is that you think other people are "faster". They're not, we're not. The only difference between you and someone who's good at these interviews is that the good ones accept that uncertainty and are willing to work through it and you aren't. Nobody aces those interviews in the way you probably think; by just magically knowing every detail.
Justsignedup 8y ago
The truth is that it is a tough problem. Everyone wants to figure out if you're smart and can figure problems out. I have, however, seen 10 year engineers have trouble reading a small data structure and writing 2 nested loops. So I think the biggest issue is just nervousness. I mean yes, some engineers are going to be better at interviews than others but we gotta go by some signals. We had to flunk a few because it was "we see the depth of knowledge the person describes, but we have to go by the signals we saw, otherwise we're just randomly picking people". Point is it is tough. However it does say something that our interviews are just a bunch of quizzes and studying for a month will make a huge difference. When hiring the goal is to find out if the person is good, not if they crammed, but cramming does work quite well.

zerr 8y ago

How did you enter the game industry?

guessmyname 8y ago
I joined a game studio as a Generalist Programmer, I started writing infrastructure tools and doing things that nowadays people refer to as “Development Operations (aka. DevOps)”. Then, I continued collaborating to game-specific projects, improving bits and pieces here and there. Thanks to my background in C++ I was able to make significant contributions. I also have built a few mobile games for my children to play with, but I’m not a game designer and don’t have artistic skills, so I try to stick to the algorithmic part of the projects.

alkibiades 8y ago

have you tried lately? it seems like it’s gotten a lot easier lately since the market has been heating up. Source: tried a few months ago and got all the offers also

guessmyname 8y ago
Congratulations on getting the offers. I haven’t applied lately. Working in one of these big companies was a dream of my younger self. Nowadays, I prefer companies where I can work at my own pace. Moreover, while the salaries at these companies are exaggeratedly high, especially in San Francisco, I feel that my current compensation package is good enough to live a kind and peaceful life.

cheez 8y ago

It's because you're old, come on.

commonsense1234 8y ago
its an open forum. you can get away with whatever shit you come up with.

vinhboy 8y ago

I am just leaving a comment to commiserate with you. This is exactly how I felt. And I have a similar story. It was a depressing time. > Finally, I realized my brain needs more time than the average programmer I also came to this conclusion. I accept it and focus on my strengths as a team lead instead.

RHSeeger 8y ago

> Finally, I realized my brain needs more time than the average programmer to find patterns in this type of problems. I'm the same way. I'm really good a identifying solutions to a problem. I'm really good at identifying the costs/benefits/issues with each of the problems. However, I take a while to get there. I may figure out one (suboptimal) solution quickly, but it takes me a while to pick out a variety of them and identify the one I think is the right one for the current situation.

spiritcat 8y ago
Story of my life, watching everyone else quickly come up with the wrong answers. :P In school would usually (ok, often) get highest score, but took the longest to finish.
- GoodJokes 8y ago
  yea, speed is very overrated in a lot of cases. Too bad big companies don’t understand this or refuse to admit it.

rachelbythebay 8y ago

Programmer distillation. Companies need to admit that only trying to hire a single type of person is not going to work. It's just like with petroleum: there's nothing wrong with the other products you get from the mix. You just have to appreciate what there is and make the most of it. I bet you're quite good at something (perhaps multiple things), but they don't value it. Their loss. I'm glad you found something that works for you.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Permit 8y ago
> Companies need to admit that only trying to hire a single type of person is not going to work. Why? It's not so clear to me that it's not working right now. These companies seem to be doing completely fine. If hiring programmers who aren't good at programming puzzles is a competitive edge, I would expect to see other companies hiring these programmers and succeeding. It seems more likely to me that there is (at most) a very marginal loss from hiring this way. It's not the fairest way to hire, it's not the most equitable way to hire but the evidence doesn't suggest to me that it's not working for these companies.
- Jach 8y ago
  It's really hard to argue with money printing machines that anything they're doing now is wrong. I don't even want to bother much myself if I can help it... Sure, maybe if they changed some things they could print money a tiny bit faster, or set themselves up to survive the next phase of the economy in some years when it's no longer so easy to print money (lots of companies die over ~15 years, which also corresponds to the global economy's doubling rate...). But also any change has an element of risk, so the money printing could slow down or put it in a worse long-term position. When something is working great right now, you're reasonably going to be more risk-adverse about changing things. We do see other companies hiring differently, and being rewarded in the market, in part, for it. Most of the time it's a marginal reward. Sometimes though we get a new FAANG, staffed by people who wouldn't have made it through FAANG's ringers.

zerohp 8y ago

I was a programmer for 10+ years and I couldn't pass the technical interviews for these companies either. I started down the path of trying to self-learn Computer Science but reading books wasn't enough for me so I wen't back to school for it. Around the end of my CS bachelors I pivoted to hardware and stuck around for a masters in ECE. Now I work at one of the companies mentioned. It is much harder to learn CS on your own than it is in a structured environment. Your experience allowed you to move toward doing work that excites you. Even though you didn't meet your goal, you still had great success.

odorousrex 8y ago

I cannot help but think that these big tech companies (FAANG, et. al) are missing out on diversifying and increasing their engineering expertise by passing over developers like you. I often think what would Google/Facebook would be like if they hired in some experienced engineers that may not be able to whiteboard a BFS tree or can tell you Djikstra's algorithm, but have proven business track records of getting projects done, on budget, and on time. Real, pragmatic, get-it-done types of engineers. (That's not to say whiteboard expert engineers can't also be this way - it's just that whiteboard interviews don't hire for this in particular - technical expertise comes first) There was an excellent comment on another thread yesterday (that I can't find) that basically said something along the lines of "If I'm asked about BFS trees in an interview I'm going to tell them I'm just going to google a library that can handle it - I've got more important work to get done"

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mav3rick 8y ago
This is just ridiculous. BFS is such a useful building block. If you're stubborn enough to not spend 10 mins on this the best of luck.
- ojr 8y ago
  The creator of ruby on rails wouldn't pass a whiteboard interview. Ruby on Rails had more of an impact at Twitter, Github, Airbnb than BFS is my guess DHH's tweet https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1085987159406927872 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1085987159406927872
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - hungryhobo 8y ago
    i mean if had to choose between no graph theory vs no ruby on rails...i would probably go with no ruby on rails

lifeisstillgood 8y ago

I call this "slow coding". Taking time to understand a problem, try out solutions, take a walk, come back to it, no pressure, no marathons. Just progress an inch at a time.

noncoml 8y ago

> Finally, I realized my brain needs more time than the average programmer to find patterns in this type of problems. > I gave up on my goal to land a job in one of these big corporations. Maybe we are just not good enough.. And maybe it's sour grapes for having been rejected by them, but honestly I don't feel I would be a good fit for Google or FB ideologically. I value user privacy and freedom too much. In my eyes they are both evil-corps.

rhizome 8y ago
It's contextual. I've worked at a big, cool company before, and the things I had to be good at to survive (mostly non-technical) simply were not important to me, nor very useful outside of work. They were core requirements for long-term success there, though.
- chris11 8y ago
  I'm interested in hearing more about that. What were the non-technical requirements that you didn't like?
  - rhizome 8y ago
    Mostly the highly-significant role that social relations play, far beyond what I have experienced at <100ppl companies. This was also in vidya, so it was extra...I don't know if I'd say "vicious," but competitive for sure.
    - AlexCoventry 8y ago
      What's vidya?

commandlinefan 8y ago

> my brain needs more time than the average programmer Well, maybe not even the "average" programmer, but just the elite of the elite Google-tier programmers ; ) I feel the same way. When I was young, I thought that absolute mastery was within my grasp but after 25 years, tons of self-study, a couple of college degrees and yet still a lot of surprising rejections, I have to concede that while I may actually be very good at what I do (I'm among the most respected and most sought after everywhere I've ever worked), there are still people out there WAY better than I am, and that's OK.

anth_anm 8y ago

2.5 years out of college sounds like it's still in that sweet spot where you can just grind Leetcode and pass interviews.

JimboOmega 8y ago

How did you find the jobs through those books and competitive programming exercises?

behringer 8y ago

If you want my opinion, these companies aren't looking for awesome talent. They're looking for people who will put up with their schedules, demands, management. They don't want creative thinkers with experience in multiple fields. They're looking for one-trick ponies that will do what their told and will be happy to get stabled by 40. You're better off following your own path and making your own things happen.

jopsen 8y ago
I work at Google some of my co-workers work reasonable hours, quite a few have been there for 10 years. The same was the case when I worked at Mozilla.. But I've always felt the interview process at these places extremely arbitrary.
mav3rick 8y ago
"They don't want creative thinkers with experience in multiple fields" You have no idea how diverse people are in terms of talent at big companies. This is a myth peddled here at HN that FAANG employees write CRUD apps and are one dimensional. The best perk of my job is the random lunch scheduler where I've met a former Olympian, someone who is on the Rust core API team and a professional ballerina + software person.

blobbers 8y ago

Don't you think you're taking a bit of a fatalistic approach to things? I applaud the linked article's can-do attitude and pro-active approach to studying for what to be honest is a slightly silly interview process. I'm not arguing that it shouldn't be the way it is, and I'm also not arguing against. Claiming "Finally, I realized my brain needs more time than the average programmer to find patterns in this type of problems." feels a little bit like you've given up and that in itself strikes me as the worst sign.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

laumars 8y ago

I don't get some peoples fascination with working for FAANG anyway. As you said yourself, you've had some amazing jobs outside of FAANG. People seem to hold such prestige for working at a household named software house but that doesn't mean the work is going to be any more interesting than at any of the countless other technology companies out there that are on the bleeding edge.

saagarjha 8y ago
It’s the same reason high school students apply to Stanford and MIT; there are amazing programs everywhere but top-level universities carry prestige and may have higher quality opportunities.
- laumars 8y ago
  I did cover those points. As I said, the prestige is misguided (in the case of FAANG) and you don't need to go down the FAANG route to have access to higher quality opportunities. Those companies sure want you to believe what you're claiming because it means they get the first bite of the cherry but the reality is very different (from my experience anyway).
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    You can have higher quality opportunities everywhere; it’s just that it’s often easier at those companies. Just like going to certain universities means it’s easier to find professors who lead their field, recruiters from better companies, and more access to be with smart people.
    - laumars 8y ago
      But is it actually any easier given you have to also factor in going through their painful recruitment process and actually getting employed by them in the first place? Maybe my things are different in London than they are in SV but I've never had any issues. Quite the opposite in fact; I've been turning awesome jobs down.

diminoten 8y ago

I bet a contributing factor in this is that you think other people are "faster". They're not, we're not. The only difference between you and someone who's good at these interviews is that the good ones accept that uncertainty and are willing to work through it and you aren't. Nobody aces those interviews in the way you probably think; by just magically knowing every detail.

Justsignedup 8y ago

The truth is that it is a tough problem. Everyone wants to figure out if you're smart and can figure problems out. I have, however, seen 10 year engineers have trouble reading a small data structure and writing 2 nested loops. So I think the biggest issue is just nervousness. I mean yes, some engineers are going to be better at interviews than others but we gotta go by some signals. We had to flunk a few because it was "we see the depth of knowledge the person describes, but we have to go by the signals we saw, otherwise we're just randomly picking people". Point is it is tough. However it does say something that our interviews are just a bunch of quizzes and studying for a month will make a huge difference. When hiring the goal is to find out if the person is good, not if they crammed, but cramming does work quite well.