8 ms·

I'm actually a little scared to leave my current FAANG gig for that exact reason tbh. I'm fairly certain I wouldn't make it back in the door without more leetco

I'm actually a little scared to leave my current FAANG gig for that exact reason tbh. I'm fairly certain I wouldn't make it back in the door without more leetcode grinding + repeated loops than I'm willing to do at this point in my career. Plus, stack on top of that, I've seen how the sausage is made. I've done 90+ interviews on the other side. At the end of the day, it comes down to how lucky you got in the loop. I've seen some people written off for some bullshit reasons. Similarly, I'VE declined on people who're likely far, far, far more skilled than I am because of the lowers/raises approach and the narrow slice you're tasked with reviewing in the 50min you're given.

alkibiades 6y ago
idk if it’s just luck. i’ve had loops in college where i failed them. but then later in my career i had times where i got every company i interviewed at. Excessive preparation was the key difference. I do think luck plays a big part but i don’t think it’s the only factor, or even the biggest. (maybe 2nd biggest)
- bradlys 6y ago
  Luck is likely not far off from preparation in terms of effect though. Luck could be divided up into separate parts like: chance you get an interviewer who asks easy problems, chance you get a hostile interviewer, chance your interviewer is racist/sexist/tabs-ist/hates-your-face, chance your interviewer loves you for no apparent reason, chance your interview is going through a divorce, etc.. I've seen some of the best interviewers I know still fail at various companies. Including ones they were given offers to before. Luck might not be the #1 component but it sure feels like it's not a distant second.
  - decafninja 6y ago
    There are some components to the interview you can directly affect, and some you can't. By grinding leetcode, you raise the odds that you'll get a problem you've seen before, or at least similar enough that you recognize the way to solve it without having to waste time by starting from absolute scratch. I guess that's still luck, but this is one area you can increase the odds in your favor. You can't change whether you get a hostile interviewer, etc. of course.
  - alkibiades 6y ago
    i agree but regarding your example about failing companies that you’ve previously had offers from: ive seen this as well. but it was a case of hubris where the person didn’t put in the work to prepare as hard the second time because of their previous results. the shitty thing about interviewing is you have to prepare hard every time you approach it
    - bradlys 6y ago
      While that might be the case for people you've known - I've seen it with people who prepared even more than the last time. I've also seen the opposite - right? People don't prepare anywhere near as much as the last time and still get offers. I've seen folks get offers at Google and spent maybe a few hours preparing. Luck is just a very wild component.
- kmonsen 6y ago
  Yeah, I'm 40+ but takes the time to prepare well for interviews and that has been the key for me. Gotten job offers from all the FAANG's without being very smart. Just go on leetcode and practice for a few months when needed. This does very unfairly skew towards people like me without kids that can take the time to do this.
  - akhilcacharya 6y ago
    Being good at LC requires being smart. Most people won't be able to do "justify text" in 20 minutes without looking up an implementation (and potentially memorizing it).
    - alkibiades 6y ago
      for me atleast that also came with experience. ie that would have been impossible in my first job search. But repeating the process of searching for jobs a few times over a decade, each time i’m preparing for interviews i’m able to build somewhat on previous times to where problems like that are manageable.
    - kerng 6y ago
      Not really, most questions have answers and discussion threads - during an interview you can see people just writing up solutions flawlessly - they just memorised them. I have interviewed 100+ people. I don't think regular coding questions, LC tell you anything meaningful in an interview. I'm more experienced now, so refuse doing it and recruiters and interviewers get all funny about it. But please, please interview. I know I'm pretty privileged compared to others but I won't ever do a LC question anymore and tell that upfront to Google and the likes. I have canceled loops because of the inflexibilty of some companies in that regard. Sometimes they tried sneaking it in last minute - also tells you much.
      - kmonsen 6y ago
        Can I ask why you refuse? For me it is more of a formality at this point. I know it won't tell a lot about me, except I cared enough to put in the hours to get this job, but still you have to do what you have to do. I'm pretty senior as well but don't really see why I should not do this when everyone else has to. In general though the tech industry has a really hard time hiring senior people, perhaps for this reason. I was at Google for 10+ years and did 100+ interviews, HC etc and once you talked to the people in charge of the process they admitted that the process is really weak for hiring senior (L5+ in Google speak) candidates. They in many ways perform worse than new grads in coding interviews which is not really surprising. So Google hardly hires anyone experience before you get to the director levels (hardly as a percentage of course). The other well know secret is that if all of us would try to do an interview unprepared we would probably fail.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Even when you prepare for months, your preparation needs to be related to what you'll actually see in the interview to pay off. Because few companies actually tell people what to expect in the interview, even preparation involves luck.
jsinai 6y ago
What is the lowers/raises approach? Google isn’t up to the job (pun was not initially intended, but here we are).
- btgeekboy 6y ago
  I think it’s the candidate vs team. Is the candidate better or worse than half of the team?
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    Yep. "does this candidate raise the bar, or lower it". I.e., they have to be better than the average at the company already. As decided by you, from 50 minutes of interaction in a completely artificial, stressful situation.
- a-priori 6y ago
  I don't know what company they're referring to but at Amazon, the criteria for hiring someone is that interviewee would be better than 50% of the people currently doing that role at the company. They should 'raise the bar' in order to be hired.
  - volkk 6y ago
    how do you even gauge that? it sounds like you'd need to keep re-interviewing the current people there to make it relative and fair. which of course isnt going to happen so "raising" the bar doesnt make any sense whatsoever
  - mattkrause 6y ago
    Doesn't this make it (literally) exponentially harder to hire people?
    - decafninja 6y ago
      I think that's part of the point. i.e. the usual line about wanting to avoid false positives (bad engineers putting on an act) even if it means sacrificing many false negatives (good engineers who suck at interviewing, or even just simply wasn't having a good day on the day of the interview). Ironically the modern technical whiteboarding interview often does require the candidate to effectively act and put on a show,
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sleepyshift 6y ago
I'm in a similar position - a tech lead role at a Big N - and have recently been doing some interviews for senior roles at FAANG. The most frustrating thing is knowing I can't really leverage anything I've learned over the past 7 years of my career in the interview, at least at the early stages. I've been "studying" Leetcode after work for a month or so but always seem to make stupid mistakes under the time pressure of the interview. I don't want to spend my entire career at one company, but it's clear I'll need to be very lucky and/or practice much harder on my own time if I want anything like a similar position/salary elsewhere.
- decafninja 6y ago
  This is something I find so disturbing, and I experience similar. I feel extremely little of what I'm doing in my real, actual, job, helps me in advancing in my career. Unless maybe if I choose to stay at my current company until retirement lol. Otherwise, why bother doing anything more than the bare minimum to get by at work? It would be a far better investment of time and effort to grind leetcode and practice for interviews, instead of going above and beyond to excel at my job. At least until I get into an "endgame company" where I feel it's worth staying long term.
  - u67583 6y ago
    If you want a good career, working on your interviewing skills is the most important thing. Networking and resume fluff are close seconds. Job skill is almost irrelevant. It's an ugly truth.
    - hawk_ 6y ago
      sad but true. hope as an industry we can find a better way.
      - ipnon 6y ago
        I think the answer is we need more innovation. We need a million small startups instead of a dozen tech giants. Software scales but starting up is a moonshot.
PascLeRasc 6y ago
My dream is to have some kind of "working for myself" career like the creators of the Apollo or Overcast apps. Not contracting with companies as clients, just working on one small great project for regular people to use and selling it yourself. It sounds fantastic.
m3kw9 6y ago
Yeah, sometimes you may not be thinking straight, a have a little sleep hangover/anxiety Induced brain fog on the day of, and you can say bye bye to the job.
hysan 6y ago
I would think that this is partially by design to get employees to second guess ever wanting to leave and explore other options.
birdyrooster 6y ago
Stop lumping Apple into FAANG in this way. Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google all have centralized hiring. Apple does not and no two groups interview the same and there is tons of latitude for managers to make this lower toil. There is no cross-organization level setting or job descriptions for any position at Apple outside of an SVP business unit. I know from experience working at two other FAANGs that Apple does things way differently. Apple's biggest weaknesses and strengths come from their lack of centrality, but here it is to the benefit of the interviewee since they are given more individual care out at the periphery.
- decafninja 6y ago
  My understanding is Netflix does not have centralized hiring either?
- dripton 6y ago
  Amazon does not really have centralized hiring. Each team hires for itself, though there are bar raisers from outside the team designed to be a counterweight to desperate hiring managers.
mavsman 6y ago
I was this way too. I got into Amazon via acquisition so I never actually passed a real interview process (though there was a limited one as part of the acquisition). I transferred teams within Amazon and then left for my current company. I do wonder if I'll ever be willing to put in the work to get a FAANG job again but at the moment I really don't care. I like where I am so I'll just cross that bridge when I get to it. If I want it badly enough at some point then I'll go through the steps. If I don't, I'll just find another job.

alkibiades 6y ago

idk if it’s just luck. i’ve had loops in college where i failed them. but then later in my career i had times where i got every company i interviewed at. Excessive preparation was the key difference. I do think luck plays a big part but i don’t think it’s the only factor, or even the biggest. (maybe 2nd biggest)

bradlys 6y ago
Luck is likely not far off from preparation in terms of effect though. Luck could be divided up into separate parts like: chance you get an interviewer who asks easy problems, chance you get a hostile interviewer, chance your interviewer is racist/sexist/tabs-ist/hates-your-face, chance your interviewer loves you for no apparent reason, chance your interview is going through a divorce, etc.. I've seen some of the best interviewers I know still fail at various companies. Including ones they were given offers to before. Luck might not be the #1 component but it sure feels like it's not a distant second.
- decafninja 6y ago
  There are some components to the interview you can directly affect, and some you can't. By grinding leetcode, you raise the odds that you'll get a problem you've seen before, or at least similar enough that you recognize the way to solve it without having to waste time by starting from absolute scratch. I guess that's still luck, but this is one area you can increase the odds in your favor. You can't change whether you get a hostile interviewer, etc. of course.
- alkibiades 6y ago
  i agree but regarding your example about failing companies that you’ve previously had offers from: ive seen this as well. but it was a case of hubris where the person didn’t put in the work to prepare as hard the second time because of their previous results. the shitty thing about interviewing is you have to prepare hard every time you approach it
  - bradlys 6y ago
    While that might be the case for people you've known - I've seen it with people who prepared even more than the last time. I've also seen the opposite - right? People don't prepare anywhere near as much as the last time and still get offers. I've seen folks get offers at Google and spent maybe a few hours preparing. Luck is just a very wild component.
kmonsen 6y ago
Yeah, I'm 40+ but takes the time to prepare well for interviews and that has been the key for me. Gotten job offers from all the FAANG's without being very smart. Just go on leetcode and practice for a few months when needed. This does very unfairly skew towards people like me without kids that can take the time to do this.
- akhilcacharya 6y ago
  Being good at LC requires being smart. Most people won't be able to do "justify text" in 20 minutes without looking up an implementation (and potentially memorizing it).
  - alkibiades 6y ago
    for me atleast that also came with experience. ie that would have been impossible in my first job search. But repeating the process of searching for jobs a few times over a decade, each time i’m preparing for interviews i’m able to build somewhat on previous times to where problems like that are manageable.
  - kerng 6y ago
    Not really, most questions have answers and discussion threads - during an interview you can see people just writing up solutions flawlessly - they just memorised them. I have interviewed 100+ people. I don't think regular coding questions, LC tell you anything meaningful in an interview. I'm more experienced now, so refuse doing it and recruiters and interviewers get all funny about it. But please, please interview. I know I'm pretty privileged compared to others but I won't ever do a LC question anymore and tell that upfront to Google and the likes. I have canceled loops because of the inflexibilty of some companies in that regard. Sometimes they tried sneaking it in last minute - also tells you much.
    - kmonsen 6y ago
      Can I ask why you refuse? For me it is more of a formality at this point. I know it won't tell a lot about me, except I cared enough to put in the hours to get this job, but still you have to do what you have to do. I'm pretty senior as well but don't really see why I should not do this when everyone else has to. In general though the tech industry has a really hard time hiring senior people, perhaps for this reason. I was at Google for 10+ years and did 100+ interviews, HC etc and once you talked to the people in charge of the process they admitted that the process is really weak for hiring senior (L5+ in Google speak) candidates. They in many ways perform worse than new grads in coding interviews which is not really surprising. So Google hardly hires anyone experience before you get to the director levels (hardly as a percentage of course). The other well know secret is that if all of us would try to do an interview unprepared we would probably fail.
pmiller2 6y ago
Even when you prepare for months, your preparation needs to be related to what you'll actually see in the interview to pay off. Because few companies actually tell people what to expect in the interview, even preparation involves luck.

jsinai 6y ago

What is the lowers/raises approach? Google isn’t up to the job (pun was not initially intended, but here we are).

btgeekboy 6y ago
I think it’s the candidate vs team. Is the candidate better or worse than half of the team?
- lostcolony 6y ago
  Yep. "does this candidate raise the bar, or lower it". I.e., they have to be better than the average at the company already. As decided by you, from 50 minutes of interaction in a completely artificial, stressful situation.
a-priori 6y ago
I don't know what company they're referring to but at Amazon, the criteria for hiring someone is that interviewee would be better than 50% of the people currently doing that role at the company. They should 'raise the bar' in order to be hired.
- volkk 6y ago
  how do you even gauge that? it sounds like you'd need to keep re-interviewing the current people there to make it relative and fair. which of course isnt going to happen so "raising" the bar doesnt make any sense whatsoever
- mattkrause 6y ago
  Doesn't this make it (literally) exponentially harder to hire people?
  - decafninja 6y ago
    I think that's part of the point. i.e. the usual line about wanting to avoid false positives (bad engineers putting on an act) even if it means sacrificing many false negatives (good engineers who suck at interviewing, or even just simply wasn't having a good day on the day of the interview). Ironically the modern technical whiteboarding interview often does require the candidate to effectively act and put on a show,

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sleepyshift 6y ago

I'm in a similar position - a tech lead role at a Big N - and have recently been doing some interviews for senior roles at FAANG. The most frustrating thing is knowing I can't really leverage anything I've learned over the past 7 years of my career in the interview, at least at the early stages. I've been "studying" Leetcode after work for a month or so but always seem to make stupid mistakes under the time pressure of the interview. I don't want to spend my entire career at one company, but it's clear I'll need to be very lucky and/or practice much harder on my own time if I want anything like a similar position/salary elsewhere.

decafninja 6y ago
This is something I find so disturbing, and I experience similar. I feel extremely little of what I'm doing in my real, actual, job, helps me in advancing in my career. Unless maybe if I choose to stay at my current company until retirement lol. Otherwise, why bother doing anything more than the bare minimum to get by at work? It would be a far better investment of time and effort to grind leetcode and practice for interviews, instead of going above and beyond to excel at my job. At least until I get into an "endgame company" where I feel it's worth staying long term.
- u67583 6y ago
  If you want a good career, working on your interviewing skills is the most important thing. Networking and resume fluff are close seconds. Job skill is almost irrelevant. It's an ugly truth.
  - hawk_ 6y ago
    sad but true. hope as an industry we can find a better way.
    - ipnon 6y ago
      I think the answer is we need more innovation. We need a million small startups instead of a dozen tech giants. Software scales but starting up is a moonshot.

PascLeRasc 6y ago

My dream is to have some kind of "working for myself" career like the creators of the Apollo or Overcast apps. Not contracting with companies as clients, just working on one small great project for regular people to use and selling it yourself. It sounds fantastic.

m3kw9 6y ago

Yeah, sometimes you may not be thinking straight, a have a little sleep hangover/anxiety Induced brain fog on the day of, and you can say bye bye to the job.

hysan 6y ago

I would think that this is partially by design to get employees to second guess ever wanting to leave and explore other options.

birdyrooster 6y ago

Stop lumping Apple into FAANG in this way. Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google all have centralized hiring. Apple does not and no two groups interview the same and there is tons of latitude for managers to make this lower toil. There is no cross-organization level setting or job descriptions for any position at Apple outside of an SVP business unit. I know from experience working at two other FAANGs that Apple does things way differently. Apple's biggest weaknesses and strengths come from their lack of centrality, but here it is to the benefit of the interviewee since they are given more individual care out at the periphery.

decafninja 6y ago
My understanding is Netflix does not have centralized hiring either?
dripton 6y ago
Amazon does not really have centralized hiring. Each team hires for itself, though there are bar raisers from outside the team designed to be a counterweight to desperate hiring managers.

mavsman 6y ago

I was this way too. I got into Amazon via acquisition so I never actually passed a real interview process (though there was a limited one as part of the acquisition). I transferred teams within Amazon and then left for my current company. I do wonder if I'll ever be willing to put in the work to get a FAANG job again but at the moment I really don't care. I like where I am so I'll just cross that bridge when I get to it. If I want it badly enough at some point then I'll go through the steps. If I don't, I'll just find another job.