6 ms·

In my experience, certainly no interviewers think that they're screening for "ability to study and dedicate yourself to a task." In being on both sides of the t

In my experience, certainly no interviewers think that they're screening for "ability to study and dedicate yourself to a task." In being on both sides of the table for more than thirty years, I have never heard an interviewer mention that.

marcinzm 6y ago
Companies encourage you to study for the interview, providing you with links to books, guides and preparation material. They'll delay the interview to give you time to study more. So it seems pretty clear to me that corporate management sees it as a test of study skills even if interviewers don't. edit: I'm talking about large tech companies, not the startups blindly copying their policies with little thought or consideration.
- m3kw9 6y ago
  Never seen that happening. Have interviewed with a few FANG companies. There are hundreds of things they can ask and is not reasonable to study for them all
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    I've had FAANG tell me to read Cracking the Coding Interview, sent me links to leetcode/hackerank, sent me PDFs with notes on what topics would be covered for domain specific interviews, linked me to their blog posts on architecture design, videos by their engineers on how to prepare, given me the literal behavioral questions I got asked, etc, etc. Facebook sent me well over a dozen links to guides for my interview and half of those had further links in them (including to a list of practice questions on hackerank). edit: It is also very reasonable to study having done it myself and talked to people who have gotten into these companies. At 15 minutes a pop you can do 100+ leetcode questions a week. Spend a few months and you'll have studied almost every reasonable question. Most of them are repetitive patterns but around 5% have tricks you need to memorize. That covers 2-3 out of your 5 interviews. Behavioral you need to memorize around 5 questions that they'll basically give you ahead of time. System design is harder but there's videos for the 10 topics that will cover 90% of the potential questions.
    - m3kw9 6y ago
      I really think having people pass these coding interviews is so that the interviewer isn’t responsible in selecting the wrong person.
    - charliepark 6y ago
      What kind of team are you with? And how many leetcode-style problems have you solved in your actual work over the past week?
    - euix 6y ago
      I went through the same thing for my Facebook interview. How do you do this if you have a day job or even worse, a day job and a family?
      - marcinzm 6y ago
        I feel these companies prefer to promote internally so losing senior talent doesn't bother them as much. Fairness is not a quality I associate with them.
        disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        That is definitely not true any more, as they got bigger most of them desperately tried to hire experienced external hires, on the principle that nobody gets for fired for hiring an ex-Googler.
    - mlboss 6y ago
      Can you post the source of system design videos ?
    - cmonnow 6y ago
      > At 15 minutes a pop you can do 100+ leetcode questions a week. By that logic, most people would have completed all 1500 LC's in 4 months. Numbers say otherwise. Each medium difficulty problem takes an hour to solve, assuming you can come up with a non-brute-force solution. Most of them force you to lookup, understand and implement other people's ideas. If you can do 3 problems a day, completely on your own without any lookup, you're doing good pace.
- dukeme09 6y ago
  Some companies even go further. I invited for McKinsey as an experienced hire. They not only sent me study materials, but also setup phone calls with McKinsey alums to practice for the interview and gave me the flexibility to speed up or slow down the process based on how prepared I felt for their interview process.
- closeparen 6y ago
  Everyone involved in the process wants you to succeed. If not out of the goodness of our hearts, then because we've invested time. Under-preparedness is a stupid and preventable reason to lose a candidate. When someone comes in and bombs, that is at least valuable information: we don't want to work with this person. When someone comes in and seems smart and capable, but makes hardly any progress on the problem because it's obviously their first time on a whiteboard, it's just regrettable all around. We're not selecting for preparedness. In fact, we try to select against it: interviewers take pride in designing twists that separate understanding from recall. If you seem to be recalling, we're supposed to pick a different question, or failing that, report a null signal. But we do need you to be prepared enough that your interview skills don't get in the way of your actual skills.

marcinzm 6y ago

Companies encourage you to study for the interview, providing you with links to books, guides and preparation material. They'll delay the interview to give you time to study more. So it seems pretty clear to me that corporate management sees it as a test of study skills even if interviewers don't. edit: I'm talking about large tech companies, not the startups blindly copying their policies with little thought or consideration.

m3kw9 6y ago
Never seen that happening. Have interviewed with a few FANG companies. There are hundreds of things they can ask and is not reasonable to study for them all
- marcinzm 6y ago
  I've had FAANG tell me to read Cracking the Coding Interview, sent me links to leetcode/hackerank, sent me PDFs with notes on what topics would be covered for domain specific interviews, linked me to their blog posts on architecture design, videos by their engineers on how to prepare, given me the literal behavioral questions I got asked, etc, etc. Facebook sent me well over a dozen links to guides for my interview and half of those had further links in them (including to a list of practice questions on hackerank). edit: It is also very reasonable to study having done it myself and talked to people who have gotten into these companies. At 15 minutes a pop you can do 100+ leetcode questions a week. Spend a few months and you'll have studied almost every reasonable question. Most of them are repetitive patterns but around 5% have tricks you need to memorize. That covers 2-3 out of your 5 interviews. Behavioral you need to memorize around 5 questions that they'll basically give you ahead of time. System design is harder but there's videos for the 10 topics that will cover 90% of the potential questions.
  - m3kw9 6y ago
    I really think having people pass these coding interviews is so that the interviewer isn’t responsible in selecting the wrong person.
  - charliepark 6y ago
    What kind of team are you with? And how many leetcode-style problems have you solved in your actual work over the past week?
  - euix 6y ago
    I went through the same thing for my Facebook interview. How do you do this if you have a day job or even worse, a day job and a family?
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      I feel these companies prefer to promote internally so losing senior talent doesn't bother them as much. Fairness is not a quality I associate with them.
      - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
        That is definitely not true any more, as they got bigger most of them desperately tried to hire experienced external hires, on the principle that nobody gets for fired for hiring an ex-Googler.
  - mlboss 6y ago
    Can you post the source of system design videos ?
  - cmonnow 6y ago
    > At 15 minutes a pop you can do 100+ leetcode questions a week. By that logic, most people would have completed all 1500 LC's in 4 months. Numbers say otherwise. Each medium difficulty problem takes an hour to solve, assuming you can come up with a non-brute-force solution. Most of them force you to lookup, understand and implement other people's ideas. If you can do 3 problems a day, completely on your own without any lookup, you're doing good pace.
dukeme09 6y ago
Some companies even go further. I invited for McKinsey as an experienced hire. They not only sent me study materials, but also setup phone calls with McKinsey alums to practice for the interview and gave me the flexibility to speed up or slow down the process based on how prepared I felt for their interview process.
closeparen 6y ago
Everyone involved in the process wants you to succeed. If not out of the goodness of our hearts, then because we've invested time. Under-preparedness is a stupid and preventable reason to lose a candidate. When someone comes in and bombs, that is at least valuable information: we don't want to work with this person. When someone comes in and seems smart and capable, but makes hardly any progress on the problem because it's obviously their first time on a whiteboard, it's just regrettable all around. We're not selecting for preparedness. In fact, we try to select against it: interviewers take pride in designing twists that separate understanding from recall. If you seem to be recalling, we're supposed to pick a different question, or failing that, report a null signal. But we do need you to be prepared enough that your interview skills don't get in the way of your actual skills.