13 ms·

I interviewed at Netflix several years ago. It was a fairly standard SV interview. That is - whiteboard questions on basic data structures and algorithms (I'm

by jcadam 6y ago

I interviewed at Netflix several years ago. It was a fairly standard SV interview. That is - whiteboard questions on basic data structures and algorithms (I'm 40 and I still absolutely suck at those). Failed of course :) But they put me up in a really nice hotel, so there's that. In the years since, I've definitely lost all interest in working in SV (the fact that I've failed every single interview I've had with SV companies admittedly might have something to do with it). Ah well, at my age it's time to accept that the window has closed on some things :) I'll give Netflix this - I left the interview knowing I'd failed. I was told this, to my face, before being shown the door (The interviewer wasn't mean about it). I'll take that over being told "We'll let you know" and waiting weeks before getting a generic rejection email from HR (or even better, being ghosted).

trident1000 6y ago
Honestly I respect that and prefer that as well; just tell me up front so I can move on and not waste any more time. I come from a wall street background and did break through eventually, but they just leave you hanging with no follow up. And the recruiters treat candidates like dates they are ghosting, its really not an acceptable way to treat a human being after they put days even weeks into preparing and coming in. Why do they do this? Because there is absolutely no downside to leaving you hanging and then they have backup plans to fill the spot. Its also just emails and coordination that pays them no dividends, so they don't care. You're dead to them. The worst is when companies post a position they never intend to even fill just to collect resumes and see their options. The whole thing is very reminiscent of the dating scene which is not very professional.
- asciident 6y ago
  I think you're missing the logistics needed to do this: 1) to officially reject someone usually needs asking around to build consensus that regardless of any changes to org structure, to outstanding offers, to the current set of interviews, etc. that this person will not get an offer from the company. Information is usually not precise, and often partially missing in the interview loop. Most of the information is focused around the top candidates, so "maybe" tier candidates are less discussed and decisions are not really made on them. So then you have to talk to your manager, colleagues, HR, etc. to make sure everyone is on the same page. A mistake here is costly. 2) you usually make offers to the best candidate, and if they decline, move down the list. So to reject someone means that this best candidate has accepted the offer. But they get a certain amount of time to consider it (often weeks, sometimes months), when you're frozen. Then you have to remember to reach out to the rejected candidates (I guess you put it on your calendar, and someone has to ensure this happens). To do fast rejections, you need short acceptance timelines, which is offputting to some candidates. Why risk pissing off your candidates you're giving an offer to, to make candidates you're not giving offers to happier? 3) even if your best candidate accepts, something might happen before they start (they change their mind), or you find out within a week of their joining that they're problematic. If you didn't reject other candidates, you can still approach them and say "sorry, we originally didn't have a position for you, but now we do", whereas rejecting them "we're moving on" closes that door 4) I haven't even gotten to the legal or reputation repercussions if you reject someone and do it in a way that can be interpreted as a problem. You can't let any employee deliver the news. This all needs policies and coordination.
  - toast0 6y ago
    > you usually make offers to the best candidate, and if they decline, move down the list. When I've been involved in hiring, we almost always have more than one opening, so this one doesn't resonate with me. We could always make a decision on 'would we like this person or not'. I've decided to hire an iffy candidate because of a corporate imposed time crunch (position went away if we didn't hire by X, so we went with someone), and it was worse than being understaffed, so I lean heavily towards only hiring good enough people.
  - ciex 6y ago
    It would be good to be transparent about this process. You can tell me that I am not the first pick and may get an offer if a spot frees up and I will prefer that to hearing nothing back.
  - borroka 6y ago
    Better. 1) Not really. Not where I work, not where I worked in the past. Maybe somewhere, but if we are talking about tech, rejections can be very quick. 2) In some companies they made a list and they then go down if the top option(s) do not accept, in others you are either the first or they re-do the search. It is company's/hiring manager culture/decision. 3) Very unlikely. Nobody likes to be chosen explicitly as second or third, as the hiring you also have to deal with someone who you did not want initially because you preferred the other(s) and as the candidate you accept to get into a problematic situation from the start. 4) Plenty of companies reject firmly and clearly with no legal follow-up whatsoever (or it they are very occasionally sued by some candidate, we all know it is part of the business). Being rude, ghosting people, waiting for other candidates to accept before rejecting is all bully behavior of who's very often in a position of power, that is the tech company.
chrisseaton 6y ago
I think if you don't break into major SV companies early in your career it becomes extremely hard to do so later on because people start assuming you must have already tried and failed so aren't at the right standard.
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  I dunno. I've had pretty good luck breaking into SF companies, and I didn't get started until 40. But I'm a glutton for punishment and went through a lot of grinding to make that happen. I'd say it depends on how flexible your mind is, and how bad you want to put in the work to get it.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > becomes extremely hard > went through a lot of grinding to make that happen Aren't we in agreement?
    - fossuser 6y ago
      Not really, you implied it was harder later in your career because of assumptions made about previous history. The comment that replied to you said you can study and pass without your age being held against you.
      - kaesar14 6y ago
        The comment reply said it was difficult and they grinded hard. First comment did not say it was impossible.
        fossuser 6y ago
        > "...it becomes extremely hard to do so later on because people start assuming you must have already tried and failed so aren't at the right standard." One person is saying it's hard because of ageism/bias against old applicants. One person is saying it's hard because you have to study. The disagreement is not about it being hard, it's about why and it's a pretty substantive difference.
gcheong 6y ago
Not to mention the sheer arrogance so many SV companies have thinking that what they are doing is so special it requires "10x" developers compared to every other company out there.
- Guest42 6y ago
  Agreed, it seems to me often that companies will have greater resume demands for lower levels than 90 percent of the people at the organization, many times for skills that aren’t relevant for projects or business goals, it doesn’t require a tier 1 PhD in order to rush through zen desk tickets
  - burnte 6y ago
    Oh, it's just as bad at higher levels, despite the people there generally having even FEWER of the qualifications. I'm top level IT management with a tremendous amount of actual technical knowledge, and just getting to an interview is the hardest part. I've never taken an interview that didn't result in an offer, but getting to the interview with all the demands is insanely difficult. Usually the spots get filled through unofficial channels and the person they hire for the job is unfit, technically. Incredibly frustrating when you're good at what you do.
    - Guest42 6y ago
      I’m sorry to hear that. Every now and again I see a person gets hired that seems like a bad fit and have no choice but to cross my fingers and hope their attitude and ego don’t drive people away. It also seems that many people that are really good prefer to avoid promotions in order to have more stability and focus on their strengths. I have a family member who is a technical expert with 30 years experience who often gets mistreated by people with fluffed up resumes.
      - burnte 6y ago
        Yes, it's frustrating. At my previous long term job, I cut IT costs _dramatically_, increased reliability to levels management didn't think was possible (it was _REALLY_ bad before I arrived), and made IT much more responsive, proactive, and well liked by the employees. I left, and was replaced by a guy who on paper looked amazing, but in reality was a disaster. I was asked to come back 5 months later to consult to train him up a bit. he told me exactly how he got the job: he paid for LinkedIn connections (his recruiter told him over 500 is a magic number), paid for endorsements in LI, and flat out lied about his skills on the resume. And here I am trying to work hard like a schmuck.
unoti 6y ago
> ...whiteboard questions on basic data structures and algorithms (I'm 40 and I still absolutely suck at those)... at my age it's time to accept that the window has closed on some things :) If you want to learn and are willing to put in the work you can do it. It will take some number of weeks or months, but it is totally doable with reading and practice. I read and practiced for a few months before getting my job at Microsoft at age 45. Your age isn’t the problem; I know plenty of young people that don’t want to do the work also.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Did you do leetcode/CTCI, interview cake? Any of the fancier in person practice stuff? I'm always curious what people find most effective.
- jtdev 6y ago
  It’s difficult to find the motivation to spend hundreds of hours working on imaginary problems. Kudos to you for doing this though. Many/most of the best developers I’ve ever worked with wouldn’t consider wasting their time on such nonsense. It seems to be somewhat of a litmus test for determining how subservient one is.
  - winphone1974 6y ago
    This a pretty mean way to dismiss someone who has a different viewpoint from you. Many developers enjoy these problems the same way someone might study a niche subject for fun or attend a Simpsons trivia contest; it's fun. No need to call them a sheep
  - triceratops 6y ago
    > It seems to be somewhat of a litmus test for determining how subservient one is. Or driven to make outlandishly high salaries.
  - MiroF 6y ago
    > Many/most of the best developers I’ve ever worked with wouldn’t consider wasting their time on such nonsense Interview practices aside - I find them to be fun puzzles and know plenty of accomplished CS/math people who do too. I understand the anger at corporate tech practices but let's not malign those who find the questions interesting.
renewiltord 6y ago
What were the words they used to decline proceeding? Do you happen to remember?
- jcadam 6y ago
  This was years ago, so my memory is fuzzy on this - not sure how much I really heard after I knew I was being told no :) There was a decision point about halfway through the day (after being grilled by engineers) where I was going to be either cut loose or sent on to interview with more senior level people and/or HR. "How do you think you did?" "Eh... ok, I think. I was struggling on the data structures." "Yes, that's what I'm hearing from $ENGINEER. There are reasons for this - maybe you are out of practice, it's been a while since college, or you don't use this knowledge in your daily work. But we do deal with this stuff at Netflix, so for this reason we're not going to move forward at this time." I was interviewing for a position doing Scala (at that point in my career, I was doing some Scala work, and it was still a fairly new and hard skill to find). The person giving me the bad news was a Lead Engineer and a proponent of Scala, seemed a bit disappointed that I knew Scala but got tripped up by low-level implementation details of some data structure (Naturally, the solution came to me later on the plane ride home). I actually had studied for this interview - but I had studied the wrong things (I was focusing on Scala-specific knowledge, but they really grilled me on fundamentals).
  - sidlls 6y ago
    Here's the thing: "But we do deal with this stuff at Netflix," is still only true for a tiny fraction of the engineers at Netflix. I currently work at a company that is not quite FAANG scale, but almost is: we have issues in our platform and systems that have forced us to adopt "FAANG-like" solutions to certain issues of scale. Almost none of the engineers at this company are doing anything at all with interview-style algorithms and data structures questions. There are a few working in a couple of areas, but for the most part engineers are working on protobuf specs and implementations around them, front-end/other client code, etc. I'd estimate less than 5% of the engineers here even touch the internals of algorithms and data structures ever, and maybe 10% of them deal with them anything close to "regularly." The specific team you were being interviewed for might have this apply, but the claim that "Netfix" (as a whole) deals with these issues regularly is almost certainly an exaggeration (at best). These interview questions generate poor signals and are best seen as hazing ritual/ego stroking exercises.
colordrops 6y ago
I'm 46 and I suck at this stuff too and have still been able to land some amazingly good jobs with SV companies. You can probably brush up on the basics you'll see in a typical interview with a few weeks of practice.
bird_monster 6y ago
The first time I interviewed at Amazon, the interviewer either pretended that a fire alarm was going off, or was actually going off, so they had to cut the phone interview short. When I asked if they wanted to call me back, they said they didn't think so, and that I'd be hearing from the recruiter. I did not ever hear from that recruiter again. It was a pretty gutting way to interview with, at the time, the company of your dreams. Plus, being 20, the weight of that call was a lot greater than it probably should've been.
- baq 6y ago
  Fire alarm tests happen at office campuses at regular intervals and aren’t announced beforehand. That said, the thing to remember at all times is that the dude doing the interview is just doing his job and you’re little more than a row in a spreadsheet before and after the interview, perhaps even during, too. I wish this was taught instead of having to be hard won experience, especially since this is obvious as soon as you start interviewing people yourself.
  - bird_monster 6y ago
    > That said, the thing to remember at all times is that the dude doing the interview is just doing his job This isn't really a thing candidates should care about, IMO. It is fine to demand decency out of interviewers, and it is fine to callout when bad things happen while people are "Just doing their job."
    - baq 6y ago
      Of course it is, never said otherwise, just don't be surprised if you don't get treated decently and especially you shouldn't give up your dreams on the grounds of failing one interview.
      - bird_monster 6y ago
        Sorry, usually when people say "Just someone trying to do their job", it means "Don't give this person shit because they're just trying to get through the day."
krisgenre 6y ago
I am going to turn 40 in a couple of years. Honestly, I have never liked the idea of 'preparing for interviews'. If I want to switch job I mostly want to apply what I have learnt so far to clear the interview. The interview at my last two jobs (current and previous one) were both vastly based on a coding task. I always prefer this as it is closest to how I work.

by jcadam 6y ago

trident1000 6y ago

Honestly I respect that and prefer that as well; just tell me up front so I can move on and not waste any more time. I come from a wall street background and did break through eventually, but they just leave you hanging with no follow up. And the recruiters treat candidates like dates they are ghosting, its really not an acceptable way to treat a human being after they put days even weeks into preparing and coming in. Why do they do this? Because there is absolutely no downside to leaving you hanging and then they have backup plans to fill the spot. Its also just emails and coordination that pays them no dividends, so they don't care. You're dead to them. The worst is when companies post a position they never intend to even fill just to collect resumes and see their options. The whole thing is very reminiscent of the dating scene which is not very professional.

asciident 6y ago
I think you're missing the logistics needed to do this: 1) to officially reject someone usually needs asking around to build consensus that regardless of any changes to org structure, to outstanding offers, to the current set of interviews, etc. that this person will not get an offer from the company. Information is usually not precise, and often partially missing in the interview loop. Most of the information is focused around the top candidates, so "maybe" tier candidates are less discussed and decisions are not really made on them. So then you have to talk to your manager, colleagues, HR, etc. to make sure everyone is on the same page. A mistake here is costly. 2) you usually make offers to the best candidate, and if they decline, move down the list. So to reject someone means that this best candidate has accepted the offer. But they get a certain amount of time to consider it (often weeks, sometimes months), when you're frozen. Then you have to remember to reach out to the rejected candidates (I guess you put it on your calendar, and someone has to ensure this happens). To do fast rejections, you need short acceptance timelines, which is offputting to some candidates. Why risk pissing off your candidates you're giving an offer to, to make candidates you're not giving offers to happier? 3) even if your best candidate accepts, something might happen before they start (they change their mind), or you find out within a week of their joining that they're problematic. If you didn't reject other candidates, you can still approach them and say "sorry, we originally didn't have a position for you, but now we do", whereas rejecting them "we're moving on" closes that door 4) I haven't even gotten to the legal or reputation repercussions if you reject someone and do it in a way that can be interpreted as a problem. You can't let any employee deliver the news. This all needs policies and coordination.
- toast0 6y ago
  > you usually make offers to the best candidate, and if they decline, move down the list. When I've been involved in hiring, we almost always have more than one opening, so this one doesn't resonate with me. We could always make a decision on 'would we like this person or not'. I've decided to hire an iffy candidate because of a corporate imposed time crunch (position went away if we didn't hire by X, so we went with someone), and it was worse than being understaffed, so I lean heavily towards only hiring good enough people.
- ciex 6y ago
  It would be good to be transparent about this process. You can tell me that I am not the first pick and may get an offer if a spot frees up and I will prefer that to hearing nothing back.
- borroka 6y ago
  Better. 1) Not really. Not where I work, not where I worked in the past. Maybe somewhere, but if we are talking about tech, rejections can be very quick. 2) In some companies they made a list and they then go down if the top option(s) do not accept, in others you are either the first or they re-do the search. It is company's/hiring manager culture/decision. 3) Very unlikely. Nobody likes to be chosen explicitly as second or third, as the hiring you also have to deal with someone who you did not want initially because you preferred the other(s) and as the candidate you accept to get into a problematic situation from the start. 4) Plenty of companies reject firmly and clearly with no legal follow-up whatsoever (or it they are very occasionally sued by some candidate, we all know it is part of the business). Being rude, ghosting people, waiting for other candidates to accept before rejecting is all bully behavior of who's very often in a position of power, that is the tech company.

chrisseaton 6y ago

I think if you don't break into major SV companies early in your career it becomes extremely hard to do so later on because people start assuming you must have already tried and failed so aren't at the right standard.

PopeDotNinja 6y ago
I dunno. I've had pretty good luck breaking into SF companies, and I didn't get started until 40. But I'm a glutton for punishment and went through a lot of grinding to make that happen. I'd say it depends on how flexible your mind is, and how bad you want to put in the work to get it.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > becomes extremely hard > went through a lot of grinding to make that happen Aren't we in agreement?
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Not really, you implied it was harder later in your career because of assumptions made about previous history. The comment that replied to you said you can study and pass without your age being held against you.
    - kaesar14 6y ago
      The comment reply said it was difficult and they grinded hard. First comment did not say it was impossible.
      - fossuser 6y ago
        > "...it becomes extremely hard to do so later on because people start assuming you must have already tried and failed so aren't at the right standard." One person is saying it's hard because of ageism/bias against old applicants. One person is saying it's hard because you have to study. The disagreement is not about it being hard, it's about why and it's a pretty substantive difference.

gcheong 6y ago

Not to mention the sheer arrogance so many SV companies have thinking that what they are doing is so special it requires "10x" developers compared to every other company out there.

Guest42 6y ago
Agreed, it seems to me often that companies will have greater resume demands for lower levels than 90 percent of the people at the organization, many times for skills that aren’t relevant for projects or business goals, it doesn’t require a tier 1 PhD in order to rush through zen desk tickets
- burnte 6y ago
  Oh, it's just as bad at higher levels, despite the people there generally having even FEWER of the qualifications. I'm top level IT management with a tremendous amount of actual technical knowledge, and just getting to an interview is the hardest part. I've never taken an interview that didn't result in an offer, but getting to the interview with all the demands is insanely difficult. Usually the spots get filled through unofficial channels and the person they hire for the job is unfit, technically. Incredibly frustrating when you're good at what you do.
  - Guest42 6y ago
    I’m sorry to hear that. Every now and again I see a person gets hired that seems like a bad fit and have no choice but to cross my fingers and hope their attitude and ego don’t drive people away. It also seems that many people that are really good prefer to avoid promotions in order to have more stability and focus on their strengths. I have a family member who is a technical expert with 30 years experience who often gets mistreated by people with fluffed up resumes.
    - burnte 6y ago
      Yes, it's frustrating. At my previous long term job, I cut IT costs _dramatically_, increased reliability to levels management didn't think was possible (it was _REALLY_ bad before I arrived), and made IT much more responsive, proactive, and well liked by the employees. I left, and was replaced by a guy who on paper looked amazing, but in reality was a disaster. I was asked to come back 5 months later to consult to train him up a bit. he told me exactly how he got the job: he paid for LinkedIn connections (his recruiter told him over 500 is a magic number), paid for endorsements in LI, and flat out lied about his skills on the resume. And here I am trying to work hard like a schmuck.

unoti 6y ago

> ...whiteboard questions on basic data structures and algorithms (I'm 40 and I still absolutely suck at those)... at my age it's time to accept that the window has closed on some things :) If you want to learn and are willing to put in the work you can do it. It will take some number of weeks or months, but it is totally doable with reading and practice. I read and practiced for a few months before getting my job at Microsoft at age 45. Your age isn’t the problem; I know plenty of young people that don’t want to do the work also.

fossuser 6y ago
Did you do leetcode/CTCI, interview cake? Any of the fancier in person practice stuff? I'm always curious what people find most effective.
jtdev 6y ago
It’s difficult to find the motivation to spend hundreds of hours working on imaginary problems. Kudos to you for doing this though. Many/most of the best developers I’ve ever worked with wouldn’t consider wasting their time on such nonsense. It seems to be somewhat of a litmus test for determining how subservient one is.
- winphone1974 6y ago
  This a pretty mean way to dismiss someone who has a different viewpoint from you. Many developers enjoy these problems the same way someone might study a niche subject for fun or attend a Simpsons trivia contest; it's fun. No need to call them a sheep
- triceratops 6y ago
  > It seems to be somewhat of a litmus test for determining how subservient one is. Or driven to make outlandishly high salaries.
- MiroF 6y ago
  > Many/most of the best developers I’ve ever worked with wouldn’t consider wasting their time on such nonsense Interview practices aside - I find them to be fun puzzles and know plenty of accomplished CS/math people who do too. I understand the anger at corporate tech practices but let's not malign those who find the questions interesting.

renewiltord 6y ago

What were the words they used to decline proceeding? Do you happen to remember?

jcadam 6y ago
This was years ago, so my memory is fuzzy on this - not sure how much I really heard after I knew I was being told no :) There was a decision point about halfway through the day (after being grilled by engineers) where I was going to be either cut loose or sent on to interview with more senior level people and/or HR. "How do you think you did?" "Eh... ok, I think. I was struggling on the data structures." "Yes, that's what I'm hearing from $ENGINEER. There are reasons for this - maybe you are out of practice, it's been a while since college, or you don't use this knowledge in your daily work. But we do deal with this stuff at Netflix, so for this reason we're not going to move forward at this time." I was interviewing for a position doing Scala (at that point in my career, I was doing some Scala work, and it was still a fairly new and hard skill to find). The person giving me the bad news was a Lead Engineer and a proponent of Scala, seemed a bit disappointed that I knew Scala but got tripped up by low-level implementation details of some data structure (Naturally, the solution came to me later on the plane ride home). I actually had studied for this interview - but I had studied the wrong things (I was focusing on Scala-specific knowledge, but they really grilled me on fundamentals).
- sidlls 6y ago
  Here's the thing: "But we do deal with this stuff at Netflix," is still only true for a tiny fraction of the engineers at Netflix. I currently work at a company that is not quite FAANG scale, but almost is: we have issues in our platform and systems that have forced us to adopt "FAANG-like" solutions to certain issues of scale. Almost none of the engineers at this company are doing anything at all with interview-style algorithms and data structures questions. There are a few working in a couple of areas, but for the most part engineers are working on protobuf specs and implementations around them, front-end/other client code, etc. I'd estimate less than 5% of the engineers here even touch the internals of algorithms and data structures ever, and maybe 10% of them deal with them anything close to "regularly." The specific team you were being interviewed for might have this apply, but the claim that "Netfix" (as a whole) deals with these issues regularly is almost certainly an exaggeration (at best). These interview questions generate poor signals and are best seen as hazing ritual/ego stroking exercises.

colordrops 6y ago

I'm 46 and I suck at this stuff too and have still been able to land some amazingly good jobs with SV companies. You can probably brush up on the basics you'll see in a typical interview with a few weeks of practice.

bird_monster 6y ago

The first time I interviewed at Amazon, the interviewer either pretended that a fire alarm was going off, or was actually going off, so they had to cut the phone interview short. When I asked if they wanted to call me back, they said they didn't think so, and that I'd be hearing from the recruiter. I did not ever hear from that recruiter again. It was a pretty gutting way to interview with, at the time, the company of your dreams. Plus, being 20, the weight of that call was a lot greater than it probably should've been.

baq 6y ago
Fire alarm tests happen at office campuses at regular intervals and aren’t announced beforehand. That said, the thing to remember at all times is that the dude doing the interview is just doing his job and you’re little more than a row in a spreadsheet before and after the interview, perhaps even during, too. I wish this was taught instead of having to be hard won experience, especially since this is obvious as soon as you start interviewing people yourself.
- bird_monster 6y ago
  > That said, the thing to remember at all times is that the dude doing the interview is just doing his job This isn't really a thing candidates should care about, IMO. It is fine to demand decency out of interviewers, and it is fine to callout when bad things happen while people are "Just doing their job."
  - baq 6y ago
    Of course it is, never said otherwise, just don't be surprised if you don't get treated decently and especially you shouldn't give up your dreams on the grounds of failing one interview.
    - bird_monster 6y ago
      Sorry, usually when people say "Just someone trying to do their job", it means "Don't give this person shit because they're just trying to get through the day."

krisgenre 6y ago

I am going to turn 40 in a couple of years. Honestly, I have never liked the idea of 'preparing for interviews'. If I want to switch job I mostly want to apply what I have learnt so far to clear the interview. The interview at my last two jobs (current and previous one) were both vastly based on a coding task. I always prefer this as it is closest to how I work.