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> My girlfriend got a business job at Visa last year and later found that 5000 applied for her role. She stood out because she read the job description and high
by avmich 6y ago
> My girlfriend got a business job at Visa last year and later found that 5000 applied for her role. She stood out because she read the job description and highlighted relevant experience. Yeah, that's the bar.
I know about different bar - not in customer service business, in software engineering. You're given a task to write a parser in 15 minutes - literally, you solve it, it mostly works - for some simple inputs at least, you don't have time to test it thoroughly. You don't pass - the bar is different.
Your experience tells that the startup is too early to think about scalability problems. They can keep things simple for a solid another iteration of the product. You explain that to them, they listen, but they are doubtful - they've heard that scaling is crucial, and even though they have like a hundred of customers, they want that - so your advice is considered wrong. You don't pass that bar.
They tell you they need somebody senior to coach and mentor a bunch of more junior engineers, somebody who'd steer the whole technical stack. In remaining minutes of the engineering interview they ask you to write Rabin-Karp implementation, or AVL balancing. You don't pass the bar if algorithms don't work first time.
- Swizec 6y agoWow nice of you to assume it was a job in customer service. She’s a core part of the team scaling a multi billion dollar product to global markets and shooting to do trillions in transactions within a few years. Thankyouverymuch And trust me the interviews for that are just as grueling as they are for engineering. Solid 7 hours of on-site followed by business case studies for homework. But unlike engineering, you can’t skirt by as a pure code monkey who can leetcode. You have to actually know how to do the job in a real world context.
- bobobob420 6y agoHahaha you think technical business interviews are more challenging than se interviews. Do an interview for Jane street or two sigma :) I have all the cracking the case interview books by people who go ran mckinsey and other firms, it’a a joke
- Swizec 6y agoNo I’d guess they’re similarly challenging just in different ways.
- bobobob420 6y agoYou really think they are similarly challenging in any way? I have a brother who is a VP at a big consulting firm and have first hand knowledge how the interviews are conducted and how candidates prepare for them. The level of skill that is required for a candidate in Software Enginering at a similar company (fangaa) is immense and the competition is ruthless. It’s disingenuous to say the interviews are similarly challenging in any case. If you can provide some points or thoughts on how they are similar in level of challenge I would greatly appreciate it.