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I've just landed a job at a FAANG company. Some random subjective comments based on my experience: - it was hard work - there was no way I could have passed t

• programmertote 6y ago
  If you don't mind sharing, where do you learn/read-up about the system design questions? I am not a software architect although I designed and built small modules/libraries of my own, but I don't think it's sufficient to learn about system design questions found in interviews (not just FAANG's).
  • davio 6y ago
    https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-interview https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-... I think that's the standard recommendation
  • yodsanklai 6y ago
    A great starting point is "designing data-intensive applications". Then you can read about various designs here and there. But you don't need to go that very deep. What they ask is very specific and (unfortunately) you're better off going through 10-20 typical interview questions and their solutions. Typical questions are "how would you design Google News/Twitter/...". There are many resources available, all of this is discussed on leetcode or interview preparation sites. It's not hard, but I'd recommend to prepare for this well-before your interviews.
    • programmertote 6y ago
      Thank you very much!
• okareaman 6y ago
  > - it's not enough to be able to solve the problems, you need to be able to solve them on the spot, without much thinking, in an interview context Sounds like they're looking for assembly line programmers - crank out the code, pass it off, then on to the next piece of code without pause. This would be a nightmare for me. The high salaries and prestige of these companies definitely would not be worth it. I'm not neurotypical. I met an older man when younger who recognized this when he hired me so he left me alone. I worked at home and provided him programming solutions on my time schedule, which turned into millions of dollars for me and much more for him. I'm happy to let the fast programmers do the speed programming.
  • yodsanklai 6y ago
    I think what is required for the interviews is very different than the actual work you do once you are hired. It 's also very team dependent. The reason why you're expected to be fast during the interviews is that you're competing with people who are fast (either because they are smart, or because they've practiced a lot). That being said, this type of interviews is clearly not for everyone. There are tons of skilled people who (for good reasons) don't want to play that game, and there'll always be a market for them.
    • danilocesar 6y ago
      Not at FAANG
    • okareaman 6y ago
      > I think what is required for the interviews is very different than the actual work you do once you are hired I'm sure that's true once you achieve seniority. I'd wager that the first couple of years, at least, you're not solving problems, but implementing solutions designed by higher ups. You need to do this fast to be useful.
  • brightball 6y ago
    One of my big impressions of Go is that it's designed to facilitate exactly that. I've also heard comments in that vein.
• throw1234651234 6y ago
  "and I'm on the older side (mid forties)" Thank you very much for listing this. I wonder how life is for older candidates in these jobs.
  • yodsanklai 6y ago
    This is also one of my concern. Most of the interviewers were in their 20/30s and so is everybody on their "career" web pages and presentation documents. However, in the team I'll join, at least two people are about my age or older. What I can tell is that never in the recruiting process did I feel discriminated against. Once you're in the loop, their main concern seems to be how well you perform in the interviews. I feel I was at a slight disadvantage compared to to my younger self in term of thinking speed for the algorithmic questions but this can be compensated by a better preparation. EDIT: not sure why you're down-voted. Ageism is a thing and a legitimate source of concern.
    • dvtrn 6y ago
      EDIT: not sure why you're down-voted. Ageism is a thing and a legitimate source of concern. There’s some folks here who REALLY don’t like talking about true ways our industry can fail and in some cases has failed at being decent and fair and ethical to people of protected classes, or just in general.
      • throw1234651234 6y ago
        I think it's generally what he said. We age in one or two ways - get old and decrepit, or get overwhelming experience/skill which is tremendously useful. The first scares people and a lot do assume it's just the first part - maybe they think I am unaware of the second. Thanks for your reply! For full context, I am older too, that's why I asked.
        • dvtrn 6y ago
          I think it's generally what he said. Oh I grokked it ;) but I felt very it needed a very fine and hyper-specific point to it because I'm older too, I also happen to be a racial minority, and it's a frustrating and sore point of mine-the way these topics sometimes (though in my honest opinion: far too often) get blunted and watered down so that whomever can avoid the uncomfortable sensation of staring a reality they don't suffer from, but might (operative word: might) be an unwitting participant of in the maw. Let it be said now that your eyes are on this line, dear readers: that's not me suggesting or intimating that the person I replied to above is doing this. They're not. But it is a trend that some would be more than happy to pretend doesn't exist because they haven't had a reason to tune their cognitive receivers into the broadcast frequency people like me are sensitive to and have been bombarded with for far longer, with far worse outcomes. And I will speak out about it. Every time. Downvotes be damned.
• drchopchop 6y ago
  One big problem is that companies (especially FAANG) are wasting time having very senior devs do Leetcode-style shit, which is a false negative for people that don't balance binary trees and manually regex strings all day. This especially penalizes more experienced / older devs who don't have time to LC grind (of which I'm also one), and introduces unconscious selection bias. Certainly there are other ways to verify someone can code: code samples, talking through high level language concepts, reviewing existing code, etc. What people should be focusing on is this - 1) Do you understand enough systems architecture / code techniques to succeed at this particular company? This can be done via mostly talking. 2) Do you have experience that will help us with our company-specific problems? Give them an actual problem you regularly deal with, and get them to attack it.
  • astrea 6y ago
    Your comment inspired me to ask a question I've had for a while. My background is not CS, it's computer engineering. So I didn't have any education in the fancy algorithms that you'll find in these interviews. Is that expected or did I miss something?
    • 121789 6y ago
      I have the same background and I think you either missed something, or your degree was much more EE focused. I had the required data structures + algorithms classes as part of my computer engineering curriculum
      • snerbles 6y ago
        A lot of CE degrees are EE with just the barest veneer of software to meet ABET requirements. Mine had data structures and software engineering as CE-specific requirements (along with a dash of microarchitecture and HDL/FPGA stuff), the CS algorithms course was an elective that obviously gave priority to CS majors. Beyond that, we had a department head that really only cared about shoving as many EEs as possible into the PG&E hiring pipeline.
• ldng 6y ago
  Well, now that you've started working. Have you actually applied any of it ? To make an analogy, I'm always perplexed at how you're asked to build an EPR on the spot and then all you do is general electricity mundane work. I've seen a lot of EPR builder beeing incapable of simple wiring ...
  • QuesnayJr 6y ago
    What's an EPR? I did a search, and none of the meanings I found seem to fit.
    • WildGreenLeave 6y ago
      I think it is "Earth Potential Rise"
    • dxdm 6y ago
      It's an Eagle-Pangolin Recombinator.
    • ldng 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) NB: First result of an "EPR electricity" search.
  • megablast 6y ago
    Why do people use weird acronyms that no one uses.
    • ldng 6y ago
      Why people can't do a simple search ? First result of an "EPR electricity" search : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
• snarf21 6y ago
  This process is all theater. We really need some kind of certification process instead. I'm a while out of school and one interview I went on had a requirement for a live coding session. The ask was to implement red/black trees from scratch despite the fact that they have an Angular app with MySQL on the backend. I took this as a blessing. I don't want to work at a place where they think this is a good way to hire people.
  • hnrodey 6y ago
    +1 for some type of formal certification process.
  • FlaSheridn 6y ago
    A certification exam wouldn’t survive a disparate impact challenge. Google stopped asking for SAT/ACT scores long before universities did. And long before that (according to my father, who actually used them), telegram companies had to stop giving spelling tests to telegraph operator applicants. Add to that difficulties with preventing cheating during a pandemic, and I see no alternative to rolling your own live examination. (Not that I’m defending the often dumb choice of trick tree recursion coding problems; I didn’t learn a lot about a candidate by watching him not get the trick.)
    • JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
      As an employer and not an academic institution, Google wasn't exactly visionary in ending requests for SAT/ACT scores, since virtually no other employer asks for them. Also, I interviewed w/ Google in ~2018, they still asked for my college transcripts even though I had been working in industry. So they still haven't fully shed their desire to academically successful people.
    • Apocryphon 6y ago
      Just have the certification system be leetcoding on a whiteboard so the interviees need only pass it once rather than all the times for each FAANG, unicorn, and wannabe unicorn-FAANG startup that mandate such questions.
    • 6y ago
• neilv 6y ago
  I really appreciate your candor here. I've long been opposed to the Leetcode battery interview processes, to the point that I started asking FAANG recruiters that several years ago, and saying that was a showstopper for me, like a signal for how they treated people. Though I otherwise wanted to work at a couple of them. After consulting levels.fyi, however, I've revised my opinion: if an employer is willing to pay a higher-level software engineer 2x the total comp they'd make most other places... whatever interview process they want suddenly becomes a rich and honored cultural tradition, to be treasured, and approached with the utmost reverence and humility. :) That said, for people who've frittered away their discretionary time on things like open source, hobbies, family, etc., rather than drilling for FAANG interviews, the well-known "test prep" commitment for Leetcode-oriented companies is a barrier to even applying there.
  • SavageBeast 6y ago
    "That said, for people who've frittered away their discretionary time on things like open source, hobbies, family, etc., rather than drilling for FAANG interviews, the well-known "test prep" commitment for Leetcode-oriented companies is a barrier to even applying there." Salary aside - this is the truth right here. I interviewed at a few FAANGs and I didn't have what Id call a good experience. Neither resulted in an offer. To even prepare for them was a monumental time investment. I tried it and now I can have an informed opinion on the subject. Id rather have a life than drill for random interview questions. Side note: I have yet to personally hear or read anything about why its so great to work at one of these places where someone DOES NOT mention the money. Frankly, were it not for the money Id have never even considered interviewing at these places at all. I have come to the opinion that if it's just money, there are other more tangible ways to invest my time that will result in money. Drilling For Interviews as a money accumulation seems to me a bit like heading to the casino on the 28th of the month because you're short a few bucks for rent.
    • neilv 6y ago
      Agreed. I kinda wish the FAANGs paid less, and had to appeal to people solely on positive impact, kinds of work people can do, work environment and how people are treated, etc. Adding "oh yeah, and you make more money here" complicates. The big G, for example, already seemed like the place to go, as soon as they launched the early site (the company was obviously smarter than most of what was going on), and there was also the "don't be evil" that resonated with a lot of the prevailing sentiment among the pre-Web Internet-savvy techies. Though I suppose there might've already been a money factor from the start (it seemed like most people were crunching hard at work, but also prone to job-hopping for the hottest IPO lottery ticket at the moment), but it wasn't as clear as today.
• valleyjo 6y ago
  I was also ghosted after passing hiring committee. The least they could have said was “sorry no updates right now”
• tomcat27 6y ago
  > - it's not enough to be able to solve the problems, you need to be able to solve them on the spot, without much thinking, in an interview context So true. It's not enough to write some approach that's better than brute force. We need to write the best possible method. And sometimes interviewers do not encourage methods that are not on their mind. Just sucks!!
• pdovy 6y ago
  Curious if any FAANG employees know if this kind of thing is still standard above a certain level, or does say "staff" level and above tend to be internal promotions only? I guess the pay is phenomenal but I have a hard time imagining that this kind of algorithmic trivia approach makes any sense at all for hiring into senior roles. Especially if someone was trying to move laterally between FAANGs.
  • kingnothing 6y ago
    Google, at least, does the same style of interview for Senior and Staff positions as they do for entry level. It's just that the expectations are obviously different.
    • mosdave 6y ago
      This is dumbfounding. Kinda tells you what kind of shit-eating devs they're looking for. What staff-level engineer possessing even a modicum of self respect would willingly subject themselves to this?
      • kingnothing 6y ago
        Probably a highly talented one who's interested in earning $500k / year.
• dasil003 6y ago
  > The whole process is very random This is a key insight that people need to understand. In a 20 year career I've only ever been on the market once (in 2017), and I saw it as a huge opportunity to join the best possible company. I did over a dozen on-sites, and every single one of them was 5 hours plus, sometimes multiple, w/ take homes or phone screens additionally. The results were shockingly random in terms of many different factors ranging from familiarity and fluency with the class of problem, to the style of the interviewer, to the order of the interviews and how exhausted I was by the end. The outcomes in terms of offer/no-offer also bore little relation to my perception of how the interview went. I think this doesn't sit well with people (especially technical people) because they want things objective and fair. However standardizing process and addressing biases only gets you so far because at the end of the day interviewers and candidates are all unique. Success in a role is highly dependent on context that one operates in. Honestly I don't think the hand-wringing helps anyone. At the end of the day you have to just play the game. Hopefully companies continue to employee a variety of different interview techniques, because they all have different biases and so the best thing is just to ensure a diversity of techniques so everyone can find their place.