5 ms·

This is... incredibly disconnected from my 15-odd years of experience in my career. Is this how Silicon Valley engineering careers work?

teddybloake 5y ago
This is really skewed to recent or new graduate and elite universities. When I was out of college, 15 years ago, some of the internships listed were hard or near impossible to get into. Take for example Goldman Sachs. They should be listing more regular internships and not those who managed to matriculate into the elite of the elite (hint: not a meritocracy). If anything it creates disillusionment that STEM careers are a straight path to being the next Bezos. It is like golfing: pick up golf to play golf not to play on the PGA tour.
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  This is a pretty garbage take. Goldman Sachs is easier to get into as a software engineer than any FAANG. And every FAANG I know takes the majority of their new grad hires from public universities which, at least in California, are banned from affirmative action and legacy admits. Despite the UC administration's best efforts to remove merit from the equation by not counting standardized test scores admissions into a top UC is still merit-based. Software engineering is not investment banking or law.
  - gorbachev 5y ago
    > Goldman Sachs is easier to get into as a software engineer than any FAANG That wasn't the case 15 years ago, as the post you're responding to stated. The world has changed.
posharma 5y ago
If your question is specifically referring to the leetcode style coding interviews, this is exactly how Silicon Valley engineering careers work if you want to change jobs.
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
  Which is such a strange optimization. As an industry we should boycott leetcode style questions.
  - qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
    I wouldn't want to work with someone that doesn't have their fundamentals down. Most people spend at least 4 years studying CS, they should know their stuff.
    - slumpt_ 5y ago
      Fortunately for all the productive engineers out there, solving leetcode reflects absolutely nothing about how much they know their fundamentals or “stuff.”
      - qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
        You'd be surprised.
        slumpt_ 5y ago
        Fifteen years of industry experience and a top uni Master’s and I can assure you leetcode doesn’t predict anything reliably. It predicts how much time they spent solving leetcode, and biases towards recent graduates. If you’re hiring senior talent it’s mostly a wash and a waste of time. But it’s deep in valley culture so we’ll likely waste our time with it for another decade or so before we wise up.
    - bussierem 5y ago
      I studied CS for 4 years and have used exactly none of it since leaving college. Our devs all help with hiring and agree as a 20-person team that academic "experience" means almost nothing unless you have no other job experience. How little academia prepares you for anything in real software engineering has become a cultural meme.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
d4mi3n 5y ago
Depends a lot on the companies and positions you’re interviewing for. I work in technical security these days and did very little in the way of actual code quizzes compared to when I was a straight up software engineer. I think it also helps to remember that interviews are two-way. If you see a company with an insane interview process, do you really have confidence in the quality of a team you’d be on when you got to the other side of it? These days I generally look for and focus on a few things when I interview with a company I’m interested in: 1. How do they make money? 2. Do they understand how they make money? Alternatively, do they understand their market, customers, and product value? 3. How mature is management? Good managers make or break your job satisfaction and dictate how good a company is at hiring & retaining talent, as well as dealing with adversity like professional adults. 4. How much of the work I’m doing is driven by planning as opposed to circumstance. E.g. am I working off a roadmap or expecting to spend the majority of my time handing incidents and fighting fires. Your mileage may vary, but I suspect these good or bad interview practices will only exist as long as hiring managers allow them to.
- MamaJumba 5y ago
  > How much of the work I’m doing is driven by planning as opposed to circumstance What question(s) do you ask the companies to get information for this?
  - d4mi3n 5y ago
    I usually ask this question multiple ways with different wording as I go through an interview panel. They're generally along the lines of: 1. What does your roadmap look like? Do you have a roadmap? 2. How reliable is the team about hitting deadlines? Why or why not? 3. Who handles incident response? How frequently does this responsibility rotate? 4. For a given week, how much work is planned vs interrupt driven (e.g. someone needs something by the end of this week and we only learned about it days prior). 5. How much firefighting does this team do? Is this driven by the team's own work or issues in other parts of the organization? Your mileage may vary, there are a lot of ways to get a sense of how a team/org works and what may be important to me may or may not be as important for you. Cheers!
- 5y ago

teddybloake 5y ago

This is really skewed to recent or new graduate and elite universities. When I was out of college, 15 years ago, some of the internships listed were hard or near impossible to get into. Take for example Goldman Sachs. They should be listing more regular internships and not those who managed to matriculate into the elite of the elite (hint: not a meritocracy). If anything it creates disillusionment that STEM careers are a straight path to being the next Bezos. It is like golfing: pick up golf to play golf not to play on the PGA tour.

b9a2cab5 5y ago
This is a pretty garbage take. Goldman Sachs is easier to get into as a software engineer than any FAANG. And every FAANG I know takes the majority of their new grad hires from public universities which, at least in California, are banned from affirmative action and legacy admits. Despite the UC administration's best efforts to remove merit from the equation by not counting standardized test scores admissions into a top UC is still merit-based. Software engineering is not investment banking or law.
- gorbachev 5y ago
  > Goldman Sachs is easier to get into as a software engineer than any FAANG That wasn't the case 15 years ago, as the post you're responding to stated. The world has changed.

posharma 5y ago

If your question is specifically referring to the leetcode style coding interviews, this is exactly how Silicon Valley engineering careers work if you want to change jobs.

ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
Which is such a strange optimization. As an industry we should boycott leetcode style questions.
- qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
  I wouldn't want to work with someone that doesn't have their fundamentals down. Most people spend at least 4 years studying CS, they should know their stuff.
  - slumpt_ 5y ago
    Fortunately for all the productive engineers out there, solving leetcode reflects absolutely nothing about how much they know their fundamentals or “stuff.”
    - qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
      You'd be surprised.
      - slumpt_ 5y ago
        Fifteen years of industry experience and a top uni Master’s and I can assure you leetcode doesn’t predict anything reliably. It predicts how much time they spent solving leetcode, and biases towards recent graduates. If you’re hiring senior talent it’s mostly a wash and a waste of time. But it’s deep in valley culture so we’ll likely waste our time with it for another decade or so before we wise up.
  - bussierem 5y ago
    I studied CS for 4 years and have used exactly none of it since leaving college. Our devs all help with hiring and agree as a 20-person team that academic "experience" means almost nothing unless you have no other job experience. How little academia prepares you for anything in real software engineering has become a cultural meme.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

d4mi3n 5y ago

Depends a lot on the companies and positions you’re interviewing for. I work in technical security these days and did very little in the way of actual code quizzes compared to when I was a straight up software engineer. I think it also helps to remember that interviews are two-way. If you see a company with an insane interview process, do you really have confidence in the quality of a team you’d be on when you got to the other side of it? These days I generally look for and focus on a few things when I interview with a company I’m interested in: 1. How do they make money? 2. Do they understand how they make money? Alternatively, do they understand their market, customers, and product value? 3. How mature is management? Good managers make or break your job satisfaction and dictate how good a company is at hiring & retaining talent, as well as dealing with adversity like professional adults. 4. How much of the work I’m doing is driven by planning as opposed to circumstance. E.g. am I working off a roadmap or expecting to spend the majority of my time handing incidents and fighting fires. Your mileage may vary, but I suspect these good or bad interview practices will only exist as long as hiring managers allow them to.

MamaJumba 5y ago
> How much of the work I’m doing is driven by planning as opposed to circumstance What question(s) do you ask the companies to get information for this?
- d4mi3n 5y ago
  I usually ask this question multiple ways with different wording as I go through an interview panel. They're generally along the lines of: 1. What does your roadmap look like? Do you have a roadmap? 2. How reliable is the team about hitting deadlines? Why or why not? 3. Who handles incident response? How frequently does this responsibility rotate? 4. For a given week, how much work is planned vs interrupt driven (e.g. someone needs something by the end of this week and we only learned about it days prior). 5. How much firefighting does this team do? Is this driven by the team's own work or issues in other parts of the organization? Your mileage may vary, there are a lot of ways to get a sense of how a team/org works and what may be important to me may or may not be as important for you. Cheers!
5y ago