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> I bag on Amazon a lot on here (which if I were to review with my therapist is likely because I had an absolutely HORRENDOUS experience in an interview loop wi

> I bag on Amazon a lot on here (which if I were to review with my therapist is likely because I had an absolutely HORRENDOUS experience in an interview loop with them my first step out of college that still makes me nervous in interviews, even 15 years later). Hey, I had a similar experience with Google! It was my first technical interview for my first job out of college. The interviewer laughed at my code, and then after going through the logic said "Wow I can't believe this actually works." Personal grievances aside, I've come to think that the Leetcode interview style has morphed from a "let's see how you handle problems at scale" test into an ego-driven hazing ritual. My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles. It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the IT field.

mk81 5y ago
geodel 5y ago
> It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the IT field. Very good point. I didn't really think about it much before. It is even difficult for candidates who are in IT field but not in FAANG type companies.
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  Depends on how motivated you are to to your current job. On two occasions I've witnessed a fellow developer mentally check themselves out after a round of layoffs, start doing the minimal amount of work necessary, and then spending the rest of their time cracking coding problems. When the next round of layoffs came, they were gone to Amazon and Google.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    Where are they now?
    - monkeybutton 5y ago
      Sorry if I was a bit ambiguous. They are at Amazon and Google now. The point is treat your staff well or they might spend their time between tasks prepping for a FAANG interview.
- majormajor 5y ago
  Now imagine if instead of coding exercises we had the interview process from other industries that weighs degree and past experience more heavily in the absence of any other sort of testing. What would it look like to break in then? Completing a BS in your spare time? EDIT: Most ideas I've seen about replacement for live coding - like take home projects or contract-to-hire - are not really any more friendly to people with busy schedules anyway.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Or how impressive their GitHub is. Or another mostly (rightfully so IMO) choice you see here. Set a low bar to hiring but have a probationary period after which you fire a notable percentage.
    - cableshaft 5y ago
      I have a decent amount of commits to my Github, but it's to 98% private projects. Things that may become products someday. Don't have a whole lot to show potential employers. My day jobs have always been private or onprem repos.
    - majormajor 5y ago
      Yeah probationary period would be great for companies, maybe better for people trying to break into industry (unless they can't fired and can't get their old job back), and not so good for most people already in the industry.
      - LordDragonfang 5y ago
        From looking at job postings, there's no shortage of jobs for people already in the industry, and a proportionally much lower number of positions for entry-level. Every company has open positions for seniors, but no one wants to train them up.
        yourapostasy 5y ago
        I think this is mainly a side effect of the kind of work being performed at companies has leaned over the decades towards an increasingly bimodal skills distribution, and the entry level work's sophistication is eroding from advances in automation and continuous improvement feedback loops. For example, I see at all of my clients entry level help desk positions to do things like help with provisioning a new employee's Wintel laptop, answer internal software packaging problems, intake VPN trouble reports, that sort of activity. But not nearly as much as when I entered the industry, because so much has been automated away or folded into centralized management systems, and the trend continues with advances in desktop engineering. On the other hand, I see an explosion of demand for the desktop engineering team positions. This is being reflected in many other IT areas as far as I can tell. There is a constant push these days at all my clients to automate all repetitive work, and a much bigger appetite from leadership to automate entry level work even when the ROI payoff is longer than 1-4 fiscal quarters than when I started. The push isn't due to direct labor savings though: it is to drive down variance of configurations exposed to the more senior and expensive roles, so the real high-payoff automation can really shine, and they can reduce business-as-usual work hours remediating the impact from those variances.
colinmhayes 5y ago
> Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles Finding people who are willing to spend months in order to get the job is one of the biggest reasons companies use leetcode.
- oblio 5y ago
  Well, he did say: > ego-driven hazing ritual :-)
  - tiredofU2 5y ago
  - samstave 5y ago
    The worst "Biggest Swingin' Dick on Campus" ego-fest I have ever experienced was working at the F in FAANG... -- Such a den of.... you can fill in the rest... I know someone who was literally fired for being "too social" -- and all they did was participate in the stupid parties that were had like "Build you're departments happy hour bar, here is $400 for alcohol to stock it up!!"
    - garbagecoder 5y ago
      I had a few FAANG+M people join my (reserve) unit in the army doing cyber and 6-shop stuff who thought they were hot shit. Some actually were, but the mentality was universal regardless of ability.
    - dymk 5y ago
      I look back fondly on the internal wiki pages documenting all the available "bar space" in the Facebook Seattle office.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Finding hard workers isn't easy. Leetcode is not a bad way to do it. It's not a great way, but it works and more importantly it scales well to the organization level.
sharkweek 5y ago
Yeah my entire experience could be summed up by saying everyone who sat across the table from me that day (with one exception, one person was super nice), was trying to prove that I was too dumb to work among the likes of them. This was in 2004 though so maybe that has changed but it certainly stuck with me.
wallscratch 5y ago
> My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to […] Wouldn’t this be true of almost any other selective interview process?
- ghaff 5y ago
  No. An interview process can be very selective without really requiring prep beyond studying up on the company somewhat--and maybe not really even that to the degree you're already familiar with the company. Not a developer (though was an engineer) but I've never studied for an interview beyond maybe spending an evening reading up on a company. But, to be honest, the (few) jobs I've had over the past 20 years or so have always come through knowing people.
  - joshribakoff 5y ago
    Some people use algorithms daily, or went to school for them, and don’t need to study for leetcode. Likewise, some people do architecture or frontend apps all day and don’t need to study for those. No matter what a company asks, some people will find it unreasonable, at the end of the day the charitable interpretation is that the company is choosing interview challenges that they feel are a proxy for the skills needed to succeed.
    - trowawee 5y ago
      You're assuming that a company has to interview all candidates the same way regardless of what job they're actually interviewing for. A frequent complaint, voiced all over this thread, is that interviewing like that makes no sense. If the job uses 100-level algos all the time, then sure, let's talk algos (also, kinda weird, but I'm sure there's something out there like this). But if you're bringing me in as an SRE and we spend a bunch of time on LC questions and much less time on my experience with AWS, Terraform, and CI/CD work, the interview is bad for me (because I don't work with low-level algos and probably won't know that stuff, _unless_ I've been grinding LC) and bad for you (because you don't have much signal about whether I can do the SRE stuff).
stayfrosty420 5y ago
> Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles I agree to some extent but moreso, I think it heavily favours those with a theoretical CS background, which means effectively you are favouring candidates from top colleges in a round about way.
- mk89 5y ago
  I honestly don't believe it has anything to do with the college level. No offense, but you study python, learn its basic syntax + "algorithm design" book + 1 practical book about algorithms and data structures and you're good enough for performing good/optimal leetcodes. Some things you might miss, for example some exercises you can optimize better if you know some algebra/maths, but 90% of that stuff is more or less repetitive. Once you learn the tricks etc, it really becomes repetitive because finally it's just if/else and for loops. (I don't mean to minimize in any way the effort it takes to make such exercises, it's just the feeling I had while doing some and failing a lot of them). It's always about specializing one or two specific algorithms you have found in the book[s]. Sometimes it requires coming up with very creative ideas - better for loops. :) For me Leetcodes are not per se bad. I still learnt something from "being forced" to do them which I probably wouldn't have done if i hadn't been forced. What I despise is the fact that companies have lost accountability in hiring. It's hard to interview, so it's better to rely on an "industry standard" - after all Amazon and Google do the same, so why shouldn't we?
  - stayfrosty420 5y ago
    right, but it's way easier to get into if you did multiple semesters of it in college. You probably won't even need the textbook, just glance at a few articles on wikipedia/google and it'll all come back.
Clubber 5y ago
>an ego-driven hazing ritual Last time I did an interview where this wasn't the case was 1998. Granted I don't really interview anymore.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I've never had an interview like this. Get out of SV if you don't want to play those games.
  - Clubber 5y ago
    This was in a mid-sized town. The main guy who was hazing was only mid-level talented, and was very insecure about it. On the other side of the table, I've never seen someone who I considered a high-level talent act that way. They may have tough questions but they certainly aren't pricks about it. This was a long time ago, I get work through my network now, interviews consist of going to lunch and shooting the shit.
  - eecc 5y ago
    Except, plenty of wannabe IT departments that want to “hire then best of breed” and start copycatting/aping these gestures. It’s a global Cargo Cult
throwawayboise 5y ago
> The interviewer laughed at my code, and then after going through the logic said "Wow I can't believe this actually works." OK, not professional, and fair grounds for deciding you don't want to work there (interviews are as much for you to evaluate the employer as they are for the employer to evaluate you) but.... have a bit of a thicker skin. Carrying something like that for 15 years instead of immediately dismissing it as the commentary of an asshole is just no way to go through life.
- deleted 5y ago
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- vanusa 5y ago
  If it were just 1 or 2 assholes, years apart, it would bounce off your skin. But the integral of having to deal with these assholes over the years (both in the hiring process, and when you start to actually work there) -- meanwhile having a real life to be responsible for (family, kids) -- can start to wear you down, after a while.
technothrasher 5y ago
Interestingly, my partner just went through the interview process at both Amazon and Google. The Amazon process was horrendous, with an insulting “good cop/bad cop” series of interviews. It was a relief when they decided not to move forward as the process was enough to know they’d be horrible to work for. The Google process was great, productive, and generated excitement about working for them. In the end they offered the job but couldn’t make the compensation quite work. But they walked away on good terms.
- nameoda 5y ago
  My personal experience was almost the exact opposite (granted, this was in 2020, and things might have changed since then). Both companies asked leetcode-style questions and behavioral questions. The Amazon interviewers were engaged, excited when talking about their work, and seemed like they were rooting for me to succeed. Google interviewers were condescending and looked like they were unhappy to be part of the interview process and were just going through the motions because they were forced to. I had a lot of self-doubt after being treated like crap by the Google interview and decided to never do that to myself again.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    I'm pretty confident it's just luck of the draw. At both companies, giving interviews is an expectation for promotion, so many interviewers don't particularly want to be there and some are bad at hiding that fact.
    - decafninja 5y ago
      Yeah, there is always a subjective factor involved in these interviews. You are just screwed if you meet an interviewer that doesn't like you personally for some reason and acts hostile. Or maybe they are putting on an act to seem hostile to push your buttons.
deleted 5y ago
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that_guy_iain 5y ago
> My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles. For me, leetcode is basically just what is taught at university level. So they're hiring people based on if they know stuff they would learn and forget from university. The thing is, it's not about having free time, it's about being so dedicated to getting the job that you'll spend ages learning things you would never do during your day job and if you did do them during your day job you would be considered a cowboy because there are predefined libraries that are optimised to do those things. For me, the main reason I don't want to work for FAANG is they have a reputation for long hours and that the hardest thing at the companies is the interview process.
- ss108 5y ago
  > For me, the main reason I don't want to work for FAANG is they have a reputation for long hours I thought working at Google or Facebook was supposed to be a pretty chill "rest and vest" situation, esp at the former (?)
  - rhizome 5y ago
    My understanding (at least where Google is concerned) is that it's a jungle situation and there's a lot of team-hopping and connection-making until you find a place to land for awhile. That may be where R&V comes into the picture, maybe some people are able to negotiate a less stressful First Act, and possibly most likely, maybe my understanding is out of date. Remember, with the kinds of education people have at these companies coupled with the amounts of money they are receiving, "the bullied become the bullies" is a serious occupational hazard.
    - tdeck 5y ago
      > My understanding (at least where Google is concerned) is that it's a jungle situation and there's a lot of team-hopping and connection-making until you find a place to land for awhile. I think this is only true if you want to work on something interesting. If you're willing to work in some obscure corner of ad infrastructure or Google Surveys or something and you're not trying to get promoted, you can stick around for a long time at Google and not get much done. At a big organization like Google the pace is pretty slow even if you are trying to get some work accomplished, so that provides cover for those who aren't as effective.
majormajor 5y ago
I would love to know how long the average FANG dev spent on leetcode practice before their interviews. From my small sample of friends who've done stints there, it's far less than "months". I similarly have had - but declined - an offer from one of them with prep measured in "hours" not "days."
- deleted 5y ago
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- smilekzs 5y ago
  Survivor bias alert: These people have all passed the interviews. I wonder if this is an intended side-effect, namely also filtering out people who would have passed if only they did rote memorization instead of actually mastering the CS fundamentals.
- Ocerge 5y ago
  I probably spent a month and a half studying most days for it (including reading my old data structures and algorithms books). It's the first time in my career I actually tried to prepare for a LC-style interview, and tbh it really wasn't bad. I also had a good experience and am still in the position, so YMMV.
- moneywoes 5y ago
  How did you get so good? Would love any tips
georgemcbay 5y ago
> I've come to think that the Leetcode interview style has morphed from a "let's see how you handle problems at scale" test into an ego-driven hazing ritual. I'm 48 and I've been a software developer a long time. The technical interview at many companies has been an ego-driven hazing ritual my entire career, well before Leetcode even existed.
autokad 5y ago
> "My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles. It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the IT field." I told google that this style of interviewing is discriminatory, especially towards people with families, or other commitments. Never got another call for an interview since ^_^
- sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
  the best part is that when you're done with the on-site you get a survey with a question like "do you think google's making the world a better place?" hah personally I think they do make some pretty cool things here and there but they do have very pretentious vibe all throughout the phase of technology that they own/owned is nearing end soon anyway
  - chiph 5y ago
    > do you think google's making the world a better place? Silicon Valley, season 1 episode 1: "But most importantly we're making the world a better place. Through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility." Mike Judge is a genius.
    - jasonladuke0311 5y ago
      > Mike Judge is a genius. He really is. Any one of his properties would prove that by itself. Having such keen insights into disparate facets of humanity tells me that he just gets humans on a level not many other people do. Hopefully that doesn’t sound too flowery and pretentious.
      - astronautjones 5y ago
        When I last saw geto boys live, willie d introduced the set by saying "we know why y'all are here, that's why this is the office space tour. and you know mike judge is the greatest satirist of this generation, watch silicon valley sundays on hbo" and then they went into "still" and bushwick bill beat up a printer on stage with a baseball bat. it was transcendent.
lumost 5y ago
Anecdotally, LC interviews are hardest when you're mid-career and get easier over time. As the main difference between a junior engineer and a mid/senior engineer is whether they can work autonomously, and an engineer with 3 years of experience rarely has good datapoints for invention/difficult projects. The only way companies have found to differentiate a strong hire from a no hire is by asking harder leetcode questions and expecting perfection. As you get to more senior levels it seems like companies still expect you to do passably well on those questions - but make their decision based on other data-points such as impact/past projects etc.
FPGAhacker 5y ago
There is nothing worse than being laughed at in an interview.
Dig1t 5y ago
Just in general this is extremely rude to do as an interviewer. I remember interviewing at Google a few years ago and the interviewer laughed at me when I asked her if they used Kotlin in the mobile app that they were hiring for. Kotlin was pretty standard at the time in most 3rd party apps and nowadays Google never shuts up about it in their dev talks, but back then I guess it was so unlikely that Google itself would be using the language in its own apps that she thought it was funny. It came across as pretty rude in that interview setting, though she probably was not intending to be so. When I interview people I try really hard not to do stuff like laughing at a serious question or suggestion from a candidate unless they're obviously trying to be funny.
- khazhoux 5y ago
  > It came across as pretty rude in that interview setting, though she probably was not intending to be so. Right, probably wasn't meant to be rude. Not hard to imagine that she might have had a lunch conversation recently about Kotlin, or just finished reading a long HN thread about it, and that was the laughter. But in general, yeah, we all need to be mindful in our language. The interviewer is under zero stress/tension during an interview, while the interviewee is on high alert.
- _huayra_ 5y ago
  > When I interview people I try really hard not to do stuff like laughing at a serious question or suggestion from a candidate unless they're obviously trying to be funny. Anyone who has worked at a big company knows how much terrible legacy cruft runs the world, and it does take an effort to not be jaded during the interview. I work for a major cloud hosting company and was fighting with the team that owns a resource manager that runs on each node over some "fancy C++11" features I used, and in an interview I had the same day, the doe-eyed new grad candidate asked me: Candidate: So do you guys have a chance to use C++20 yet for work? I find it pretty neat Me: Well...it's hard to explain C: How about C++17, are you at least on that? Me: ... C: 11? Me: the standard we use is older than you are The guy eventually joined and at least I have a pal to commiserate with now.
- danielmarkbruce 5y ago
  There are several reasons that might be funny. Assuming that funny question = stupid question is going to result in you being offended quite frequently. It's google, the interviewer probably thought it was funny because what you just asked would be logical, but because of insert crazy bureaucratic reason here they can't. Most interviewers are nice people. Assuming good intent when they laugh is going to be the right assumption most of the time.
mrbonner 5y ago
That interviewer behavior is borderline abusive.
boppo1 5y ago
> The interviewer laughed at my code, and then after going through the logic said "Wow I can't believe this actually works." Is it possible you had a better solution that the interviewer simply didn't recognize?
gcanyon 5y ago
I had a similar experience in a college physics class. I was reviewing my solution to a problem (maybe angular momentum?) with the TA, and they said, “I know you got the right answer, but I don’t see how I can give you credit for this when I don’t understand your solution.” And I replied, “Is it even remotely possible I came up with the correct answer by chance?” They agreed not. “Then why should it be my problem that you can’t understand my method?” In retrospect I was an ass, but I got credit and passed the class, so…
- nmfisher 5y ago
  Seems pretty reasonable to me.
austincheney 5y ago
Or even people currently in programming jobs doing real world code all day instead of hand jamming some contrived leet code algorithm fiction that will never be allowed to enter production. More realistic is to talk through a process that can be sporadically described in various 1-3 line code samples that will eventually be put together to form a program for something boring. A good boring example is something like transmit a file from a file system across a network and perform an integrity check. Boring but enough steps to talk through and demonstrate with a couple instructions. Nobody does this. I would hear a discussion on proper use of APIs and step by step walk towards success than see somebody lost writing for loops and conditions.
ignoramous 5y ago
> ...an ego-driven hazing ritual. Google India (c. late 2000s / early 2010s) used to be notorious for this, so much so that Googlers I knew would rather have their referrals give interviews at Google HQ (MTV), instead (not that it was any better, but rather it wasn't as worse). One piece of advice I received early on was, interviews aren't meant to be a pissing contest but often are. As an interviewee, accept that and try not to take rejections personally (easier said than done). As an interviewer, know that you're in a position of power, and try not to abuse it (easily done but never said).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jnwatson 5y ago
This isn't a new interview style. I interviewed with Microsoft in 1997 and encountered the haughtiest person I've ever met.
the_only_law 5y ago
> The interviewer laughed at my code, and then after going through the logic said "Wow I can't believe this actually works." It’s fine. I’ve seen code from FAANGs that evoked the same reaction from me.
zepolen 5y ago
My biggest gripe is that medical associations are systematically favoring candidates who have years of free time to memorize arbitrary organ names. It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the surgeon field.
mercy_dude 5y ago
At least you had an interviewer who could speak English and explained the problem. Mine had an interviewer who just typed the problem and his English was so bad that I couldn’t get answers to any follow up questions. He kept saying “ok…ok” as I was explaining the approach and once I finished coding up my approach he said that’s not what he is looking for. I kept asking clarifying questions till the end but never got the answer since his English was incomprehensible. I don’t understand how a person like this can function assuming they have to deal with English speaking team members.
- guitarsteve 5y ago
  I had the same issue in an Amazon interview in 2020. Couldn’t understand the interviewer’s extremely strong accent so I had to keep asking him to repeat himself. I never really understood the question he was asking. Not the best experience. But, I did work for Amazon several years before and that was mostly a good experience. So, luck of the draw, depending on which manager/team you get assigned to.
raxxorrax 5y ago
> "let's see how you handle problems at scale" test into an ego-driven hazing ritual Don't hold it against your colleagues. A lot of this knowledge isn't obvious to anyone and people chiding people for not knowing would be the last to come up with solutions themselves. This is just insecurity and bickering. Google has been a publicly traded company with a massive scale. If the technical problems aren't interesting to you, I doubt it is worth it to work there. The culture of such companies are always the same. Detached to minimize problems, don't make personal problem a problem of the company. Good colleagues can make you forget this for a while of course.

mk81 5y ago

geodel 5y ago

> It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the IT field. Very good point. I didn't really think about it much before. It is even difficult for candidates who are in IT field but not in FAANG type companies.

monkeybutton 5y ago
Depends on how motivated you are to to your current job. On two occasions I've witnessed a fellow developer mentally check themselves out after a round of layoffs, start doing the minimal amount of work necessary, and then spending the rest of their time cracking coding problems. When the next round of layoffs came, they were gone to Amazon and Google.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Where are they now?
  - monkeybutton 5y ago
    Sorry if I was a bit ambiguous. They are at Amazon and Google now. The point is treat your staff well or they might spend their time between tasks prepping for a FAANG interview.
majormajor 5y ago
Now imagine if instead of coding exercises we had the interview process from other industries that weighs degree and past experience more heavily in the absence of any other sort of testing. What would it look like to break in then? Completing a BS in your spare time? EDIT: Most ideas I've seen about replacement for live coding - like take home projects or contract-to-hire - are not really any more friendly to people with busy schedules anyway.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Or how impressive their GitHub is. Or another mostly (rightfully so IMO) choice you see here. Set a low bar to hiring but have a probationary period after which you fire a notable percentage.
  - cableshaft 5y ago
    I have a decent amount of commits to my Github, but it's to 98% private projects. Things that may become products someday. Don't have a whole lot to show potential employers. My day jobs have always been private or onprem repos.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    Yeah probationary period would be great for companies, maybe better for people trying to break into industry (unless they can't fired and can't get their old job back), and not so good for most people already in the industry.
    - LordDragonfang 5y ago
      From looking at job postings, there's no shortage of jobs for people already in the industry, and a proportionally much lower number of positions for entry-level. Every company has open positions for seniors, but no one wants to train them up.
      - yourapostasy 5y ago
        I think this is mainly a side effect of the kind of work being performed at companies has leaned over the decades towards an increasingly bimodal skills distribution, and the entry level work's sophistication is eroding from advances in automation and continuous improvement feedback loops. For example, I see at all of my clients entry level help desk positions to do things like help with provisioning a new employee's Wintel laptop, answer internal software packaging problems, intake VPN trouble reports, that sort of activity. But not nearly as much as when I entered the industry, because so much has been automated away or folded into centralized management systems, and the trend continues with advances in desktop engineering. On the other hand, I see an explosion of demand for the desktop engineering team positions. This is being reflected in many other IT areas as far as I can tell. There is a constant push these days at all my clients to automate all repetitive work, and a much bigger appetite from leadership to automate entry level work even when the ROI payoff is longer than 1-4 fiscal quarters than when I started. The push isn't due to direct labor savings though: it is to drive down variance of configurations exposed to the more senior and expensive roles, so the real high-payoff automation can really shine, and they can reduce business-as-usual work hours remediating the impact from those variances.

colinmhayes 5y ago

> Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles Finding people who are willing to spend months in order to get the job is one of the biggest reasons companies use leetcode.

oblio 5y ago
Well, he did say: > ego-driven hazing ritual :-)
- tiredofU2 5y ago
- samstave 5y ago
  The worst "Biggest Swingin' Dick on Campus" ego-fest I have ever experienced was working at the F in FAANG... -- Such a den of.... you can fill in the rest... I know someone who was literally fired for being "too social" -- and all they did was participate in the stupid parties that were had like "Build you're departments happy hour bar, here is $400 for alcohol to stock it up!!"
  - garbagecoder 5y ago
    I had a few FAANG+M people join my (reserve) unit in the army doing cyber and 6-shop stuff who thought they were hot shit. Some actually were, but the mentality was universal regardless of ability.
  - dymk 5y ago
    I look back fondly on the internal wiki pages documenting all the available "bar space" in the Facebook Seattle office.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Finding hard workers isn't easy. Leetcode is not a bad way to do it. It's not a great way, but it works and more importantly it scales well to the organization level.

sharkweek 5y ago

Yeah my entire experience could be summed up by saying everyone who sat across the table from me that day (with one exception, one person was super nice), was trying to prove that I was too dumb to work among the likes of them. This was in 2004 though so maybe that has changed but it certainly stuck with me.

wallscratch 5y ago

> My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to […] Wouldn’t this be true of almost any other selective interview process?

ghaff 5y ago
No. An interview process can be very selective without really requiring prep beyond studying up on the company somewhat--and maybe not really even that to the degree you're already familiar with the company. Not a developer (though was an engineer) but I've never studied for an interview beyond maybe spending an evening reading up on a company. But, to be honest, the (few) jobs I've had over the past 20 years or so have always come through knowing people.
- joshribakoff 5y ago
  Some people use algorithms daily, or went to school for them, and don’t need to study for leetcode. Likewise, some people do architecture or frontend apps all day and don’t need to study for those. No matter what a company asks, some people will find it unreasonable, at the end of the day the charitable interpretation is that the company is choosing interview challenges that they feel are a proxy for the skills needed to succeed.
  - trowawee 5y ago
    You're assuming that a company has to interview all candidates the same way regardless of what job they're actually interviewing for. A frequent complaint, voiced all over this thread, is that interviewing like that makes no sense. If the job uses 100-level algos all the time, then sure, let's talk algos (also, kinda weird, but I'm sure there's something out there like this). But if you're bringing me in as an SRE and we spend a bunch of time on LC questions and much less time on my experience with AWS, Terraform, and CI/CD work, the interview is bad for me (because I don't work with low-level algos and probably won't know that stuff, _unless_ I've been grinding LC) and bad for you (because you don't have much signal about whether I can do the SRE stuff).

stayfrosty420 5y ago

> Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles I agree to some extent but moreso, I think it heavily favours those with a theoretical CS background, which means effectively you are favouring candidates from top colleges in a round about way.

mk89 5y ago
I honestly don't believe it has anything to do with the college level. No offense, but you study python, learn its basic syntax + "algorithm design" book + 1 practical book about algorithms and data structures and you're good enough for performing good/optimal leetcodes. Some things you might miss, for example some exercises you can optimize better if you know some algebra/maths, but 90% of that stuff is more or less repetitive. Once you learn the tricks etc, it really becomes repetitive because finally it's just if/else and for loops. (I don't mean to minimize in any way the effort it takes to make such exercises, it's just the feeling I had while doing some and failing a lot of them). It's always about specializing one or two specific algorithms you have found in the book[s]. Sometimes it requires coming up with very creative ideas - better for loops. :) For me Leetcodes are not per se bad. I still learnt something from "being forced" to do them which I probably wouldn't have done if i hadn't been forced. What I despise is the fact that companies have lost accountability in hiring. It's hard to interview, so it's better to rely on an "industry standard" - after all Amazon and Google do the same, so why shouldn't we?
- stayfrosty420 5y ago
  right, but it's way easier to get into if you did multiple semesters of it in college. You probably won't even need the textbook, just glance at a few articles on wikipedia/google and it'll all come back.

Clubber 5y ago

>an ego-driven hazing ritual Last time I did an interview where this wasn't the case was 1998. Granted I don't really interview anymore.

throwawayboise 5y ago
I've never had an interview like this. Get out of SV if you don't want to play those games.
- Clubber 5y ago
  This was in a mid-sized town. The main guy who was hazing was only mid-level talented, and was very insecure about it. On the other side of the table, I've never seen someone who I considered a high-level talent act that way. They may have tough questions but they certainly aren't pricks about it. This was a long time ago, I get work through my network now, interviews consist of going to lunch and shooting the shit.
- eecc 5y ago
  Except, plenty of wannabe IT departments that want to “hire then best of breed” and start copycatting/aping these gestures. It’s a global Cargo Cult

throwawayboise 5y ago

> The interviewer laughed at my code, and then after going through the logic said "Wow I can't believe this actually works." OK, not professional, and fair grounds for deciding you don't want to work there (interviews are as much for you to evaluate the employer as they are for the employer to evaluate you) but.... have a bit of a thicker skin. Carrying something like that for 15 years instead of immediately dismissing it as the commentary of an asshole is just no way to go through life.

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vanusa 5y ago
If it were just 1 or 2 assholes, years apart, it would bounce off your skin. But the integral of having to deal with these assholes over the years (both in the hiring process, and when you start to actually work there) -- meanwhile having a real life to be responsible for (family, kids) -- can start to wear you down, after a while.

technothrasher 5y ago

Interestingly, my partner just went through the interview process at both Amazon and Google. The Amazon process was horrendous, with an insulting “good cop/bad cop” series of interviews. It was a relief when they decided not to move forward as the process was enough to know they’d be horrible to work for. The Google process was great, productive, and generated excitement about working for them. In the end they offered the job but couldn’t make the compensation quite work. But they walked away on good terms.

nameoda 5y ago
My personal experience was almost the exact opposite (granted, this was in 2020, and things might have changed since then). Both companies asked leetcode-style questions and behavioral questions. The Amazon interviewers were engaged, excited when talking about their work, and seemed like they were rooting for me to succeed. Google interviewers were condescending and looked like they were unhappy to be part of the interview process and were just going through the motions because they were forced to. I had a lot of self-doubt after being treated like crap by the Google interview and decided to never do that to myself again.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  I'm pretty confident it's just luck of the draw. At both companies, giving interviews is an expectation for promotion, so many interviewers don't particularly want to be there and some are bad at hiding that fact.
  - decafninja 5y ago
    Yeah, there is always a subjective factor involved in these interviews. You are just screwed if you meet an interviewer that doesn't like you personally for some reason and acts hostile. Or maybe they are putting on an act to seem hostile to push your buttons.

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that_guy_iain 5y ago

> My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles. For me, leetcode is basically just what is taught at university level. So they're hiring people based on if they know stuff they would learn and forget from university. The thing is, it's not about having free time, it's about being so dedicated to getting the job that you'll spend ages learning things you would never do during your day job and if you did do them during your day job you would be considered a cowboy because there are predefined libraries that are optimised to do those things. For me, the main reason I don't want to work for FAANG is they have a reputation for long hours and that the hardest thing at the companies is the interview process.

ss108 5y ago
> For me, the main reason I don't want to work for FAANG is they have a reputation for long hours I thought working at Google or Facebook was supposed to be a pretty chill "rest and vest" situation, esp at the former (?)
- rhizome 5y ago
  My understanding (at least where Google is concerned) is that it's a jungle situation and there's a lot of team-hopping and connection-making until you find a place to land for awhile. That may be where R&V comes into the picture, maybe some people are able to negotiate a less stressful First Act, and possibly most likely, maybe my understanding is out of date. Remember, with the kinds of education people have at these companies coupled with the amounts of money they are receiving, "the bullied become the bullies" is a serious occupational hazard.
  - tdeck 5y ago
    > My understanding (at least where Google is concerned) is that it's a jungle situation and there's a lot of team-hopping and connection-making until you find a place to land for awhile. I think this is only true if you want to work on something interesting. If you're willing to work in some obscure corner of ad infrastructure or Google Surveys or something and you're not trying to get promoted, you can stick around for a long time at Google and not get much done. At a big organization like Google the pace is pretty slow even if you are trying to get some work accomplished, so that provides cover for those who aren't as effective.

majormajor 5y ago

I would love to know how long the average FANG dev spent on leetcode practice before their interviews. From my small sample of friends who've done stints there, it's far less than "months". I similarly have had - but declined - an offer from one of them with prep measured in "hours" not "days."

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smilekzs 5y ago
Survivor bias alert: These people have all passed the interviews. I wonder if this is an intended side-effect, namely also filtering out people who would have passed if only they did rote memorization instead of actually mastering the CS fundamentals.
Ocerge 5y ago
I probably spent a month and a half studying most days for it (including reading my old data structures and algorithms books). It's the first time in my career I actually tried to prepare for a LC-style interview, and tbh it really wasn't bad. I also had a good experience and am still in the position, so YMMV.
moneywoes 5y ago
How did you get so good? Would love any tips

georgemcbay 5y ago

> I've come to think that the Leetcode interview style has morphed from a "let's see how you handle problems at scale" test into an ego-driven hazing ritual. I'm 48 and I've been a software developer a long time. The technical interview at many companies has been an ego-driven hazing ritual my entire career, well before Leetcode even existed.

autokad 5y ago

> "My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles. It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the IT field." I told google that this style of interviewing is discriminatory, especially towards people with families, or other commitments. Never got another call for an interview since ^_^

sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
the best part is that when you're done with the on-site you get a survey with a question like "do you think google's making the world a better place?" hah personally I think they do make some pretty cool things here and there but they do have very pretentious vibe all throughout the phase of technology that they own/owned is nearing end soon anyway
- chiph 5y ago
  > do you think google's making the world a better place? Silicon Valley, season 1 episode 1: "But most importantly we're making the world a better place. Through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility." Mike Judge is a genius.
  - jasonladuke0311 5y ago
    > Mike Judge is a genius. He really is. Any one of his properties would prove that by itself. Having such keen insights into disparate facets of humanity tells me that he just gets humans on a level not many other people do. Hopefully that doesn’t sound too flowery and pretentious.
    - astronautjones 5y ago
      When I last saw geto boys live, willie d introduced the set by saying "we know why y'all are here, that's why this is the office space tour. and you know mike judge is the greatest satirist of this generation, watch silicon valley sundays on hbo" and then they went into "still" and bushwick bill beat up a printer on stage with a baseball bat. it was transcendent.

lumost 5y ago

Anecdotally, LC interviews are hardest when you're mid-career and get easier over time. As the main difference between a junior engineer and a mid/senior engineer is whether they can work autonomously, and an engineer with 3 years of experience rarely has good datapoints for invention/difficult projects. The only way companies have found to differentiate a strong hire from a no hire is by asking harder leetcode questions and expecting perfection. As you get to more senior levels it seems like companies still expect you to do passably well on those questions - but make their decision based on other data-points such as impact/past projects etc.

FPGAhacker 5y ago

There is nothing worse than being laughed at in an interview.

Dig1t 5y ago

Just in general this is extremely rude to do as an interviewer. I remember interviewing at Google a few years ago and the interviewer laughed at me when I asked her if they used Kotlin in the mobile app that they were hiring for. Kotlin was pretty standard at the time in most 3rd party apps and nowadays Google never shuts up about it in their dev talks, but back then I guess it was so unlikely that Google itself would be using the language in its own apps that she thought it was funny. It came across as pretty rude in that interview setting, though she probably was not intending to be so. When I interview people I try really hard not to do stuff like laughing at a serious question or suggestion from a candidate unless they're obviously trying to be funny.

khazhoux 5y ago
> It came across as pretty rude in that interview setting, though she probably was not intending to be so. Right, probably wasn't meant to be rude. Not hard to imagine that she might have had a lunch conversation recently about Kotlin, or just finished reading a long HN thread about it, and that was the laughter. But in general, yeah, we all need to be mindful in our language. The interviewer is under zero stress/tension during an interview, while the interviewee is on high alert.
_huayra_ 5y ago
> When I interview people I try really hard not to do stuff like laughing at a serious question or suggestion from a candidate unless they're obviously trying to be funny. Anyone who has worked at a big company knows how much terrible legacy cruft runs the world, and it does take an effort to not be jaded during the interview. I work for a major cloud hosting company and was fighting with the team that owns a resource manager that runs on each node over some "fancy C++11" features I used, and in an interview I had the same day, the doe-eyed new grad candidate asked me: Candidate: So do you guys have a chance to use C++20 yet for work? I find it pretty neat Me: Well...it's hard to explain C: How about C++17, are you at least on that? Me: ... C: 11? Me: the standard we use is older than you are The guy eventually joined and at least I have a pal to commiserate with now.
danielmarkbruce 5y ago
There are several reasons that might be funny. Assuming that funny question = stupid question is going to result in you being offended quite frequently. It's google, the interviewer probably thought it was funny because what you just asked would be logical, but because of insert crazy bureaucratic reason here they can't. Most interviewers are nice people. Assuming good intent when they laugh is going to be the right assumption most of the time.

mrbonner 5y ago

That interviewer behavior is borderline abusive.

boppo1 5y ago

> The interviewer laughed at my code, and then after going through the logic said "Wow I can't believe this actually works." Is it possible you had a better solution that the interviewer simply didn't recognize?

gcanyon 5y ago

I had a similar experience in a college physics class. I was reviewing my solution to a problem (maybe angular momentum?) with the TA, and they said, “I know you got the right answer, but I don’t see how I can give you credit for this when I don’t understand your solution.” And I replied, “Is it even remotely possible I came up with the correct answer by chance?” They agreed not. “Then why should it be my problem that you can’t understand my method?” In retrospect I was an ass, but I got credit and passed the class, so…

nmfisher 5y ago
Seems pretty reasonable to me.

austincheney 5y ago

Or even people currently in programming jobs doing real world code all day instead of hand jamming some contrived leet code algorithm fiction that will never be allowed to enter production. More realistic is to talk through a process that can be sporadically described in various 1-3 line code samples that will eventually be put together to form a program for something boring. A good boring example is something like transmit a file from a file system across a network and perform an integrity check. Boring but enough steps to talk through and demonstrate with a couple instructions. Nobody does this. I would hear a discussion on proper use of APIs and step by step walk towards success than see somebody lost writing for loops and conditions.

ignoramous 5y ago

> ...an ego-driven hazing ritual. Google India (c. late 2000s / early 2010s) used to be notorious for this, so much so that Googlers I knew would rather have their referrals give interviews at Google HQ (MTV), instead (not that it was any better, but rather it wasn't as worse). One piece of advice I received early on was, interviews aren't meant to be a pissing contest but often are. As an interviewee, accept that and try not to take rejections personally (easier said than done). As an interviewer, know that you're in a position of power, and try not to abuse it (easily done but never said).

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jnwatson 5y ago

This isn't a new interview style. I interviewed with Microsoft in 1997 and encountered the haughtiest person I've ever met.

the_only_law 5y ago

> The interviewer laughed at my code, and then after going through the logic said "Wow I can't believe this actually works." It’s fine. I’ve seen code from FAANGs that evoked the same reaction from me.

zepolen 5y ago

My biggest gripe is that medical associations are systematically favoring candidates who have years of free time to memorize arbitrary organ names. It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the surgeon field.

mercy_dude 5y ago

At least you had an interviewer who could speak English and explained the problem. Mine had an interviewer who just typed the problem and his English was so bad that I couldn’t get answers to any follow up questions. He kept saying “ok…ok” as I was explaining the approach and once I finished coding up my approach he said that’s not what he is looking for. I kept asking clarifying questions till the end but never got the answer since his English was incomprehensible. I don’t understand how a person like this can function assuming they have to deal with English speaking team members.

guitarsteve 5y ago
I had the same issue in an Amazon interview in 2020. Couldn’t understand the interviewer’s extremely strong accent so I had to keep asking him to repeat himself. I never really understood the question he was asking. Not the best experience. But, I did work for Amazon several years before and that was mostly a good experience. So, luck of the draw, depending on which manager/team you get assigned to.

raxxorrax 5y ago

> "let's see how you handle problems at scale" test into an ego-driven hazing ritual Don't hold it against your colleagues. A lot of this knowledge isn't obvious to anyone and people chiding people for not knowing would be the last to come up with solutions themselves. This is just insecurity and bickering. Google has been a publicly traded company with a massive scale. If the technical problems aren't interesting to you, I doubt it is worth it to work there. The culture of such companies are always the same. Detached to minimize problems, don't make personal problem a problem of the company. Good colleagues can make you forget this for a while of course.