14 ms·

Lessons from a tech job search

232 points by nindalf 5y ago

DougMellon 5y ago
I’m currently on the hunt for a new grad position and this was an awesome read. The process is proving stressful so it’s nice to learn from others experiences.
- nindalf 5y ago
  Glad I could help! Feel free to reach out if have any questions. My email is on the blog.
  - DougMellon 5y ago
    Will do. Appreciate that.
- shoo 5y ago
  one thing to keep in mind: one component of the outcome is in your control (your skill, how much prep you've put in -- especially for things like interview technique that you won't otherwise use on the job), and the other component is controlled by factors completely outside your control (which bunch of interviewers get pulled out of the hat on the day, which idiosyncratic aspects they focus on, which exact questions they ask you, if the interviewers got enough sleep, if the job advertisement is a sham they've put on for HR but they've already decided to promote an internal candidate to fill the role...) so don't get too discouraged by the outcome from any particular interview, part of that is hugely variable and essentially random. focus on putting the effort into the bits in your control and maximising the number of situations you create where your prep could pay off.
  - DougMellon 5y ago
    Thank you so much for your time. Always love any insight I can take in — means a lot.
- ipnon 5y ago
  I struggled so much as a new grad I wanted to give you some specific advice: There are two kinds of employee candidates, red flaggers and green flaggers. By this I mean people look at your resume and either think "wow, what's the catch?" or "hmm okay, maybe there's something good here." A red flagger would be someone who built a supercomputer out of beach pebbles then proved P=NP on it. The interviewer already knows you're good enough for the job, they're just looking for red flags that would disqualify you. A green flagger would be someone who worked at GenericCorp for 2 years on a Java queue. The interviewer knows you're a programmer, but they need a signal that you'll actually be able to do the job. Why does this matter? If you're a red flagger, all you need to do in the interview is not make an obvious mistake. They already want to hire you, they just have to do the HR dance first. If you're a green flagger, you have to do everything right in the interview to get the job. They need programmers ASAP, but you still need to prove yourself. Being a green flagger is much harder than a red flagger. Becoming a red flagger is simple: Your interviewer needs to think you are smarter than them. If you pull this off they will always give you the benefit of the doubt. Your job interviewing will be so much easier. To do this you just need one thing on your resume that they don't know how to do. If your resume has an internship writing React, and a side project using NodeJS, your relative inexperience will make them think "I can code circles around this chump." Switch that side project to a niche area they've never dabbled in, and suddenly they're over their head. "What do they know that I don't? We must hire immediately!" I accomplished this by doing side projects in machine learning and crypto. For any programmer with some tenacity these are totally doable, but most people I interviewed with hadn't done it themselves so I became a red flagger. It doesn't need to be these subjects, it should be whatever niche computer topic you're most interested in. It doesn't need to be complicated either. If you can demo it, and it works, and you can explain it in a way that teaches the interviewer something, you've made the job of interviewing much easier.
  - magneticnorth 5y ago
    >> in a way that teaches the interviewer something, you've made the job of interviewing much easier. A tip I have that I don't see much is related to this - good people love to learn, and also generally like to teach, and this goes both ways across the interview table. If you know something the interviewer doesn't and they want you to teach them about it, that's a good sign for your interview outcome, and also a great sign that this is probably someplace you want to work. And vice-versa - if you don't know something in an interview but you have time to ask the interviewer to explain it, or to point you to a reference where you can learn about it, that'll help a lot with the they-don't-know-this signal, especially in more junior roles. In most technical jobs, it's impossible to already know everything, so demonstrating that you're someone who is always learning is the next best thing to already being the expert they want.
keiran01 5y ago
How has hiring become such a wandering maze of errands?
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  That wandering maze of errands is only if you're applying to FAANGs and top companies paying top of the market compensation, which the author is. If you apply at average European companies for example, paying average EU wages, you don't get any of that, but you'll have to be OK with earning very avenge wages in line or sometimes below most other skilled white collar professions (in Western EU at least, in the East devs still earn higher then everyone else). It's kind of like dating, the less attractive a company is to potential candidates, the easier it is to get in, the more attractive it is, the harder it is. Supply and demand.
  - sitzkrieg 5y ago
    i disagree, i had to do quite a song and dance and nearly every dev job i applied to in the US. mid range noname companies and all
  - BlargMcLarg 5y ago
    Yeah no. Plenty of companies do this in the EU as well. It's exactly that difference between the hiring process and the rewards which upsets people. Ironically that is still in line with your dating analogy.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      >Yeah no. Plenty of companies do this in the EU as well True, but it really depends on the region and local market. If you go to an over-hyped place like Berlin for example, where there's tons of low quality start-ups claiming they're the next Google, and tons of both ambitious and low-quality candidates pouring in from abroad with inflated resumes trying to break into the market, then yeah, the hiring process will be broken from all the effort needed to filter out the posers and chancers from the candidates who can actually deliver results, especially if you don't have a strong network of contacts you can leverage. But in my small city that nobody from abroad has heard of, hiring is much more sane, since there's much less noise you need to filter out. Granted, the number of opportunities and the pay is also much lower than in places like Berlin so that's the trade-off for sane interviews since the small market attracts less posers and chancers.
dehrmann 5y ago
> I spoke with 2 engineers who asked very specific questions about Java. Like "when is a static block run?" I thought it was a bit strange to ask easily googled programming language trivia. This isn't language trivia. It can be the difference between Util.helper() running very quickly or blocking while an unrelated cache loads. Even if you don't know, you could tell them that (why it's good to know), what your guess would be and why, and how you could find out experimentally. > They later got back to me saying they wanted someone with experience with Java 14 and I had only worked with Java 8. This one's weird. You can get caught up from 8 pretty quickly.
- nindalf 5y ago
  I did try to tell them that. I answered almost all their questions, including going really deep on garbage collection. I got a comment elsewhere from a former JPMC development manager about their hiring practices. > most people there hire for the specific problem they’re facing this week, as opposed to trying to get the best talent.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > You can get caught up from 8 pretty quickly. That jumped out at me, too - like, "what the hell does 'experience with Java 14' even mean?" OP did mention earlier in the post that his Java was a bit rusty, so maybe they were just being nice.
durnygbur 5y ago
I had been quite patient with our industry recruitment practices until I took a longer breake and had to deal with other problems in life. Doctors, lawyers, contractors, plumbers, electricians, accountants, agents - you pay them even if you want them only to open their mouth in your general direction. No free labour, I'm not solving any problems for free.
- treis 5y ago
  That's just not true at all. Doctors in particular have ridiculous hiring processes. Trades provide free quotes and to some extent diagnoses all the time. Pretty much every lawyer will have free initial consults and almost all plaintiff attorneys work on contingency.
  - durnygbur 5y ago
    YMMV. The only time in life I needed a lawyer, even to shop around I had to pay to each of them EUR 150-200 per hour for the initial consultation to introduce my case. Doctors?! I have yet to meet one who would feel obliged towards me in any way, when it comes to hiring at a hospital then perhaps it's a demanding process - no idea.
- jothme 5y ago
  Ok, but how do you get a job then? I hate those take home assignments as well. I work for over a decade in the industry, if they don't believe me that I can do basic stuff, it's just annoying. But I am not aware if any company who does not do that. They all just copy the hiring process of the big companies. "What works for Google must work for us too". And that's just not true. Google has thousands of applicants per day, the average shitty company can be happy if they get one or two qualified candidates. For Google, I'd gladly to a several hour assignment, but not for an average company - because it is not Google.
  - lentil_soup 5y ago
    Guess it depends in the industry, I've never had to do live coding interviews when interviewing in game-dev. It's been mostly technical discussions, maybe some take home tests, once I had a debugging session. Never a leetcode type of thing.
pizzaknife 5y ago
my experience w amazon about a year was a huge turn off. 45min of lighting coding via a company named carrot or some such. "dont worry about code quality just complete the exercises." ive been in enterprise scale orgs for 14yrs. i completed the exercises and then said no thanks. very demeaning experience
- nindalf 5y ago
  karat.io I believe. The Deliveroo interview I mentioned in the post was outsourced to them.
- runlaszlorun 5y ago
  I’ve actually worked for them as an interviewer (no longer). They ‘try’ to make it a decent candidate exerience in my view, but are missing some obvious flaws in their approach. For example, they do “care somewhat” about code quality but you’d have to catch that from the subtle wording. And I’ve seen entry level candidates demonstrate far above entry level skillsets and not pass the interview.
- dr-smooth 5y ago
  I also felt the experience was demeaning. When I asked the interviewer if I was allowed to execute the code, he wouldn't tell me yes or no. WTF? So if I don't run it, I might have a bug, but if do run it and they don't want me to, then that's a strike. I didn't run it, but went home and wrote it again, and in fact, it did have a bug. Oh, well. That experience turned me off from AWS. Their recruiters are hitting me up lately, but I'm ignoring them.
bspear 5y ago
How did you rule out startups? I'm interviewing with some startups right now, found this site helpful for anyone in the same boat: https://topstartups.io/ https://topstartups.io/
- nindalf 5y ago
  Author here. I used cord.co and got a several reachouts from founders. Just my opinion but I didn’t find any of the pitches compelling.
- codingdave 5y ago
  I rule out startups because I'm not at a point in life where high risk makes sense - I have 3 teenagers in my family, so our home and life needs stability, not risk. Startups have some merit if you are young and ambitious and looking for your work to drive your life forward. But not everyone is at that stage of life.
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    I did startups the entire time my three boys were growing up - 0 to out of the house. It's not really risk. The job pays; if it goes away, the next job pays. Just have something in the bank.
    - throwra620 5y ago
    - silicon2401 5y ago
      > It's not really risk. The job pays; if it goes away, the next job pays. Just have something in the bank That's risk. The difference is that you're comfortable with the risk, but it is risk.
      - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
        Don't understand. All sorts of jobs go away. How does it differ from any other gig?
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
I'm having a horrible time finding work. I left my previous job on bad terms after hostility from managers. Recent company wanted previous manager as reference. Previous manager gave a negative reference so the company passed on me. I did a take home project for a startup and fulfilled all of their requirements. They said the code was sound but wanted more documentation and they passed on me. It's been infuriating to say the least.
- soulofmischief 5y ago
  Have you tried posting on the monthly Who Wants To Be Hired threads? What kind of industry experience do you have? I had a similar experience with a toxic, sociopathic CEO from a previous job leading to at least one known instance where an interview process was going along just fine and got cut short after contacting that person. At first I was very worried that, given the highly niche aspect of my work, I would have trouble remaining in that part of the industry. So I switched tactics, and that CEO has become the first previous boss I will willingly trash talk. I get it out of the way immediately and then it's a non-issue. And then I get to use the reaction as a litmus test for whether the culture will fit. Just make sure not to come across like a jerk.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    I have not posted there- perhaps I shall. I have 3 years of experience in defense software doing C/C++ and Perl. I'm not a coding superstar or genius but I am genuinely passionate and grew up with a Linux family PC in the 90s. The trouble is that the work in defense was so monotonous that I learned practically nothing. The sensitive nature of the work also means that I cannot talk about it very much in interviews. I'm going to borrow your tactic of not being shy about previous negative experiences with managers. Thanks
    - bladegash 5y ago
      As a person who formerly worked in both defense and other classified environments, I definitely empathize with what you are saying regarding not being able to share much about your previous experiences. Best thing I can recommend is to spend some time building a public portfolio, even if it’s doing simple stuff. It will benefit you in multiple ways, not the least of which includes honing/practicing your skills, learning some new technologies, and having something to show for it.
fecak 5y ago
Nice piece. I write resumes and give career advice to a lot of tech professionals, and what you wrote about applying for jobs and "not being sure if a human ever read my resume" hit home for me. I don't trust that the algorithms will identify qualified people, and I think job search is too important a thing to trust to algorithms. Getting discovered within the traditional application process (LinkedIn, Indeed, applying through company website) is difficult, because you have a large number of applications, and many of those are entirely unqualified. When I was recruiting, it wasn't unusual to get 50+% of applicants for a Senior Dev role that clearly had never written a line of code. It's a needle in a haystack problem, and the bigger issue is that at some point is the recruiter going to keep investing time looking through the haystack to find a couple needles, or will the recruiter identify a better way to find a few needles? Direct outreach to recruiters through LinkedIn is what I coach my clients to do, and I provide specific language for that messaging which is just as important. Recruiters like hearing from qualified candidates, and if the recruiter gets enough messages like this he/she doesn't have to wade through the resume pile. It's a clear win/win.
palindrome818 5y ago
does that youtuber Tech Lead know what he's talking about? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ4YPdu0RLo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ4YPdu0RLo
rootusrootus 5y ago
Does anyone just partner with a recruiter they like and stick with them, rather than try to play the numbers game on an open market? In the past, as a hiring manager, my best hires by far came from a recruiter that I trusted. His hit rate was amazing. He spent hours interviewing people himself and by the time they came to me for an interview, it was because he already knew they were qualified. In a world where people jump every few years, hooking up with someone like that seems like it could work out well, if they've built up a decent reputation. Basically like a good contracting company, but for FTE. Instead of multi-stage interviews at 10s of companies (or more), everyone on both sides of the process could save a lot of time and get down to the nitty gritty. Just spitballing. I am only halfway through my cup of coffee, however. And clearly things like this have been tried, but always on some kind of large scale, which in turn destroys the effectiveness -- because it gets gamed, I'd guess. But at a much smaller scale, does it work, do people do it?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- giaour 5y ago
  I did this early in my career and ended up underpaid in an unfulfilling job. As a candidate (especially one without sufficient experience in the industry), it's difficult to tell if a recruiter is good or if they're just looking to place people as quickly as possible, fit be damned. If you don't know what to look out for, bad recruiters can frequently come off as better from a candidate's perspective. They get you more interviews, and they won't tell you to pass on an offer because the compensation is too low. You generally don't find out that the job would be a poor fit until you interview, and you won't find out that you're being underpaid until you've already started (if ever).
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    It's important to understand the incentives of the recruiter in order to have a successful relationship with them, and to keep your expectations realistic. (No, a government employee doesn't particularly care about someone they just met, either. They have their own incentives, too.)
Veuxdo 5y ago
Are there back-end engineers who still write actual algorithms, or is it all just 1 million QPS microservice architecture design at this point.
aguilarm 5y ago
This is good advice and tracks pretty well to my recent experience. I applied almost exclusively to startups though. 7 YoE full stack web. I did two take home assignments but zero white-boarding, just a few general language/framework questions. Some very casual system design questions also. This was for mid-level to senior full stack web dev roles. I had a minimum salary but beyond that do not need more, so I didn't bother with FAANG or large enterprise stuff. Very happy where I landed. I was actually really surprised at how smooth and relatively simple the whole search was compared to the almost horror story level experiences some people have. It is mentally exhausting but I was lucky to have polite and professional interviewers.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  Did you deal with recruiters? A lot of (but not all of) my bad interview experiences were for jobs that contacted me through a 3rd party recruiter.
digitalsanctum 5y ago
Thanks very much for this post. I'm currently going through the process of preparing and interviewing after six years of being at the same company. A lot of what you offer for advice validates my strategy. No matter your experience and skill level there's always apprehension and a bit of imposter syndrome so it's helpful to hear about someone who's worked through that.
- nindalf 5y ago
  I’m glad you got a lot out of the post. Feel free to reach out over email if you’d like to discuss this more.
rr808 5y ago
I'd love a study on desirability of ex-FANG devs vs non-FANG. I think the best credential that OP has is having Meta on the CV. It seems the best step in career paths.
- nindalf 5y ago
  I think it helped a lot. Not so much in clearing the later rounds, but definitely in terms of getting responses to resume submissions on the careers pages.
remote_only_eng 5y ago
VincentEvans 5y ago
Can you share what compensation band are these interviews were for?
Gortal278 5y ago
I had a pretty similar experience while going through a series of interviews at the beginning of last year. The way to really get your compensation up is to do as the article suggests and interview many places in parallel. Then negotiate offers to get what you want. I found I don't actually like take home interviews, I work as a mobile engineer so it's often the same take home, a list of stuff retrieved a back-end and then rendered in a list on screen. Selecting a list item should open up a details page. While the take home is never particularly difficult, the boundaries of the task are often not set clearly. So it's easy for that 4 hours to extend to a whole weekend to make sure all the latest patterns, and trendy libraries are used. Annoyingly on a few occasions after sinking a weekend into a project, I have had an auto-reject with no feedback. That soured me on them. I have put a few hundred leetcode practice problems over the years and can discuss mobile system design pretty extensively, i'd rather interview that way in future.
- etblg 5y ago
  > So it's easy for that 4 hours to extend to a whole weekend to make sure all the latest patterns, and trendy libraries are used. And including those could potentially be a liability. I had a take-home assignment (a front-end application) where I decided to use Typescript, because I would like to use it and I figured it would reflect nicely. One of the items of feedback given (I still passed) was that there was an implicit "any" in the code. If I hadn't included Typescript would I have gotten feedback that I wasn't using Typescript? If you're using Typescript but not going the full 10 yards and making sure it's set up in a perfect way you'd use it in production? Could including it harm your chances over not including it because you're not using it in a way the reviewer likes? Ultimately you'd think it wouldn't matter and that just including it was good enough (and I think it was for this specific reviewer), but it's a tricky game of hoping your choices line up with the unknown opinions and biases of the person reviewing in order for it to work out.
motohagiography 5y ago
Is there some legalistic reason companies don't seem to keep a funnel of quality CVs for candidates and reach out to them when a role looks like it's going to become active? This whole "application," process seems like the artifact of a kind of historical paternalism among employers that doesn't reflect reality anymore, and it seems to be an unneceessarily synchronous bottleneck in the talent market, where both parties (employer and employee) have to time the market correctly. Objectively, that seems...limited.
- paxys 5y ago
  Well they do, or at least try to. Anyone who gets a dozen recruiter emails a day will attest to this.
- bigzyg33k 5y ago
  They do, I got my current FAANG role from a reach out a year after I applied, and another FAANG company has been sending me emails for over 2 years now asking if I'd like to interview with them again.
dmoy 5y ago
That design interview checklist seems on-point to me. I almost only conduct PM / technical design interviews now, so I rarely get to go into that much depth with candidates (don't expect PM candidates to get nearly as far as dev candidates), but that looks like an ideal breadth and depth. > Reverse Questions > > But IMO this is only for you, not to impress the interviewer. In my experience, asking no questions didn't affect the result. For example, by the time I did the 3 coding interviews at Google I was mentally exhausted and couldn't muster the energy to ask them anything. I still got an offer. Your mileage may vary. Correct this should absolutely be true. Unless your question is something blatantly offensive, it doesn't matter one way or the other. That time is for you, and has no affect on your feedback. I say should, because, well... people are people.
- JacobThreeThree 5y ago
  >That design interview checklist seems on-point to me. Yeah, the author linked to some interesting other links. Good article, good luck to him!
sanderjd 5y ago
I just finished a job search. Some of my own notes: Preparing a resume: I just updated my linkedin profile and exported that into a pdf using the tool they provide. I think this is perfectly fine. I only ended up sending the actual pdf to one company (Stripe) and I get the sense it was just a formality. Scheduling: This really tripped me up actually. I didn't plan it very well and I ended up asking a company where I had already completed the interviews to slow roll making an offer because I had other interviews scheduled and didn't want to turn down their offer just because I hadn't finished all the interviews I wanted to do yet. This kind of sucks because it's super stressful, but I think it really is best to try to schedule it so that you do all the final interviews you want to do all in the same week or maybe two. I think this is really the main reason to narrow down the search to a small number of companies (like less than 5). There are only so many interviews you can do in this time frame. Algorithm interview: I did not get any hard questions in these this time around; they were all of the screening question variety, like Leetcode's "easy" (or perhaps easier), where if you know how to write basic code, they really don't require any preparation. Design interview: I didn't prepare for these because I actually do architectural design at work fairly often (as opposed to the weird little bottle coding problems in interviews, which I don't ever do). I was a little disappointed at how I did in these; it turns out that talking through this under time pressure is not the same as doing it for real, and I often wasn't actually quite sure what to draw in the boxes they want you to draw, because that isn't really part of my real process at work. But I guess these went fine because I didn't get turned down for anything because of this. But I may prepare more next time. Something not covered in the article, but which I want to mention: The styles of interviews listed here are not the only possible ones! My new all-time favorite interview I have done was at Stripe. Using my own language of choice and my own tools (ie. my IDE), they dropped me into a fairly large codebase (which looked like it was adapted from an open source project for the purpose of this interview) with a failing test case and asked me to figure out the bug and fix it. This was really really fun and very illustrative of the kind of thing I do at work pretty much every day. I had another interview with a similar sort of question except it was in the realm of operations. It wasn't quite as great because it was a bit more contrived, but I still really enjoyed it. The contrivance was: you are new and our sysadmin is on vacation with phone service but no internet, we start getting reports that people aren't seeing anything when they go to our website, you are on the phone with the sys admin and your job is to ask questions to get to the bottom of what's going on. This seemed like a hard kind of interview for the interviewer to do, but it was really fun for me. Stripe also did a "system integration" interview, which was like one of the take-homes mentioned in the article, but was live-coding on screen share. I had to use an unfamiliar json library and an unfamiliar http library and interact with a couple unfamiliar API endpoints and get it all to work together. This went ok, but it was a lot of moving pieces for a one hour live interview, and I think it would have been better as a take-home with a two-hour or so time box. I will say that I was pleasantly surprised that a lot of people seem to have started moving somewhat away from the esoteric CS-y data structure and algorithm interviews that I think most of us despise.
WalterBright 5y ago
> Before writing the resume I set out to find the ideal tool to write it. Um, any word processor? Even a text file? A good resume is only a page long. Spending time researching the ideal tool, buying it, installing it, worrying that it is malware, learning how to use it, seems like far more time than just typing it in. Heck, my early resumes were written on a manual typewriter. Then they became text files sent to a daisy wheel printer, which made them look very nice.
- nindalf 5y ago
  You’re right. I was afraid I wouldn’t get any responses to the resume so I was procrastinating. Hence the yak shaving. I still think keeping the content and layout separate has its benefits but like you say, using any tool is better than what did.
dadkins 5y ago
How can it simultaneously be the hottest job market in anyone's memory, and yet the process still looks like this? These don't look like companies struggling to hire; these look like companies being exceedingly picky and not suffering one bit for it.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  It's where they're applying, I think: "Apple, Babylon, Cloudflare, Deliveroo, Monzo, Spotify, TrueLayer." Don't know anything about Babylon or TrueLayer but most of these are largish, established companies. I've found early-stage startups less picky recently - I got a job at a startup in November that only required 4 video interviews each between 30 minutes to an hour. No whiteboarding, mostly just discussing previous projects. Finally the last (4th) interview was with the CTO where he started by saying: "It's really hard to find people good people to hire right now" and basically said he wanted to hire me and asked if I had any questions.
  - adamsmith143 5y ago
    Have Startup salaries gone up recently to match the market? I had thought it's pretty understood that you are taking a significant paycut relative to established players to basically play the lottery with startup equity?
    - UncleOxidant 5y ago
      Maybe the other way to look at it is, the "established players" can only employ so many people. Many of them are paying some pretty insane salaries now (I consider over $200K pretty insane) - but as I said, they can only employ so many people. In my case the salary is plenty good without even having to take equity into account. And the work is likely much more interesting than I'd get to do in an established company. Also, if the startup makes it I could be in a pretty good position being able to call a lot of my own shots as to what I'm going to work on and how I'm going to work on it - autonomy. All that to say, it seems a lot more like a lottery trying to get a job with the established players (after jumping through all their interview hoops), and while the money might be better, the type of work, what you work on, the level of autonomy you're given (or not) is also very important.
nosefrog 5y ago
> Cloudflare asks you to take an online test with basic tech questions. I found most of them straightforward except one very specific, obscure question about SSDs. I assume if you answer it, it looks like you looked up the answers somewhere. If that's actually the reason for the question, that's clever :P It doesn't necessarily imply that they cheated, but maybe they use that to flag candidates. I've done a lot of interviews, and there were a couple of phone interviews where I suspected the candidate was cheating.
ivraatiems 5y ago
I appreciate this guide, truly, but one of the things I was struck by was how few of these companies I'd be willing to work for. Let's go down the list... Apple - lots of evidence it's a toxic work environment, highly secretive. Maybe not an instant veto, but skeptical. Deliveroo - Gig economy gets a veto from me. Uber - ditto, if anything, even worse. Spotify - Would have once upon a time, but these days they seem pretty awful, and their front-end tech is sorely lacking, to say the least. Amazon - intensely and notoriously abusive to employees at all levels. Netflix - high-pressure work environment not for me, some disturbing practices. Palantir - state-sponsored spying, no thanks. Lives up to its name. Google - mostly an adtech business at this point. Skeptical. Meta - I'd rather be homeless than help Meta do anything for anyone. The places above, I'd be reluctant or outright unwilling to ever even bother applying to. That leaves Babylon, Cloudflare, Monzo (where the OP was hired), TrueLayer, Instabase, Microsoft, Shopify, Wise, Revolut and JP Morgan as orgs I didn't immediately veto or view with high suspicion, and I still view the several related to finance as inherently pretty suspicious. I can't be the only person out there with a robust "will not work for" list. Fortunately, there's no shortage of tech companies. How do people filter out companies when considering who to apply to?
- pcthrowaway 5y ago
  I think this is common, or at least not uncommon; I'm in the same situation though it's more of a "strongly prefer not to work for". If I didn't have any other options that could provide a bare minimum salary that I can live off of, I would certainly apply at the "evil(tm)" companies. It's an unfortunate symptom of capitalism that evil tends to get ahead. I also think this is part of the reason salaries at these companies are so high (exceptions aside, they're generally higher than at less evil companies). If they didn't distinguish themselves on salary, people would always go with the underdogs which may not be as corrupt yet.
  - ivraatiems 5y ago
    I'd like to believe that if I had no choice I still wouldn't go work for Meta. Many of the other ones, though, I probably would.
- 5y ago
VirusNewbie 5y ago
Curious if you could compare/contrast the interview methods between the different companies. Were any of them more challenging? Did they all expect perfect working optimal code and/or make you run test cases, or was it more like "ok you more or less have the right algorithm" or something in between? How fast do you generally solve various LC questions on your own? Thanks in advance, appreciate sharing your experience.

232 points by nindalf 5y ago

I’m currently on the hunt for a new grad position and this was an awesome read. The process is proving stressful so it’s nice to learn from others experiences.

nindalf 5y ago
Glad I could help! Feel free to reach out if have any questions. My email is on the blog.
- DougMellon 5y ago
  Will do. Appreciate that.
shoo 5y ago
one thing to keep in mind: one component of the outcome is in your control (your skill, how much prep you've put in -- especially for things like interview technique that you won't otherwise use on the job), and the other component is controlled by factors completely outside your control (which bunch of interviewers get pulled out of the hat on the day, which idiosyncratic aspects they focus on, which exact questions they ask you, if the interviewers got enough sleep, if the job advertisement is a sham they've put on for HR but they've already decided to promote an internal candidate to fill the role...) so don't get too discouraged by the outcome from any particular interview, part of that is hugely variable and essentially random. focus on putting the effort into the bits in your control and maximising the number of situations you create where your prep could pay off.
- DougMellon 5y ago
  Thank you so much for your time. Always love any insight I can take in — means a lot.
ipnon 5y ago
I struggled so much as a new grad I wanted to give you some specific advice: There are two kinds of employee candidates, red flaggers and green flaggers. By this I mean people look at your resume and either think "wow, what's the catch?" or "hmm okay, maybe there's something good here." A red flagger would be someone who built a supercomputer out of beach pebbles then proved P=NP on it. The interviewer already knows you're good enough for the job, they're just looking for red flags that would disqualify you. A green flagger would be someone who worked at GenericCorp for 2 years on a Java queue. The interviewer knows you're a programmer, but they need a signal that you'll actually be able to do the job. Why does this matter? If you're a red flagger, all you need to do in the interview is not make an obvious mistake. They already want to hire you, they just have to do the HR dance first. If you're a green flagger, you have to do everything right in the interview to get the job. They need programmers ASAP, but you still need to prove yourself. Being a green flagger is much harder than a red flagger. Becoming a red flagger is simple: Your interviewer needs to think you are smarter than them. If you pull this off they will always give you the benefit of the doubt. Your job interviewing will be so much easier. To do this you just need one thing on your resume that they don't know how to do. If your resume has an internship writing React, and a side project using NodeJS, your relative inexperience will make them think "I can code circles around this chump." Switch that side project to a niche area they've never dabbled in, and suddenly they're over their head. "What do they know that I don't? We must hire immediately!" I accomplished this by doing side projects in machine learning and crypto. For any programmer with some tenacity these are totally doable, but most people I interviewed with hadn't done it themselves so I became a red flagger. It doesn't need to be these subjects, it should be whatever niche computer topic you're most interested in. It doesn't need to be complicated either. If you can demo it, and it works, and you can explain it in a way that teaches the interviewer something, you've made the job of interviewing much easier.
- magneticnorth 5y ago
  >> in a way that teaches the interviewer something, you've made the job of interviewing much easier. A tip I have that I don't see much is related to this - good people love to learn, and also generally like to teach, and this goes both ways across the interview table. If you know something the interviewer doesn't and they want you to teach them about it, that's a good sign for your interview outcome, and also a great sign that this is probably someplace you want to work. And vice-versa - if you don't know something in an interview but you have time to ask the interviewer to explain it, or to point you to a reference where you can learn about it, that'll help a lot with the they-don't-know-this signal, especially in more junior roles. In most technical jobs, it's impossible to already know everything, so demonstrating that you're someone who is always learning is the next best thing to already being the expert they want.

keiran01 5y ago

How has hiring become such a wandering maze of errands?

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
That wandering maze of errands is only if you're applying to FAANGs and top companies paying top of the market compensation, which the author is. If you apply at average European companies for example, paying average EU wages, you don't get any of that, but you'll have to be OK with earning very avenge wages in line or sometimes below most other skilled white collar professions (in Western EU at least, in the East devs still earn higher then everyone else). It's kind of like dating, the less attractive a company is to potential candidates, the easier it is to get in, the more attractive it is, the harder it is. Supply and demand.
- sitzkrieg 5y ago
  i disagree, i had to do quite a song and dance and nearly every dev job i applied to in the US. mid range noname companies and all
- BlargMcLarg 5y ago
  Yeah no. Plenty of companies do this in the EU as well. It's exactly that difference between the hiring process and the rewards which upsets people. Ironically that is still in line with your dating analogy.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >Yeah no. Plenty of companies do this in the EU as well True, but it really depends on the region and local market. If you go to an over-hyped place like Berlin for example, where there's tons of low quality start-ups claiming they're the next Google, and tons of both ambitious and low-quality candidates pouring in from abroad with inflated resumes trying to break into the market, then yeah, the hiring process will be broken from all the effort needed to filter out the posers and chancers from the candidates who can actually deliver results, especially if you don't have a strong network of contacts you can leverage. But in my small city that nobody from abroad has heard of, hiring is much more sane, since there's much less noise you need to filter out. Granted, the number of opportunities and the pay is also much lower than in places like Berlin so that's the trade-off for sane interviews since the small market attracts less posers and chancers.

dehrmann 5y ago

> I spoke with 2 engineers who asked very specific questions about Java. Like "when is a static block run?" I thought it was a bit strange to ask easily googled programming language trivia. This isn't language trivia. It can be the difference between Util.helper() running very quickly or blocking while an unrelated cache loads. Even if you don't know, you could tell them that (why it's good to know), what your guess would be and why, and how you could find out experimentally. > They later got back to me saying they wanted someone with experience with Java 14 and I had only worked with Java 8. This one's weird. You can get caught up from 8 pretty quickly.

nindalf 5y ago
I did try to tell them that. I answered almost all their questions, including going really deep on garbage collection. I got a comment elsewhere from a former JPMC development manager about their hiring practices. > most people there hire for the specific problem they’re facing this week, as opposed to trying to get the best talent.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> You can get caught up from 8 pretty quickly. That jumped out at me, too - like, "what the hell does 'experience with Java 14' even mean?" OP did mention earlier in the post that his Java was a bit rusty, so maybe they were just being nice.

durnygbur 5y ago

I had been quite patient with our industry recruitment practices until I took a longer breake and had to deal with other problems in life. Doctors, lawyers, contractors, plumbers, electricians, accountants, agents - you pay them even if you want them only to open their mouth in your general direction. No free labour, I'm not solving any problems for free.

treis 5y ago
That's just not true at all. Doctors in particular have ridiculous hiring processes. Trades provide free quotes and to some extent diagnoses all the time. Pretty much every lawyer will have free initial consults and almost all plaintiff attorneys work on contingency.
- durnygbur 5y ago
  YMMV. The only time in life I needed a lawyer, even to shop around I had to pay to each of them EUR 150-200 per hour for the initial consultation to introduce my case. Doctors?! I have yet to meet one who would feel obliged towards me in any way, when it comes to hiring at a hospital then perhaps it's a demanding process - no idea.
jothme 5y ago
Ok, but how do you get a job then? I hate those take home assignments as well. I work for over a decade in the industry, if they don't believe me that I can do basic stuff, it's just annoying. But I am not aware if any company who does not do that. They all just copy the hiring process of the big companies. "What works for Google must work for us too". And that's just not true. Google has thousands of applicants per day, the average shitty company can be happy if they get one or two qualified candidates. For Google, I'd gladly to a several hour assignment, but not for an average company - because it is not Google.
- lentil_soup 5y ago
  Guess it depends in the industry, I've never had to do live coding interviews when interviewing in game-dev. It's been mostly technical discussions, maybe some take home tests, once I had a debugging session. Never a leetcode type of thing.

pizzaknife 5y ago

my experience w amazon about a year was a huge turn off. 45min of lighting coding via a company named carrot or some such. "dont worry about code quality just complete the exercises." ive been in enterprise scale orgs for 14yrs. i completed the exercises and then said no thanks. very demeaning experience

nindalf 5y ago
karat.io I believe. The Deliveroo interview I mentioned in the post was outsourced to them.
runlaszlorun 5y ago
I’ve actually worked for them as an interviewer (no longer). They ‘try’ to make it a decent candidate exerience in my view, but are missing some obvious flaws in their approach. For example, they do “care somewhat” about code quality but you’d have to catch that from the subtle wording. And I’ve seen entry level candidates demonstrate far above entry level skillsets and not pass the interview.
dr-smooth 5y ago
I also felt the experience was demeaning. When I asked the interviewer if I was allowed to execute the code, he wouldn't tell me yes or no. WTF? So if I don't run it, I might have a bug, but if do run it and they don't want me to, then that's a strike. I didn't run it, but went home and wrote it again, and in fact, it did have a bug. Oh, well. That experience turned me off from AWS. Their recruiters are hitting me up lately, but I'm ignoring them.

bspear 5y ago

How did you rule out startups? I'm interviewing with some startups right now, found this site helpful for anyone in the same boat: https://topstartups.io/ https://topstartups.io/

nindalf 5y ago
Author here. I used cord.co and got a several reachouts from founders. Just my opinion but I didn’t find any of the pitches compelling.
codingdave 5y ago
I rule out startups because I'm not at a point in life where high risk makes sense - I have 3 teenagers in my family, so our home and life needs stability, not risk. Startups have some merit if you are young and ambitious and looking for your work to drive your life forward. But not everyone is at that stage of life.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  I did startups the entire time my three boys were growing up - 0 to out of the house. It's not really risk. The job pays; if it goes away, the next job pays. Just have something in the bank.
  - throwra620 5y ago
  - silicon2401 5y ago
    > It's not really risk. The job pays; if it goes away, the next job pays. Just have something in the bank That's risk. The difference is that you're comfortable with the risk, but it is risk.
    - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
      Don't understand. All sorts of jobs go away. How does it differ from any other gig?

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

I'm having a horrible time finding work. I left my previous job on bad terms after hostility from managers. Recent company wanted previous manager as reference. Previous manager gave a negative reference so the company passed on me. I did a take home project for a startup and fulfilled all of their requirements. They said the code was sound but wanted more documentation and they passed on me. It's been infuriating to say the least.

soulofmischief 5y ago
Have you tried posting on the monthly Who Wants To Be Hired threads? What kind of industry experience do you have? I had a similar experience with a toxic, sociopathic CEO from a previous job leading to at least one known instance where an interview process was going along just fine and got cut short after contacting that person. At first I was very worried that, given the highly niche aspect of my work, I would have trouble remaining in that part of the industry. So I switched tactics, and that CEO has become the first previous boss I will willingly trash talk. I get it out of the way immediately and then it's a non-issue. And then I get to use the reaction as a litmus test for whether the culture will fit. Just make sure not to come across like a jerk.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  I have not posted there- perhaps I shall. I have 3 years of experience in defense software doing C/C++ and Perl. I'm not a coding superstar or genius but I am genuinely passionate and grew up with a Linux family PC in the 90s. The trouble is that the work in defense was so monotonous that I learned practically nothing. The sensitive nature of the work also means that I cannot talk about it very much in interviews. I'm going to borrow your tactic of not being shy about previous negative experiences with managers. Thanks
  - bladegash 5y ago
    As a person who formerly worked in both defense and other classified environments, I definitely empathize with what you are saying regarding not being able to share much about your previous experiences. Best thing I can recommend is to spend some time building a public portfolio, even if it’s doing simple stuff. It will benefit you in multiple ways, not the least of which includes honing/practicing your skills, learning some new technologies, and having something to show for it.

fecak 5y ago

Nice piece. I write resumes and give career advice to a lot of tech professionals, and what you wrote about applying for jobs and "not being sure if a human ever read my resume" hit home for me. I don't trust that the algorithms will identify qualified people, and I think job search is too important a thing to trust to algorithms. Getting discovered within the traditional application process (LinkedIn, Indeed, applying through company website) is difficult, because you have a large number of applications, and many of those are entirely unqualified. When I was recruiting, it wasn't unusual to get 50+% of applicants for a Senior Dev role that clearly had never written a line of code. It's a needle in a haystack problem, and the bigger issue is that at some point is the recruiter going to keep investing time looking through the haystack to find a couple needles, or will the recruiter identify a better way to find a few needles? Direct outreach to recruiters through LinkedIn is what I coach my clients to do, and I provide specific language for that messaging which is just as important. Recruiters like hearing from qualified candidates, and if the recruiter gets enough messages like this he/she doesn't have to wade through the resume pile. It's a clear win/win.

palindrome818 5y ago

does that youtuber Tech Lead know what he's talking about? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ4YPdu0RLo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ4YPdu0RLo

rootusrootus 5y ago

Does anyone just partner with a recruiter they like and stick with them, rather than try to play the numbers game on an open market? In the past, as a hiring manager, my best hires by far came from a recruiter that I trusted. His hit rate was amazing. He spent hours interviewing people himself and by the time they came to me for an interview, it was because he already knew they were qualified. In a world where people jump every few years, hooking up with someone like that seems like it could work out well, if they've built up a decent reputation. Basically like a good contracting company, but for FTE. Instead of multi-stage interviews at 10s of companies (or more), everyone on both sides of the process could save a lot of time and get down to the nitty gritty. Just spitballing. I am only halfway through my cup of coffee, however. And clearly things like this have been tried, but always on some kind of large scale, which in turn destroys the effectiveness -- because it gets gamed, I'd guess. But at a much smaller scale, does it work, do people do it?

deleted 5y ago
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giaour 5y ago
I did this early in my career and ended up underpaid in an unfulfilling job. As a candidate (especially one without sufficient experience in the industry), it's difficult to tell if a recruiter is good or if they're just looking to place people as quickly as possible, fit be damned. If you don't know what to look out for, bad recruiters can frequently come off as better from a candidate's perspective. They get you more interviews, and they won't tell you to pass on an offer because the compensation is too low. You generally don't find out that the job would be a poor fit until you interview, and you won't find out that you're being underpaid until you've already started (if ever).
- WalterBright 5y ago
  It's important to understand the incentives of the recruiter in order to have a successful relationship with them, and to keep your expectations realistic. (No, a government employee doesn't particularly care about someone they just met, either. They have their own incentives, too.)

Veuxdo 5y ago

Are there back-end engineers who still write actual algorithms, or is it all just 1 million QPS microservice architecture design at this point.

aguilarm 5y ago

This is good advice and tracks pretty well to my recent experience. I applied almost exclusively to startups though. 7 YoE full stack web. I did two take home assignments but zero white-boarding, just a few general language/framework questions. Some very casual system design questions also. This was for mid-level to senior full stack web dev roles. I had a minimum salary but beyond that do not need more, so I didn't bother with FAANG or large enterprise stuff. Very happy where I landed. I was actually really surprised at how smooth and relatively simple the whole search was compared to the almost horror story level experiences some people have. It is mentally exhausting but I was lucky to have polite and professional interviewers.

ravenstine 5y ago
Did you deal with recruiters? A lot of (but not all of) my bad interview experiences were for jobs that contacted me through a 3rd party recruiter.

digitalsanctum 5y ago

Thanks very much for this post. I'm currently going through the process of preparing and interviewing after six years of being at the same company. A lot of what you offer for advice validates my strategy. No matter your experience and skill level there's always apprehension and a bit of imposter syndrome so it's helpful to hear about someone who's worked through that.

nindalf 5y ago
I’m glad you got a lot out of the post. Feel free to reach out over email if you’d like to discuss this more.

rr808 5y ago

I'd love a study on desirability of ex-FANG devs vs non-FANG. I think the best credential that OP has is having Meta on the CV. It seems the best step in career paths.

nindalf 5y ago
I think it helped a lot. Not so much in clearing the later rounds, but definitely in terms of getting responses to resume submissions on the careers pages.

remote_only_eng 5y ago

VincentEvans 5y ago

Can you share what compensation band are these interviews were for?

Gortal278 5y ago

I had a pretty similar experience while going through a series of interviews at the beginning of last year. The way to really get your compensation up is to do as the article suggests and interview many places in parallel. Then negotiate offers to get what you want. I found I don't actually like take home interviews, I work as a mobile engineer so it's often the same take home, a list of stuff retrieved a back-end and then rendered in a list on screen. Selecting a list item should open up a details page. While the take home is never particularly difficult, the boundaries of the task are often not set clearly. So it's easy for that 4 hours to extend to a whole weekend to make sure all the latest patterns, and trendy libraries are used. Annoyingly on a few occasions after sinking a weekend into a project, I have had an auto-reject with no feedback. That soured me on them. I have put a few hundred leetcode practice problems over the years and can discuss mobile system design pretty extensively, i'd rather interview that way in future.

etblg 5y ago
> So it's easy for that 4 hours to extend to a whole weekend to make sure all the latest patterns, and trendy libraries are used. And including those could potentially be a liability. I had a take-home assignment (a front-end application) where I decided to use Typescript, because I would like to use it and I figured it would reflect nicely. One of the items of feedback given (I still passed) was that there was an implicit "any" in the code. If I hadn't included Typescript would I have gotten feedback that I wasn't using Typescript? If you're using Typescript but not going the full 10 yards and making sure it's set up in a perfect way you'd use it in production? Could including it harm your chances over not including it because you're not using it in a way the reviewer likes? Ultimately you'd think it wouldn't matter and that just including it was good enough (and I think it was for this specific reviewer), but it's a tricky game of hoping your choices line up with the unknown opinions and biases of the person reviewing in order for it to work out.

motohagiography 5y ago

Is there some legalistic reason companies don't seem to keep a funnel of quality CVs for candidates and reach out to them when a role looks like it's going to become active? This whole "application," process seems like the artifact of a kind of historical paternalism among employers that doesn't reflect reality anymore, and it seems to be an unneceessarily synchronous bottleneck in the talent market, where both parties (employer and employee) have to time the market correctly. Objectively, that seems...limited.

paxys 5y ago
Well they do, or at least try to. Anyone who gets a dozen recruiter emails a day will attest to this.
bigzyg33k 5y ago
They do, I got my current FAANG role from a reach out a year after I applied, and another FAANG company has been sending me emails for over 2 years now asking if I'd like to interview with them again.

dmoy 5y ago

That design interview checklist seems on-point to me. I almost only conduct PM / technical design interviews now, so I rarely get to go into that much depth with candidates (don't expect PM candidates to get nearly as far as dev candidates), but that looks like an ideal breadth and depth. > Reverse Questions > > But IMO this is only for you, not to impress the interviewer. In my experience, asking no questions didn't affect the result. For example, by the time I did the 3 coding interviews at Google I was mentally exhausted and couldn't muster the energy to ask them anything. I still got an offer. Your mileage may vary. Correct this should absolutely be true. Unless your question is something blatantly offensive, it doesn't matter one way or the other. That time is for you, and has no affect on your feedback. I say should, because, well... people are people.

JacobThreeThree 5y ago
>That design interview checklist seems on-point to me. Yeah, the author linked to some interesting other links. Good article, good luck to him!

sanderjd 5y ago

I just finished a job search. Some of my own notes: Preparing a resume: I just updated my linkedin profile and exported that into a pdf using the tool they provide. I think this is perfectly fine. I only ended up sending the actual pdf to one company (Stripe) and I get the sense it was just a formality. Scheduling: This really tripped me up actually. I didn't plan it very well and I ended up asking a company where I had already completed the interviews to slow roll making an offer because I had other interviews scheduled and didn't want to turn down their offer just because I hadn't finished all the interviews I wanted to do yet. This kind of sucks because it's super stressful, but I think it really is best to try to schedule it so that you do all the final interviews you want to do all in the same week or maybe two. I think this is really the main reason to narrow down the search to a small number of companies (like less than 5). There are only so many interviews you can do in this time frame. Algorithm interview: I did not get any hard questions in these this time around; they were all of the screening question variety, like Leetcode's "easy" (or perhaps easier), where if you know how to write basic code, they really don't require any preparation. Design interview: I didn't prepare for these because I actually do architectural design at work fairly often (as opposed to the weird little bottle coding problems in interviews, which I don't ever do). I was a little disappointed at how I did in these; it turns out that talking through this under time pressure is not the same as doing it for real, and I often wasn't actually quite sure what to draw in the boxes they want you to draw, because that isn't really part of my real process at work. But I guess these went fine because I didn't get turned down for anything because of this. But I may prepare more next time. Something not covered in the article, but which I want to mention: The styles of interviews listed here are not the only possible ones! My new all-time favorite interview I have done was at Stripe. Using my own language of choice and my own tools (ie. my IDE), they dropped me into a fairly large codebase (which looked like it was adapted from an open source project for the purpose of this interview) with a failing test case and asked me to figure out the bug and fix it. This was really really fun and very illustrative of the kind of thing I do at work pretty much every day. I had another interview with a similar sort of question except it was in the realm of operations. It wasn't quite as great because it was a bit more contrived, but I still really enjoyed it. The contrivance was: you are new and our sysadmin is on vacation with phone service but no internet, we start getting reports that people aren't seeing anything when they go to our website, you are on the phone with the sys admin and your job is to ask questions to get to the bottom of what's going on. This seemed like a hard kind of interview for the interviewer to do, but it was really fun for me. Stripe also did a "system integration" interview, which was like one of the take-homes mentioned in the article, but was live-coding on screen share. I had to use an unfamiliar json library and an unfamiliar http library and interact with a couple unfamiliar API endpoints and get it all to work together. This went ok, but it was a lot of moving pieces for a one hour live interview, and I think it would have been better as a take-home with a two-hour or so time box. I will say that I was pleasantly surprised that a lot of people seem to have started moving somewhat away from the esoteric CS-y data structure and algorithm interviews that I think most of us despise.

WalterBright 5y ago

> Before writing the resume I set out to find the ideal tool to write it. Um, any word processor? Even a text file? A good resume is only a page long. Spending time researching the ideal tool, buying it, installing it, worrying that it is malware, learning how to use it, seems like far more time than just typing it in. Heck, my early resumes were written on a manual typewriter. Then they became text files sent to a daisy wheel printer, which made them look very nice.

nindalf 5y ago
You’re right. I was afraid I wouldn’t get any responses to the resume so I was procrastinating. Hence the yak shaving. I still think keeping the content and layout separate has its benefits but like you say, using any tool is better than what did.

dadkins 5y ago

How can it simultaneously be the hottest job market in anyone's memory, and yet the process still looks like this? These don't look like companies struggling to hire; these look like companies being exceedingly picky and not suffering one bit for it.

UncleOxidant 5y ago
It's where they're applying, I think: "Apple, Babylon, Cloudflare, Deliveroo, Monzo, Spotify, TrueLayer." Don't know anything about Babylon or TrueLayer but most of these are largish, established companies. I've found early-stage startups less picky recently - I got a job at a startup in November that only required 4 video interviews each between 30 minutes to an hour. No whiteboarding, mostly just discussing previous projects. Finally the last (4th) interview was with the CTO where he started by saying: "It's really hard to find people good people to hire right now" and basically said he wanted to hire me and asked if I had any questions.
- adamsmith143 5y ago
  Have Startup salaries gone up recently to match the market? I had thought it's pretty understood that you are taking a significant paycut relative to established players to basically play the lottery with startup equity?
  - UncleOxidant 5y ago
    Maybe the other way to look at it is, the "established players" can only employ so many people. Many of them are paying some pretty insane salaries now (I consider over $200K pretty insane) - but as I said, they can only employ so many people. In my case the salary is plenty good without even having to take equity into account. And the work is likely much more interesting than I'd get to do in an established company. Also, if the startup makes it I could be in a pretty good position being able to call a lot of my own shots as to what I'm going to work on and how I'm going to work on it - autonomy. All that to say, it seems a lot more like a lottery trying to get a job with the established players (after jumping through all their interview hoops), and while the money might be better, the type of work, what you work on, the level of autonomy you're given (or not) is also very important.

nosefrog 5y ago

> Cloudflare asks you to take an online test with basic tech questions. I found most of them straightforward except one very specific, obscure question about SSDs. I assume if you answer it, it looks like you looked up the answers somewhere. If that's actually the reason for the question, that's clever :P It doesn't necessarily imply that they cheated, but maybe they use that to flag candidates. I've done a lot of interviews, and there were a couple of phone interviews where I suspected the candidate was cheating.

ivraatiems 5y ago

I appreciate this guide, truly, but one of the things I was struck by was how few of these companies I'd be willing to work for. Let's go down the list... Apple - lots of evidence it's a toxic work environment, highly secretive. Maybe not an instant veto, but skeptical. Deliveroo - Gig economy gets a veto from me. Uber - ditto, if anything, even worse. Spotify - Would have once upon a time, but these days they seem pretty awful, and their front-end tech is sorely lacking, to say the least. Amazon - intensely and notoriously abusive to employees at all levels. Netflix - high-pressure work environment not for me, some disturbing practices. Palantir - state-sponsored spying, no thanks. Lives up to its name. Google - mostly an adtech business at this point. Skeptical. Meta - I'd rather be homeless than help Meta do anything for anyone. The places above, I'd be reluctant or outright unwilling to ever even bother applying to. That leaves Babylon, Cloudflare, Monzo (where the OP was hired), TrueLayer, Instabase, Microsoft, Shopify, Wise, Revolut and JP Morgan as orgs I didn't immediately veto or view with high suspicion, and I still view the several related to finance as inherently pretty suspicious. I can't be the only person out there with a robust "will not work for" list. Fortunately, there's no shortage of tech companies. How do people filter out companies when considering who to apply to?

pcthrowaway 5y ago
I think this is common, or at least not uncommon; I'm in the same situation though it's more of a "strongly prefer not to work for". If I didn't have any other options that could provide a bare minimum salary that I can live off of, I would certainly apply at the "evil(tm)" companies. It's an unfortunate symptom of capitalism that evil tends to get ahead. I also think this is part of the reason salaries at these companies are so high (exceptions aside, they're generally higher than at less evil companies). If they didn't distinguish themselves on salary, people would always go with the underdogs which may not be as corrupt yet.
- ivraatiems 5y ago
  I'd like to believe that if I had no choice I still wouldn't go work for Meta. Many of the other ones, though, I probably would.
5y ago

VirusNewbie 5y ago

Curious if you could compare/contrast the interview methods between the different companies. Were any of them more challenging? Did they all expect perfect working optimal code and/or make you run test cases, or was it more like "ok you more or less have the right algorithm" or something in between? How fast do you generally solve various LC questions on your own? Thanks in advance, appreciate sharing your experience.