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Are the interviews still pointlessly hard? I would consider going back to AWS, but there’s no way I’m spending a month grinding leetcode.

baq 4y ago
I’m convinced this is a conscious decision to weed out the ‘unmotivated’ (old and/or people with families).
- burntoutfire 4y ago
  This, plus sunken cost fallacy - people who had to work hard to get in will be less willing to just leave if they find out that the job itself sucks.
ActorNightly 4y ago
The interviews aren't designed to be representative of the work that you do, its more about whether or not you are willing to put in the time to study and get to know some topic to be effective at it, and integrate that into your general knowledge. This is why Amazon doesn't base the interviews for specific teams in terms of technical knowledge, because the understanding is that some Amazon SDE working in web service should be able to take a position doing ML and be an effective contributor in a reasonable amount of time. Furthermore, the ranking isn't on whether or not you even figure out the problem. One of the things that gets looked at is coachability - if you are given a hint about the solution, can you immediately recognize it and run with it and implement code fast? Many people fail at this step - they can't put thoughts into code even when told almost explicitly on how they should approach the problem.
mmmm2 4y ago
I've been thinking about this as well, and I think it becomes fairly clear why they do it if you look at it from a BigTechCo's perspective. From Google's perspective (or whoever), they're about to sink a million dollars into a new hire. I'm getting this number from salary, stock, benefits, other engineers time, etc. They won't see a return on this investment for 6 months to a year, because it takes a long time to learn their obscure, complicated tech stack. They want to be sure they're getting someone who's willing to grind on "pointless" tech problems, because that's what they'll be doing for their first year there: learning the tech stack.

baq 4y ago

I’m convinced this is a conscious decision to weed out the ‘unmotivated’ (old and/or people with families).

burntoutfire 4y ago
This, plus sunken cost fallacy - people who had to work hard to get in will be less willing to just leave if they find out that the job itself sucks.

ActorNightly 4y ago

The interviews aren't designed to be representative of the work that you do, its more about whether or not you are willing to put in the time to study and get to know some topic to be effective at it, and integrate that into your general knowledge. This is why Amazon doesn't base the interviews for specific teams in terms of technical knowledge, because the understanding is that some Amazon SDE working in web service should be able to take a position doing ML and be an effective contributor in a reasonable amount of time. Furthermore, the ranking isn't on whether or not you even figure out the problem. One of the things that gets looked at is coachability - if you are given a hint about the solution, can you immediately recognize it and run with it and implement code fast? Many people fail at this step - they can't put thoughts into code even when told almost explicitly on how they should approach the problem.

mmmm2 4y ago

I've been thinking about this as well, and I think it becomes fairly clear why they do it if you look at it from a BigTechCo's perspective. From Google's perspective (or whoever), they're about to sink a million dollars into a new hire. I'm getting this number from salary, stock, benefits, other engineers time, etc. They won't see a return on this investment for 6 months to a year, because it takes a long time to learn their obscure, complicated tech stack. They want to be sure they're getting someone who's willing to grind on "pointless" tech problems, because that's what they'll be doing for their first year there: learning the tech stack.