4 ms·

Then you joined big tech at the peak of the pandemic boom, when it was completely fair game to for recruiters to be poaching even foreigners due to the outsized

by lhorie 4y ago

Then you joined big tech at the peak of the pandemic boom, when it was completely fair game to for recruiters to be poaching even foreigners due to the outsized growth outlooks. You should be aware that the economic environment has basically taken a 180 since then, and your experience might be very different from someone joining the workforce today with no work experience. To counter the "cram LC" thing, the issue is that there are plenty of new grads doing exactly that who don't even get past ATS screening. You just don't hear about it much because places like cscq are echo chambers w/ high degrees of survivorship bias and there's qualitative levels of difference to "cramming leetcode" that can't really be captured in online discussions. Ultimately the generalization seems to be "don't pigeonhole yourself, set yourself apart in some way", which is, IMHO, not exactly a super insightful revelation. That has always been the "smart" way to play the game.

scarface74 4y ago
My title is not “software engineer”. I pivoted into “cloud consulting” to get into BigTech. I fell into that role because I do have the combination of skills that the article author spoke of - and I’m an MBA drop out. But my route was very circuitous and I would never recommend it. As someone who considers himself a student of organizational behavior and being on the inside informs my viewpoint. Being that I’m billable. There is a direct line between my work and revenue I generate.
- lhorie 4y ago
  Many of us went through circuitous routes. My title is SWE at a big tech company and I interview SWE candidates, so I think I'm relatively close to how the sausage is made in terms of the pipeline through which most engineering candidates go through to get into big tech. Personally I think "grind LC" is a very common meme perpetuated by folks on the candidate side, but it lacks a lot of context in terms of how modern big tech interviews are actually done. Focusing exclusively on code, for example, is IMHO, a counter productive way of hyper-focusing. I personally didn't even know what leetcode was when I joined my big tech company, for example. I did well in the loops because they evaluated various other things that I could demonstrate thanks to previous open source work (e.g. community building). What you're basically seem to be saying is that you fell into big tech thanks to a fortuitously aligned set of previous experiences, as many of us did. But that's the exact opposite of grinding LC as a newbie. Grinding LC is one way of hyper-focusing, and going by the numbers, it's no longer necessarily sufficient to land a big tech job.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    I have only been involved in software engineering interviews at BigTech for senior devs in the System Design round (because doing System Design is part of my $DayJob). Just to explain my perspective. When I was in the real world and when I interviewed at my current job, I practiced being able to explain my experience in STAR format based on my “career document”. In the real world, all of my “interviews” were mostly just my talking to CxOs and directors at small companies. My loop for my current job was all behavioral after the initial screening and even that was more system design than anything else. If you know there is going to be a coding interview, wouldn’t it behoove you to practice that too - or “grind leetcode?” I did DS&A back as part of my job during the first decade of my career bit twiddling in C across multiple architectures and later on maintaining a custom compiler toolchain. But I would definitely have to practice to be interview ready at this point. The coding part of my job has gotten a lot easier during the last decade. It’s been about knowing what to write and getting buy in
    - lhorie 4y ago
      > wouldn’t it behoove you to practice that too I mean, sure, the more you do the merrier. But that goes back to what I was saying: if "unfair advantage" means extracurriculars in high school to get into an ivy league + the ivy league degree to get spotted by recruiters + internships in STAR format on resumes + grinding leetcode + etc etc to increase your chances as much as possible, is any of that really a clever life hack as the "grind LC" meme implies, or is it merely just going way above and beyond what everyone else is able to/willing to put up with in the traditional career path? If anything, it sounds more like going through a non-traditional career to build up the "street smarts" is the shortcut to big tech riches, given that the alternative is to try to stand out from a sea of millions of resumes all listing C++ and python internships/roles, potentially never landing big tech at all.
scarface74 4y ago
Is my impression wrong that the major tech companies will give anyone a chance to do the initial online assessment with a pulse?
- lhorie 4y ago
  OAs aren't super widespread in "elite" companies for a variety of reasons. One is that sourcing recruiters are not equipped to handle technical screening logistics. They can't tell, for example, if a solution works but has O(n^2) complexity, or if the candidate failed because the tool was being stupid in some way or the question was phrased ambiguously. Another is that OAs can be gamed much more easily than face-to-face phone screen sessions (see, for example, reports of indian "study" groups). Another issue is that the evaluation criteria for OAs is often so coarse that it does not provide a reasonable level of filtering, compared to having a combo of a good sourcing team + an engineer "guarding the gate" so to speak via the phone screen session. An engineer's technical screening skill is considered non-automatable enough that companies would fly them into school fairs to vet internship candidates. Teams may not even trust OAs that they didn't devise themselves, nor have the actual inclination to develop/maintain their own OAs. OAs also tend to gravitate towards trivia-style quizzes that are often associated w/ "lesser" companies. There may also be concerns about being respectful of candidates' time.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    My impression came from the lack of discernment with the BigTech recruiters I encountered over the past few years. I thought they would give anyone a chance to do at least the initial screening for an SWE role that applied. - my very light LinkedIn profile showed nothing but a history of working at no name companies and doing CRUD work before 2020 yet I had recruiters reach out to me from Facebook, Apple, Google, MS and I believe Netflix - I’ve had two internal recruiters reach out to me about “exciting opportunities at Amazon” while my LinkedIn profile clearly showed I worked at AWS. - I’ve had a recruiter from Facebook reach out to me about a senior engineer position repeatedly even though my LinkedIn byline doesn’t say anything about my being a current software engineer (“cloud consultant specializing in application modernization”) - I’ve had a recruiter from Google reach out to me about an “engineering manager” position even though I have never managed anyone in my life.

by lhorie 4y ago

scarface74 4y ago

My title is not “software engineer”. I pivoted into “cloud consulting” to get into BigTech. I fell into that role because I do have the combination of skills that the article author spoke of - and I’m an MBA drop out. But my route was very circuitous and I would never recommend it. As someone who considers himself a student of organizational behavior and being on the inside informs my viewpoint. Being that I’m billable. There is a direct line between my work and revenue I generate.

lhorie 4y ago
Many of us went through circuitous routes. My title is SWE at a big tech company and I interview SWE candidates, so I think I'm relatively close to how the sausage is made in terms of the pipeline through which most engineering candidates go through to get into big tech. Personally I think "grind LC" is a very common meme perpetuated by folks on the candidate side, but it lacks a lot of context in terms of how modern big tech interviews are actually done. Focusing exclusively on code, for example, is IMHO, a counter productive way of hyper-focusing. I personally didn't even know what leetcode was when I joined my big tech company, for example. I did well in the loops because they evaluated various other things that I could demonstrate thanks to previous open source work (e.g. community building). What you're basically seem to be saying is that you fell into big tech thanks to a fortuitously aligned set of previous experiences, as many of us did. But that's the exact opposite of grinding LC as a newbie. Grinding LC is one way of hyper-focusing, and going by the numbers, it's no longer necessarily sufficient to land a big tech job.
- scarface74 4y ago
  I have only been involved in software engineering interviews at BigTech for senior devs in the System Design round (because doing System Design is part of my $DayJob). Just to explain my perspective. When I was in the real world and when I interviewed at my current job, I practiced being able to explain my experience in STAR format based on my “career document”. In the real world, all of my “interviews” were mostly just my talking to CxOs and directors at small companies. My loop for my current job was all behavioral after the initial screening and even that was more system design than anything else. If you know there is going to be a coding interview, wouldn’t it behoove you to practice that too - or “grind leetcode?” I did DS&A back as part of my job during the first decade of my career bit twiddling in C across multiple architectures and later on maintaining a custom compiler toolchain. But I would definitely have to practice to be interview ready at this point. The coding part of my job has gotten a lot easier during the last decade. It’s been about knowing what to write and getting buy in
  - lhorie 4y ago
    > wouldn’t it behoove you to practice that too I mean, sure, the more you do the merrier. But that goes back to what I was saying: if "unfair advantage" means extracurriculars in high school to get into an ivy league + the ivy league degree to get spotted by recruiters + internships in STAR format on resumes + grinding leetcode + etc etc to increase your chances as much as possible, is any of that really a clever life hack as the "grind LC" meme implies, or is it merely just going way above and beyond what everyone else is able to/willing to put up with in the traditional career path? If anything, it sounds more like going through a non-traditional career to build up the "street smarts" is the shortcut to big tech riches, given that the alternative is to try to stand out from a sea of millions of resumes all listing C++ and python internships/roles, potentially never landing big tech at all.

scarface74 4y ago

Is my impression wrong that the major tech companies will give anyone a chance to do the initial online assessment with a pulse?

lhorie 4y ago
OAs aren't super widespread in "elite" companies for a variety of reasons. One is that sourcing recruiters are not equipped to handle technical screening logistics. They can't tell, for example, if a solution works but has O(n^2) complexity, or if the candidate failed because the tool was being stupid in some way or the question was phrased ambiguously. Another is that OAs can be gamed much more easily than face-to-face phone screen sessions (see, for example, reports of indian "study" groups). Another issue is that the evaluation criteria for OAs is often so coarse that it does not provide a reasonable level of filtering, compared to having a combo of a good sourcing team + an engineer "guarding the gate" so to speak via the phone screen session. An engineer's technical screening skill is considered non-automatable enough that companies would fly them into school fairs to vet internship candidates. Teams may not even trust OAs that they didn't devise themselves, nor have the actual inclination to develop/maintain their own OAs. OAs also tend to gravitate towards trivia-style quizzes that are often associated w/ "lesser" companies. There may also be concerns about being respectful of candidates' time.
- scarface74 4y ago
  My impression came from the lack of discernment with the BigTech recruiters I encountered over the past few years. I thought they would give anyone a chance to do at least the initial screening for an SWE role that applied. - my very light LinkedIn profile showed nothing but a history of working at no name companies and doing CRUD work before 2020 yet I had recruiters reach out to me from Facebook, Apple, Google, MS and I believe Netflix - I’ve had two internal recruiters reach out to me about “exciting opportunities at Amazon” while my LinkedIn profile clearly showed I worked at AWS. - I’ve had a recruiter from Facebook reach out to me about a senior engineer position repeatedly even though my LinkedIn byline doesn’t say anything about my being a current software engineer (“cloud consultant specializing in application modernization”) - I’ve had a recruiter from Google reach out to me about an “engineering manager” position even though I have never managed anyone in my life.