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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 saus

by 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.

by lhorie 4y ago

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.