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The problem is that the system design interview somehow became a necessary component of the FAANG hiring process.
by nineplay 3y ago
The problem is that the system design interview somehow became a necessary component of the FAANG hiring process.
- Zetice 3y agoWhy would you interview for a role at a FAANG company in the first place?
- nineplay 3y agoIn retrospect it was a horrible mistake.
- bagels 3y agoThey pay a lot?
- scarface_74 3y agoThey want to exchange the most money possible for their labor ?
- Zetice 3y agoThis isn’t true, and even if it were, “most money possible” isn’t a meaningful metric.
- scarface_74 3y agoSo what companies pay on average than FAANG[1] for developers. The most money possible is far from meaningless. If I work for a company, which one will deposit the most in my bank account in a year and/or the most in my brokerage account when my stock vests? [1] not literally FAANG, the most profitable public tech companies
- Zetice 3y agoMost Fortune 100 companies are competitive now, and the most money is extremely meaningless.
- scarface_74 3y agoI assure you that the other Fortune 100 companies are not paying even in the same ball park as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google. https://finasko.com/fortune-100-companies/ https://finasko.com/fortune-100-companies/ What do you think the average compensation of those companies are? I’m well aware of the comp levels at at least three of those companies because they are based in my former home town - Delta, Home Depot and Coke. They pay their senior devs about the same amount as an intern I mentored got as a return offer (cash + stock).
- Zetice 3y agoI can assure you they are absolutely paying in the same ballpark as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, you just don't know how to limit your searches to the tech roles.
- scarface_74 3y agoSo give some numbers of what the f100 companies make compared to FAANG? I’m very familiar with at least three of the companies that are based in Atlanta - Delta, Coke and Home Depot. Seeing that I’ve worked for corp dev for almost 25 years before joining BigTech.
- Zetice 3y agoDepends on the role. $500k total comp is common on the tech scale of the companies I'm familiar with. While not the $800k+ you might see at some FAANG in specific roles, it absolutely is enough to no longer consider FAANG if you're bothered even one iota by their hiring process.
- scarface_74 3y ago
- tester756 3y agoThey do some impressive stuff
- palata 3y agoSalary, I suppose?
- zoover2020 3y agoIs this a problem? I would argue that this style of interviewing is much more relastic to day-to-day activities than leetcode
- weego 3y agoYou'd be arguing wrong imo. No one sits down solo and has to design a system to scale in isolation,and if you do then something up the chain from that moment went very wrong. It's a pointless academia by proxy situation that encourages filling out teams with the kids of people who csn architect and tinker forever but have no capability to actually deliver software anyone wants to use. This becomes more clear when you look across the last 10 years in FAANG and list out what products have actually been delivered that are improvements to users and customers vs what's just infrastructure padding and bought in though acquisition.
- greiskul 3y agoIn both FAANG jobs I had I was expected to design systems solo, and then review them with my team. If the system is complex enough, I would probably whiteboard it first with some teammates while I was designing it. It is something that was asked of me in interviews, and comes up often in my day to day job. And being able to design systems, and to help review systems others are designing, is probably the single biggest impact thing I do regularly. It is more useful in day to day than the algorithmic knowledge that was also asked of me during interviews. While there are people that do use complex algorithms in both companies, most software of Google is converting a protocol buffer into another protocol buffer, and in Amazon is the same thing but with JSON. If you are a frontend engineer, you might convert into HTML by plugging the values into a template engine.
- SpicyLemonZest 3y agoFAANG and similar companies typically subscribe to something like the "T shaped engineer" philosophy. They're making a conscious choice that their engineers should be comfortable in discussions about distributed systems, performance tradeoffs, etc. regardless of whether they do such things on a regular basis.
- duckfruit 3y agoCertainly not at the FAANG I work at. We hire specialized engineers to work on device drivers and OS kernels and absolutely do not ask them questions on how to design distributed web services. I encourage you to apply: https://www.apple.com/careers/us/ https://www.apple.com/careers/us/
- babyshake 3y agoAnd the second part of this is that just as all non-rich people tend to consider themselves as soon to be millionaires temporarily down on their luck, most startups (especially the VC funded ones making big promises to investors) tend to consider themselves soon to be FAANGs temporarily in the early phase of their inevitable hockey stick growth.
- greiskul 3y agoMy understanding is that this is not the case any more for the more junior software engineer positions in Google and in Amazon, which are expected to them learn system design before being promoted. If you are applying to a more senior position, then yes, there should be a question about system design, and yes, you will probably be doing system design in your work, so it's completely fair game.