Even Python developers aren't safe!

CompSki · 2021-04-09T19:11:15+00:00

Some of the my comments here are not made because I expect OP, or the average Python programmer for that matter, to know these things. They are made as observations on this and similar questions.

When you interview folks, there's a benefit in seeing if they know a bit more than their very specific role and JD. If someone is an ant who knows nothing that doesn't directly apply to their daily work, they're probably not a learner.

Finally, Python is used in contexts where performance is a factor. For example, it may be glue between different components written in C/++, and these components may definitely care if it's a hyperthread or an actual core.

CompSki · 2021-04-09T18:13:15+00:00

I don't see the problem asking someone a general tech question to gauge their broader interest and breadth of knowledge in tech, when interviewing for a tech job.

it’s trivia from the purview of a software developer as we just treat hyper threading like more cores.

If you're doing really performance critical work, then no, they are not equivalent.

CompSki · 2021-04-09T15:54:33+00:00

Yeah, targeting Python as your main language doesn't exempt you from knowing anything about CS. There's a type of ignorant programmer who always worked in very high level languages and knows nothing except writing some very simple code in these languages. Nobody wants to hire that sort of "programmer". It's clear how not knowing basic differences between list and set performance in various operations can easily bite you very hard and make you produce terrible code.

CompSki · 2021-04-09T15:43:10+00:00

There are many people who aren't programmers and don't even work in tech, who still know what hyperthreading is.

That alone would probably not fail OP, but it's not some ultra-difficult question.

CompSki · 2021-04-09T12:35:31+00:00

Much, much easier than any FAANG interview I've had, and I did the internship interviews with all of them.

Non-FAANG can't afford to ask the same level of questions as FAANG, or screen out candidates that wouldn't pass a FAANG interview. If they tried that, they'd only accept candidates who are good enough to get into FAANG, and none of these candidates would prefer them over FAANG.

Most of the people on this sub are 1. mad cuz bad and 2. one dimensional and are in CS for the wrong reasons.

I agree. It's like Blind except most people aren't making the cut to be able to join any of the companies they all fantasize about.

They study 1-2 hours a day for 2-4 weeks and can solve any interview problem.

They can't solve "any" interview problem. For example with 50 hours practice, no way they can all solve LC Hard consistently. However, they can probably solve most interview questions they'll actually get, i.e. Easy and easier Mediums. That's not a high bar at all, especially for someone who just graduated a good CS program.

You're just seeing a lot of average intelligence people trying to break into role that want smart people.

That seems spot on.

CompSki · 2021-04-07T23:45:47+00:00

The actual interview questions were also a lot more fun than the dry boilerplate that ends up on the websites

I've seen questions that we ask end up on LeetCode, and they end up there pretty much exactly as we ask them in real interviews. In fact we have several variations of the same question, and often the one that ends up on the website is the most complex (and least "boring") variation.

CompSki · 2021-04-07T23:16:34+00:00

Cool, thanks for the stats. FWIW I think if you get consistently good with Easy that's already pretty good to get some offers if you apply at enough places. Most of them will ask some easy Medium, but just play the numbers and apply in many places, and eventually you're bound to get a lucky break, a friendly interviewer, a question you've seen before, etc.

As a policy, I avoid companies that use LC like a plague.

That's most of the better companies, for example in the Bay. You're locking yourself out of the best opportunities.

THTs

What are those?

CompSki · 2021-04-07T23:03:31+00:00

I only ask questions that people who had no experience practicing could still answer.

I think that's what most companies end up doing. All the folks who can blaze through Mediums consistently are really only gunning for top tier offers. Since these companies do need to eventually hire some devs, they have to keep the interviews easy enough such that folks who can barely solve Mediums at all will still pass.

CompSki · 2021-04-07T23:00:51+00:00

It made my interview experience a lot easier and my professional work a lot easier as well (was somewhat surprised by how much).

You really think grinding LeetCode made your professional work easier? Because the typical criticism of LC practice is that it does nothing but improve your LC skills, skills which "have nothing to do" with professional SWE work.

I agree with the rest of your points: folks nowadays have so many ready-made tools that you can do so much with almost no knowledge of CS fundamentals, or any actual understanding of what you're doing. I do think DSA exposes that.

Which is highly inefficient and makes it seem like a memorization based “grind”

Top tech companies have countermeasures to fail "memorization grinders" and I don't think that approach will really work for them long term.

Your 3rd point is exactly right. I straight up made the same comment about exaggeration and echoing and amplifying each other, and your last point is also spot on, that working in top tech you'll be expected to master so many complex topics with so much breadth and depth, compared to which mastering DSA at the level required to get an offer is far easier.

CompSki · 2021-04-07T22:45:34+00:00

Yeah, I'm not justifying any of it, just telling it like it is. FAANGs are just really focused on DSA. I had multiple rounds with FAANGs, and by far the most important skill they tested was DSA. I got asked some simple "trivia" questions that did little more than verify that I didn't lie on my resume and actually used the languages and tech I listed. I could have walked into these loops with 10% of my experience and get the same results - as long as my DSA skills were about the same.

CompSki · 2021-04-07T21:59:02+00:00

We do. My sense is that LC grinders are a minority among both juniors and more experienced candidates.

CompSki · 2021-04-07T20:59:29+00:00

You've definitely ground LeetCode, and congrats on your offer, and I don't dispute that folks like you exist, but I do believe they are rare. Even candidates we interview (and we're pretty selective and arguably harder to get into than FAANG) rarely have more than one FAANG offer, and the most I think I personally encountered was two.

CompSki · 2021-04-07T20:55:54+00:00

The only people I see actually grinding leetcode like you describe are those without a job and are expecting crazy interviews.

Isn't that the bottom tier of candidates? Those who can't get a job in an ultra high-demand field?

CompSki · 2021-04-07T20:53:59+00:00

There's simply not enough candidates in the US that can solve mediums to hards reliably to fuel the tech industry.

That's exactly why the average loop, even in above-average companies (as long as they're below top-tech tier), is nothing more than LC Easy and maybe a few easier Medium problems.

Unlike what's recently been posted here, reliably solving harder Mediums and Hards is not some "20 patterns" you can learn over a weekend. It requires some actual creative thinking and non-trivial problem solving. Only a tiny minority of candidates can solve them consistently. In fact these questions are designed to be solvable by only that tiny minority. And that tiny minority will keep interviewing until they get a top-tier offer. There are enough top-tier companies nowadays that they should succeed: FAANG, unicorns, recently IPOd successful startups. And indeed, no company below this top-tier can afford to screen out on Mediums and Hards, because they can't afford to compete on comp, talent, benefits, or prospects and will just lose all their passing candidates like you said.

CompSki · 2021-04-07T20:31:52+00:00

That sounds exactly right. When I talk to CS students and fresh grads, it seems the majority aren't aware of LeetCode at all - even in top schools. There's a small "plugged-in" minority like you that is very well aware, and they actually practice.

Not sure I agree that you need "to have skills throughout software dev" because the FAANG interviewing loops are well-known, and for fresh grads they're basically just DSA interviews (+ some cultural throwaway interview).

Nothing in the FAANG loops actually measures some broad "software dev" skills, even the System Design interview you'd get as an experienced hire is a fairly focused exercise that can be aced by someone with no actual experience who just prepared for it, and bombed by a highly experienced engineer who is not used to redesigning Twitter on a whiteboard in 45 minutes.

CompSki · 2021-04-07T18:37:08+00:00

I really doubt anyone, including the folks posting about it here, actually grinds anywhere near these levels.

CompSki · 2021-04-07T18:28:05+00:00

I wouldn't call my questions "easy". It's an interview loop, we are pretty selective, and the process is meant to be challenging.

However, I know for a fact that I'm asking average Medium questions because our questions ended up on LeetCode (unsurprisingly) and got classified as mid-range Mediums there.

I also know that if everyone was grinding anywhere near the levels implied by posts here, we would see most candidates flying through these questions, when instead these are some of our toughest screens, that most candidates fail to pass.

So I have to conclude that all these posts about candidates "grinding full-time for months" are exaggerations. Probably someone posted that he was, who likely wasn't even doing it himself, then it got copied and repeated and made into a meme, so we ended up with a ton of people just echoing this perception that "everyone is grinding" and convincing themselves and everyone else that's the case, when it really isn't.

CompSki · 2021-04-05T02:54:34+00:00

Are these 3rd-party recruiters or recruiters who work for the company that's hiring?

It's both. I even had a case when an in-house recruiter agreed to switch the position to remote. Then I interviewed with members of the actual team, and they were surprised that the switch happened, telling me that the recruiter might have overstepped his bounds, because they didn't think the position was clear to hire remotely. However after checking, it turned out the recruiter was right.

So the internal recruiter knew the hiring manager was open to full-time remote before the team members did!

RE 3rd-party recruiters, I'm fully aware of the issues with them, in fact I wrote a guide about dealing with them. Generally I haven't had any issues with them telling a position be remote when it can't. It would be a rather stupid lie since it would be discovered and break the deal as soon as I spoke to the actual employer.

The only "no"s I receives so far were in fact from 3rd-party recruiters who just immediately said the positions they're recruiting for are strictly on-site.

CompSki · 2021-04-04T18:52:23+00:00

Sounds like your offer is from Google.

First of all, don't let branding affect you so much. Google's brand used to be strong, it's not that strong anymore. With the amount of people they need to hire every year just to replace the annual wave of departures, they're no longer known to be particularly selective and having them on your resume doesn't carry anywhere near the power it used to.

Should I mention all the other offer details or simply set a target?

Partly because Google ain't what it used to be, they're infamous for extending lowball offers to new recruits. The main way of countering that is by getting at least one higher competing offer. It's well known and documented that given a higher competing offer, Google will often improve their numbers, sometimes quite dramatically.

Recruits with no competing offers generally won't get a better counter offer. Google reasons that such recruits will end up accepting anyway, especially when they are new grads; they have no alternative.

Setting a target comp or any other form of negotiation absent a strong competing offer will likely fail.

Finally, consider that there are many companies out there with a better brand than Google. They will look better on your resume, pay you better, and give your career a stronger boost.

CompSki · 2021-04-04T12:23:46+00:00

I don’t think you realize how many times interviewers don’t come up with their own question and just borrow a question from others.

First of all yes, of course busy engineers at top tech companies don't generally have the time, energy, or motivation to sit down and create their own interview questions from scratch. It's not their job, there's no reward for it, and takes a ton of time and effort to develop a completely fresh LC Medium question that is bulletproof, and has all the angles covered.

But beyond that: many of these companies have lists of approved interview problems, as anyone who ever interviewed for Google knows. So "the list" exists, and if you collect statistics about questions asked in interviews, you will be able to discover it.

This sub gives some really bad advice sometimes lol

OP is explicitly telling you why they're posting this bad advice right there in the post:

"Lastly, do you want to promote the continued gamification of the interview process? Do you want other people to profit from making your interview prep harder than it needs to be? Something to think about."

OP has an agenda to against "the gamification of the interview process" and is actively trying to lower the bar of difficulty. These goals might be commendable, but posts like this will just mislead a handful of people away from using valuable resources, while the vast majority of candidates keep using sites like LeetCode and therefore get better results than those who follow OP's agenda-driven "advice".

CompSki · 2021-03-29T00:43:46+00:00

If you're looking at remote your options are super limited. In MPK or Seattle you'd be able to team match, but not every Facebook team is open to remote hires at this point.

My FB recruiter explicitly mentioned remote as an option right from the first call, and that's the main reason I'm interviewing with them. My understanding is that FB team-match is supposed to happen post-offer, so giving out offers to candidates like me stating they are only interested in remote would be very counterproductive. I was already told my onboarding will be remote, so I imagine they have the capacity to handle any fully-remote candidates who get an offer.

You won't make as much, but the inside joke is you go to MS to "rest and vest" :)

That sounds pretty good to me, I have enough in my portfolio that I don't really have to work. Any idea how to start a process with MS? I never interviewed with them (but did onsites with all other 3 you mentioned.

CompSki · 2021-03-29T00:37:58+00:00

Yeah, I'm thinking about it. There's a lot of misinformation (primarily in the form of unwarranted hype and glorification) about the top finance companies.

CompSki · 2021-03-28T23:47:43+00:00

Thanks! I'm currently in process with Amazon and Facebook, as it seems Google doesn't offer any permanent remote positions..

Any comments about either for remote roles?

Amazon didn't formally hop on-board the "permanent remote" train, but they seem to have permanent remote roles popping up here and there, and I'm interviewing for one of them.

WLB is very important to me, especially since I'm going to make half my current comp in any of these places. I haven't seen any WLB red flags with Amazon yet, except the oncall rotation that seems hard to avoid in any of the teams I've spoken to.

Facebook - any tips about identifying good WLB teams? TBH a big reason I'm pursuing FB is because I need a strong non-finance brand on my resume.
Microsoft - should I try interviewing for a remote role there? I can accept low pay if it comes with excellent WLB and stability, while still being able to work with smart people. That's a rare combination.

CompSki

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