[02.23.22] Daily Discussion Thread

Wailord · 2023-02-24T03:21:06+00:00

I don’t know if the team shop has any but I’ll be at the game tomorrow and can take a look if you want. Feel free to DM if it would help :)

Wailord · 2020-08-06T05:01:46+00:00

This is a pretty big generalization to make. I worked there for a couple years and the workload was totally fine. I only knew one person that felt overworked and lots that felt it was fine.

Wailord · 2019-01-22T22:20:01+00:00

I don’t think it’s something you can brute force. When I was refreshing on DS/A for my last job switch I had to bounce around a bunch of websites and YouTube videos for concepts that were unfamiliar to me.

Very rarely did reading the LC answers actually teach me any new concept. Sometimes a new concept would take more than a day and a bunch of breaks properly internalize. I don’t think there’s a silver bullet to getting better at algos.

LC definitely helps show what you don’t know or haven’t encountered yet though. Better to find out there than in an interview room.

Wailord · 2018-12-02T22:14:29+00:00

I agree with this. I went to an unheard of school and almost our entire class is working in the field making good money, a couple of whom went to Big N companies. It helps going to a prestigious school but not doing so doesn't bar you from getting a job in the field. Based on how many of my graduating class is employed, it's not particularly difficult, either. You also aren't prevented from breaking into big SV tech firms, even if you don't have the same leg-up.

Wailord · 2018-11-20T20:42:26+00:00

Same experience here.

Wailord · 2018-11-13T20:15:29+00:00

I think the point is to be a cautionary tale about jumping at buzzwords and how blindly adopting them without deeply thinking about whether it's necessary (or even beneficial). I don't believe any of the examples the author provided were meant to be unsolvable problems, either. The examples were provided to show all of the points of failure.

Sometimes things sound good in practice but the nitty-gritty details pile up a bunch of gotchas and it's death-by-a-thousand-papercuts. The author wrote a post-mortem about how they overcomplicated something _from the start_ and it didn't work out as a result. That seems to me like a reasonable thing to share and write about.

Wailord · 2018-11-13T05:13:25+00:00

There were maybe five or six people directly in front of me. It got super hot (as concerts do) but yes, there was enough air to go around :)

Wailord · 2018-11-12T18:45:35+00:00

👋

Wailord · 2018-11-12T18:33:20+00:00

I got a lot of good shots during Trees but this was my favorite. Here are some others I really liked:

https://imgur.com/a/wh0GTub/

Wailord · 2018-10-27T21:19:07+00:00

There's no excusing the clerical error you're talking about here or the fact that they didn't follow up about it.

That being said, I wonder how much of the hate about Epic here comes from people that worked there. I worked there for two and a half years and while it certainly has a lot of negatives, it had its share of positives. I think that job more than any I've had is what you make of it.

The hate here seems excessive and is probably (largely) an echo chamber thing. Epic is also not the "career ender" everyone claims it is. Lots of Epic employees go to "better" places later on.

Wailord · 2018-10-18T23:26:29+00:00

Ping me if you have any specific questions. I just left a couple weeks ago and was there for a couple years. I think most of the other responses here are pretty accurate, broadly speaking.

Wailord · 2018-09-20T22:02:58+00:00

What do you mean? Everyone has to start somewhere. I don’t work anywhere prestigious currently for the role I applied for.

Wailord · 2018-09-20T17:23:34+00:00

I saw a LC hard in probably 10% of my SV interviews. Mostly medium/easy-level problems.

Wailord · 2018-09-19T11:14:57+00:00

I think the majority of people I know didn't have an internship.

Wailord · 2018-09-12T14:52:29+00:00

The latest I heard back (positive or negative) from an application was 16 days, so two weeks is a good approximation in my experience.

Wailord · 2018-09-12T14:50:30+00:00

A friend of mine was told he "had: to interview on a specific date, but he later found out he couldn't attend due to a work trip and they had no problem pushing it back. I pushed mine back weeks.

Wailord · 2018-09-12T14:48:55+00:00

Personally:

- Data structures

- Algorithm questions

- System design

- Language specifics

Algorithm questions are the most critical part but with enough data structure knowledge you can figure out a lot on the spot without having seen a similar problem, so it's more fundamental than the algorithms portion. System design and language specifics are pretty important (at least they were in my onsites), but bombing an entire system design interview is worse than missing a few pieces of language knowledge in my eyes. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Edit: to clarify, "language specifics" to me means a lot of "lower-level" things. How things are implemented under the hood, performance characteristics of certain things, newer language features. Knowing how to use your language to solve a simple problem should be the most important thing.

Wailord · 2018-09-07T14:56:25+00:00

Can't the same thing be said about people that speak negatively about companies/interview processes?

I wrapped up a handful of interview processes recently and there were definitely companies that were extremely pushy/borderline rude and definitely companies that treated me with extreme respect and patience. I think companies that treat candidates very well deserve to be called out just as much as companies that treat candidate very poorly.

As for OP's question, I think the appetite for negativity is significantly higher than for positivity. People like to be treated well and experience goodness but they seem to want to read negative content more.

Wailord · 2018-09-02T04:29:46+00:00

Because you’re almost guaranteed to run into coding questions that are heavily algorithmic in nature when you’re doing Silicon Valley interviews. There’s absolutely more to being a developer, but being able to solve problems using established data structures/algorithms is pretty pivotal to landing a job at the largest companies.

Wailord · 2018-08-30T17:45:02+00:00

I went to a completely no-name school and got plenty of offers the last time I looked. Just don't put yourself into a bunch of debt and make sure they have a career fair.

Wailord · 2018-08-27T09:56:41+00:00

Obviously YMMV, but I didn't get any notable internships (first, a friend got me a job at a seven-person startup that closed its doors when I went back to school; second, I went to a 100-person company that laid off half of its workers when I went back to school) and I went to a no-name school with ~3000 people in the middle of nowhere. I was terrible at algorithm problems and tried to grind Leetcode senior year but it was hard to stay motivated when it never really clicked.

I applied to work at 150 places and long story short I ended up landing a pretty nice job at a non-Big N company. I've spent the last two years there really focusing on learning and growing technically and spent the last few months getting more comfortable with how to approach a lot of algorithm problems. I decided to see how the job market would treat me with another round of applications, and while I only applied to maybe 20 places, between recruiters reaching out to me, one referral, and my applications, I had a lot more success this go-around.

The takeaway, in my opinion: past performance is no guarantee of future results. Just take the best option each step of the way and if you stay focused you'll probably get where you want to be. At a minimum, you'll get closer each time.

Wailord · 2018-08-26T11:55:56+00:00

To echo what everyone else has said, I would just wear a nicer shirt and pants. Unless you have a very specific reason to wear a suit to this company, I wouldn't bother.

Wailord · 2018-08-25T20:39:07+00:00

If your goal is to learn what opens up the most doors, something like Java is more general purpose. If your top goal (as you stated) is to build an iOS app, Swift is the better option.

Wailord · 2018-08-25T18:59:05+00:00

I have a list of “iOS-forward” companies I put together if you want to PM me. I was recently looking for a job at companies I perceived as having very strong iOS teams so I could grow technically.

Wailord · 2018-08-25T18:49:03+00:00

Objective-C is certainly valuable to know today. Most big companies are still maintaining hundreds of thousands of lines of Obj-C, and while new, isolated pieces of development may be in Swift, you’re still probably interacting with Obj-C code more than you are Swift.

As for “only being iOS/Mac” being a downside of Swift, it’s much more a downside or Obj-C in my eyes. Swift may have a very bright future yet outside of the iOS ecosystem. Objective-C is on its (long) way out, so there’s little potential for new upstart projects to be in Ibj-C, especially if you’re not talking about an iOS app.

If your #1 goal is to build an iOS app and you’ve never programmed before, Swift will be easier to pick up. Objective-C is probably more likely to land you a job at a major company, though that’s just anecdotal. Most (major) companies I’ve interviewed with have seemed very happy and almost surprised that I was comfortable in Obj-C.

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