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ThePeavstenator
Dec 18, 2012

:burger::burger::burger::burger::burger:

Establish the Buns

:burger::burger::burger::burger::burger:

mila kunis posted:

i've never interviewed at a faang before and everything i've read about the whiteboarding stuff seems dreadful

I'm in the offer stage with Microsoft and am wrapping up the interview process with other FAANGs. A month and a half ago I had never interviewed or even applied to a FAANG. I felt like I bombed a few different whiteboard sessions with Microsoft because I ran out of time and didn't have a complete solution. Every round though they got back to me within an hour to move forward to the next step, and I ended up getting an offer a few days ago. Some problems are going to be harder than others and you may not finish but it's really not that bad. Worst case is you stumble through a problem and don't really get anywhere but it's over after an hour.

Even if you bomb the interview no one will remember or care unless you do something particularly memorable or extreme. Sucking at whiteboard problems doesn't qualify. I've been on the interviewer side of the table plenty of times at my current job and I can't remember any candidate being particularly terrible, even though I know it's happened.

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raminasi
Jan 25, 2005

a last drink with no ice
i remember the guy who didn’t believe that recursion was real. not didn’t think of it, not bad at it, not couldn’t analyze it. refused to believe that a function calling itself could ever possibly work. 20 years of experience.

AnimeIsTrash
Jun 30, 2018



In my experience most interviewers just want you to be able to demonstrate how your problem solving abilities and hopefully solve a problem. Granted I have had a few interviewers with very smug attitudes about how I didn't use whatever clever solution they would have used.

You should take some time to practice, and go over some algorithms again. There is pretty much no downside in trying, having a FAANG on your resume basically sets you up for the rest of your career (at least imo).

silvergoose
Mar 18, 2006

IT IS SAID THE TEARS OF THE BWEENIX CAN HEAL ALL WOUNDS




when was that??

elcannon
Jun 24, 2009
The whiteboarding experience in my virtual Amazon interview wasnt as bad as a lot of the stories I've seen posted here. Since it was virtual I got to at least use a shared text editor but no compiler. I absolutely whiffed an optimization to O(1) on one problem but still got an offer. It definitely felt like they cared more about thought process and whatnot.

They have a really rigid interview structure and AFAIK the recruiter should lay it all out before the interview. I ended up grinding leetcode mediums on the evenings for a week, prepped a bunch of "tell me about a time when X" stories, and didnt feel caught off guard by anything by the time it rolled around. Much less painful than having a take home hackathon type project.

This was for SDE so if you are going for something else ymmv I guess.

ultrafilter
Aug 23, 2007

It's okay if you have any questions.


raminasi posted:

i remember the guy who didn’t believe that recursion was real. not didn’t think of it, not bad at it, not couldn’t analyze it. refused to believe that a function calling itself could ever possibly work. 20 years of experience.

A colleague of mine interviewed a guy who, when asked about the complexity of a piece of code, stated that it was complicated because it had a lot of loops.

in a well actually
Jan 26, 2011

dude, you gotta end it on the rhyme

ultrafilter posted:

A colleague of mine interviewed a guy who, when asked about the complexity of a piece of code, stated that it was complicated because it had a lot of loops.

no need to remember gentoo compiler flags if the loops are already unrolled

PIZZA.BAT
Nov 12, 2016


:cheers:


so far all of my experiences with faang interviews have been extremely negative. back when i had my internship in silicon valley the whole scene was still extremely pretentious regarding whether or not you came from a pedigree school and i could sense people's demeanor towards me immediately shifting when they found out i was from a lowly state school. ever since any time i've interviewed i've always eventually talked to someone who i could tell wasn't even pretending to pay attention and the next day would get my rejection. gently caress them

Hughlander
May 11, 2005

AnimeIsTrash posted:

In my experience most interviewers just want you to be able to demonstrate how your problem solving abilities and hopefully solve a problem. Granted I have had a few interviewers with very smug attitudes about how I didn't use whatever clever solution they would have used.

You should take some time to practice, and go over some algorithms again. There is pretty much no downside in trying, having a FAANG on your resume basically sets you up for the rest of your career (at least imo).

Most *good* interviewers. I worked at a place where another division had a cargo-cult interview process. Write the assignment operator of a linked list in C++. If you didn't get each of the Minitue correct you were not given an offer. (take a const reference, return a reference, check that the rhs didn't already have a value before allocating memory, allocate memory, memcpy, return the reference.) That was the entirity of the 'whiteboard' section.

The Management
Jan 2, 2010

sup, bitch?
shithead interviewers are doing you a favor by letting you know that you don’t want to work with them

raminasi
Jan 25, 2005

a last drink with no ice

The Management posted:

shithead interviewers are doing you a favor by letting you know that you don’t want to work with them

this is less heartening at big companies where the people interviewing you aren’t the people you’ll be working with. looking at you, sitting-silently-with-crossed-arms-for-45-minutes google guy.

The Management
Jan 2, 2010

sup, bitch?

raminasi posted:

this is less heartening at big companies where the people interviewing you aren’t the people you’ll be working with. looking at you, sitting-silently-with-crossed-arms-for-45-minutes google guy.

google’s interview and hiring process is entirely hosed up. having people that you will never see again interview you is a recipe for the shittiest of interviews, and it doesn’t let you meet your future colleagues. part of interviewing is for you to decide if you want to join them.

Hughlander
May 11, 2005

The Management posted:

shithead interviewers are doing you a favor by letting you know that you don’t want to work with them

Yep I've talked on various threads how embarrassed I am now to have been part of those loops and didn't stand up saying, "What are we actually looking for here?!"

Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine

The Management posted:

part of interviewing is for you to decide if you want to join them.

"Feature not bug" (as the kids say these days). They're telegraphing their belief that there is no question which you may legitimately raise regarding this.

I mean: they're right, but not for the reason they think they are?

AnimeIsTrash
Jun 30, 2018



The Management posted:

shithead interviewers are doing you a favor by letting you know that you don’t want to work with them


They really are.

I applied for an internal position in my company in a different department since our department was going to get downsized. They asked me to come in for a chat, which I figured would be an informal interview. Turns out it was a full on FAANG style interview with the kicker that instead of whiteboarding problems, I code live in vim.

PIZZA.BAT
Nov 12, 2016


:cheers:


the best was the coding interview where on the first question i started talking things through / showing my thought process and asked the interview if i understood the question correctly. silence. i go okaaaaay and start working on the assumption that i was understanding it correctly. about ten minutes later- the whole time i'm talking through what i'm doing and why- i say that i'm about finished. silence. i say i'm done again but a bit louder. i hear the guy stop typing and immediately starts berating me for misunderstanding the question and that i should have prepared better. gently caress 100% off

Captain Foo
May 11, 2004

we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

PIZZA.BAT posted:

the best was the coding interview where on the first question i started talking things through / showing my thought process and asked the interview if i understood the question correctly. silence. i go okaaaaay and start working on the assumption that i was understanding it correctly. about ten minutes later- the whole time i'm talking through what i'm doing and why- i say that i'm about finished. silence. i say i'm done again but a bit louder. i hear the guy stop typing and immediately starts berating me for misunderstanding the question and that i should have prepared better. gently caress 100% off

wow what the fucc

Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde
what design patterns are you familiar with?

ok tell me about
















singleton

PokeJoe
Aug 24, 2004

i interviewed at Google and also encountered an interviewer who didn't give a gently caress. the rest of the loop seemed to go fine but one guy didn't even pretend to pay attention. barely any answers to my questions and hosed around on his phone a bunch. then they rejected me. they asked me to come in for another interview later but I had already found a better job and wasnt gonna spend another entire day at their campus for that experience

Bored Online
May 25, 2009

We don't need Rome telling us what to do.

PokeJoe posted:

i interviewed at Google and also encountered an interviewer who didn't give a gently caress. the rest of the loop seemed to go fine but one guy didn't even pretend to pay attention. barely any answers to my questions and hosed around on his phone a bunch. then they rejected me. they asked me to come in for another interview later but I had already found a better job and wasnt gonna spend another entire day at their campus for that experience

did you tell them why you didnt go back or is that bridge burning

Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde
it seems to be a thing at bay area staffing agencies to lead from design patterns into a discussion of how to implement a singleton in java. if you talk about a direct implementation with lazy init and static locking and so forth, you're an idiot because that can be hacked through reflection and breaks under serialization. annotating a class as a singleton with a common framework is also unacceptable. the right answer (there is one right answer) is to declare a singleton enum, which apparently prevents people from smashing their thumbs with it

i'm open to the possibility that reflection hacking and serialization are practical concerns but since i've never seen anyone bring them up outside a staffing agency, i lean toward the view that it's a ceremonial question and maybe something more sinister

Maximo Roboto
Feb 4, 2012

ultrafilter posted:

A colleague of mine interviewed a guy who, when asked about the complexity of a piece of code, stated that it was complicated because it had a lot of loops.

Seems to be misunderstanding cyclomatic complexity

PokeJoe
Aug 24, 2004

no, it wasn't like a follow up interview but more of a "we're hiring again and you got pretty far in the interview last time, want to try again." i just told them i had accepted a job recently and wasn't interested in looking elsewhere at this point. i don't think it would be bridge burning to tell them why but also i don't really care if they improve their interview process

qirex
Feb 15, 2001

PIZZA.BAT posted:

so far all of my experiences with faang interviews have been extremely negative. back when i had my internship in silicon valley the whole scene was still extremely pretentious regarding whether or not you came from a pedigree school and i could sense people's demeanor towards me immediately shifting when they found out i was from a lowly state school. ever since any time i've interviewed i've always eventually talked to someone who i could tell wasn't even pretending to pay attention and the next day would get my rejection. gently caress them

my first two interviews with google [main goog and youtube] were like this, love getting belittled for not going to grad school by someone who's been doing my job for one sixth the time

still don't understand why you'd ever ask someone with a full decade of relevant experience about college courses

bob dobbs is dead
Oct 8, 2017

I love peeps
Nap Ghost
i once gave an interview to a guy who called me a chink in that interview

this is my greatest "interviewees are dipshits" story and it probably wont ever be topped

qsvui
Aug 23, 2003
some crazy thing

Achmed Jones posted:

my interview at Amazon was a really good experience

counterpoint: my interview at Amazon was a bad experience

Captain Foo
May 11, 2004

we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

bob dobbs is dead posted:

i once gave an interview to a guy who called me a chink in that interview

this is my greatest "interviewees are dipshits" story and it probably wont ever be topped

goddamn

bob dobbs is dead
Oct 8, 2017

I love peeps
Nap Ghost
it was pretty out of the blue too

pretty easy to reason out why that guy was unemployed

carry on then
Jul 10, 2010

by VideoGames

(and can't post for 9 years!)

qirex posted:

my first two interviews with google [main goog and youtube] were like this, love getting belittled for not going to grad school by someone who's been doing my job for one sixth the time

still don't understand why you'd ever ask someone with a full decade of relevant experience about college courses

it's because they needed something in order to feel superior to you, op

qirex
Feb 15, 2001

"I see you've designed multiple products I use on a regular basis, let's talk about this cognitive processes class you took in 1997"

jesus WEP
Oct 17, 2004


Gazpacho posted:

it seems to be a thing at bay area staffing agencies to lead from design patterns into a discussion of how to implement a singleton in java. if you talk about a direct implementation with lazy init and static locking and so forth, you're an idiot because that can be hacked through reflection and breaks under serialization. annotating a class as a singleton with a common framework is also unacceptable. the right answer (there is one right answer) is to declare a singleton enum, which apparently prevents people from smashing their thumbs with it

i'm open to the possibility that reflection hacking and serialization are practical concerns but since i've never seen anyone bring them up outside a staffing agency, i lean toward the view that it's a ceremonial question and maybe something more sinister
i have seen singletons in loads of codebases and literally every single one was implemented in the first way you mentioned. literally all of them.

Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde
yep i know. singletons within the JDK too. makes you wonder how anyone ever knows the "right" answer, doesn't it?

Gazpacho fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Aug 27, 2020

jesus WEP
Oct 17, 2004


the correct answer is "please try not to use singletons, and if you must just go with the one everyone does"

CPColin
Sep 9, 2003

Big ol' smile.
A coworker a few jobs ago read that one article everybody did that said volatile+synchronized in Java wasn't enough to prevent double-initialization of your precious singletons and started adding extra checks and double-locks and stuff all over. I was then excited to remove all of that poo poo, because the problem with volatile hadn't been a thing since Java 1.6, but none of the articles whining about it had been updated since before 1.6 came out.

Thankfully, we didn't have to have an argument about it that ended with me saying, "I don't care if it gets initialized ten times as long as I don't have to see this dumb pattern everywhere!" because it was, of course, working properly already.

The Management
Jan 2, 2010

sup, bitch?
more like simpleton pattern

Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde
there was that one interviewer for a major bank who believed that essential java development knowledge included (1) the rename hotkey in idea (2) that java uses type boxing to distinguish mathematical + from string concatenation + (nb: it does not)

Share Bear
Apr 27, 2004

Huge Bank Clan - Mystery of Type Boxing

Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde

Share Bear posted:

Huge Bank Clan - Mystery of Type Boxing

raminasi
Jan 25, 2005

a last drink with no ice

PokeJoe posted:

no, it wasn't like a follow up interview but more of a "we're hiring again and you got pretty far in the interview last time, want to try again." i just told them i had accepted a job recently and wasn't interested in looking elsewhere at this point. i don't think it would be bridge burning to tell them why but also i don't really care if they improve their interview process

in case anyone is unaware, google knows that their process is awful so basically lets you reapply indefinitely

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ThePeavstenator
Dec 18, 2012

:burger::burger::burger::burger::burger:

Establish the Buns

:burger::burger::burger::burger::burger:
Countered again, had a conversation with the hiring manager and got them to move more on the RSUs and signing bonus. I'm going to accept tomorrow! :yotj:

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