Hacker News Reader

Comment by oraguy | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary, the interview was an ordinary one. The screening round consisted of very basic fizzbuzz type coding ability checks: Reversing a linked list, finding duplicates in a list, etc.

Further rounds of interviews covered data structure problems (trees, hashtables, etc.), design problems, scalability problems, etc. It was just like any other interview for software engineering role.

View on HN

"Well, your interviews went quite well. Now the final question: what would you do if you start losing your mind?"

"I'd like you to write a graph algorithm that traverses the abyss, the cosmic horror that consumes one's mind, that traverses twilight to the rim of morning, that sees the depths of man's fundamental inability to comprehend.

Oh ya, the markers in here are pretty run down, let me pray to the old ones for some more"

I have written the algorithm you requested - but I wish I hadn’t run it. I hit ctrl-c when I realized what it was doing but it was too late... The damage is done — we are left with only the consequences and fallout.

Forgotten dreams like snowflakes melt on hot dusty ground, soon to turn into hard dry mud beneath a bitter polluted sky.

Pretty sure I was asked that question in an Amazon interview.

Were you even given substantial time to ask the interviewers questions? In most interviews I’ve done, even later round interviews whether it’s a finance company, start-up, FAANG, and companies of all sorts in between, I was given at most 5 minutes to ask questions after some dumb shit whiteboard algo trivia.

I was given 5 minutes to ask questions after each round of interview. That part was ordinary too. That's what most of the other companies do (FAANG or otherwise).

The real risk is for people who are too young to know what to ask

I'd hope they wouldn't even consider somebody for this sort of job who's too young to know what to ask.

That's kind of naive, of course you want young people who will work hard and maybe not know what they are getting in to. I was offered a job at oracle back in the day, I would have felt a lot of despair if this is what it was.

I am not sure what position you were interviewing for and to what level of interview you made it.

When I was interviewing for an SRE position with Google in Dublin, I had about 10min to ask questions in each of the 5 interviews that were conducted on-site.

In between the interviews, a sixth SRE would take me to lunch for about an hour. Anything discussed with him wouldn't be evaluated as part of the interview.

So there was plenty of time for questions, I would say.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com