I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.
Whether I could get ready is an open question, I don't want to claim I necesessarily would have passed had I studied intensely for a longer period of time.
But yeah, I have kids in school, a job, I was a baseball coach at the time, there's homework, music lessons, all that.
Honestly, I do wonder if maybe part of the purpose of the interviews is to filter out people like me who can't drop everything to prep for an interview. I'm not trying to be glib here. My inability to prepare for a white board exam at this level actually does tell you something about how much time I am able and/or willing to devote to work.
But yeah, it's a bad feeling, I'm with you there.
Here are a few of things to be aware of that may make you feel better:
- tech companies in the bay area have extremely high churn rates (2-4 yrs is not uncommon)
- unicorns often hire constantly and in high volume (e.g. Facebook increased head count by some 8k people last year alone), so the likelihood that all hires for all unicorns are all "cream of the crop" is far lower than most will admit.
- many companies here are willing to spend significantly more on hiring process than companies in other cities/countries: I've been flown in for on-sites from Toronto on multiple occasions and when I accepted my current role, I received a generous amount of money for moving expenses ($7500) for my family of 4, in addition to getting legal support for visa/immigration procedures. This makes physical location a much smaller hurdle than one might expect.
- not all roles have algorithm-centric interviews (e.g. in my experience, interviews for web-related roles tend to be much more about day-to-day experience), and even for more "traditional" roles, there may be variations in interviewers' expectations (this is exacerbated by the high churn rate from point 1)
- interviewing doesn't need to be that intensive or stressful. I only did a few passively over several years. An interview process typically starts w/ a 1 hour phone screen, so you don't necessarily have to commit to whole-day interview marathons right off the bat. In that one hour you often get a chance to ask more about the role and get a feel for yourself if it'd be a good fit (it often isn't!) Doing this kind of fishing every once in a blue moon is fairly manageable.
But the company you interviewed for and got into.. does..right?
Uber whiteboarded you.
Since I've started participating in the hiring process myself, I'm not aware of people doing whiteboarding (AFAIK it's strongly discouraged because it leaves no digital record), and only the bar raiser session might ask something algorithmic-ish at their discretion (but most do coding exercises to gauge meta stuff like communication skills or methodical approach rather than things like algorithmic complexity).
Training material for tech hiring discourages looking for rote memorization of specifics and instead recommends looking for signals via an open ended exercise.
yeah, well these companies don't want you. I mean they do but they need to make sure you have the same availability as a college hire. One way of checking that is to have you block time like that for a while.
Edit: single men and exceptions to the rule, please keep downvoting me.
Besides, in addition for it being illegal to discriminate candidates based on marital status, in my experience nobody that does interviews ever thinks of considering that as a hiring criteria.
Maybe you're arguing that people leave their jobs after the fact due to thinly disguised rationalizations of these proxy metrics affecting raises, but that's a huge stretch. I've seen plenty of cases of bosses and coworkers being understanding of personal circumstances (and I'd go as far as saying that is more so here in SF than at previous jobs in Canada) and I've yet to see these alleged backstabbing evil brogrammers. Saying that a company likes this or that is also anthropomorphizing something that isn't sentient and strikes me as a strawman.
discriminating is trivial if they just have your name
While having a github presence can help recruiters find you, you aren't required to have such presence at all; the vast majority of people I interview don't (and the same goes for coworkers).
Measuring lines of code written is another fallacy that gets thrown around easily, but that any engineer worth their salt knows is a stupid metric (1MLOC of shit code is a pile of shit). One only needs to look at their most recent perf evaluation to realize that absolute code output doesn't actually factor in - it's high level impact perception that does, if anything.
Being single doesn't in any way correlate to more dedication; plenty of singles clock 9-5 and spend free time on non-coding activities (games, TV, exercise, etc), and plenty of family people work late by choice. It's not even an either-or proposition either: there are married people w/ no kids, single people that need to pick up their dogs at daycare, people that work so late so often that they become unproductive due to fatigue, etc.
The idea that someone will take your name and go dig up all your personal info and discriminate you and cackle maniacally is just flat out absurd. As someone who's been both an outsider and an insider to bay area tech, I honestly don't see evidence of discrimination, deliberate or otherwise. I feel like the occam's razor in this discussion is that armchair speculators seal themselves in an echo chamber of delusional conspiracy theory out of self pity or to feel smug. I also noticed that there are people who have had asshat bosses/coworkers at companies w/ dysfunctional cultures and think that experience translates to there being asshats everywhere.
I'm sure the people that perform interviews are not discriminating and I'm certain a number of bright, older, time-squeezed people make it through. But maybe I would imply conspiracy since I'd imagine the people at the upper levels, that designed the process, have at least noticed that it's biased in favor of young, recent graduates able to give extra time to the company.
If it makes a difference, the work you do at home is so much more important than anything you'll do in front of a keyboard. Thank you.
Now, twenty million people have watched me and I have been in the industry for 10 years as a senior software engineer. I wouldn't pass Google's interview either I bet, but they invited me to an educational convention last year.
I don't know your specifics, I only know mine.
I've recently started volunteering / D&D 2 nights a week. It's been good for me and the family. This spurred some interest from me in doing work when I'm sitting in the kids room waiting for them to fall asleep.
This came after I switched jobs and started working on the bus, which cut down on my total amount of time away from home.
He also did this for a month, you might have to do 30 min to 1 hr for 3 months. Set a goal and go for it. The important distinction for me was that my goal board now includes being a good dad. Part of that was realizing I wanted my kids to see someone reaching for goals and doing it.
Anyway, good luck and don't hold yourself to others ideals, shoot for your own goals. I had a short term goal to re-center myself and let some mental baggage go. It meant a lot of video-games. But now I'm onto the next goal.
And no, I'm far from a genius programmer - it's just that I spent ~30 years working in this field, and reading a lot along the way.
If you can, go out and interview. Just to see what it's like. If you really want to find a job, start with companies you're less interested in and use their interviews as free whiteboard training.
I've seen people discredited for not setting up some large inheritance hierarchy for their whiteboard design question. What's "Doing it Right" for one person (me: avoid inheritance like the plague), is someone else's "this guy couldn't code his way out of a paper bag".
There's really no way to prepare for the full set of eventualities, and unless you do something spectacular (chances of which are slim in a high-stress situation), their opinion of you is formed in the first few minutes of the interview anyway.
I also question a lot of these "I landed every offer" claims. People often exaggerate their victories.
If you're using the term "trapped" to describe where you work, I'm inferring that you want a change. It's hard to get specific without knowing all your priorities, details, and life choices, but it's almost certainly worth taking a step back and evaluating if there's ways to get what you need by an alternative path that doesn't involve slotting yourself into a process that's optimized for smart single twentysomethings.
So you don't get to work at a big name tech company, big whoop. Go find one of the myriad of companies that are still doing great work, pay well, and where overtime isn't expected. There are literally thousands of them, you just won't get any name recognition from them.
Pay is a huge reason why people join them. The pay scale is completely different and (practically) necessary to compete in the bay area housing market. Checkout levels.fyi.
I think there might be another solution to that problem then...
https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2018/time-flies-...
The radio time could be while commuting to/from work. Quite a few folks have TV on in the kitchen while they prepare dinner. Social media time is frequently a minute or two at a time scattered throughout the day. etc. etc. etc.
The chart even indicates "Some amount of simultaneous usage may occur across devices".
Besides that, I work with plenty of people who are married with kids. Sure, at the end of the day, there's some amount of luck, but they didn't get in because someone felt sorry for them.
Yes, you probably are. Just in case you were interested in a realistic answer based on the rut most family men and women themselves in.