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Comment by jrbancel | Hacker News Reader

> Expect at minimum 2 Medium difficulty questions in a phone interview that need to be able to be solved in optimal space time complexity in under 45 mins

I see this being repeated on Leetcode and Blind, but it is not my experience at all.

In 2019, I got Senior level (L5/E5) offers from everywhere I applied, including Facebook and Google. I never solved more than a single medium problem in 45m-1h. I was asked a hard problem maybe twice, and not at FB & G.

I also interviewed 100+ candidates at Microsoft and Google. I have seen hundreds of interview questions and feedback reports and I simply can't corroborate that statement.

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Oh nice, I've been waiting for someone like you to reply. Thanks for replying, I need a perspective from you as well.

Why do you think it happens this way? I have some other anecdatas that I gathered from the forums but I am not gonna spew it here because it could be offensive/racist or whatever.

But what I think the more reasonable answer is, because interviewers are humans, and a lot of it are based on luck. Maybe the interviewer has a bad day? Maybe the interviewer has a favorite question that is super tricky and he/she really want to test this to the candidates.

I also think that due to your seniority, it seems that the FAANG companies already know that you know your stuffs. Since L5/E5 definitely not an easy task. Therefore you don't get a really hard question, because they don't need to determine whether you are a risk or not. They already know that you will perform great in the company.

Btw if you are doing your interview like this, I commend you. Thank you for not making life hard on people. I myself has gone through hundreds of Leetcode but still failed, due to the harsh questions that I've seen these days. Yet due to Leetcode I postpone learning other things that can serve me better in my career. It is stupid, but it is what it is. I know a lot of people can relate with me.

Anyway, please continue to do a great work of interviewing people! Maybe one day I will get my chance.

Googler here. I've probably done 150 interviews.

I've never once adjusted my question based on where the candidate was coming from. The idea that people would ease up if they saw FAANG on a resume or a 10+ year career is just not a thing I've ever seen.

There are a few truths in modern tech interviewing:

1. There is a large amount of randomness. Between the question that an interviewer chooses to ask and whether the interviewer is having a really bad day, you might just get screwed.

2. A lot of people are genuinely working really hard to do a good job interviewing. I've seen careful and detailed interview feedback and talked with a huge number of people who really care about interviewing well.

3. Interviewing has less oversight than ordinary work, so some people are bad at it and don't get feedback. Some people get back luck and are assigned one of these interviewers.

4. Interviewees suck at evaluating their experience. This means that when somebody says "I did everything well except I missed some impossible optimal algorithm and they rejected me so that's bullshit" you should become skeptical.

5. Angry people get signal boosted. Online discourse around interviewing is dominated by people with bad experiences.

You answered some of my questions in some other HN posts. I remember you.

Thanks for the replies.

Btw I am curious of this one thing. Say a FAANG has X years of experience in a FAANG company and then quit. When he/she reapplies to the company, is there any sort of stuff that makes he/she preferred over other candidates? Why I'm asking this question is this. I imagine that a FAANG engineer who has more than X years of experience, say x = 10, he/she must have better things to do rather than just memorizing 1000 Leetcode problems. Therefore if being judged strictly by using Leetcode style questions, I imagine he/she would not do well.

I only have experience with this at Google.

If you leave and then re-apply, hiring managers will look at your past performance reviews when considering you as a candidate. If your past performance reviews were excellent, it'll be a lot easier to come back. If you left another FAANG company... it doesn't matter beyond maybe making it easier to get a phone screen.

I expect that everybody has better things to do than memorizing Leetcode problems. That's because I don't expect people to memorize problems at all. I strongly believe that candidates should be able to succeed at the question I ask despite never having seen it before in their lives.

That makes sense. Thank you.

#5 Is very true, but also remember that outrage that the online masses finds particularly true and relatable gets signal boosted more.

What is considered a medium problem? Is this in terms of equivalence of problem levels found on leetcode and such? I have yet to do the grind. My current job is great and pays FAANG level- I hope to not have to engage in this crap.

Medium is defined as Leetcode's problem tagged in Medium category. It is quite blurry to be honest because some questions should be on Easy category and some Easy questions should be Medium and some Medium should be Hard and some Hard should be Medium.

That's good, keep that! Don't get involved in this crap. I have to do it out of necessity.

On leetcode they are literally marked "Medium". Mostly questions that involve some sort of BFS or DFS on graphs, figuring out the next available time slot in a meeting calendar, figuring out the best time to buy and sell a stock given the daily price, stuff like that.

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