And don't get me started on lack of job-related questions, false negatives and having to guess what interviewers want to hear
I live in Scandinavia, and I have yet to encounter the levels of rigor I see in the US (tech) interviewing process - which is kind of weird, as we have much, much more stringent workers rights/laws, making it more difficult to get rid of a bad hire.
Sure, US companies, especially in tech hubs, operate on a completely different scale than companies over here - at least in terms of funding/capital, size, and impact; So one might suspect your companies and startups to be more selective. But yet, it seems like a completely different world.
Over here, there seems to be much more emphasis (and trust) on your resume, and the hiring process is more focused on fit. If you have the basics down, most can be thought - but it's pretty difficult to teach culture.
That's probably because OP makes triple to quadruple your total compensation at minimum as an L5 ML Engineer at Google.
Total: $356,119
And for the price of a small 2-bedroom apartment in the SF-area, you can pretty much buy a mansion where I live.
Then you have things like healthcare, school costs, daycare / cost of raising a child, etc. etc.
edit: Two engineers together can make $700k+ which is $450+k after taxes per year. After one year and reasonable spending that's enough for a down payment on a house in the Bay Area. Every single year you get enough to pay for 1.5 kid's worth of college education at a top private school. Very few costs actually matter in comparison at that point.
edit: This is as someone who has experienced household lifestyles going from <$40k/year to >$250k/year.
I've gone from 0K to 200K in my life and more money is always better, it's more freedom and it's more happiness and there has never been any downside.
Making more money has always made me happier and it's given me the ability to take care of the people I care about.
I want more and if a job comes up tomorrow that will pay me more, I'm there.
Tere's diminishing returns on wealth accumulation. You need to give up something to make that extra more. Different people have different thresholds for "giving up" certain aspects of their life.
However, the housing stock is mostly old & run down even at two million dollar prices. Not to mention, a kid with two full time Googler parents? They are attending an academically rigorous private school with 3-4 hours of cram classes after, not sipping virgin daiquiris by the pool.
The life you can't imagine are all the lucky Engineers to be paid bay area salaries at reasonable cost of living locations like Seattle. You may laugh at me calling Seattle "reasonable" but compared to the bay it is.
I don't see why not. It's not like the Bay Area is particularly great culturally, culinarily or in most other ways. It's a giant suburb sandwiched between a medium sized city and a place that is only technically dense enough to be a city. There's plenty of mid-sized cities and suburbs in the US with reasonable costs of living.
In terms of diverse activities I've personally found east coast cities better and most have broader suburbs than the bay area (due to not being restricted by mountains) so it's easier to trade commute against price.
Cost of living sucks, it’s why I just moved to a better COL area but damn do I miss the restaurant scene.
It’s not hard to save a million or more on those salaries before you turn 30. That’s a lot of freedom.
I'd bet H1Bs are going to be much more motivated to jump through that hoop. Benefits them and the company doing the hiring that conveniently just can't find enough qualified American engineers to do the job.
I think coding interviews are actually working fairly well. They divide people into at least two groups: a first group is people that can pass them without too much trouble, and they mostly seem to get hired, but of course there are mistakes. A second group is people that need to spend 500 hours cramming to appear qualified, and basically are trying to game the system. These people mostly don't get hired, and I suspect also are completely driving the conversation on HN and elsewhere about how coding interviews are a terrible failure.
Do you really? If they're all well qualified, wouldn't any of them do?
No, you don't. Simply hire the first one that's a fit. If all 50 are well-qualified, that means hire the very first one you interview.
I hate stupid leetcode based interviews. It's like "gotcha journalism " just to have a justification for a subjective rejection
It's like when as couple of weeks ago some random recruiter was interviewing me and asked "what's your weak point as a manager" ... I was sincere and if course the reason I was rejected is because they are looking for someone who doesn't have THAT exact weakness. GOTCHA!!
Rejecting candidates based on their response to those types of questions is completely counter-productive. You'll just end up with a bunch of employees who are either liars, or very good at delegating blame. You want employees who take ownership of their work and assigned tasks.
As for programming tasks/questions in interviews. I think that it's important to test applicants' practical knowledge of sorting and other enumerable operations as it's a common task that's often done wrong, often with significant performance impacts. However, requiring a candidate to re-implement a common sorting algorithm for an array of numbers does nothing but stroke the interviewer's ego. The last time I actually had to write a sorting algorithm from scratch was in a 200-level computer science paper.
An actually sane interview question/task would be to ask the candidate to sort an array by an unconventional comparison, using a language's standard sorting functionality.
For example: sorting an array of coordinates by their absolute distance from (0, 0), or sorting an array of RGB colours by intensity. They're problems that a programmer would realistically encounter in a real-life application, and test that the candidate actually understands how to manipulate non-trivial enumerable/comparable data.
Asking candidates to implement quicksort selects for applicants who have a case of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome. You don't want to hire programmers who implement their own sorting algorithms from scratch, there's a >90% chances they'll implement it worse than the language's standard implementation, while wasting a bunch of time that could be spent solving actual business problems, and creating technical debt to boot.
Huh? OP wasn't a rando who just 'studied' for a few weeks and passed. He has been working in Tech for 7+ years [1].
If anything the moral of this story is it doesn't matter that you have a 7 year experience, you still have to do fucking Leetcode for 2 months if you want to get a new job.
Exactly my point -- two weeks of leetcode do not significantly affect the candidate's ability to perform the job, but it has immense influence on how well s/he'll do in the interview
1. If you're not a good programmer even with leetcode practice you can't get good 2. If you're a good programmer with leetcode practice you eliminate anxiety and are able to perform optimally according to your programming skills
Thus, it is definitely semi annoying that you need to "prep" for interviews with leetcode, its not the absolute worst thing in the world. Software engineers in the US tend to routinely forget how good they have basically everything compared to every other profession / nation out there.
This is also coming from and Indian dude currently back in India after a decade of being in the States. I think a 60 day window is perfectly acceptable (not great but not terrible either) for immigrant workers. I'm still glad for the opportunity this gives people. You're supposed to be a smart cookie anyways right? Didn't you know these terms when you started? Perhaps you should have made sure you had an exit plan. It's definitely on you if you come on a h1b and instantly proceed to buy a mansion that you can't sell off and leave nation if needed. Also, people blame their kids for not wanting to move them back to their original countries - I feel like the kids will be alright. It's probably the adults who will despise going back to a "lesser" lifestyle or something.
Leetcode is solving small problems, often with tricks, in a very short period of time. Being a software engineer is solving large problems over large periods of time.
In the past 2 years I've done about 40ish+ interviews at all the big tech co's + smaller-midsize startups and aside from 3 or 4 take home assignments I was given, _every_ interview was leetcode style, to the point where I would just start noting which exact leetcode questions I was asked when friends asked about my experience. The only exception would be 1 or 2 "system design" rounds out of the 5/6 on-site interviews if the company was calibrating me for senior level.
At least you can actually hunker down and do these silly tests. There's a huge amount of advice on the technical stuff.
And yes it means people who have a job already are disadvantaged, but that also means people who have no income have a way in.
In a lot of other industries, there's no real way to boost your game. Often it's purely reputation of your school and previous employers, and your feedback on a failed application is just platitudes. People circle around for ages and never find anything but crappy advice that doesn't work.
It's also a process that makes bias a little bit harder to introduce. If your pal from the country club can't fizzbuzz, it will be hard to convince people to accept him. Not saying this is bullet proof, but in most jobs it's a lot more vague whether someone is terrible.
Now we're at the scale where if you haven't done a minimum of 200 problems before any interview round - you're not likely getting an offer from FAANG/etc.
What they are trying to do is not just practically impossible, it is literally impossible.
Lol then what do you think about the hefty exams people have to go through in Spain to become a public employee? People spent several years just studying after finishing college just to get a job - for life, that is.