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Comment by 120bits | Hacker News Reader

I haven't cleared a single technical interview after applying to FAANG companies in last 5 years. I'm currently employed and I have been working for than 8 years. I'm good at what I do. I might not the greatest programmer but I can come up with a approach to solve a problem.

My past experiences have been terrible, not a single person who interviewed me wanted to know what I worked on or what I have achieved or how I solved a given problem. Few introductory questions and jump into coding questions. Some of them are medium and few of them were hard. But at most I was able to find a way to solve(not completely code a solution).

It seems lot easier when you are in college and are surround by students who are practicing coding interviews. You can talk, discuss and gain more experience. I don't know how I can do that, when I'm busy maintaining and coding for my current job. Its just so demotivating.

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Practice definitely helps.

There's a lot luck involved because there are so many candidates, most of whom cannot come up with an approach to solve a problem (let alone to solve it well enough to serve billions of users well). So even most candidates who are qualified can't convincingly demonstrate that given the time constraints and pressure etc.

It is hard to get into FANG for college new grads, it is even harder if you're trying to break into the tech industry from outside without the schedule flexibility and focused community support of a top tier university. It is possible but you need a combination of high ability, strong drive, and luck.

At my FANG, we've made some interviewing changes over the past 5 years such that these days you'd spend at least 20% of your day interviewing talking about what you worked on and achieved and how you solved problems, whereas in the past it would be entirely at your interviewer's discretion and typically only be a few minutes of unscored small talk.

FANG is an interesting life experience and it pays well, but plenty of people find it is not all it is cracked up to be. Just as in every job, a lot depends on the particular people you work with and whether you enjoy the particular problems you are solving. So maybe also consider whether you really need to go FANG (right now) or whether you could be just as happy at a place that's willing to take a more individual approach on hiring. That place could even be a stepping stone to reach FANG later on if that's what you want to do later.

The usual HackerNews advice here is something like find a way to commit a few hours a week to LeetCode.

The usual HN sentiment seems to be that take-home assignments are degrading, whiteboarding interviews are broken, which can be summarized as "I take a lot of pride in my craft, how dare you ask me undergrad trivia"; whereas the Blind sentiment is that all you need to do to get a 300K+ salary is to grind Leetcode and system design prep, which can be summarized as "I'll do anything to get money and that's the only thing that matters". I guess there's also cscareerquestions, which is more "I've applied to 500 jobs and heard back from none, help!".

So you're saying we need more different programmer communities.

It's like tech interviewing has become the modern equivalent of the old Chinese Imperial examination: keep your head down, don't rock the boat, study these arbitrary tests to rise in status. A far cry from the early days of HN when the culture was more "think different".

I would be wary of new teammates whose motto is "think different" when it comes to operating services at $B scale, because if they break something, someone else on the team will have to work all day and night to get things fixed and it won't be them.

That does probably depend on whether you're doing greenfield work or not, but even then these costs are there but just not immediately visible.

Which is understandable, if you have services at $B scale. It's a bit like teams that adopt microservices or Kubernetes for their three-person startup: just because Amazon or Facebook do it doesn't mean you should.

This entire industry is just awful, and the antithesis of anything resembling the compassionate virtues they claim to espouse. I'm done with programming, and maybe that's what is supposed to happen, but it has left a very bitter taste in my mouth. If you have serious chops, go for it. Otherwise, give it a wide berth.

To continue the normal HackerNews go-around on this topic: there are plenty of companies that don't interview like this, at least outside of Silicon Valley.

> I'm done with programming

Curious: what did you switch to?

I DJ. Not something I would recommend as a career choice. Pay isn't as good and I don't have benefits, but the lack of dread is nice.

Never thought of freelancing?

Oh I don't know that freelancing is the best choice when one wants "lack of dread"... :))

The interview process for FAANG companies is primarily focused on preventing false positives because of the damage that can be done by individuals when working at scale. Unless you have a really large sample size I wouldn't take any of that personally because for each interview, luck is involved.

Furthermore, the process is partly about how good you are at being able to learn, and partly about how well you are able to keep yourself motivated to grind something out, or a combination of the two. Given enough time, FAANG interviews are 100% something you can study for, and furthermore, it is expected that you spend the time to study for them as that is also a signal of something in itself.

On the job, you'll either have to be smart enough to pick stuff up quickly or spend the time to grind out the work (working overtime, etc). You also can't fuck things up too much because the fallout can be really expensive, so it helps to be able to do things right the first time. I think what is generally tested in the interview correlates with these requirements, and prevents false positives (and probably lots of false negatives too but you can just study more and try again at that point).

I would guess, with some evidence from experience, that all FAANG companies have sufficiently bureaucratic process, checks, and balances, to largely mitigate the risk of a disaster caused by a lone wolf screwing something up. Multiple cross-functional sign-offs whenever you deploy something to production, mandatory code reviews, gatekeeping access to push changes for junior folks, etc. This has got to be a mostly solved problem for companies of that size.

I'm not denying they are primarily focused on preventing false positives, but not for the reason you mentioned.

Yeah there are definitely other reasons but this is one of the biggest in my opinion.

There's always a tradeoff between security/bureaucracy and speed in delivery so as to remain competitive. This does matter even at large scale.

I would agree that if one were purposefully trying to cause as much damage as possible, that impact would be contained by these processes.

But one can still make mistakes or be a drain on the team's energy and focus which increases the chance of mistakes team-wide. At scale, even minor mistakes are costly, not just in terms of direct impact but in terms of the opportunity-cost of developer effort that could be better spent elsewhere.

Of course, my direct knowledge has sample size of n=1 here so it likely does not apply uniformly across all large companies.

I would love to hear contrasting opinions on this topic. I've spent a lot of time thinking about what would help developer teams increase their productivity w/ regards to adding value.

An honest question; do you need to work for FAANGs if this is the case? I think it's fairly accepted that you need X amount of hours per week to designate only to studying for your FAANG interview if you want to pass. This might be 10h a week for the next 3-6 months, or 15 for the next 10 months (or any other number of hours a week for any other number of months/weeks), as it wholly depends on you.

You can either dedicate the time and practice, or decide you don't want to do it since your situation does not enable you to do so (e.g. due to kids, family, or simply lack of motivation).

Of course, there are people who do not have to study. It seems you are not one of them. (Neither am I to be honest, this is just an observation, not an offensive remark). What else is there to do other than studying or not passing the interview in such a case?

Start or find a company that takes a "value" approach to investing in humans. There are a lot of undervalued people out there, in North America many if not most people's potential is being wasted. SV / FAANG is a land of, in some ways, artificial scarcity. The reason jobs are hard to get is not just that the work is so demanding, it is not true. The rewards are high, and this is part of the reason that not everyone is allowed to partake.

I am oversimplifying it, but the same forces that created the FAANGs can allow you to avoid them and companies like them, avoid SV. The world has become more evenly distributed in some ways, but HN and channels like it can make you think you have to pass through these certain gates.

This is pretty explicit in interview training at least at Google. Nobody cares how you solved some problem because inside the Google none of your experience applies. What are needed are people who can read and write code, who know algorithms and can discuss the complexity of them.

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