Hacker News Reader

Comment by tharne | Hacker News Reader

These posts are getting tiresome. There's way too much focus on FAANGs and SV in general.

Most of us work in hum-drum industries for companies no one's heard of, in towns no one's heard of, and have reasonable hours, good enough pay, and have never logged onto leetcode for anything other than to briefly see what all the fuss is about.

I will guarantee that at least half the developers I work with have never logged onto leetcode and many have not even heard of it. They're too busy working, raising kids, and coaching little league to be wringing their hands about the latest nonsense in SV.

View on HN

As a lucratively employed Silicon Valley engineer, I’ve never seen leetcode. Not even sure what it looks like or how it works.

And that’s with being an immigrant from eastern-ish europe.

But it sure is fun to flog on it as a meme. I doubt more than 30% of engineers working in SV startups ever actually used leetcode. And I certainly wouldn’t hire anyone above absolute junior based on their leeting skillz.

Have you worked at a publicly traded SV company that pays comparable to MSFT, Amazon, FB, Google or Apple with good stock growth? Nowadays there are startups that don't do algo interviews, so if you've been lucky, then you've never encountered that interview type.

Leetcode is shorthand for algo interview prep, there are many alternatives to leetcode itself.

No, he's only worked at Yup in SV AFAICT. Maybe he's making $400K+/yr there but I'm somewhat skeptical. It could be his perspective on what is lucrative is very different having come from eastern europe and maybe comparing to there rather than to FAANG TC or what a soon-to-IPO company TC would be. (e.g. Instacart)

I've interviewed with 100+ companies in the bay. His experience is not representative of the industry at all, IMO... 90% of companies use leetcode here. Again, I need to emphasize, I've interviewed with way more companies than most people and most of my peers interview with dozens as well and they all have to grind leetcode.

> Leetcode is shorthand for algo interview prep

Fair. And no, I haven't worked at a publicly traded company nor would I really want to. The optionality makes for good leverage in salary negotiation though.

From what I can tell when interviewing engineers, most over-index on the algorithms. Sure we all ask an algorithms question, but it's more of a checkbox. It's the other 6 interviews that tell us way way more about the candidate.

And yes, I could get more at Facebook, Google, or Apple, but then I'd have to work for FB, Goog, or App.

I think you should try to interview at a few of those places, then you'll understand why everyone focuses on the algo parts. If you fail one interview type, it's very rare that you will get an offer, and it pisses you off that you failed one interview because it was some left field random algo question that you haven't encountered before.

The rest of the interview types are fairly easy to prepare for, you almost do not have to, just do a few interview loops with your lower priority companies and your mostly good.

I also would reconsider not working at a pubicly traded company. I used to work in a startup for years, and I regret not switching sooner. Dan luu summarizes my thoughts on it: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

I've never had a startup offer to pay close to what FAANG gives in terms of compensation. And no the equity worth as much as pre-COVID toilet paper doesn't count.

edit: And I've never seen a startup offer enough equity to offset the average risk of that equity being worth nothing (and things like not being able to invest the money). It's fine to take a gamble, the payout can be nice, but in terms of average expected money after X years startups are light years away from FAANG in my experience.

I can understand your annoyance at the FAANG obsession, but when the total comp is literally 2-3 times that of the hum drum industries, doing roughly the same work, it makes sense that people would want to consider them.

A significant portion of developers (and especially developers on this website) have experience with, or desire experience with, these FAANGs and SV companies, and these posts are relevant to them. If you feel like you aren't the target audience, then you are welcome to ignore the post and click on something else. But it's a bit absurd to condescend others just because they have different experiences than you.

And with that said, you too should care, because I guarantee it's only a matter of time before those "hum-drum industries" take a look at the way SV does things and says "hey, we should do that too". This is already happening in many places. Your company could be next. You should be interested, if only to learn to spot the warning signs and nip it in the bud when you can.

Or you can use the diversity hiring to increase your probability

[1] https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/25badfc6b6d1b33f...

Preparing for tech interview has become a cottage industry by itself. We sent people to Moon before people were subjected to these theoretical tests.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com