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Comment by ma2rten | Hacker News Reader

I don't necessarily agree regarding FAANG. Once someone gets an interview it doesn't matter much what their previous work experience is.

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Not only does that make no sense in the context of hiring programmers, it doesn't make sense for hiring anyone. Nailing interviews is about impressing someone first and foremost. It's kind of hard to impress when you don't have prior experience to look to.

While I agree with you, my experience in hiring in this industry for the last few years has been to agree with the parent comment. Once you land an interview, I don't think any of my interviewers even looked at my resume, or cared what it might have said. Most companies, at that point, were 100% and solely interested in my ability to answer leetcode questions. The better companies asked more meaningful technical questions. None asked me about experience, career, projects, skills, etc. And yes, it is a bad hiring practice.

When I was a hiring manager, I specifically designed an interview process that procured me candidates that were great devs that didn't do well in leetcode style interviews, and as a result was able to hire a much better team than I should have been able to at my budget level. We did this, by doing no-brainer things like, actually reading the resumes.

But good hiring practices are hard to scale. Reading a resume or a person is difficult to teach. But a minimally competent leetcode style interview session can be run with some success by most engineers, so it scales. Which means it worked great for some quickly growing tech companies with large amounts of cash and little need to filter questionable resume lists (usually because their name brands guaranteed high level quality applicants). This then became a fad as every company copied the name brand engineering company without wondering if their hiring process had the same constraints as name-brand co, and is now what the industry thinks is 'the one true way.;

They look at the resume. If you are not just OK, then your interview may fix your CV. If you are not the best candidate, just barely OK, your bad CV can fuel worries.

I was asked about my previous internship work experience from my resume by Point72, Salesforce, Google, Addepar, Okta, Iterable, Visa, Veritas from my resume during my interviews.

I work at Google (the only FAANG company in your list). We would ask about it, but it's not a significant deciding factor.

It might be a deciding factor if you get an interview at all, which team you are interviewing with and for which level. Those decisions are made by recruiters, not interviewers or hiring committees.

And a recruiter is not really looking at your resume as anything other than a wordlist with which to shotgun applicants that might earn him/her commission into the process. And then the engineering team just jumps to leetcode. What's so easy to go missing here is the step where the person is interviewed, as a person, by someone who is not a recruiter or equivalent HR screener, and is technically skilled enough to understand the resume. Ya know, in a word, a good manager.

I don't think internal recruiters (what I believe the GP was referring to) get paid a commission.

depends on firms and their work contracts and definition of "internal recruiters"

I definitely read resumes (and ask about it). While it's not the sole criteria for hiring/not hiring, I think it says a lot about the candidate.

People who I have seen hiring definitely read resume prior interview. They did not necessary asked about it directly.

It is not about what your previous job title was, but if you actually have the chops to do the new job.

There are many tricks you can use to get an interview. However nothing abut OPs past shows that he can actually be a productive programmer.

>Dev job at IBM

No details what he did or for how long. I've been in teams with fresh juniors who are amazing. They bring in new knowledge and new perspectives and over all crush the job. Then I've seen juniors who "work" on something for weeks and weeks and when we start for them to demo how far they are we find out that they haven't been able to produce anything working.

>QA at EA

While with normal software I'd say this requires at least scripting skills with games I don't know if that is necessarily true and again probably not a good skill set for getting hired as dev in FAANG

>Cybersecurity team at college

I immediately assume this is some kind of CTF team, which might teach you to use some tools, but again I've seen people in college just "pass through" without really learning anything

If the job OP could do and do well was Amazon help desk then he should aim somewhere between FAANG dev and that position and probably erring on the side of the help desk. The new job will teach them more and in a year or two they can apply for a higher position.

I guess the person aimed for FAANG precisely because they interview skills that are learnable quickly (leetcode) and care less about skill that requires you to grow organically by working on real products

Given this persons experience level and their predilection to "spoofing" phone numbers and related activity - it's entirely plausible that they lied on the resume to get the interview. Or embellished enough detail on their roles to make them pass the resume screening.

If this is the case the gap in skill required to pass a FAANG interview may be too great to overcome in a reasonable timeframe.

Hustle culture pushes the unqualified person changing their life by taking a big risk. But most of the "success" examples are people moving into high turnover, metric driven, entry level positions such as investment advisors performing cold calls, entry level b2b sales etc.

I interviewed at Amazon.

Aced all questions, except the one that ALL of their inverviewers asked, that was how I had shown leadership solving a problem in a team situation in my past jobs.

See, in all my past jobs, I never been in a large team.

Didn't pass the interview, they have a policy to not tell you why but I can guess why...

They weren't expecting you to be a manager, team lead, or to have worked in a big team.

They just wanted you to have shown some modicum amount of leadership skill. For a normal position, this doesn't mean that you have to act like a CEO. A simple case where you took the lead to solve some issue and maybe guided a colleague or even a customer would have sufficed.

> I interviewed at Amazon. Aced all questions, (...)

To me that raises a flag on how you may not have a good grasp on what really happened in your interview. You don't ace questions in the onsite interview at Amazon. You are there to provide data for the interviewers to decide if you're a valid candidate. If you were rejected then the data your interviewers collected on you led them to that decision.

Source: I know a few people who went as far as onsite interviews at Amazon. Some got in, others didn't. None of the guys who were left out were cut because of their hard skills.

I agree. If OP can consistently get interviews at FAANGs, then that’s all that’s needed for the job.

To make this even more explicit: if OP can get interviews, then the resume (and the "on paper" job record) is clearly not an issue. The issue is interview technique, possibly the verbal description of the job history, but possibly something else (technical or social).

I second other comments elsewhere in the threads here to get a candid friend to help with interview practice.

It sounds to me like it is either a knowledge gap of which they may be unaware, or a personality issue. When hiring in the past, I looked for thoughtful, but honest answers-- even if the answer was "I don't know." Someone talking around the question or bullshitting me resulted in a no. Also, interviewers may be sensing some quality which hint that the interviewee would make existing employees' jobs harder. Dunno if this is happening, but things like talking bad about previous jobs, management, etc can turn folks off. Also, if one implies many previous jobs were problems the interviewer may assume that the employee was the issue instead.

I think personality issues are kind of overstated for interviews. Just about every industry has its fair share of jerks and sociopaths that throw people under the bus. Regardless, they have jobs, and almost all of them had to pass interviews to get into their respective companies. These are the workers that set the lower bar for entry into a job, and in the "right" companies, your personality would be passable by those standards to get hired.

But what did he interview for? There's a big difference between getting a customer support interview at Google and getting an engineering interview. He doesn't really say what he interviewed for.

Or for that matter, what kind of job he's looking for and what his skills are other than QA @ EA (was he writing automation, or doing gameplay testing?), an 18 year old developer (intern?) at IBM, and customer service at Amazon. And maybe that's part of the problem -- hiring managers don't know what he wants to do. (which is easier to get away with at a small company since you'll do a bit of everything, but larger companies are generally looking for someone to fill a specific role)

If he's consistently getting first interviews but not getting past that, then maybe his resume sounds better than his actual skill level.

There's the caveat on education.

From the other side of the fence, if a candidate has an atypical resume, the best course of action will be to interview to check their level.

You can't ignore the possibility of them being good autodidacts, but it will also lead to a very quick rejection if they're below those high expectations. It creates a cycle of quick interviews at prestigious places and quick rejections.

Presumably lack of previous work experience would be visible on the resume and the any competent company would filter people out before interview if that is important to them.

Once you have an interview, presumably its something that they learned from it that gets you rejected.

From reading the rest of the posts, I don’t see how OP could pass the standard FAANG behavioral STAR interview loops.

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