I resigned in July. So far things have been going well as I've concentrated on a combination of relaxation, studying, traveling, and exercise/yoga. Last week was my first week actively looking for new employment, so far that has been going well too as I have recruiter introduction calls booked for the next 3 weeks. Right now I'm not sure how to frame my period of unemployment so I've just been speaking as if I'm still employed.
Seems like this program will mostly reward those who can somehow survive the Amazon culture, similar to the way Amazon RSUs are back loaded for SWEs.
If the accounts of Amazon front line workers having to pee in cups and being PIP'd for taking lunch breaks is true how could a significant % of workers maintain that level of workload while attending university?
HBO Max performance seems to be platform/tv dependent.
It works fine on my Ipad but is absolutely dreadful on my Samsung televisions. Super slow and crashes every single time when viewing content that is 30+ minutes.
Only entry level software jobs(because of the weird x years requirements) and FAANG jobs (because of the required DS&A prep) are hard to get. Standard run of the mill Fortune 500 SWE jobs paying 100-200k are relatively easy to get once you have any experience at all.
>You wouldn't believe how lonely it is. In my team of 150 people, we were two black people.
Almost a decade in the industry and I have never worked with another black developer. One time I was on a team with a black project manager who use to be a developer but that's it. For all the pushback on diversity recruiting I appreciate events like Google sandbox that remind me that we do exist and present opportunities to network.
My take away from this is that the bar may have been lower in 2008 when the headcount was lower than it is now despite the headcount having exploded recently.
You still get the in-depth system design questions and "tech trivia" that requires a review of the spec for whatever language/technology you interview on, but the algo questions are harder now.
Finding the unique set and implementing a binary tree would be "lay up" questions now to most prepared candidates. At the very least those caliber of questions have limited ambiguity and don't require knowledge of any tricks to get optimal solutions.
This. I'm having some difficulty remembering details of systems I worked on and bugs/approaches I took at places I no longer work at. Going forward I'm going to document details about everything I do, a personal post mortem of sorts.
A handful of politicians have been trying to decouple health insurance from employment the last two election cycles but for whatever reason a significant portion of the country "likes their health insurance", whatever that means. Personally I've never loved any of my health plans and dread the yearly increases and frequent provider changes as I either jump between jobs or my job eliminates or adds new plans due to rising cost.
As long as I can register with a competent physician and dentist and keep the cost low I could care less who administers my plan. It truly is a mystery but I suspect resistance is tied to a belief that a government implementation would some how be more inefficient than what we have and the general disdain people in the U.S have against taking "freebies" or public assistance due to the history of social/racial stratification in the country.
If it's really sealed this may be a scenario where you'd be better off not mentioning it. Similar thing happened to me when I went through a security clearance for a position. I mentioned that I was arrested once upon a time and the charges were expunged as part of an agreement. It didn't come up in their search but since I mentioned it they still wanted to know details. Details that were impossible to get since it was sealed/expunged. I essentially created a problem for myself by being honest.
This seems like an issue which is heavily skewed towards start ups and tech companies, which are ironically generally viewed as the most attractive companies for tech workers to work at.
The pay will be lower but there are opportunities out there where you can genuinely work towards helping people with technical solutions. Both the local research hospital and world class children hospital in my area always have data science openings and positions like that for instance
>I get a feeling that process as this somehow does not select for top performers that are already working on exciting stuff.
There are senior engineers who essentially work as tech leads making $500K+ at these companies. It's a tradeoff to prepare but if you can essentially double/triple your salary to do comparable work while also getting whatever benefit from brand awareness in your social circles....
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.
>From my experience, the bulk of discrimination occurs before hiring event starts - recruiters extend phone interviews to diverse candidates at higher rates.
How is this different from any other targeted recruiting?
FAANG recruits students from CMU while not even visiting my alma mater. Recruiters extend phone interviews to referrals at 100% rate no matter how bad they suck, etc. Diversity recruiting != diversity hiring, and the numbers bare that out. Unless you argue that recruiters should have zero targeted pipelines I'm not sure how it's unique for diversity initiatives
People will just game this as well. If you already know the answer to a question coming in because you leetcode all day you could easily ask a lot of clarifying questions, identify edge cases, and give brunt force/alternative approaches before solving the question. A smart person will use that opportunity to highlight their communication skills and get an even higher grade on the interview
Aren't sites like leetcode partially to blame for this?
Years ago asking a candidate to push all zeros to the end of an array , in place, probably eliminated 75% of the pool. Now anyone who adequately prepares can probably solve that optimally in 10 minutes. I remember when asking for optimal solution to isPalindrome was a "bar raiser".
I was recently told that I am expected to solve 2 medium-hard questions with clean code and good variable names and test cases in 30 minutes for phone screen. The recruiter emphasized that speed was a factor. The bar will keep increasing as people optimize for the test.
Yup, this is why I'm using hotels more now. Too many random problems, hosts who are in another country when I'm trying to solve issues, and accommodations that are often inconsistent with what was portrayed in the listing.
With all of these factors I really need a good deal for it to be worth the hassle
I have started using hotels more lately after almost exclusively booking with airbnb for several years.
1 thing that I really appreciate about Airbnb still is that it allows you to stay in areas that usually don't have a lot of hotels, like Manhattan Beach CA or some other mostly residential area that also makes sense for tourist to stay. I would hate for them to fail and lose those options on a large scale
In a world where you are expected to solve 2 leetcode medium-hard questions in 30 minutes with no syntax errors and test cases.... I doubt it. The questions come in different forms with optimizations, it's not about memorizing answers it's "pattern matching" and being efficient in implementation.
A partition method would be part of a larger implementation you still have to reason through and talk through. You just remember that the quicksort of the top half starts at pivot+1 instead of pivot, etc. Essentially you eliminate the little mistakes people tend to make when they are nervous
I use it for interview prep. I know some people advise against memorizing stuff in programming but it's been effective for me so far.
You can spend 3-5 minutes in an interview trying to reason about implementing the partition method of a quicksort or translating 2D array indexes into 1d. With anki you can just regurgitate it out of your deep memory in 30 seconds whether you use it in your day to day or not.
Be the change you want to see!
Did this job offer a substantial bump in pay? If so ride it out while trying to improve the culture\processes. Seems like it's very slow pace so you can spend time leveling up some skills you may be interested in and even implement some side projects to improve the processes and present them to management. If they aren't receptive bounce with a few cool projects under your belt and a couple extra months of pay.
The reason why some places don't accept AMEX is because their transaction fees are higher. I haven't paid a cent in interest in probably over a decade but AMEX incentivizes me to use my card for everything with rewards and make money off the fees.
>Besides that he pressured her into quitting with promises of financial support, then left her with the baby and refused to pay.
California doesn't have child support? If he's not in his child's life he's a scumbag but at the very least I'm assuming the child is getting a very generous financial contribution.
Do this and the market will speak. I view ridesharing mostly as a luxury/convenience thing. My usage has already began to decline as prices have risen locally. If they start operating like taxis then I'll use them as often as taxis, which is to say rarely.
Thanks, those are reasonable expectations a candidate can demonstrate at any company. OP qualified further that they didn't even consider his projects, the bar is just raised some on the interview questions. That's reasonable.
Is there a guide for what type of projects FAANG expect for L5+? There was just a thread here about a guy slacking for multiple years, so are their L5s even working on complex projects themselves?
An individual might be trying to get into a FAANG in order to get experience with technically complex projects of a certain scope. A lot of roles out here at non tech or smaller firms are just building and maintaining simple CRUD interfaces. The business domain may be complicated but the tech execution is probably not.
I thought the algo gauntlet was a equalizer where exceptional coders could clear the bar regardless of education or work history.
Thanks, I hear a lot of stories of people being down leveled but it sounds like some companies have strict bands related to YOE. L4 appears to be mid level and I guess 7 yrs if on the upper limits of that but you'd think they'd give you the option of being down leveled or not to get your foot in the door.
>In both cases, the conclusion was that my results were good enough for an L4 position, but they wouldn't hire me for less than L5. (Why not, I'd be happy as an L4...).
Can you elaborate on this? Were you interviewing specifically for L5 roles? I wonder if years of experience or even achievements can be used against a candidate by raising the bar so to speak. Maybe one is a L5 at their current company but only a L4 elsewhere. As long as you can contribute at whatever level is appropriate for the given company I don't think it should be held against the candidate.
Not in my 40s yet but I'm in a similar position. I'm going to take some time off and prep for FAANG interviews. The benefit of the algo focused interview is it seems like there would be less ageism there as less of the criteria is based on behavior or fit type questions. Maybe I'm off here but that's what it appears like. I recently attended a Google recruiting event where a lot of the Googlers there were over 40 and recently joined the company, a couple of people even looked to be over 50.