I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days

When I was a new college grad, I felt trapped by the fact that everywhere I looked they wanted several years of experience, and I had none yet. How can I get experience if it&#x27;s required to get the job?<p>Now that I am 51, I feel annoyed that all of these stories of interviews involve asking questions about algorithms that rarely come up in real coding, and if they do you should NOT be rolling your own code, you should use the established, battle-tested solution that is out there on the internet if you spend 60 seconds looking for it. Much more important is to have the experience of how code complexity accumulates, and how to mitigate that. I cannot spend hours and hours studying up on these algorithms, there are much more important things (real coding-related things) which I need to learn about, to the extent I have time to do that. What should I choose, pytorch or keras? React or Vue? Go? Kubernetes? Spark? All much more important questions than how to do a breadth-first search.<p>So, was I wrong then? Or am I wrong now? Perhaps both.

&gt; <i>If it’s of any use: I was interviewing for my second job out of college with about two and a half years of experience without any particularly notable internships or employers on my resume; I went to a very small school that had zero known software companies at their “career fair”; I started preparing in late April and started applying in June&#x2F;July; and, lastly, a few months in, my job is everything I could have possibly dreamed of.</i><p>Wow, that’s amazing! Congratulations to the author because this demonstrates they have genuine talent.<p>In contrast, I’ve been a programmer for 10+ years, and I cannot pass the technical interviews in the companies mentioned above. At first, I thought the reason behind my failures was a lack of formal education in Computer Science, so I started reading more books. Then I thought, maybe it’s the fact that I spend more of my “productive” hours in my job just doing lumberjack web development, so I started participating in competitive programming <i>(LeetCode, Code Golf, HackerRank, Code Wars, among many others)</i>.<p>Finally, I realized my brain needs more time than the average programmer to find patterns in this type of problems.<p>I gave up on my goal to land a job in one of these big corporations.<p>However, I don’t feel bad about giving up, in fact, thanks to all these books and competitive coding exercises, I was able to find two of the most exciting jobs I ever thought I would have, for 4+ years I worked in the software security industry doing Malware Research and building infrastructure tools for other security researchers. Most recently, I entered the game industry, and finally, I can use my algorithms and data structures for non-trivial projects.<p>Interestingly, I’ve been recently getting more messages by recruiters who want me to work for some of these companies. I politely decline the invitations because I know I cannot pass the technical interviews, but I promptly refer to some of my colleagues because I can see my younger self reflected in them, and I want them to have the experience that I couldn’t have to work for one of these companies. Even if they work only for a few months, as many people burn out, having the company’s name in their resume will grant them dozens of new opportunities.

As someone who has interviewed with 3 of those 6 companies and gotten offers from all 3, I think the best way to approach these interviews is to not walk in with the mentality that it&#x27;s a one sided &quot;test&quot; where you are put on a spot to defend yourself.<p>In reality it&#x27;s more often than not a role-playing exercise where you are pretending to be coworkers trying to solve problems together. Sure you&#x27;d be the one leading the problem solving, but being capable to explain your thought process effectively, having the ability to exchange ideas with the interviewer, and just being able to come across as a good teammate is probably more important than getting that last 5% of optimization.<p>This is especially more true for senior level position interviews where there are more design&#x2F;architecture problems with relatively open answers. Out of these companies Google felt most impersonal and &quot;test like&quot;, which I guess is not a surprise considering they mostly don&#x27;t hire for any specific teams&#x2F;positions (and we can debate the pros&#x2F;cons of that all we want), and they try to eliminate human factors by the way of having hiring committees (which leads to other pros&#x2F;cons).<p>In the end even though most still comes down to the technical skills, walking in with the right mentality and attitude actually really helps one to emphasize one&#x27;s strengths.<p>Oh one last thing, showing confidence is also super important. But too many people mistake arrogance for confidence. In my personal experience there is no better way to demonstrate confidence than being comfortable (not to be confused with complacency) with what you <i>don&#x27;t</i> know, and showing intellectual curiosity&#x2F;eagerness to learn.

I find it shocking that Facebook would still be considered as a peer to these other companies in terms of desirability as an employer.<p>I would only accept a position at Facebook, which seems to be building a fundamentally destructive product while going out of its way to behave unethically in many dimensions, if it was an absolutely last resort to pay the medical bills of some dying loved one or something.<p>Why would anyone be willing to work there if they had offers from companies that make products that help people and don&#x27;t treat society with contempt?<p>EDIT: for a good primer on this subject, read this essay by Matthew Yglesias called &quot;The case against Facebook&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vox.com&#x2F;policy-and-politics&#x2F;2018&#x2F;3&#x2F;21&#x2F;17144748&#x2F;case-against-facebook" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vox.com&#x2F;policy-and-politics&#x2F;2018&#x2F;3&#x2F;21&#x2F;17144748&#x2F;c...</a>

&gt; Leetcode Medium, Leetcode Hard, Cracking the Coding Interview ...<p>I feel like there is something wrong with the industry. Here is a person applying to do mobile development and they need to spend weeks and weeks drilling binary tree inversions and trapping rain water (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leetcode.com&#x2F;problems&#x2F;trapping-rain-water&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leetcode.com&#x2F;problems&#x2F;trapping-rain-water&#x2F;</a>) etc.<p>I was interviewing at AWS and I don&#x27;t think most of the people I talked to even looked at my resume and asked about the projects I worked on, happy customers etc. It was mostly palindromes, buckets of water and various trees, and parroting back Jeff&#x27;s 14 leadership principles. Now obviously these companies are around and lots of smart people are working there and delivering great products but it just seems so strange.

&quot;After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours&#x2F;day, more on weekends)...&quot;<p>I&#x27;m reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.

The candidate&#x27;s experience shows how flawed Bay Area recruiting is. This candidate was clearly strong, as they had a 100% offer rate on companies that they interviewed at and almost all of those companies are top tier(Apple, LinkedIn, Amazon, Facebook, Google).<p>Yet 70% of the companies didn&#x27;t even give the candidate a chance to interview. It&#x27;s incredibly sad that a candidate that is able to get offers at Google, Facebook, and Apple can&#x27;t even get 70% of the companies to let them in the door to interview. Interviewing is clearly broken.

I see so many people talking about how irrelevant algorithm skills are for real world coding, and lots of allegations of age discrimination.<p>I see the validity of both points, and I’m sure they are true.<p>But people, please, some perspective.<p>The author spent a couple of months studying and practicing material in their spare time and got offers from top companies in the comfortable 6 figures.<p>That happens in no other industry, ever.<p>Look at what lawyers, structural engineers, accountants, and most especially architects ... not to mention the obvious one: doctors, go through to be qualified to make good money.<p>The author presumably graduated with a bs, worked for pay for 2.5 years, did some online learning, and makes a great living?<p>A doctor would still be in (very expensive) school.<p>I suspect there’s an element of IQ-ish testing with these puzzles and it sucks if your brain doesn’t work that way and you are permanently excluded as a result of that.<p>But if you have the capacity but can’t be bothered to learn a bunch of material over a fairly short time frame to handle an interview, why should these companies want you? You obviously just don’t care that much, because the investment is tiny.

<i>It is critical, in my opinion, to either whiteboard problems with someone or mock a phone interview with someone. Not critical as in “very important”, but critical as in you should consider it an absolute requirement when studying.</i><p>Which would seem to further substantiate the observation that the modern interview process seems to be (strongly) calibrated not towards finding folks who are good at real-life problem-solving and engineering and long-term collaboration in a team environment, but rather folks who are good at ...<p>... killing it at the whiteboard and on phone screens.

I would say, that out of all the companies I&#x27;ve interviewed with so far, Apple was the best, no bullshit interview experience I&#x27;ve ever had. Very to the point, incredibly specific to the type of work you&#x27;ll be doing. Most of the interviews are with two people, that are from team you&#x27;ll be working with. Also very refreshing was a lack of competitive programming type questions...

I&#x27;ve always been curious about working at one of these companies.<p>I believe if I set the goal of getting hired at one of these places, I would probably be able to get a job:<p>- 10 years professional programming experience<p>- half-life, Quake, Starcraft, Warcraft II modding experience growing up<p>- Avid reader ( ~50+ books&#x2F;yr )<p>- tons of self practice and continuing education. I just like learning new things and find programming fun<p>- Have had success in most of the roles I have occupied<p>- have a personality people make friends with<p>- edit: Also a computer science degree from a good college!<p>But anymore I just do not want to work that hard. I&#x27;ve been doing the start-up thing for a few years now. I am TIRED. I am BURNED OUT. I am not particularly interested in writing GoLang or Python to sell ads. Lately I have been trying to think of a part-time or EASIER job I can phone in on with my programming chops so I can go home and hack on my side projects.[0]<p>I want to go home, read, work out, cook dinner with my partner, hack on toys and open source stuff. I do not want to empty my tank every day working for the man. How hard do these places work you? What do I actually get out of it, other than learning how to write websites and a good salary and perks? Where do these jobs fall in the reward&#x2F;bullshit ratio?<p>0: Which are probably better career development than fullstack&#x2F;devops work anyway...

Implied but not explicitly stated in the post is the idea that these interviews are mainly about solving puzzles given during interviews.<p>How depressing. A big part of software development is knowing how to get things done with people you don&#x27;t agree with or like. A good chunk of the rest is about communication. You know, organizing thoughts into something coherent and actionable, speaking, writing, and most of all listening.<p>Is big tech hiring that broken that a person&#x27;s past history of shipping quality software under severe business constraints matters so little?<p>Or is it perhaps that too few people at large tech companies are capable of evaluating candidates on any other basis than cooked-up on-the-spot brain teasers?

I really dislike the fact that you need to study for weeks with specific questions that really have no hold in real life.<p>I&#x27;ve been doing this for 16+ years and I have never asked the type of questions you encounter in these books. Not even once.

I&#x27;m working on preparing for an interview gauntlet but in no way would I do 6 interviews in 6 days. A full day of interviewing is such a draining experience mentally and physically, after interviewing with Google in 2014 I just wanted to get a glass of water for my parched throat and go to sleep.<p>Congratulations to the OP, I have EPI as well and it&#x27;s certainly a challenging book.

Whenever I read job search war stories such as this article, I keep wondering if these are sent from a parallel universe of some kind. Six job offers? That&#x27;s incredible! I mean that literally: I have a very difficult time believing such stories because they never jive with my own experience.<p>The below is taken directly from my &quot;Job search - 2017&quot; Trello board. (I always use Trello to organize a job search because without it there&#x27;s no way I could keep track of every company I&#x27;ve applied to.)<p>Companies I&#x27;ve decided not to pursue due to obvious red flags: 15<p>Companies that have rejected me explicitly (without regard for stage of process): 15<p>Companies that have ignored my application entirely: 25 (including all of the so-called &quot;top companies&quot;)<p>Companies that have invited me for an onsite interview: 8 (of which one was a remote-mostly team that did a video conference interview in lieu of onsite)<p>Offers received: 4<p>Of the 4 offers, one was laughably low; another was for a management position that would have precluded any programming (bad for my career); and the remaining two were both attractive and presented a difficult choice. This was the first time in my career of 15+ years when I had more than one offer to choose from.<p>This job search took place after I got laid off unexpectedly, and took two months of job searching on a full time basis. The various phone calls, meetings, interviews, etc. took place in a solid chunk of time from 9am to 5pm, sometimes seeping into the 7-9pm time frame whenever I was doing a call with a busy person on the West Coast. Somehow I also managed to do half a dozen of take-home projects, the longest of which took me two weeks of all-nighters to complete.<p>To summarize: I wish someone would show me which bus to take to the parallel universe where folks get to choose from six different offers. Here and now, I feel incredibly lucky to have my current job, and dread the day when I might be forced to seek another.

Would love to see specific numeric information on offer packages, negotiations, counter-offers, and final accepted offer, if the author feels comfortable disclosing such information.<p>I bet you can get a really nice offer when you get six big tech companies to bid over you.

I was surprised that he got an offer from Google after a single interview during his 6 days of interviews - it took 3 months and several interviews before I got an offer from them.<p>Turns out that he didn&#x27;t:<p>&quot;It’s a very loooooong process relative to the rest of the companies I spoke with, so I definitely had to keep everyone updated on where Google was. I also had to let Google know where I was with everyone else.&quot;

These big companies (including Google where I work) have so little idea of where they&#x27;re going that they go way too general with interviews. If you want a good iOS engineer then ask them all questions about the platform and have platform experts interview them.<p>The concern is that priorities shift and this person might end up on a C++ backend in a year and you want to make sure they&#x27;re good enough in general. The inability to forecast the existence of a role a few years down the road is a sign of incompetent planning. And having software generalists everywhere instead of domain experts is a great way to get good but not great software.

It would be nice to know which offer the author decided to accept...

The heart rate info that he provides for the onsite interviews is a funny and interesting thing to include (around 100-122 during interviews, with a resting of 60).<p>Does an elevated heart rate during an interview count towards one&#x27;s daily fitness goals? :)

The way I see it, there are several reasons for such an interview process:<p>1) [Leverage]. The interviewer can negotiate down salary expectations based on the performance of the interview. You can ramp up requirements until the candidate breaks. Then, you get the upper hand in the negotiation process.<p>2) [Responsibility]. Nobody wants to take responsibility for the bad decision. In the formalized interview you can blame the metric. If the metric is external (Google&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;Amazon do it), then there is nobody to assign the blame, so, no responsibility gets redistributed.<p>3) [Effort]. Treating people as they are different is hard. Reading their CV or learning more about their projects requires time effort and expertise in the field. This is expensive. Much easier is assessing people through a generic process.<p>4) [Loyality]. Someone, who spends their free time for a year preparing for the interview is bound to be more loyal than somebody who prepares only for a week.<p>5) [Initiation]. People who go through a difficult initiation process tend to value their group more. That builds tightly knit teams.<p>Overall, I think that the process is difficult, somewhat irrational and inhumane. But I have no idea how to really fix it.

&gt; <i>It was exhausting and it meant that most of my lunch breaks were just interviews for multiple weeks. I had to start going into work very early so I could leave earlier to take calls at home. Making sure I was still meeting all of my commitments at work was a challenge, too, but I made sure to prioritize that over interviewing, rescheduling when necessary. I wouldn’t phone it in for the purposes of interviewing. It makes you look bad, it’s unethical, and if you don’t get a job, you’re now a lower performer.</i><p>I&#x27;m impressed with this person&#x27;s ability to write a blog that BOTH:<p>— feeds people&#x27;s curiosity via the current interview experience at several of the worlds biggest companies all in one read<p>— Incorporates (advertises) his own personal work ethic and credibility throughout, to where I would bet he&#x27;s getting all sorts of significantly higher paying offers around the area.<p>The latter was likely the motivation to write it, which is great. I&#x27;m surprised more people with similar stories don&#x27;t use their ultra-blog-worthy experience as an opportunity to humble brag and display their value. Might as well, right? Small risk&#x2F;big reward

Paraphrasing a comment I left elsewhere in this thread, but I&#x27;ve been seeing actual improvement on the state of the art on the much maligned and polarizing algo brain teaser interview. I&#x27;m not sure if Karat is the best in this area but I did have a good experience with a company that used them and interviewed me well, but I like that companies are actually incentivized to minimize false positives and negatives rather than just one. I try to tell other engineers that they&#x27;d be surprised at how much better a good technical interviewer can be than an average strong engineer, but that goes in roughly two directions: one group can see why the dominant mode exists but is curious about a better way that remedies the shortcoming of the dominant mode; one group defends the dominant mode and gets fairly defensive about criticisms of it.<p>Can you guess which group is better at technical interviewing and I&#x27;ve found more capable of handling the responsibility of screening talent in the past?

Just goes to show you that software interviewing exactly captures the entire experience of being a working software engineer and always tests you on the things that all of us reading this right now already know.<p>Right?

It seems that LeetCode and HackerRank have become the SAT and ACT of the SV Big Techs, and FAANG et al are becoming the workplace Ivy Leagues. If so then where are the Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, and local coding boot camps of the world?

I can’t help but wonder how I would do in these interviews.<p>Honestly, I think I’m a horrible programmer. My current gig is developing an api for a survey app, as well as an environmental sensor data app (which me and my partner built from the ground up).<p>It’s tough though. I don’t know many algorithms, and I have to do a lot of research. That said, I still get shit done and deliver.<p>I have no formal education and have taught myself.I would most likely fail these kinds of interviews.<p>How I got my current gig? No idea. Maybe my honesty won them over. Yes, I can do front end development. No I don’t know that, but I can learn.<p>Seems to have worked out so far.

Though I empathize with senior people of the software industry, I will like to add some other perspective to this discussion. I am from the Oil and Gas industry in Operations domain, nothing to do with software. Previously I have worked for IBM as a software engineer. Hence, I have the perspective of both industries. From this discussion thread, it seems that senior people are looking for exclusivity and immunity. I can correlate it with seniors of my industry. My company is government owned. Here, seniors people (by age, not by rank &#x2F; +1 rank but the same job responsibility) command juniors (by age, not by rank &#x2F; -1 rank but the same job responsibility) and seldom do any work. They come to office late, leave office early citing family issues everyday. When I bring up the topic to my boss, he says I need to understand they are like that, can&#x27;t help. Sometimes he says &quot;Learn from them, how to get work done by others&quot;. Those others are younger people like us - 22 to 40 age groups.

&gt; Although every company loved telling me that “it really feels like a startup!”, it rang the truest at Amazon.<p>That made me laugh. I have to wonder if the author is somehow so naive that they don&#x27;t understand what they observe or what to ask. It&#x27;s also possible that the sentiment is the only lip service they could pay that hellhole, with a straight face.

This is really impressive! I will keep this in mind if I ever apply to any of these big tech companies. I&#x27;ve sent a few applications over the years, but I never got past a phone screening, and I didn&#x27;t realize how completely unprepared I would have been.<p>Maybe these whiteboard interviews also filter out people who don&#x27;t really want the job enough. If someone spends a lot of time brushing up on algorithms and practicing interviews, then it shows that they really want the job, so they&#x27;re more likely to be a high performer.<p>I&#x27;m surprised they were able to get job offers from Google and Facebook, while their application was just rejected by Stripe. I also got rejected by Stripe without a phone call. I have some really talented friends who were also rejected after an interview. I&#x27;m starting to think that Stripe&#x27;s hiring bar is just much higher than Google or Facebook.

PROTIP:<p>1) Write blog article on interviewing 2) Promote on hackernews 3) Use as leverage for salary&#x2F;equity negotiations

&gt; After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours&#x2F;day, more on weekends) I moved on to doing primarily Leetcode’s “Top Interview Questions”<p>I&#x27;m completely fine with interviewers expecting you to solve some problems in front of them and knowing basic algorithms + data structures, but if it&#x27;s becoming standard to dedicate this much time to studying and applying for jobs something is really, really wrong.<p>I think a day or two to refresh your knowledge you haven&#x27;t used for a while and practice a few problems to get you warmed up is reasonable but when you&#x27;re talking weeks of preparation then the interview is testing the wrong thing. I can&#x27;t see in the article how much preparation was done but it sounds like months of work.

Done this whole process as well. Every year, in fact. I&#x27;ve interviewed with quite a few top Bay area companies with quite a few going to onsite.<p>I never got an offer though and the only thing I can say that differentiates me from this person in terms of how we studied is the part where you practice with other peers. I&#x27;ve done this maybe once or twice a few years ago. I think in order to get to these companies you need to practice with peers. Preferably with ones who have made it through. Unfortunately, in my experience, it can be hard to find peers willing to do such things. I&#x27;ll continue to make half (or less) of what I could be making if I was at some top public company. And this area will continue to be out of my reach financially because of that.

So people are complaining that whiteboarding is the wrong way to interview. That we don&#x27;t discover if they can write and maintain complex software system, instead focusing on &#x27;trivia&#x27;. I don&#x27;t disagree (I think that the trivia being tested can be important - a team with <i>no one</i> that has deep knowledge of data structures of algorithms is lost), but I also don&#x27;t know a <i>good</i> way to interview that finds out what we need to know.<p>How do you find out if someone can make good long term decisions in a short amount of time? It seems inherently contradictory. Some people say by giving homework problems. They&#x27;re not wrong, that might give valuable insight, but I know that I would hate that, so others might too.<p>Can there be a good answer?

One big problem is that the people interviewing are rarely &quot;big picture&quot; people, because in general there are few &quot;big picture&quot; people as a percentage of any population.<p>So, when &quot;small picture&quot; people think &quot;competence&quot;, they think in minutiae, which in software development means the smallest distinct units: algorithms.<p>I&#x27;ve been in the industry long enough to see it everywhere, and it&#x27;s not necessarily a bad thing. Most people prefer tactics to strategy, and you only actually want a small percentage to be strategists anyway; too many chiefs and whatnot.<p>But when it comes to the technical interview, it&#x27;s frustrating to deal with a tactically minded rather than a strategically minded person.

&gt; Companies don’t hire people based on the knowledge they were born with.<p>Yes, this, so much.<p>&gt; Don’t get discouraged. There were multiple interviews I had where I didn’t know the solution and interviewers had to shepherd me towards a solution. I still got offers from everywhere I interviewed.<p>And this, so much, particularly for those with imposter syndrome. You miss all the shots you don&#x27;t take. If you&#x27;re unhappy, and have done your best to find a way to happiness in your present role, start looking. Don&#x27;t keep telling yourself &quot;in another year I&#x27;ll be ready&quot; or &quot;once I learn X and Y&quot;.

I get messages from recruiters from some of these companies time to time and I always decline it. Because I know I can&#x27;t get through the technical interviews without spending at least a month preparing for them.

This only covers getting the interview and potentially succeeding at it.<p>It doesn&#x27;t cover:<p>- how many hours a week will be worked<p>- how much stock options are on offer<p>- what other benefits there are<p>- what&#x27;s the total compensation package like<p>- what skills will be gained<p>- what is the office environment like<p>Most of those &quot;top&quot; companies can be skipped over as places to interview at because they aren&#x27;t very good on the above topics.<p>For example, interviewing at Facebook in 2018? <i>After the Cambridge Analytica scandal? (which was in March 2018 according to Wikipedia <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cambridge_Analytica" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cambridge_Analytica</a> )</i> Even millions of dollars of compensation wouldn&#x27;t be worth interviewing at Facebook during that time, not until they get their house in order. Even Google has privacy and ethical issues that make it a less-than-desirable place to work at.<p>Amazon also has a culture of working <i>a lot</i>, maybe that&#x27;s fine for someone just getting started in their software development career, but for most people, it isn&#x27;t great to be working so many hours.<p>So 3 of the interviews didn&#x27;t even need to happen; he could have concentrated on acing the other half of interviews (Apple, Yelp, LinkedIn)?<p>Also, fundamentally, he&#x27;s interviewing for jobs where he will be told what to do and will either have to job-hop to get better salaries and better positions or spend 3-4 years <i>at minimum</i> to work up the ladder. So selecting Apple, Amazon, Google, etc. is actually a <i>tough</i> choice because you have to kinda plan for the next 5 years if you want to ensure you aren&#x27;t wasting time and are actually advancing in your career!<p>It&#x27;s a great start for an article but feels like a dime a dozen at this point (I&#x27;ve been reading about SV startups since highschool and Paul Graham&#x27;s essay): <i>if you want to work at a top SV company, no matter which is at the top at the moment, you&#x27;ll have to jump through the algorithm interview questions hoops.</i>

If I were giving a technical interview, after asking some basic fizzbuzz style questions, I would just ask a candidate to bring a personal laptop and &quot;do something cool&quot;, i.e. show me what you&#x27;re good at that is also valuable or useful. Could be spinning up a website, could be some cool parallelized data science or processing job, could be setting up a simple REST server infrastructure, as long as it&#x27;s done <i>de novo</i>. Has anybody ever been an interviewer or candidate with this kind of interview?

IMHO, this is the worst possible approach to finding a job. The opportunity cost of doing this over working on interesting problems and letting that guide you to pay seems extremely high.<p>Also, the focus on &quot;top bay area companies&quot; seems misguided at best. If you work more on identifying what type of work you want to be doing you might find there are GREAT opportunities in other regions or at smaller scale companies.<p>Maybe I am just not the type of person who resonates with this approach, but I cant imagine this being healthy for most people.

Those are some awesome statistics: 6 out of 6 successes, practically unheard of. But, it sounds like you know exactly how to study for it: that whitebaording tip probably helped.

I had 4 onsite interviews in 5 days once. It was brutal, so exhausting. I felt like a machine though. A lot of the questions were recycled (behavioral), and so were some of the tech questions.<p>I don’t know how they managed to do 6 in 6 days, that’s almost hard to believe. Most companies aren’t so flexible on the days they can host you.<p>It would have been very interesting to see how the offers compared and which company they went with. I’d also be interested to see what the negotiations did for their final TC.

The interviews are certainly difficult. I tried a few times years ago and never made it anywhere in the process, which was frustrating to say the least. I was working at a startup doing everything under the sun to keep the technical side of things going, but found that I was using so many different programming languages in my day to day job, that I couldn&#x27;t whiteboard a reasonable solution to anything. It was shocking.<p>Congrats to the author for their success!

I interview programmers. I would love to see a candidate who prepared like this, but it seems like everyone I talk to hasn’t done any practice at all.

Good to see Yelp being compared with giants :P

What was your portfolio, I&#x27;m talking the existing examples of work?<p>&gt; I was interviewing for my second job out of college with about two and a half years of experience without any particularly notable internships or employers on my resume; I went to a very small school that had zero known software companies at their “career fair”;

So the hiring procedure is to optimize for people who adhere to the advice of a specific training manual that&#x27;s not actually mentioned in the job posting? You just have to want to work there so much that you find out about it? What is it about that kind of candidate that makes them desirable? Obsequiousness?

The problem is actually that due to the plethora of tools, languages, dev stacks and other variability, it&#x27;s hard to diagnose software engineering skills effectively. So it makes sense to go back to basics and use things that everyone should know like data structures.<p>The issue is that this is taken to the extreme.

Good effort. Personally after 20 years i simply have no motivatiob for this kind of game anymore. Gah.

If I subtracted &lt;this article&gt; - &lt;code&gt; the vector would be almost exactly equal to &lt;what I did to study for pathology boards&gt; - &lt;pathology&gt;, except in the path boards, there&#x27;s no opportunity for &quot;if you know more, show it.&quot;

The article is, unfortunately, lacking in substance. For example, the author applied to 20 jobs and got interviews with 6. This is an incredible success rate. I&#x27;m guessing he had referrals from hiring managers and didn&#x27;t just apply through a CTS.

I wonder if it&#x27;s possible to get a job at &quot;FAANG&quot; with just studying interview questions !? It would however be a proof that you are dedicated and willing to learn, kinda like a engineer degree, but one year instead of five.

Way to go young&#x27;un! My advice would be, though it may seem attractive to work at the large behemoths, I&#x27;d advise you to go to a startup or a medium size company for greater satisfaction and less bureaucracy&#x2F;politics.

That is still an impressive response rate given it sounds like the author cold applied w&#x2F;o a referral. Generally it is much easier to at least get to the phone screen with a referral from someone within the company.

I wonder if he feels like he&#x27;s a better programmer after all that studying.

Seems like it would make a lot of sense to outsource hiring interviewing and vetting. In this guy’s case if he could have just been interviewed once and it probably wouls have suited all 6 companies.

the problem of interview in large companies is no one want to take responsibility of recruiting the wrong guy. So they just use some &quot;standard&quot; process to screen and test the candidates. If they still pick the wrong guy, no one will be blamed, since other big companies use the same process.<p>And that is the main reason big companies like google, facebook can&#x27;t make good products. Instead, they pay billions to buy successful products made by those who were rejected in their interview.

Finally, a GOOD post about the tech interview process:<p>- Upbeat and To the point - Helpful relevant information - Actionable advice with multiple references<p>Thank you Bay Area Belletrist!

And I thought he would give out numbers.

Feels good to know I am on the right track. Mindset is a major difference maker.

Does studying CLRS improve odds of succeeding at these interviews?

it really is a different skill that you need to invest time in and practice. it sucks, but there are also plenty of high paying positions that have more practical interviews

curious why the author <i>wants</i> to work in the Bay area. does he actually enjoy the area, or is he excited about all his career opportunities there?

I was preparing for a few months and interviewed at 0 of six top companies bhahaha. It seems like they are very reluctant to hire guys from overseas even if you are already in SV for interviews.

TL;DR: [obvious] Preparation and practice works.<p>Some famous dead dude once said something along the lines of &quot;by failing to prepare you&#x27;re preparing to fail&quot;.

Nice

When I see engineers in their late 40s, 50s etc being harsh on algorithm interviews, I often wonder is it because they failed to keep up with changing times and are now playing victims. I mean, IT industry is nothing like what it was in the 70s and 80s when these people started out. Back then, it was still rather nascent and almost all business problems could be solved by gluing together existing tools (I was born in the 80s so I am only speculating based on what I have read). May be that&#x27;s how it is even now. They were all essentially glue engineers doing some type of CRUD job. For them, the more tools they knew the better they were at their jobs. It is a bit amusing how this glue job is usually oversold as &#x27;architecting&#x27; or &#x27;system design&#x27;.<p>However, times have changed. Since late 1990s, the industry has become a lot more aggressive. While the CRUD shops exist, there are more and more companies who produce products that need engineering from ground up. Some of these are truly innovative but many simply reinvent solutions. The kind of funding these new age companies with NIH syndrome get allows them to afford quite a bit of reinventing of the wheel, a wheel that suits their purpose specifically. In this scenario, one needs to know fundamentals of CS, so having interviews of this nature is justified. The candidate must be aware of the sort of company they have applied to and know what to expect. There is no point ranting after they fail.<p>That said, I do have my objections to these sort of interviews. I am in my mid thirties and what I do is 50-50 in terms of over all architecture and low level details. I am currently looking for a change and every time I see ds-algo mentioned in the job description I feel disappointed.<p>Firstly, the cargo cult interviewing is quite enraging. I mean, just because a mega corp with NIH syndrome does tough algo-ds interviews because they arguably need it, the CRUD shops following suite is ridiculous. They are glue job companies with CRUD jobs that need glue job engineers whose need to know CS fundamentals will be limited to reading the label on the libraries they use, if they advertise the ds and algo they use in their implementation.<p>Secondly, even if its a NIH mega corp, I dislike how the interviews automatically filter out experienced good engineers. The sort of questions asked can only be answered by three kinds of people - recent graduates, those who have written ds-algo libraries at their job before, or those who study them just for the interview. I feel the third kind is a sham as its worse form of rote learning without applied knowledge. People like me who possess a lot of knowledge through real world experience on a lot of things and can build a lot of things from scratch, basically generalists, but can&#x27;t write code to balance a binary tree on whiteboard in 5 minutes feel almost discriminated. Why can&#x27;t where be a middle ground where we discuss the solution strictly qualitatively without having to answer it as if it were a college exam? I think this is how it ought to be for mid career engineers.<p>I have had my share of both kind of interviews that has left me extremely disappointed. I have realized that people like me are best suited to work at medium sized product companies whose name not many have heard of. I used to work at one such and had tremendous success, and I am exclusively looking for such now.

It&#x27;s interesting that software interviews have degenerated into literal auditions. Just as with auditions, you need to train specifically for them.<p>Is there really a reason why software jobs can&#x27;t hire in a blue-collar fashion where there&#x27;s a background&#x2F;experience + sanity check and a subsequent trial period? Even looking beyond that, is there any similar profession where interviews like these take place?<p>I&#x27;m starting to think this may be in part be related to the phenomenon of bullshit jobs. Basically that people in administrative roles need to have something to do, and as such, the interviews themselves have over time expanded to as much as multiple days.

At this point I&#x27;ve conducted dozens of screening interviews at a SV tech company, which is in the ballpark of the ones mentioned here. Interviewees choose the language they&#x27;d like to work in, and the questions are of the shape &quot;given a list of data and a simple criterion, find an element of the list&quot;. This isn&#x27;t exactly depth-first search: finding elements of collections that meet some criteria is, like, extremely common in day-to-day work.<p>It&#x27;s really surprising to see how hard people fall down on even the simplest part of this exercise. People with lots of experience, people who work in big-name companies (including the ones mentioned here), you name it.<p>This experience has really caused me to soften my erstwhile stance of &quot;tech hiring is broken and inhumane&quot;, because it really makes me suspect that no matter how simple or common the problem is, many people will fall all over themselves attempting to solve it. Even if the problem is nerves, how much can you really ease someone&#x27;s nerves over a video chat?<p>This is basically the lesson of FizzBuzz.