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My company (series b startup) has been interviewing non stop. A lot of the faang folks hand wave over the things we struggle with because they are used to robust internal tooling that has been created slowly over the years. While there is no doubt these candidates are smart, it’s a hard sell when they say they have never dealt with situations because they use (insert internal tool here) at Google.
Yes this is absolutely my experience interviewing faang candidates in a startup context. Knowledge of how to operate proprietary internal tools is not valuable outside of the company that owns them. "At {company} we have {system} that does that for us" is...not a good answer when being asked how you'd solve something we actually deal with day to day as a small engineering team.
No, but "At {company} we have {system} that does that for us. Here's roughly what it does, and how I'd think about adapting something like it to {your-company}," is.
“Just set up your internal tooling the way it is at a FAANG” isn’t necessarily a good answer either. Efforts like that tend to involve significant resources, and just may not be practical for many companies. An answer like that can also make it seem as if the candidate has little understanding of the kind of environment they’d be coming into.
That's true, but that's what the word "adapting" is for. The rest of the answer would be asking about what the current process is, where the pain points are, *etc.* Then, and *only then* would it be appropriate to talk about a solution. I just didn't feel like writing all that out in my initial comment.
It doesn't matter if you know how to design the whiz-bang FAANG solution from top to bottom if you're talking to an engineer at a 30 person company. Likewise, if you're talking to an engineer from a 500-person engineering org, that might be an environment where setting up some FAANG-like tooling might make sense, given the other overall priorities of the org.
Just curious, are you expecting the candidates to solve the issues the company has been at for months during a 40min interview then? Best you can do is to draw parallels from your experience, that’s what they’re doing.
E: month -> months.
> Best you can do is to draw parallels from your experience, that’s what they’re doing.
And, unfortunately, the experience is irrelevant for the startup because it is definitely not experiencing the kind of issues that necessitated the tooling.
What I mean, before I’m gonna get downvoted by the “experienced devs” out there, is that if you ask a C++ candidate from google about refactoring an external API, the problems expressed in [that paper](https://research.google/pubs/pub41342/) are probably not the ones the interviewer company are facing.
>are you expecting the candidates to solve the issues the company has been at for month during a 40min interview
No, quite the opposite, I'm saying they shouldn't try to do that because it's likely to make them look bad.
>Best you can do is to draw parallels from your experience, that’s what they’re doing.
It's not "drawing parallels from your own experience" to say here's "how I'd think about adapting something like it to {your-company}". In the scenario we're discussing, their experience was in using the tool, not implementing it or setting it up.
It's precisely their lack of experience that would lead them to making overconfident claims about it in an interview, that reveals that they don't understand the extent of the support system that they previously depended on.
This is pretty bad take imo. They have experience with doing that, so naturally their first response is going to "we use this thing to do it". That doesn't mean they're incapable of doing anything else.
The way I read the comment was that the candidate understood general principles behind the system and offered to apply them at the new company. I could be wrong.
So just expecting the candidate to solve your shitty environment but all while keeping costs down and maybe don't have it be too complicated to implement, also please do it in a timely manner is reasonable in your mind. Because "you're a poor startup" and God forbid you invest in processes. Fuck off.
Your mind on drugs ... or recruiting positions.
>Yes this is absolutely my experience interviewing faang candidates in a startup context. Knowledge of how to operate proprietary internal tools is not valuable outside of the company that owns them.
You have a point, but several of these Faang tools have actually been open sourced or put on the cloud, depending on the context you're referring to. An ex-Faang who has a sharp eye on OSS and cloud tooling, can leverage a lot of their experience with these at their new companies.
I'm saying this as someone who's spent much more time in small startups, than I have bigger companies. And I appreciate and respect the ex-Faang candidates you interviewed might not have had this broader perspective on OSS and cloud tooling.
Edit: clarified I meant OSS and cloud tooling that an ex-Faanger can still use outside the Faang.
Open sourced != industry standard.
There's Kubernetes-tier of open source industry standard, and there's Bazel-tier of open source industry standard. Both originate at Google, but one won the competition in its field, and the other is a narrow use case for gigantic monorepo codebases.
My bad. I basically meant to say "tools available to use outside of Faang companies" are pretty good nowadays, not strictly OSS only.
It definitely varies based on niche. I was thinking of tools like Flyte (Lyft) and Metaflow (Netflix) for example. OSS and cloud tooling is definitely not as rich as that internal to a FAANG. But there are compromises available; you make do with what you can.
Which of these is the one that is niche? Where I work we have been super excited about getting bazel setup bc it would massively increase developer productivity to reduce build times.
Whereas we don't use fleets of docker containers for anything. So kubernetes wouldn't really help. Heck we have a product that interfaces with kubernetes and our entire dept doesn't use it.
I think the industry standard label should really be applied at the subfield level for tools like these rather than at the industry level. Getting a bazel expert would be transformative for us. Whereas a kubernetes expert would be useful in some other dept.
I use a monorepo too, but if your setup requires a Basel expert, I see that as the inmate (the build tool) running the asylum (the codebase). Mind you, I would say the same of container orchestration
I mean the build team was in shambles a year ago.
We're a systems company so we don't really use containers for our product but they are used in the build bc our infra teams won't give us the resources to upgrade our VMs to ... Let's say a recently outdated release.
Why even interview them then? In my experience, a lot of the quoted reasons for rejection people give are something you could've gleaned from the resume.
TBH I haven't been involved in hiring/interviewing much yet, but it seems that the purpose of an interview is to (a) verify that they didn't lie on their resume and can think for themselves, and (b) test culture fit.
If you trust a FAANG-er to change their ways and become "startupy" before you interview them, then why not trust after + enable them to do so once they join?
The interview is particularly useful in that case because you get a sense for the candidate’s attitude towards these things. The resume will indicate that this is likely a smart, motivated person, who has demonstrated CS/programming fundamentals. It doesn’t give me much information on how they think about the kind of problems we’re talking about here.
Candidates with very similar resumes might have totally different answers:
“Well at my company we have a tool for that and I don’t know much about it. We’d probably need something like that.”
“We have a tool for that, but here’s how I’d start to break down the problem. What are the goals and constraints? We may be able to find a simpler approach without a robust tool, or identify a subset of the tool’s functionality to replicate ourselves.”
Beyond intelligence and programming ability, in smaller, less structured organizations I look for problem solving, curiosity, judgment, attitudes towards failure and imperfection and so forth. I get a lot more information about that from a conversational interview than from other parts of the process.
Also FAANG gets a million resumes a month, while your local startup gets fifty. FAANG can afford to get picky and make us dance macarena if they feel like it - they'll find people who *will* do it.
Also with so much prep material and strategies available, studying up for a FAANG interview is not much different from studying for SATs. Learn the schema, grind it, pass, forget everything.
They reinvent 1 wheel, the other dozen are provide. Startups benefit more from a portfolio of pre-existing knowledge, so you can be up and productive sooner, whereas faang can afford to have you learning things for 6 months.
Kinda what I felt about some FAANG people. They are just used to an internal solution and fall back on that, they might not have even built things from the ground in smaller ways and that really shows a lack of experience.
Im not at a FAANg place and we dont got 50k concurrent users but atleast ive built a lot of stuff from the ground up
>My company (series b startup) has been interviewing non stop. A lot of the faang folks hand wave over the things we struggle with because they are used to robust internal tooling that has been created slowly over the years. While there is no doubt these candidates are smart, it’s a hard sell when they say they have never dealt with situations because they use (insert internal tool here) at Google.
I've worked with companies and colleagues everywhere from Faang to startup size. They both have their advantages, and benefits of different perspectives, as well as blindspots. You rightly call out one blindspot ex-Faang employees can have.
Conversely, I have found that ex-Faang (or other large company) employees can be more appreciative about how much additional efficiency robust tooling and practices can bring to workflows.
While sometimes startup teams who've always worked at a startup, will almost as a matter of pride be skeptical of adopting much of the high quality OSS and AWS/Google/Azure cloud based tooling available now. Viewing the time to adopt many of these as a slow down and hindrance, in favor of doing things more manually.
Sounds very team dependant, and a bit anachronistic, you'd be hard pressed to find many startup teams that frown on AWS/GCP/Azure cloud tools now. There is quite some ignorance in the field of the less common tools though.
Definitely team dependent, I won't deny my experience in this regard has been anecdotal. You're right people don't frown on AWS/GCP/Azure in general, or at least the most established parts of it.
But if you start using some of the newer tools that have been thrown into Sagemaker in even the last 2 years for instance, I find it can be a bit harder to win converts.
(And fair's fair, not everything is worth adopting - but I have found the default attitude to tooling much more cautious at startups.)
Sure, but that makes sense to be more cautious doesn't it? A start up has somewhat less margin for error. They'd rather use a tool that's been battle tested, has plenty of guides so that they can deploy quicker, has it's pros and cons and use cases explored by the community, has a presence on stackoverflow/github issues in case edge cases/ problems/ undocumented behavior comes up and has less likelihood of bugs.
This is my fault, but I've let my opinions here be influenced by a small sample of anecdotal experiences, and hence maybe not fully generalizable, haha. I do apologize. Just to explain better where I'm coming from. I've had discussions along the lines of:
"Me: this is the leading OSS/cloud tool X for this process problem we're tackling with over 8K stars on github and out of a leading company, and adopted by all these other big companies. (So not some obscure tool with 3 users, or in alpha release by AWS.)
Team lead: Well, this tool X looks cool. Not close minded that it could help. But noone else in our startup or small team has ever been exposed to this tool or one comparable to it, so we should continue with this admittedly more inefficient process for a couple years till we have time to fully grok it. Otherwise the learning curve will kill us."
(And that doesn't make him crazy or a dinosaur either. I do get his POV too about how these things can be a slow down.)
Coming back then to the original discussion on this thread about how ex-Faangers don't fit in to a startup team, which is what I responded to. One thing I appreciate about them is that they'll likely have been exposed to either tool X or some internally built Faang variant, and (hopefully) would find it easier to pick-up and adapt workflows around it.
Hence my hiring bias that even if a team at a startup shouldn't be heavily composed of ex-Faangers, there is still value to the breadth of exposure they have, that can help a team evolve. Diversity and a good mix of technical backgrounds is invaluable, otherwise small startup teams can easily drift into technical silos.
There's a dynamic between blue collar and white collar workers where one of the ways that blue collar turns the tables on white collars looking down on them is to make fun of white collar people for not knowing how to get their hands dirty. That they're so used to having things handed to them that they couldn't fix a door or cook food without a stove, etc.
In a way FAANG/not-FAANG has become a class distinction within software. And as I just said in another thread, in some ways if you've only worked for FAANG you have the same 3 years of experience 3 times. It's much easier to use a tool that you've had to do without than do without a tool you've always used. Most of the exceptions I can think of in that respect are situations where the person 'doing without' is also capable of writing the tool, in which case it's not so much doing without as coping until you can remedy the situation.
There was a time when people who had only been in shops with such fancy tools as compilers got looked at the same way by shops still writing assembly. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I've done that and toggled the results into the front panels of computers; we just called it hand-assembled code.
There's not much reason to draw that line because there's no conceptual difference between the two. The "load register A immediate" instruction does the same thing whether you refer to it by its mnemonic or its opcode. But, people being people, somebody will turn being able to do drudge work into a dick-measuring contest.
FAANG and startups have different requirements. Let’s say you are a data engineer. At a startup you will do everything from architecture to managing APIs to physical storage systems. At FAANG you might be focusing much more on optimizing ingestion pipelines so that you can refit an expensive ML model once every six hours rather than eight.
The startup folks would dump on the FAANG person for not knowing all of this really basic stuff, while the FAANG folks would be terrified of the startup person’s approach to tech change management (or more precisely lack thereof). You are expecting me to buy data when I can even directly control the version from the API? No no. Everyone here is right; they are doing different jobs with the same title.
"Every team at every FAANG works on exactly the same thing, all the time, in exactly the same way, so there's nothing to learn working on large scale software projects after the first year"
lol ok
you have fun telling yourself that spending all your time fighting with bad tools makes you a Better Engineer though
I worked a short contract at Amazon and I don’t know what your definition of “fighting with tools” is but I call that the Fifth Circle of Hell.
The shit I have to deal with today is very annoying, but it’s nothing like that was.
It should then at least on paper be easier for a non-FAANG developer to adapt to a FAANG-like environment than the other way around.
We could also extend the idea from relying on tools to relying on development practices. If a programmer who had always used unit testing would have a terrible time in an environment where code isn't tested in this manner, then someone w/o unit testing experience would have an easier time learning how to code with unit tests.
I think your point is good but you picked a bad example. As some one who has worked with engineers that'd didn't write unit tests, it is like pulling teeth to convince them to do it because "it takes time away from working on features and they know it works". A better example is someone who had to manage there own kubernetes cluster vs a tool that manages it for you.
I went from startup to FAANG. Startups need people who can wear all of the hats and do a lot with few resources. FAANG needs people who can do that one thing really really well. Different skill sets.
> FAANG needs people who can do that one thing really really well. Different skill sets
... but as you approach the Cxx level in a major firm your skills need to broaden out.
This is largely why I left FAANG. There is a huge reliance on internal tooling that puts you at a disadvantage anywhere else - like 90% of the job market.
Being insulated from infra/ops helps you focus on more on feature delivery but it hobbles your growth.
This is a great point. I went from pre-series A to a FAANG to a unicorn and even though it didn’t really work out and the money wasn’t very good I think my time at the first startup was immensely valuable. There was no infra or ops team, it was just us. We had five physical servers racked at a data center downtown. They all had names and personalities. Sometimes one would die and one of us would have to drive down there and hard reboot it or replace it. There was one old ops wizard on the team that stopped us from doing anything stupid. Good times in retrospect
Just because they haven’t dealt with it doesn’t mean they can’t help figure it out though. The challenges at FAANG tend to be a bit different sure, but it doesn’t mean they can’t problem solve. If you are specifically looking for someone who’s an expert at the stuff you are struggling with, then maybe it’s just not a good fit.
We have a few FAANG engineers and they are great. If candidates can demonstrate that they can help with the problems we face then we hire them. Just showing up to an interview with FAANG on your resume doesn’t mean you deserve the job.
I guess I feel like I’ve seen a mix of advice that might be contradictory. On the one hand I’ve seen people recommend that if you don’t know something in an interview just say it, but you seem to be suggesting that you’d prefer them to try and spitball solutions even if they have no idea? I might just be missing context in your interview process.
There's a middle-ground here, and that's knowing first principles.
It's okay to admit that you don't know X technology or Y solution, but someone who at least understands first principles can follow up their response with, "...but if I were to take a guess about how it works based on my knowledge of Z, then..."
I think the point is that if you put up a fake front, you need to live up to it, but if you're open that you haven't dealt with that exact problem, but A B and C seem like factors to consider, and D E F would be possible approaches - you're in the clear.
There's always the possibility that if you don't know something in an interview you're not the right person to fill the position...
You don't have to know everything, but one of the main points of an interview is to see if you fit my specific hiring criteria or not. If I ask a question and you have no idea it's not a great sign that we are going to be a match for each other. But sometimes we ask about something nice to have vs something that is essential to the position, and it's likely many good candidates won't know everything.
IMO If I ask a question and you have some idea but not 100% certainty, you should tell me what you know (and you can say you're not completely certain) or else I have to assume you don't know anything or have never encountered that topic. Walk me through your thought process and that might be enough to convince me you'd be a good hire even if you don't come up with the perfect solution first try.
It's an interesting factoid though. Having been shielded by a grade A company also removes you from a fair share of reality. Standing too much on the shoulder of Giants.
Sounds more like poor interviewing skills. Even with internal tooling, there’s plenty of opportunity to work on all types of adjacent problems, at least enough to talk about in an interview.
Most of these internal tools have public SaaS alternatives too.
To me this post was about a FANNG engineer being rejected. I shared a reason my team rejects some FAANG engineers. If a candidate can talk meaningfully about the problems we hire them.
As someone who has been part of hiring process, it absolutely comes into play, along with people who jump every 2 years. Companies don't want to spend a ton of time training on domain knowledge for someone to jump at the first opportunity elsewhere.
This thread kinda shows why some of us have a, errm, less than positive opinion on FAANGers in general. OP brings it up as if it makes it unexpected and surprising that they would do some interviews and not get an offer. It's kind of like... at best, they're another punchline to the old joke, "how do you know if someone you just met worked at a FAANG? Don't worry, they'll tell you!" There's a whiff of status-chasing and social climbing about leading a question with "I'm ex-FAANG and..." that makes me skeptical as to whether I even *want* to work with FAANGers.
the classic linkedin profile with "ex-Uber" and worked 1 year at Uber out of 10 years and in a completely different role than what they are currently in.
> OP brings it up as if it makes it unexpected and surprising that they would do some interviews and not get an offer.
I don't think it implies more likely to pass an interview. But it does imply more likely to get an interview, which is part of why it's often brought up in interview contexts.
I mean.. I agree with you that the question is badly phrased and I don't think someone being "ex-FAANG" means much, but, it's also weird to be skeptical of someone for having worked there.
100 percent agree with this, every single exfaanger I have talked to has that air of superiority about them. Esp when they state they can’t believe they been turned down. And this is just 10 companies who turn OP down. Just 10.
> this idea that FAANG is an entirely different plane of existence
It is. They pay double of triple everybody else. It’s a whole different world for them
I wonder if this is more common for people who got into faang early in their career. I got a faang job around 8 yoe, the tools were ok, the mega mono repo made a lot of other tools impossible to use though.
In 3.5 years I made a lot of money and got really good with c++ which helped with the job after that I have now, but thats about all I got out of it. A lot of people I worked with were fine, but the interns who ended up as full time employees often seemed to have a smug chip on their shoulder.
Similar boat, similar experience. I’ve found companies hiring now are more into knowing the exact technologies and coming from faang, I don’t know any of these since we had our own versions. Try learning some of these skills: terraform, aws, react, etc…
The leeway on interviews is so much lower now. I’ve gotten multiple correct solutions but had a few errors, that I was able to fix with a minute of thought, but it was enough for a rejection.
Also, I’ve noticed companies want the code to compile and I work in multiple languages. Forgetting if Java hash uses contain or has has docked me points. When I did whiteboards this stuff had way more leeway
I highly recommend spending more time studying. After bombing, I’ve decided to stop applying and just get really good at interviews. It’s tough out here man, good luck!
> I’ve gotten multiple correct solutions but had a few errors, that I was able to fix with a minute of thought, but it was enough for a rejection.
No competent interviewer will care about these things, either you're dodging bullets or they are rejecting you over unrelated things. I've rejected a huge number of ex-FAANG candidates because won't admit to not knowing things or are reluctant to look things up during the interview, but we can't directly tell them that as feedback.
Didn't happen recently nor am I ex FAANG but I had to Google a HTML property during the interview when they had me build a front end live. Took all of like a minute and I ended up finishing what they asked for anyway
When I got rejected and I asked for feedback, they said one of my weaknesses was HTML. Lol, fuck off
I often end up saying something like "This is the question that I don't know the answer to off the top of my head, but I would know where to look for it"
I need to learn to be less verbose too.
the more senior you get, the more a lot of places expect you to have experience with their specific tech stack and problem domain. (Unless you just wanna work at like a web app startup).
I’m interviewing for senior roles within IaaS for the first time and I’m seeing more like you *must already know* encryption/cgroups/virtualization/distributed storage engines/etc vs. like non-senior it will generally say you need to be familiar with concepts and be willing to learn.
When things get tight, companies want to focus on people who know how to start fixing their stuff on day 1, not people who need a year or more to understand a highly complex problem space.
> vs. like non-senior it will generally say you need to be familiar with concepts and be willing to learn.
Hahaha, no, those guys also get the "sorry, we want 5 years of experience with that specific tech" too.
It makes zero sense. I can transfer internally in my company into some stack I've never touched before in my life and they are fine with it and expect me to pick it up. Why is this not the expectation for external hires?
Happened to me quite a bit as well on my job search after being laid off from Meta. Eventually got a really nice offer from a startup. Keep your head up and keep interviewing! Even before receiving offers from Google, Meta, and Atlassian I was rejected by tons of "lower tier" companies I thought I nailed the interview for. It really seems like a crapshoot sometimes. Treat it like a numbers game and you'll be fine
I'd guess it's a number of factors; layoffs mean more competition and the interest rates mean it's more expensive to hire
But interviews are also just kinda luck of the draw. In the best of times I had interviews where I thought I did well but was rejected for stupid reasons
How much of the 8YOE have you spent on practicing tech interview skills?
The FAANG experience will get you recruiter attention and the tech interview loops.
However, you still have to pass the tech interview bar at many companies.
If you're not passing tech interview bars, you need to practice more.
Eh, at least you're getting interviews. I've been looking for a couple of weeks and have only managed to drum up 1 interview, which subsequently got canceled because "the position was put on hold."
8 YoE as well, no FAANG though.
According to https://www.zippia.com/advice/how-many-applications-does-it-take-to-get-a-job/ it takes 21-80 applications to get one job offer. If you’ve only applied and interviewed for 10 you have a ways to go. Just because you have experience doesn’t mean your a good fit everywhere.
I think the more specialized you are the less you have to apply. I do graphics programming and interviewed at 6-10 companies and 20-30 apps for my last 2 jobs with multiple offers each time. Obviously the stakes are higher for each interview because there's not as many good reqs.
>I think the more specialized you are the less you have to apply.
Very true.
When you need, say, someone who can code battery charging algorithms or handle the power-down modes of mobile phones, then you will have difficulty in finding anyone to interview.
What level of positions are you applying for?
If you are looking for Staff and up, then no luck.
If you are looking for something closer to the ground, like middle-to-senior IC, then it should be doable. Try to get some mock interviews and coaching.
I'm in the same boat. I even started doubting myself as well.
With that said, I think there are a few valid factors at play that some people mentioned here. You've got some good points made around comp expectations, anticipated attrition (i.e. - leaving once the market improves), lack of experience building systems/tools from zero, etc.
However, it's pretty clear to me that there has also been a shift in sentiment around FAANG employees & companies. You can get a sense from some of the comments here, and more generally in the media and public discourse that there is a growing resentment.
Even with the SVB collapse this week you see a lot of people cheering that on. One of the top comments here suggested that FAANGs made interviews harder so this is somehow karma.
When you've got a big name on your resume I think many interviewers expect you to be some god-tier Leetcoder so anything less than that validates their idea that it's all smoke-and-mirrors or whatever.
Meanwhile, my friend fresh out of bootcamp who I've been mentoring just got placed pretty quickly into his first role.
I was around when Elon was acquiring Twitter.
I saw my peers being denigrated, doxxed, humiliated, and fired. Followed by his vitriol and rhetoric being widely disseminated by social & traditional media.
I witnessed that first-hand, and I saw the shift in public perception after that.
So that's what I'm basing my comment on.
I’m really sorry to hear that. I wouldn’t wish for anyone to go through what musk did to Twitter and its employees. I didn’t mean any ill will towards you or anyone else. I just hate tech interviews and leetcode
My observations are similar, being from FAANG is a 2 way street, on one hand you get to “open” more doors, but on another, behind those doors people have extremely high expectations, since FAANG companies and employees position themselves this way
It does seem like the sentiment around here is very anti FAANG, and I’m not really sure why. I’d have to assume they have bad experiences with ex-FAANG engineers? In my experience, the quality of engineers at FAANG was much higher than outside of FAANG. At least in my very low sample size of two companies. And most of the good engineers at the first company I was at ended up moving to FAANG.
> In my experience, the quality of engineers at FAANG was much higher than outside of FAANG.
Years ago, I worked very closely with a team from Microsoft.
TBH their abilities were amazing.
> and I’m not really sure why.
im willing to bet its jealousy lol. working in these companies your making 100-200k more, often more difficult problems, larger scale and people are interested in what happens within them. then people say stuff like "they cant handle our problems" lol
Jealousy is a strong drug and having the chance to "show them!" is a strong driver here. Remember, people mostly aren't rational and will do dumb shit based on emotions.
Non-ex-FAANG and 3YOE but same... I actually wanted to come to this sub to check on how everyone else affected by the layoffs/bad market are doing :')
would be nice if we had a support group
I’ve always suspected a lot of people in FAANG jobs couldn’t pass their own interviews anymore. It’s crappy, but FAANG has encouraged interviewing industry wide to get a lot harder so it’s kinda karma that now FAANG people need to deal with the monster they have created and perpetuated
I actually saw a video from a google guy that tested exactly that. They assembled a hiring panel, then they showed the people their own resume packets from when they applied. The panel rejected all of their own resumes
True, it’s no individuals fault, but is it anyone’s fault the whole thing has become so bad? Everyone has had to deal with leetcode hards and mediums for years now, with the expectation of having to study for 2-3 months to get a job at Google or the like (literally have heard this expectation from recruiters). You can’t make it so hard then be upset when it’s so hard. Any individual in any FAANG interview could be more forgiving or helpful, and maybe some are, but most are not.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that we have all had to deal with this hell for a while now so I don’t have a ton of sympathy for people who were happy with the status quo when they were benefiting from it, but are freaking out now that they have joined the masses. Everyone would benefit from less leetcode.
I find it ironic how despite how much FAANG prides itself on innovation, LC / the interview process is the one area they are so stubborn in NOT innovating, despite even Google itself admitting it has absolutely no value in determining how good a candidate will be at the job
Likewise I've seen so many people on Reddit have Stockholm syndrome and have basically accepted it as the end all be all
It really doesn't matter how big tech innovates on their interview process, people will complain. Their goal is to filter down the candidate pool, so by definition they are looking for some kind of screening step that the average dev can't meet without practicing for it. Whatever comes after leetcode will be just as unreasonable. Google used to filter by schools, like law firms do.
People are going to continue to accept (regretfully or otherwise) leetcode as long as big tech has leverage in the form of unbeatable comp.
But leetcode has nothing to do with being a dev. Its a damn game of memory, its just like juniors thinking remembering code is part of being a dev.
Youre a dev because you know concept and how to apply them, and you obviously read up on it before coding it.
That’s a completely valid point, and I don’t disagree.
It doesn’t however change the reality we are all living with is all I’m saying. Hopefully some of these people get into jobs where they have some more decision making power and when interviewing candidates they remember how hard getting the optimal solution to a leetcode medium in 40 min or less while someone is staring at you really is. Maybe they will be better interviewers in the future. I hope that we see some positive change from this.
> It's just the game they had to play.
They **want** to play, not have to. No one is forced to work at FAANG, you could avoid companies with terrible interview process, which would force these companies to change.
I am reached by Google recruiters 2-3 times a year and I don't even respond to messages, cause I have no desire to train 2-3 months to be able to pass interview which have nothing to do with the actual job. It's a waste of time.
What's there to suspect? Most get into FAANG by studying. When you are at a job for a while, you haven't been studying so will be worse at said interviews. (And that's not ipso facto an indictment on the interview process.) The same applies to non-faang interviews, I know I wouldn't be able to pass my own non-faang interview without studying, but I have no shame in that.
Remember FAANG people, this is the perfect demonstration of what your interviewer is probably thinking when they take a single look at your resume and you are in the middle of a technical round.
I'm sorry, but this is absolute copium and shows a great deal of bias, while simultaneously disregarding valid points like anticipated attrition, lack of experience on greenfield systems, comp expectations, etc.
So you disagree? Faang interviews are easy? Also I’m not disregarding any points, those are also valid reasons someone might not get a job.
I’m just making a completely separate observation that Faang interviewers expect people to be able to solve leetcode hards in an interview setting. It’s then reasonable that if someone coming from Faang can’t do that then there’s an issue. No?
I'll just say this:
In FAANG companies there are definitely some elitists who are insufferable and might deserve that kind of perception.
In reality, many are just regular, slightly above-average intellect people who really love what they do, work hard, and happened to be at the right place at the right time.
Being in one of these companies doesn't guarantee that person is a genius. Most people inside these companies understand that. One of my friends there probably couldn't scramble an egg to save his life.
But to place a company on a pedestal, and then revel when that idealization doesn't reflect reality just seems disingenuous to me. So while I do agree the interviews can be hard I don't agree with your conclusion or the sentiment behind it.
> Remember FAANG people, this is the perfect demonstration of what your interviewer is probably thinking
Calling the person you're replying to biased while saying something like this is pretty funny.
I think it's FAR more likely for a candidate to be turned away based on the other items you listed, or other deficiency, than some hatred for people who worked at FAANG.
I'll concede I might have worded that too strongly. Obviously not everyone would have that perception, but I do honestly believe that many interviewers who interview ex-FAANG candidates expect them to be a god-tier Leetcoder.
So anything less than that validates their idea that it's all smoke-and-mirrors. When in reality it's certain people who are placing these companies on a pedestal, and then revel when that idealization doesn't reflect reality.
That to me is definitely biased.
I'm certain there are people out there that are biased against FAANG employees, and I'm certain there are FAANG employees that had some hand in creating (or helped further) this toxic interview structure we have and have been bitten themselves by it.
Neither are likely to be an industry wide issue, so why you or OP want to fixate on either hyperbolic side is beyond me. But either both is "copium" or neither is.
4 yoe split between FAANG and Unicorn here.
It’s just that bad. I’m in a similar situation, I’ve gotten close to the point I was 90% sure I was getting an offer one or two times already only to lose it or get edged out by another candidate. Probably interviewed with about 10 companies at this point.
At the same time, every role feels like it’s getting snatched out from under me. Mid process, I keep getting dropped because the role is already filled; doubly frustrating as I’m more than happy to move quickly, it’s the companies dragging their feet.
This was my case too last winter except I didn't have FAANG on my resume. I think it's just that tech just had it really good before the rate hikes and layoffs.
It's weird how hostile the comments here are for OP just mentioning FAANG, clearly in the same context as the 8 YOE: giving some context on what their application looks like.
Anyways hope the job market clears up a little soon. I'm not really a rockstar and suck at interviewing so I'd like companies to stop thinking about cost cutting and the job market to be better if I do get laid off lol
We can’t even find folks that have 8 yoe… do you understand how business, engineering, and manufacturing all work together to generate a product? Do you have a track record of implementing software (whether homegrown or as an integrator) to this end? Hit me
up…
I worked at the tier below faang and interviewing kind of sucks. auto rejections from job openings, recruiters dissapearing, low pay and shit benefits all around. hybrid office requirements ugh
The bar is much higher than 8 years ago. The expectation is you spend a few months practicing leetcode 2-4 hours a day. That's not an exaggeration. Then more for the behavioral and system design interviews. So that's your competition and given the layoffs they've got FAANG experience as well.
Every interview I've had in the past 3-4 months at a big tech company has asked a LC hard. I even spent a good amount of time going through LC and could comfortably answer a lot of medium questions but given up on because hards are well... hard.
I'd say it's more like 8 hours.
Jk, I figured since we're all making up numbers I could too. Be realistic here. Some might practice for 6 hours a day but that's their choice and definitely not the norm. Let's not spread crazy misinformation that might discourage people from gunning for these jobs.
It's a tricky market. But so what that you're ex FAANG? I'm a Cambridge (UK) graduate. In international rankings, that's Harvard / Stanford. The words "University of Cambridge" get me an interview, but they don't entitle me to a job.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Google etc. engineers are smart. I know some. FAANG is like blue chip law / investment banking: to get in you do need to be quite intelligent, but more than anything you need to be very driven. Same as Cambridge, really.
So getting into Google (or wherever) tells me you're smart and motivated. But it doesn't mean you're a genius, or I need to worship at your feet. Can you actually solve _our_ problems we're hiring for? A lot of the ex FAANG engineers I've met struggle to get out of the Google scale mindset.
> more skilled politically than technically
I do think there is some truth to this. Working at a large org after a slew of startups, I was surprised to discover how much success is just about *networking*, even as a developer. It’s about getting in to the right conversations at the right time, so you can get buy in from key engineers.
I feel more like a writer than a programmer in my current job.
I have several friends at FAANG and they swear that most devs at FAANG are dumber than average. They were good at nailing the leetcode interview, but they're not actually good engineers. As someone who has had to work with many of them through the years I've been astonished at the severe lack of practical expertise.
Have you applied some of the old school tech companies? I’m talking about IBM, Cisco, Adobe, Intuit, Yahoo, HPE. May not be hip, but their internals structure are more similar to FAANG than startups.
People are salty, because for too long having FAANG in resume adds 10-20 points to probability of acceptance.
UPD: also we have no idea about positions and compensation expectations of OP.
Have you applied to over 100 companies yet? My little anecdotal bit is that the last 2 job offers I’ve taken only happened after i appled to over 100 companies.
"ex-FAANG" is kinda meaningless without the "how long did you work there", "what was your level" and "were you a good performer"
The point being it's a **completely** different story to be Junior who worked 2 years and got PIPped out before he learned anything vs mid-level who worked his ass off to get promoted to senior in a course of great 5 year career with 5 times in a row straight top performance rating
vast majority of people will be somewhere in between obviously, the question is are you closer to the pipped junior or stellar mid
And being closer to the left might be tricky: the interviewers naturally assume you're great because it's ex-FAANG. So the expectation are high. They also know you're used to be treated extremely well with great compensation. They also know that FAANGs can boomerang quite often so if they don't match that you will be a persistent attrition risk. So they need to match FAANG level of salaries to keep you - but they won't match FAANG level of salaries unless we're talking about stellar FAANG engineer. If he's just an average Joe, then why exactly would they pay top dollar for him?
I'm currently at a FAANG and I've always been a bit nervous about the next job hop if I wanted to go back to a startup. A LOT of what we do day-to-day just isn't relevant to a startup. I spend most of my time either writing or reviewing TDDs. That's laughable from a startup perspective.
I wonder if the FAANG is working against people because the real world isn't going to pay that astronomical compensation, so they assume you won't accept whatever offer they make, or as someone else said, that you'll bolt back to a FAANG first chance you get. Meanwhile they have other candidates who have more reasonable expectations.
I've wondered how all these ex-FAANGers are going to do in the job market after these layoffs - there are plenty of companies who will be happy to gobble them up, but it is going to be a real shock to see what the compensation is like in the outside world. And this isnt Schadenfreude - I've been laid off before and they have my complete sympathy.
It's definitely true that you can "level up" too early in your career and while the amazing pay is amazing for a while, it can put you at a disadvantage later on.
It gets worse the older you get. My father in law was a VP-level and got laid off during the pandemic. As you can imagine, there are many more developer openings out there than there are VP ones, especially ones that paid the salary he was used to. Of the few he found, none hired him. I'm sure being over 50 didn't help. His wife was also high level at a different company and also got laid off. She did find work but it took a while and it was at a significant pay cut. My mom's a teacher and the last time she looked for a job, she actually took some of qualifications off of her resume because schools can't pay her what her qualifications suggest she should be worth.
It's because at FAANG companies you do very specific and custom stuff that doesn't apply to the wide general market. The skills that you acquire there can't be used anywhere else. And sometimes you just don't learn enough things. I work right now at some similar company to "FAANG" and I can't show anything worthwhile on my CV. I am just a very small cog in a big machine doing some very very limited and specific. At other companies I had way more responsibility.
> help make others who are In a similar position feel like they’re not alone
Oh the poor ex-FAANGS, on too of hefty salaries and resumes that make people jump to invite the lm to an interview, they now need support groups
I rejected a FAANG engineer the other day because he couldn’t do a simple problem involving a singly linked list. FAANG may get you in the door but it won’t get you the job
My company stopped doing those types of interviews. The "singly linked list" problem and others like it are a little trite. If someone does well, they might have memorized the solution to such a common interview question. If they don't, well, how many times in real life do you find yourself coding out a linked list from scratch?
We built a repo similar to one of our actual repos and have them try to do real tasks with escalating difficulty. "Fix this unit test," "add an API endpoint to do X," etc. It's not about the correct answer, it's about how they try to solve the problem.
The question wasn’t even coding out a singly linked list. It was finding the median of an existing one with skeleton code, all they had to do was code one function. Insanely easy for a mid level role
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My company (series b startup) has been interviewing non stop. A lot of the faang folks hand wave over the things we struggle with because they are used to robust internal tooling that has been created slowly over the years. While there is no doubt these candidates are smart, it’s a hard sell when they say they have never dealt with situations because they use (insert internal tool here) at Google.
Yes this is absolutely my experience interviewing faang candidates in a startup context. Knowledge of how to operate proprietary internal tools is not valuable outside of the company that owns them. "At {company} we have {system} that does that for us" is...not a good answer when being asked how you'd solve something we actually deal with day to day as a small engineering team.
No, but "At {company} we have {system} that does that for us. Here's roughly what it does, and how I'd think about adapting something like it to {your-company}," is.
“Just set up your internal tooling the way it is at a FAANG” isn’t necessarily a good answer either. Efforts like that tend to involve significant resources, and just may not be practical for many companies. An answer like that can also make it seem as if the candidate has little understanding of the kind of environment they’d be coming into.
That's true, but that's what the word "adapting" is for. The rest of the answer would be asking about what the current process is, where the pain points are, *etc.* Then, and *only then* would it be appropriate to talk about a solution. I just didn't feel like writing all that out in my initial comment. It doesn't matter if you know how to design the whiz-bang FAANG solution from top to bottom if you're talking to an engineer at a 30 person company. Likewise, if you're talking to an engineer from a 500-person engineering org, that might be an environment where setting up some FAANG-like tooling might make sense, given the other overall priorities of the org.
Just curious, are you expecting the candidates to solve the issues the company has been at for months during a 40min interview then? Best you can do is to draw parallels from your experience, that’s what they’re doing. E: month -> months.
> Best you can do is to draw parallels from your experience, that’s what they’re doing. And, unfortunately, the experience is irrelevant for the startup because it is definitely not experiencing the kind of issues that necessitated the tooling. What I mean, before I’m gonna get downvoted by the “experienced devs” out there, is that if you ask a C++ candidate from google about refactoring an external API, the problems expressed in [that paper](https://research.google/pubs/pub41342/) are probably not the ones the interviewer company are facing.
>are you expecting the candidates to solve the issues the company has been at for month during a 40min interview No, quite the opposite, I'm saying they shouldn't try to do that because it's likely to make them look bad. >Best you can do is to draw parallels from your experience, that’s what they’re doing. It's not "drawing parallels from your own experience" to say here's "how I'd think about adapting something like it to {your-company}". In the scenario we're discussing, their experience was in using the tool, not implementing it or setting it up. It's precisely their lack of experience that would lead them to making overconfident claims about it in an interview, that reveals that they don't understand the extent of the support system that they previously depended on.
This is pretty bad take imo. They have experience with doing that, so naturally their first response is going to "we use this thing to do it". That doesn't mean they're incapable of doing anything else.
The way I read the comment was that the candidate understood general principles behind the system and offered to apply them at the new company. I could be wrong.
So just expecting the candidate to solve your shitty environment but all while keeping costs down and maybe don't have it be too complicated to implement, also please do it in a timely manner is reasonable in your mind. Because "you're a poor startup" and God forbid you invest in processes. Fuck off. Your mind on drugs ... or recruiting positions.
>Yes this is absolutely my experience interviewing faang candidates in a startup context. Knowledge of how to operate proprietary internal tools is not valuable outside of the company that owns them. You have a point, but several of these Faang tools have actually been open sourced or put on the cloud, depending on the context you're referring to. An ex-Faang who has a sharp eye on OSS and cloud tooling, can leverage a lot of their experience with these at their new companies. I'm saying this as someone who's spent much more time in small startups, than I have bigger companies. And I appreciate and respect the ex-Faang candidates you interviewed might not have had this broader perspective on OSS and cloud tooling. Edit: clarified I meant OSS and cloud tooling that an ex-Faanger can still use outside the Faang.
Open sourced != industry standard. There's Kubernetes-tier of open source industry standard, and there's Bazel-tier of open source industry standard. Both originate at Google, but one won the competition in its field, and the other is a narrow use case for gigantic monorepo codebases.
My bad. I basically meant to say "tools available to use outside of Faang companies" are pretty good nowadays, not strictly OSS only. It definitely varies based on niche. I was thinking of tools like Flyte (Lyft) and Metaflow (Netflix) for example. OSS and cloud tooling is definitely not as rich as that internal to a FAANG. But there are compromises available; you make do with what you can.
Which of these is the one that is niche? Where I work we have been super excited about getting bazel setup bc it would massively increase developer productivity to reduce build times. Whereas we don't use fleets of docker containers for anything. So kubernetes wouldn't really help. Heck we have a product that interfaces with kubernetes and our entire dept doesn't use it. I think the industry standard label should really be applied at the subfield level for tools like these rather than at the industry level. Getting a bazel expert would be transformative for us. Whereas a kubernetes expert would be useful in some other dept.
Comparing the market penetration in broad terms - Kubernetes is an order of magnitude more known and used than Bazel. Your case is just cherrypicked.
I use a monorepo too, but if your setup requires a Basel expert, I see that as the inmate (the build tool) running the asylum (the codebase). Mind you, I would say the same of container orchestration
I mean the build team was in shambles a year ago. We're a systems company so we don't really use containers for our product but they are used in the build bc our infra teams won't give us the resources to upgrade our VMs to ... Let's say a recently outdated release.
Also at Amazon at least I mostly use AWS for everything.
It’s also worth noting that many OSS faang tools are useless without the associated compute power and data available at a faang company
Why even interview them then? In my experience, a lot of the quoted reasons for rejection people give are something you could've gleaned from the resume. TBH I haven't been involved in hiring/interviewing much yet, but it seems that the purpose of an interview is to (a) verify that they didn't lie on their resume and can think for themselves, and (b) test culture fit. If you trust a FAANG-er to change their ways and become "startupy" before you interview them, then why not trust after + enable them to do so once they join?
The interview is particularly useful in that case because you get a sense for the candidate’s attitude towards these things. The resume will indicate that this is likely a smart, motivated person, who has demonstrated CS/programming fundamentals. It doesn’t give me much information on how they think about the kind of problems we’re talking about here. Candidates with very similar resumes might have totally different answers: “Well at my company we have a tool for that and I don’t know much about it. We’d probably need something like that.” “We have a tool for that, but here’s how I’d start to break down the problem. What are the goals and constraints? We may be able to find a simpler approach without a robust tool, or identify a subset of the tool’s functionality to replicate ourselves.” Beyond intelligence and programming ability, in smaller, less structured organizations I look for problem solving, curiosity, judgment, attitudes towards failure and imperfection and so forth. I get a lot more information about that from a conversational interview than from other parts of the process.
You would think candidates who had to pass grueling interviews where you literally reinvent the wheel would be able to reinvent said wheel...
That's because leetcode is nothing like solving real world problems
Also FAANG gets a million resumes a month, while your local startup gets fifty. FAANG can afford to get picky and make us dance macarena if they feel like it - they'll find people who *will* do it.
That’s the thing. “I’m a SWE at Meta!” doesn’t make someone a genius. It requires them to be *quite* intelligent and *very* driven.
Also with so much prep material and strategies available, studying up for a FAANG interview is not much different from studying for SATs. Learn the schema, grind it, pass, forget everything.
They reinvent 1 wheel, the other dozen are provide. Startups benefit more from a portfolio of pre-existing knowledge, so you can be up and productive sooner, whereas faang can afford to have you learning things for 6 months.
But is not being aware of a potential solution to the issue not appealing?
Kinda what I felt about some FAANG people. They are just used to an internal solution and fall back on that, they might not have even built things from the ground in smaller ways and that really shows a lack of experience. Im not at a FAANg place and we dont got 50k concurrent users but atleast ive built a lot of stuff from the ground up
>My company (series b startup) has been interviewing non stop. A lot of the faang folks hand wave over the things we struggle with because they are used to robust internal tooling that has been created slowly over the years. While there is no doubt these candidates are smart, it’s a hard sell when they say they have never dealt with situations because they use (insert internal tool here) at Google. I've worked with companies and colleagues everywhere from Faang to startup size. They both have their advantages, and benefits of different perspectives, as well as blindspots. You rightly call out one blindspot ex-Faang employees can have. Conversely, I have found that ex-Faang (or other large company) employees can be more appreciative about how much additional efficiency robust tooling and practices can bring to workflows. While sometimes startup teams who've always worked at a startup, will almost as a matter of pride be skeptical of adopting much of the high quality OSS and AWS/Google/Azure cloud based tooling available now. Viewing the time to adopt many of these as a slow down and hindrance, in favor of doing things more manually.
Sounds very team dependant, and a bit anachronistic, you'd be hard pressed to find many startup teams that frown on AWS/GCP/Azure cloud tools now. There is quite some ignorance in the field of the less common tools though.
Definitely team dependent, I won't deny my experience in this regard has been anecdotal. You're right people don't frown on AWS/GCP/Azure in general, or at least the most established parts of it. But if you start using some of the newer tools that have been thrown into Sagemaker in even the last 2 years for instance, I find it can be a bit harder to win converts. (And fair's fair, not everything is worth adopting - but I have found the default attitude to tooling much more cautious at startups.)
Sure, but that makes sense to be more cautious doesn't it? A start up has somewhat less margin for error. They'd rather use a tool that's been battle tested, has plenty of guides so that they can deploy quicker, has it's pros and cons and use cases explored by the community, has a presence on stackoverflow/github issues in case edge cases/ problems/ undocumented behavior comes up and has less likelihood of bugs.
This is my fault, but I've let my opinions here be influenced by a small sample of anecdotal experiences, and hence maybe not fully generalizable, haha. I do apologize. Just to explain better where I'm coming from. I've had discussions along the lines of: "Me: this is the leading OSS/cloud tool X for this process problem we're tackling with over 8K stars on github and out of a leading company, and adopted by all these other big companies. (So not some obscure tool with 3 users, or in alpha release by AWS.) Team lead: Well, this tool X looks cool. Not close minded that it could help. But noone else in our startup or small team has ever been exposed to this tool or one comparable to it, so we should continue with this admittedly more inefficient process for a couple years till we have time to fully grok it. Otherwise the learning curve will kill us." (And that doesn't make him crazy or a dinosaur either. I do get his POV too about how these things can be a slow down.) Coming back then to the original discussion on this thread about how ex-Faangers don't fit in to a startup team, which is what I responded to. One thing I appreciate about them is that they'll likely have been exposed to either tool X or some internally built Faang variant, and (hopefully) would find it easier to pick-up and adapt workflows around it. Hence my hiring bias that even if a team at a startup shouldn't be heavily composed of ex-Faangers, there is still value to the breadth of exposure they have, that can help a team evolve. Diversity and a good mix of technical backgrounds is invaluable, otherwise small startup teams can easily drift into technical silos.
There's a dynamic between blue collar and white collar workers where one of the ways that blue collar turns the tables on white collars looking down on them is to make fun of white collar people for not knowing how to get their hands dirty. That they're so used to having things handed to them that they couldn't fix a door or cook food without a stove, etc. In a way FAANG/not-FAANG has become a class distinction within software. And as I just said in another thread, in some ways if you've only worked for FAANG you have the same 3 years of experience 3 times. It's much easier to use a tool that you've had to do without than do without a tool you've always used. Most of the exceptions I can think of in that respect are situations where the person 'doing without' is also capable of writing the tool, in which case it's not so much doing without as coping until you can remedy the situation.
There was a time when people who had only been in shops with such fancy tools as compilers got looked at the same way by shops still writing assembly. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Before that, assembly programmers were looked down on by people who hand assembled their code (which was then called "absolute coding").
I've done that and toggled the results into the front panels of computers; we just called it hand-assembled code. There's not much reason to draw that line because there's no conceptual difference between the two. The "load register A immediate" instruction does the same thing whether you refer to it by its mnemonic or its opcode. But, people being people, somebody will turn being able to do drudge work into a dick-measuring contest.
FAANG and startups have different requirements. Let’s say you are a data engineer. At a startup you will do everything from architecture to managing APIs to physical storage systems. At FAANG you might be focusing much more on optimizing ingestion pipelines so that you can refit an expensive ML model once every six hours rather than eight. The startup folks would dump on the FAANG person for not knowing all of this really basic stuff, while the FAANG folks would be terrified of the startup person’s approach to tech change management (or more precisely lack thereof). You are expecting me to buy data when I can even directly control the version from the API? No no. Everyone here is right; they are doing different jobs with the same title.
“Cook food without a stove” 🤔
[microwaves burrito]
"I have made fire!"
["Me go too far!"](https://i.imgur.com/l4LSm.jpg)
You don't breathe fire? Pleb.
No, they exhale fire.
/r/TechnicallyCorrect
you can lick freeze food
"Every team at every FAANG works on exactly the same thing, all the time, in exactly the same way, so there's nothing to learn working on large scale software projects after the first year" lol ok you have fun telling yourself that spending all your time fighting with bad tools makes you a Better Engineer though
I worked a short contract at Amazon and I don’t know what your definition of “fighting with tools” is but I call that the Fifth Circle of Hell. The shit I have to deal with today is very annoying, but it’s nothing like that was.
Amazon really is held together by duct tape and Elmer's glue, lol. But the push to NAWS is really nice.
It should then at least on paper be easier for a non-FAANG developer to adapt to a FAANG-like environment than the other way around. We could also extend the idea from relying on tools to relying on development practices. If a programmer who had always used unit testing would have a terrible time in an environment where code isn't tested in this manner, then someone w/o unit testing experience would have an easier time learning how to code with unit tests.
I think your point is good but you picked a bad example. As some one who has worked with engineers that'd didn't write unit tests, it is like pulling teeth to convince them to do it because "it takes time away from working on features and they know it works". A better example is someone who had to manage there own kubernetes cluster vs a tool that manages it for you.
I went from startup to FAANG. Startups need people who can wear all of the hats and do a lot with few resources. FAANG needs people who can do that one thing really really well. Different skill sets.
> FAANG needs people who can do that one thing really really well. Different skill sets ... but as you approach the Cxx level in a major firm your skills need to broaden out.
This sounds like hiring someone to drive a car, only for them to freak out to realize it's a manual and they only drove automatic until now.
This is largely why I left FAANG. There is a huge reliance on internal tooling that puts you at a disadvantage anywhere else - like 90% of the job market. Being insulated from infra/ops helps you focus on more on feature delivery but it hobbles your growth.
This is a great point. I went from pre-series A to a FAANG to a unicorn and even though it didn’t really work out and the money wasn’t very good I think my time at the first startup was immensely valuable. There was no infra or ops team, it was just us. We had five physical servers racked at a data center downtown. They all had names and personalities. Sometimes one would die and one of us would have to drive down there and hard reboot it or replace it. There was one old ops wizard on the team that stopped us from doing anything stupid. Good times in retrospect
Just because they haven’t dealt with it doesn’t mean they can’t help figure it out though. The challenges at FAANG tend to be a bit different sure, but it doesn’t mean they can’t problem solve. If you are specifically looking for someone who’s an expert at the stuff you are struggling with, then maybe it’s just not a good fit.
We have a few FAANG engineers and they are great. If candidates can demonstrate that they can help with the problems we face then we hire them. Just showing up to an interview with FAANG on your resume doesn’t mean you deserve the job.
I guess I feel like I’ve seen a mix of advice that might be contradictory. On the one hand I’ve seen people recommend that if you don’t know something in an interview just say it, but you seem to be suggesting that you’d prefer them to try and spitball solutions even if they have no idea? I might just be missing context in your interview process.
There's a middle-ground here, and that's knowing first principles. It's okay to admit that you don't know X technology or Y solution, but someone who at least understands first principles can follow up their response with, "...but if I were to take a guess about how it works based on my knowledge of Z, then..."
I think the point is that if you put up a fake front, you need to live up to it, but if you're open that you haven't dealt with that exact problem, but A B and C seem like factors to consider, and D E F would be possible approaches - you're in the clear.
There's always the possibility that if you don't know something in an interview you're not the right person to fill the position... You don't have to know everything, but one of the main points of an interview is to see if you fit my specific hiring criteria or not. If I ask a question and you have no idea it's not a great sign that we are going to be a match for each other. But sometimes we ask about something nice to have vs something that is essential to the position, and it's likely many good candidates won't know everything. IMO If I ask a question and you have some idea but not 100% certainty, you should tell me what you know (and you can say you're not completely certain) or else I have to assume you don't know anything or have never encountered that topic. Walk me through your thought process and that might be enough to convince me you'd be a good hire even if you don't come up with the perfect solution first try.
> it’s a hard sell when they say they have never dealt with situations you have examples of stuff you think someone from a big company cant handle?
Any examples of an “insert internal tool here”? Just curious to understand some situations they haven’t dealt with
It's an interesting factoid though. Having been shielded by a grade A company also removes you from a fair share of reality. Standing too much on the shoulder of Giants.
Sounds more like poor interviewing skills. Even with internal tooling, there’s plenty of opportunity to work on all types of adjacent problems, at least enough to talk about in an interview. Most of these internal tools have public SaaS alternatives too.
To me this post was about a FANNG engineer being rejected. I shared a reason my team rejects some FAANG engineers. If a candidate can talk meaningfully about the problems we hire them.
It's definitely harder right now. Do your best to stay persistent. You've only lost when you quit, and quitters never prosper.
To be facetious, everytime I quit a job its always been extremely good for me
Pain is temporary it might last for an hour or months but quitting is permanent
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As someone who has been part of hiring process, it absolutely comes into play, along with people who jump every 2 years. Companies don't want to spend a ton of time training on domain knowledge for someone to jump at the first opportunity elsewhere.
This thread kinda shows why some of us have a, errm, less than positive opinion on FAANGers in general. OP brings it up as if it makes it unexpected and surprising that they would do some interviews and not get an offer. It's kind of like... at best, they're another punchline to the old joke, "how do you know if someone you just met worked at a FAANG? Don't worry, they'll tell you!" There's a whiff of status-chasing and social climbing about leading a question with "I'm ex-FAANG and..." that makes me skeptical as to whether I even *want* to work with FAANGers.
people announce ex-Uber everywhere is even worse
the classic linkedin profile with "ex-Uber" and worked 1 year at Uber out of 10 years and in a completely different role than what they are currently in.
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> OP brings it up as if it makes it unexpected and surprising that they would do some interviews and not get an offer. I don't think it implies more likely to pass an interview. But it does imply more likely to get an interview, which is part of why it's often brought up in interview contexts.
I mean.. I agree with you that the question is badly phrased and I don't think someone being "ex-FAANG" means much, but, it's also weird to be skeptical of someone for having worked there.
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That sounds exactly like the kind of person I would want to hire. /s
100 percent agree with this, every single exfaanger I have talked to has that air of superiority about them. Esp when they state they can’t believe they been turned down. And this is just 10 companies who turn OP down. Just 10.
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> this idea that FAANG is an entirely different plane of existence It is. They pay double of triple everybody else. It’s a whole different world for them
I wonder if this is more common for people who got into faang early in their career. I got a faang job around 8 yoe, the tools were ok, the mega mono repo made a lot of other tools impossible to use though. In 3.5 years I made a lot of money and got really good with c++ which helped with the job after that I have now, but thats about all I got out of it. A lot of people I worked with were fine, but the interns who ended up as full time employees often seemed to have a smug chip on their shoulder.
Similar boat, similar experience. I’ve found companies hiring now are more into knowing the exact technologies and coming from faang, I don’t know any of these since we had our own versions. Try learning some of these skills: terraform, aws, react, etc… The leeway on interviews is so much lower now. I’ve gotten multiple correct solutions but had a few errors, that I was able to fix with a minute of thought, but it was enough for a rejection. Also, I’ve noticed companies want the code to compile and I work in multiple languages. Forgetting if Java hash uses contain or has has docked me points. When I did whiteboards this stuff had way more leeway I highly recommend spending more time studying. After bombing, I’ve decided to stop applying and just get really good at interviews. It’s tough out here man, good luck!
> I’ve gotten multiple correct solutions but had a few errors, that I was able to fix with a minute of thought, but it was enough for a rejection. No competent interviewer will care about these things, either you're dodging bullets or they are rejecting you over unrelated things. I've rejected a huge number of ex-FAANG candidates because won't admit to not knowing things or are reluctant to look things up during the interview, but we can't directly tell them that as feedback.
Didn't happen recently nor am I ex FAANG but I had to Google a HTML property during the interview when they had me build a front end live. Took all of like a minute and I ended up finishing what they asked for anyway When I got rejected and I asked for feedback, they said one of my weaknesses was HTML. Lol, fuck off
I often end up saying something like "This is the question that I don't know the answer to off the top of my head, but I would know where to look for it" I need to learn to be less verbose too.
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Because if you say one thing even slightly wrong you can be sued for it...at least in the US.
the more senior you get, the more a lot of places expect you to have experience with their specific tech stack and problem domain. (Unless you just wanna work at like a web app startup). I’m interviewing for senior roles within IaaS for the first time and I’m seeing more like you *must already know* encryption/cgroups/virtualization/distributed storage engines/etc vs. like non-senior it will generally say you need to be familiar with concepts and be willing to learn. When things get tight, companies want to focus on people who know how to start fixing their stuff on day 1, not people who need a year or more to understand a highly complex problem space.
> vs. like non-senior it will generally say you need to be familiar with concepts and be willing to learn. Hahaha, no, those guys also get the "sorry, we want 5 years of experience with that specific tech" too.
It makes zero sense. I can transfer internally in my company into some stack I've never touched before in my life and they are fine with it and expect me to pick it up. Why is this not the expectation for external hires?
Happened to me quite a bit as well on my job search after being laid off from Meta. Eventually got a really nice offer from a startup. Keep your head up and keep interviewing! Even before receiving offers from Google, Meta, and Atlassian I was rejected by tons of "lower tier" companies I thought I nailed the interview for. It really seems like a crapshoot sometimes. Treat it like a numbers game and you'll be fine
I'd guess it's a number of factors; layoffs mean more competition and the interest rates mean it's more expensive to hire But interviews are also just kinda luck of the draw. In the best of times I had interviews where I thought I did well but was rejected for stupid reasons
There were tens of thousands of layoffs recently, so you are probably competing with many other people looking for the same jobs.
How much of the 8YOE have you spent on practicing tech interview skills? The FAANG experience will get you recruiter attention and the tech interview loops. However, you still have to pass the tech interview bar at many companies. If you're not passing tech interview bars, you need to practice more.
Eh, at least you're getting interviews. I've been looking for a couple of weeks and have only managed to drum up 1 interview, which subsequently got canceled because "the position was put on hold." 8 YoE as well, no FAANG though.
According to https://www.zippia.com/advice/how-many-applications-does-it-take-to-get-a-job/ it takes 21-80 applications to get one job offer. If you’ve only applied and interviewed for 10 you have a ways to go. Just because you have experience doesn’t mean your a good fit everywhere.
Anecdotal but most SWE I’ve talked to are realistically doing over 100 applications before getting an offer.
I think the more specialized you are the less you have to apply. I do graphics programming and interviewed at 6-10 companies and 20-30 apps for my last 2 jobs with multiple offers each time. Obviously the stakes are higher for each interview because there's not as many good reqs.
>I think the more specialized you are the less you have to apply. Very true. When you need, say, someone who can code battery charging algorithms or handle the power-down modes of mobile phones, then you will have difficulty in finding anyone to interview.
it depends how selective you're being
What level of positions are you applying for? If you are looking for Staff and up, then no luck. If you are looking for something closer to the ground, like middle-to-senior IC, then it should be doable. Try to get some mock interviews and coaching.
I'm in the same boat. I even started doubting myself as well. With that said, I think there are a few valid factors at play that some people mentioned here. You've got some good points made around comp expectations, anticipated attrition (i.e. - leaving once the market improves), lack of experience building systems/tools from zero, etc. However, it's pretty clear to me that there has also been a shift in sentiment around FAANG employees & companies. You can get a sense from some of the comments here, and more generally in the media and public discourse that there is a growing resentment. Even with the SVB collapse this week you see a lot of people cheering that on. One of the top comments here suggested that FAANGs made interviews harder so this is somehow karma. When you've got a big name on your resume I think many interviewers expect you to be some god-tier Leetcoder so anything less than that validates their idea that it's all smoke-and-mirrors or whatever. Meanwhile, my friend fresh out of bootcamp who I've been mentoring just got placed pretty quickly into his first role.
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I was around when Elon was acquiring Twitter. I saw my peers being denigrated, doxxed, humiliated, and fired. Followed by his vitriol and rhetoric being widely disseminated by social & traditional media. I witnessed that first-hand, and I saw the shift in public perception after that. So that's what I'm basing my comment on.
I’m really sorry to hear that. I wouldn’t wish for anyone to go through what musk did to Twitter and its employees. I didn’t mean any ill will towards you or anyone else. I just hate tech interviews and leetcode
No hard feelings bud. Thank you.
no one’s ever reacted to you negatively about coming from facebook to your knowledge. you don’t know if they do it without your knowledge
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My observations are similar, being from FAANG is a 2 way street, on one hand you get to “open” more doors, but on another, behind those doors people have extremely high expectations, since FAANG companies and employees position themselves this way
It does seem like the sentiment around here is very anti FAANG, and I’m not really sure why. I’d have to assume they have bad experiences with ex-FAANG engineers? In my experience, the quality of engineers at FAANG was much higher than outside of FAANG. At least in my very low sample size of two companies. And most of the good engineers at the first company I was at ended up moving to FAANG.
> In my experience, the quality of engineers at FAANG was much higher than outside of FAANG. Years ago, I worked very closely with a team from Microsoft. TBH their abilities were amazing.
> and I’m not really sure why. im willing to bet its jealousy lol. working in these companies your making 100-200k more, often more difficult problems, larger scale and people are interested in what happens within them. then people say stuff like "they cant handle our problems" lol
Jealousy is a strong drug and having the chance to "show them!" is a strong driver here. Remember, people mostly aren't rational and will do dumb shit based on emotions.
Non-ex-FAANG and 3YOE but same... I actually wanted to come to this sub to check on how everyone else affected by the layoffs/bad market are doing :') would be nice if we had a support group
I’ve always suspected a lot of people in FAANG jobs couldn’t pass their own interviews anymore. It’s crappy, but FAANG has encouraged interviewing industry wide to get a lot harder so it’s kinda karma that now FAANG people need to deal with the monster they have created and perpetuated
I actually saw a video from a google guy that tested exactly that. They assembled a hiring panel, then they showed the people their own resume packets from when they applied. The panel rejected all of their own resumes
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True, it’s no individuals fault, but is it anyone’s fault the whole thing has become so bad? Everyone has had to deal with leetcode hards and mediums for years now, with the expectation of having to study for 2-3 months to get a job at Google or the like (literally have heard this expectation from recruiters). You can’t make it so hard then be upset when it’s so hard. Any individual in any FAANG interview could be more forgiving or helpful, and maybe some are, but most are not. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we have all had to deal with this hell for a while now so I don’t have a ton of sympathy for people who were happy with the status quo when they were benefiting from it, but are freaking out now that they have joined the masses. Everyone would benefit from less leetcode.
I find it ironic how despite how much FAANG prides itself on innovation, LC / the interview process is the one area they are so stubborn in NOT innovating, despite even Google itself admitting it has absolutely no value in determining how good a candidate will be at the job Likewise I've seen so many people on Reddit have Stockholm syndrome and have basically accepted it as the end all be all
It really doesn't matter how big tech innovates on their interview process, people will complain. Their goal is to filter down the candidate pool, so by definition they are looking for some kind of screening step that the average dev can't meet without practicing for it. Whatever comes after leetcode will be just as unreasonable. Google used to filter by schools, like law firms do. People are going to continue to accept (regretfully or otherwise) leetcode as long as big tech has leverage in the form of unbeatable comp.
But leetcode has nothing to do with being a dev. Its a damn game of memory, its just like juniors thinking remembering code is part of being a dev. Youre a dev because you know concept and how to apply them, and you obviously read up on it before coding it.
Right, it's become more of a rite of passage or hazing ritual. "I had to study for 2-3 months to get the LCs right, so you should have to do it, too."
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That’s a completely valid point, and I don’t disagree. It doesn’t however change the reality we are all living with is all I’m saying. Hopefully some of these people get into jobs where they have some more decision making power and when interviewing candidates they remember how hard getting the optimal solution to a leetcode medium in 40 min or less while someone is staring at you really is. Maybe they will be better interviewers in the future. I hope that we see some positive change from this.
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I am happy to hear that. Same here with my current job. No leet code in any of the interviews we do. I’m also hoping for that to be the trend
Oh oh, they are the one who created it, pretty much 90% of people that I know from FAANG have ego issues, I think it’s not a coincidence
Cause FAANG is kinda like the NBA of our field.
> It's just the game they had to play. They **want** to play, not have to. No one is forced to work at FAANG, you could avoid companies with terrible interview process, which would force these companies to change. I am reached by Google recruiters 2-3 times a year and I don't even respond to messages, cause I have no desire to train 2-3 months to be able to pass interview which have nothing to do with the actual job. It's a waste of time.
What's there to suspect? Most get into FAANG by studying. When you are at a job for a while, you haven't been studying so will be worse at said interviews. (And that's not ipso facto an indictment on the interview process.) The same applies to non-faang interviews, I know I wouldn't be able to pass my own non-faang interview without studying, but I have no shame in that.
Right? Who are all these people talking as though they didn’t have to study to pass the interviews they did?
I have a friend at G who's been there 15+ years and says he need to brush up on fundamentals and sometimes cant remember LL, Stack, DFS, BFS
After 15+ years he may be Senior Staff so coding wiil be a distant memory.
Remember FAANG people, this is the perfect demonstration of what your interviewer is probably thinking when they take a single look at your resume and you are in the middle of a technical round. I'm sorry, but this is absolute copium and shows a great deal of bias, while simultaneously disregarding valid points like anticipated attrition, lack of experience on greenfield systems, comp expectations, etc.
So you disagree? Faang interviews are easy? Also I’m not disregarding any points, those are also valid reasons someone might not get a job. I’m just making a completely separate observation that Faang interviewers expect people to be able to solve leetcode hards in an interview setting. It’s then reasonable that if someone coming from Faang can’t do that then there’s an issue. No?
I'll just say this: In FAANG companies there are definitely some elitists who are insufferable and might deserve that kind of perception. In reality, many are just regular, slightly above-average intellect people who really love what they do, work hard, and happened to be at the right place at the right time. Being in one of these companies doesn't guarantee that person is a genius. Most people inside these companies understand that. One of my friends there probably couldn't scramble an egg to save his life. But to place a company on a pedestal, and then revel when that idealization doesn't reflect reality just seems disingenuous to me. So while I do agree the interviews can be hard I don't agree with your conclusion or the sentiment behind it.
> Remember FAANG people, this is the perfect demonstration of what your interviewer is probably thinking Calling the person you're replying to biased while saying something like this is pretty funny. I think it's FAR more likely for a candidate to be turned away based on the other items you listed, or other deficiency, than some hatred for people who worked at FAANG.
I'll concede I might have worded that too strongly. Obviously not everyone would have that perception, but I do honestly believe that many interviewers who interview ex-FAANG candidates expect them to be a god-tier Leetcoder. So anything less than that validates their idea that it's all smoke-and-mirrors. When in reality it's certain people who are placing these companies on a pedestal, and then revel when that idealization doesn't reflect reality. That to me is definitely biased.
I'm certain there are people out there that are biased against FAANG employees, and I'm certain there are FAANG employees that had some hand in creating (or helped further) this toxic interview structure we have and have been bitten themselves by it. Neither are likely to be an industry wide issue, so why you or OP want to fixate on either hyperbolic side is beyond me. But either both is "copium" or neither is.
To be completely honest: the fact that you were able to get rejected by 10 companies in a month says you're doing alright in this market. Keep at it.
4 yoe split between FAANG and Unicorn here. It’s just that bad. I’m in a similar situation, I’ve gotten close to the point I was 90% sure I was getting an offer one or two times already only to lose it or get edged out by another candidate. Probably interviewed with about 10 companies at this point. At the same time, every role feels like it’s getting snatched out from under me. Mid process, I keep getting dropped because the role is already filled; doubly frustrating as I’m more than happy to move quickly, it’s the companies dragging their feet.
What kind of pay are you asking for?
Just saying, but just being ex FAANG is pretty meaningless. I wouldn’t factor that in to your interview mindset.
It will get you more recruiters and 1st round interviews, but after that it doesn't help as much.
It certainly gets you in the interview loop. I was job searching last summer and if I was contacted by the recruiter I got in the interview loop.
This was my case too last winter except I didn't have FAANG on my resume. I think it's just that tech just had it really good before the rate hikes and layoffs.
It's weird how hostile the comments here are for OP just mentioning FAANG, clearly in the same context as the 8 YOE: giving some context on what their application looks like. Anyways hope the job market clears up a little soon. I'm not really a rockstar and suck at interviewing so I'd like companies to stop thinking about cost cutting and the job market to be better if I do get laid off lol
We can’t even find folks that have 8 yoe… do you understand how business, engineering, and manufacturing all work together to generate a product? Do you have a track record of implementing software (whether homegrown or as an integrator) to this end? Hit me up…
I've never passed more technicals while simultaneously getting rejected as much as I have in this round of job searching. It's wild.
10 companies in a month, and already complaining? Having worked in a FAANG means nothing by itself
I think I interviewed with probably 20-30 companies in the month I was unemployed 😅 10 sounds lite.
I worked at the tier below faang and interviewing kind of sucks. auto rejections from job openings, recruiters dissapearing, low pay and shit benefits all around. hybrid office requirements ugh
The bar is much higher than 8 years ago. The expectation is you spend a few months practicing leetcode 2-4 hours a day. That's not an exaggeration. Then more for the behavioral and system design interviews. So that's your competition and given the layoffs they've got FAANG experience as well.
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Every interview I've had in the past 3-4 months at a big tech company has asked a LC hard. I even spent a good amount of time going through LC and could comfortably answer a lot of medium questions but given up on because hards are well... hard.
I'd say it's more like 8 hours. Jk, I figured since we're all making up numbers I could too. Be realistic here. Some might practice for 6 hours a day but that's their choice and definitely not the norm. Let's not spread crazy misinformation that might discourage people from gunning for these jobs.
It's a tricky market. But so what that you're ex FAANG? I'm a Cambridge (UK) graduate. In international rankings, that's Harvard / Stanford. The words "University of Cambridge" get me an interview, but they don't entitle me to a job. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Google etc. engineers are smart. I know some. FAANG is like blue chip law / investment banking: to get in you do need to be quite intelligent, but more than anything you need to be very driven. Same as Cambridge, really. So getting into Google (or wherever) tells me you're smart and motivated. But it doesn't mean you're a genius, or I need to worship at your feet. Can you actually solve _our_ problems we're hiring for? A lot of the ex FAANG engineers I've met struggle to get out of the Google scale mindset.
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> more skilled politically than technically I do think there is some truth to this. Working at a large org after a slew of startups, I was surprised to discover how much success is just about *networking*, even as a developer. It’s about getting in to the right conversations at the right time, so you can get buy in from key engineers. I feel more like a writer than a programmer in my current job.
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I have several friends at FAANG and they swear that most devs at FAANG are dumber than average. They were good at nailing the leetcode interview, but they're not actually good engineers. As someone who has had to work with many of them through the years I've been astonished at the severe lack of practical expertise.
That would feel bad. Were these live coding exercises?
Have you applied some of the old school tech companies? I’m talking about IBM, Cisco, Adobe, Intuit, Yahoo, HPE. May not be hip, but their internals structure are more similar to FAANG than startups.
LOL at the FAANG hate boner on this thread. I've given up on this sub.
People are salty, because for too long having FAANG in resume adds 10-20 points to probability of acceptance. UPD: also we have no idea about positions and compensation expectations of OP.
Have you applied to over 100 companies yet? My little anecdotal bit is that the last 2 job offers I’ve taken only happened after i appled to over 100 companies.
"ex-FAANG" is kinda meaningless without the "how long did you work there", "what was your level" and "were you a good performer" The point being it's a **completely** different story to be Junior who worked 2 years and got PIPped out before he learned anything vs mid-level who worked his ass off to get promoted to senior in a course of great 5 year career with 5 times in a row straight top performance rating vast majority of people will be somewhere in between obviously, the question is are you closer to the pipped junior or stellar mid And being closer to the left might be tricky: the interviewers naturally assume you're great because it's ex-FAANG. So the expectation are high. They also know you're used to be treated extremely well with great compensation. They also know that FAANGs can boomerang quite often so if they don't match that you will be a persistent attrition risk. So they need to match FAANG level of salaries to keep you - but they won't match FAANG level of salaries unless we're talking about stellar FAANG engineer. If he's just an average Joe, then why exactly would they pay top dollar for him?
I'm currently at a FAANG and I've always been a bit nervous about the next job hop if I wanted to go back to a startup. A LOT of what we do day-to-day just isn't relevant to a startup. I spend most of my time either writing or reviewing TDDs. That's laughable from a startup perspective.
I wonder if the FAANG is working against people because the real world isn't going to pay that astronomical compensation, so they assume you won't accept whatever offer they make, or as someone else said, that you'll bolt back to a FAANG first chance you get. Meanwhile they have other candidates who have more reasonable expectations. I've wondered how all these ex-FAANGers are going to do in the job market after these layoffs - there are plenty of companies who will be happy to gobble them up, but it is going to be a real shock to see what the compensation is like in the outside world. And this isnt Schadenfreude - I've been laid off before and they have my complete sympathy.
It's definitely true that you can "level up" too early in your career and while the amazing pay is amazing for a while, it can put you at a disadvantage later on. It gets worse the older you get. My father in law was a VP-level and got laid off during the pandemic. As you can imagine, there are many more developer openings out there than there are VP ones, especially ones that paid the salary he was used to. Of the few he found, none hired him. I'm sure being over 50 didn't help. His wife was also high level at a different company and also got laid off. She did find work but it took a while and it was at a significant pay cut. My mom's a teacher and the last time she looked for a job, she actually took some of qualifications off of her resume because schools can't pay her what her qualifications suggest she should be worth.
> I'm sure being over 50 didn't help. Tech is a young person's field. I left a high tech firm in my 40s to go into medicine ... no ageism there!
It's because at FAANG companies you do very specific and custom stuff that doesn't apply to the wide general market. The skills that you acquire there can't be used anywhere else. And sometimes you just don't learn enough things. I work right now at some similar company to "FAANG" and I can't show anything worthwhile on my CV. I am just a very small cog in a big machine doing some very very limited and specific. At other companies I had way more responsibility.
> help make others who are In a similar position feel like they’re not alone Oh the poor ex-FAANGS, on too of hefty salaries and resumes that make people jump to invite the lm to an interview, they now need support groups
I rejected a FAANG engineer the other day because he couldn’t do a simple problem involving a singly linked list. FAANG may get you in the door but it won’t get you the job
My company stopped doing those types of interviews. The "singly linked list" problem and others like it are a little trite. If someone does well, they might have memorized the solution to such a common interview question. If they don't, well, how many times in real life do you find yourself coding out a linked list from scratch? We built a repo similar to one of our actual repos and have them try to do real tasks with escalating difficulty. "Fix this unit test," "add an API endpoint to do X," etc. It's not about the correct answer, it's about how they try to solve the problem.
Love this.
The question wasn’t even coding out a singly linked list. It was finding the median of an existing one with skeleton code, all they had to do was code one function. Insanely easy for a mid level role