I'm a Google SWE that's coached 50 through the FAANG interview process. AMA
My name is Coach Darek. I work at Google and I run a program that helps people get FAANG jobs for no upfront-payment.
Thought I'd reach out and answer any questions you have about the process/what you'd need to do here.
If you're interested you can check out my program - www.codebreakersacademy.com.
EDITED: Since this has been asked in a couple of comments. There is no age, location, or CS background restriction for CodeBreakers. We're fully remote and all ages/backgrounds are welcome and encouraged.
156 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadFAANG companies have increased their employment of engineers by almost 10% for the past 3 years. I don't see the software engineer market slowing down anytime soon. Even if FAANG companies see competition from disruptive startups, those disruptive startups will need to hire engineers too.
Our students come from all ages, cs backgrounds and locations.
Things to improve changes - Find people to refer you. This pretty much guarantees an interview. - Prepare for the technical interview. This does take time, but it's a really good investment. Websites like Leetcode are really good. If you can Leetcode medium's in 30 minutes, you're golden. - Get people to mock interview you. This is something we make a HUGE emphasis on in CodeBreakers.
Then 2 months later I got someone to refer me at Google. I applied. The applications get stuck for 2 months now and still pending. No phone, no email, nothing from Google whatsoever.
Can you tell me what happened? Did I get shadowbanned by Google?
https://codebreakersacademy.com/reviews/
Here's a link explaining their methodology - https://support.trustpilot.com/hc/en-us/articles/201748946-T...
Is there a demand in FAANG for programmers but in Europe, and if so how much of a difference is it between US and Europe?
What would you say is a single trait which differentiates candidates to FAANG? Specific college, programmer from a young age, already established experience or personality, etc.
And finally, is it true that a lot of candidates are socially inept? I.e. lack interpersonal skills, verbal and non-verbal communication, if so, how big of a role does it play in an interview?
I think there is a big myth that FAANG engineers are somehow different than anyone else. Anyone who is willing to invest the time to properly prepare for the interview process has a a great shot at getting the job. Most people don't know HOW to best prepare which I find is what holds most people back.
I wouldn't say that candidates are socially inept. However, I've interviewed candidates where communication issues turn a possible hire into a no-hire. Communication is as important as technical skills because you need both to pass.
Google, Microsoft and Facebook have large offices in London. They also have offices in Zürich, where the pay is much better, though only Google has a large presence there.
All the FAANG companies will generally hire anyone who passes their interview process as long as the office has open positions (it usually does) but the US generally has much much higher demand than Europe. London is no comparison to the bay area. Not even really the Seattle area.
(Though I'm happy in Europe)
> What would you say is a single trait which differentiates candidates to FAANG? Specific college, programmer from a young age, already established experience or personality, etc.
The ability to, given a reasonable time, solve an enormously broad range of problems (which is what I see the interview process as testing for).
FAANG engineers usually aren't "frontend", "backend", "iOS" or "Android" engineers, they're just "engineers". It's usually expected that they can grab someone from anywhere in the company, put them anywhere else in the company and within ~6 months have them productively contributing code.
Of course there are exceptions to this, like research positions or design/UX engineers but generally that's the expectation.
> And finally, is it true that a lot of candidates are socially inept? I.e. lack interpersonal skills, verbal and non-verbal communication, if so, how big of a role does it play in an interview?
My biggest issue with interview candidates has been people who don't talk. The interview isn't as much about solving the problem as how you solve the problem. If you just hear the problem and start silently coding an answer on the board, that's nice but it won't get you a hire recommendation. I need to know what your thought process was, what other options you considered and why you settled on the implementation you chose. I also deliberately leave the problem somewhat ambiguous so that you have to ask questions.
Usually the people who don't talk aren't socially inept though, they're not comfortable with English.
https://codebreakersacademy.com/about-us/
So it's just you then? One person correct? On the home page its states there's a team of software engineers.
I typically don't take mentoring calls during the workday. I fit them in before or after most of them.
> Hackerrank-style interviews suck and they aren't representative (not even remotely) of real working conditions. But they are good at something: evaluating the tenacity and the drive of a candidate. You need to work hard to ace these interviews, and companies are looking for candidates who are persistent and able to work hard—even on things they don't choose to work on.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21123588
What options will you have as an experienced candidate which are competitive with FAANG?
I'm an experienced engineer, and my leading FAANG offers were over 50% higher than my top non-FAANG offer.
In fact, my non-FAANG offers as an experienced engineer weren't much better than the offers junior candidates get. So unfortunately, it seems if you're an experienced candidate who wants to be appreciated and rewarded for your experience, FAANGs are basically your only option. Non-FAANGs will pay you maybe 30% more than a junior, and for that they'd expect you to lead a team and work twice as hard.
I moved on triumphantly from my previous programming job where I built a company's product from Greenfield to million a month with awesome performance and features.
Other start-ups in my area are offering me 5-10k more than I was making at my last job to do the same thing again. My counter offer from a large company was 50k higher for a laid back environment. Guess which opportunity I took.
Hilarious to me. One lead engineer is worth three junior engineer at least. I see startups doing the same thing over and over again. Hiring Junior developers fresh out of boot camp who are completely worthless, and refusing to spend money on high quality candidates who are interested.
Far more, I'd say. Fresh graduates and juniors are often held to almost no production bars at all. In many startups, you could be a junior for a year, accomplish very little, yet be in no danger of failing any performance metrics.
Before I left the startup world behind, I observed that seniors were often held responsible to 95% of the production that was happening at their startup.
You'd expect them to be paid x10-20 times as much as juniors, but instead it's typically no more than x1.3-1.4.
So as a senior engineer with a track record of shipped projects, I get to work harder than all juniors, be held to x20 their performance metrics, and for that I get 30% better pay?
No wonder every single senior engineer I know has a "FAANG or bust" attitude nowadays.
Google is known for "low-balling" if you compare to Facebook. My Google offer was higher than both my Amazon and Microsoft offer by a significant margin, and these offers in turn were higher than almost any other offer I had in the Bay.
The only companies that got anywhere near Google on pay were some very exceptional unicorns.
My typical friend who got a Google offer, already had a bunch of other offers by the time their Google process finally completed. Then the Google offer came in and it was typically higher than most or all of these outstanding offers. Often substantially so.
However, if you have an outlier offer that is based on some theoretical equity valuation ("an extra $1m in stock options based on our last fundraising round"), Google will not match it.
Frankly, they don't need to when their initial offer is already higher than most other options, and far safer.
Also from what I've seen, Google won't just match other offers, but they do have some specific companies whose offers they will match, like FB. FB is also one of the few companies that may offer you higher comp than Google.
By that logic, surely every interview practice is justified? And the less related to the job, the better?
I could ask a programmer to build a wooden boat, become a proficient opera singer, or complete four marathons in a year.
Maybe! Quite often success at work is determined by getting crap done that doesn't require the skills you trained for initially.
I'm given to understand companies used to do this.
This idea has been tried. It’s called college.
You could, but you would get better results by posing more relevant challenges.
If you ask them to become singers, you'd get a whole lot of people with great voices, who may or may not be good engineers.
At least coding solutions to DSA problems has a fairly high (though not perfect) correlation with being a good programmer.
In a sense, they are. As long as the interview practice is well understood by the applicants, it only leads to filtering the applicants that cannot pursue the requirements for that practice. Granted, the FAANG interview process and filtering only works because the SWE jobs are desirable enough.
I understand that the required practices and filtering also lead to a certain type of applicant. This is the main fault of the system (the lack of diversity potential).
Talking about age discrimination in particular, it's difficult since often older hires may not have the shiny new skill on their resumes or may have something indicating that this person may not be keeping up with tech (the bias). One of the weirdest things about joining a startup is realizing that 98% of engineers are in their 30s or 20s, while not having any engineers in their 50s, 60s or 70s.
Honestly, I think 80% of what keeps candidates from succeeding is an unwillingness to conform their character and personality to the needs of the institution that is recruiting them.
That said, I don't want to be a corporate drone either. There are more important things in my life. Like family, health, my hobbies, etc.
Yes, I know that if I lived the organizational values of my company I'd get ahead. But honest, I'd rather go play catch with my kids than obsess about customers[1]
[1] https://sellernexus.com/amazon-mission-statement
That being said I don’t think there’s a really great way to assess that in a 5 hour onsite interview. So hackerrank ends up being the best they’ve got.
Someone's job performance over time depends on lots of different factors, many out of the control of the company. Understanding someone's potential and risk can be the result of conversations about what they have already done and possibly looking at what they've done. No irrelevant puzzles needed.
A company could probably save lots of time and money by cutting some of the fluff in the process. From the pov of a candidate with a good job already testing the waters, these companies come off as trying to hard to add objectivity in situations where it doesn’t exist.
We’ve found that an average undergraduate or masters in CS or STEM field who just knows how to code basic Python will require ~250 hours of total work to become interview ready for FAANG. That’s a lot of time which is why I wouldn’t consider it gaming a system.
I have a friend that is in his late twenties and is now a partner for a boutique investment shop. About four years ago he made a commitment to pass the CFA 1 in nine months. Studied a little each day after work, and then studied more on the weekends. 180 hours total. Passed the CFA 1 without any fan fare. Hardly told a soul. Did the same for the CFA 2 the following year. Didn't tell any colleagues. No fan fare. Boss was pleasantly surprised when he listed the new qualification on the firm website.
He does the exact same thing the following year for the CFA 3. His wife tells someone at the firm, and when he walks into work they throw a surprise celebration for this very impressive accomplishment (many people spend a decade reaching CFA 3).
A couple months later the managing director moves to have the firm make him a partner. Easy decision. You had a junior analyst quietly dedicate themselves to substantially improving their skills.
Now, while his salary is certainly quite impressive as a partner and for someone that young, the true freedom he has achieved is being given responsibility of a new order of magnitude to establish things he wants to establish in that world (internal values maybe, many new types of clients, new employees he can then bring up through the firm, etc.).
Point is: good on you. You're a lesson for most of us.
You ask for 6 weeks unpaid leave. Could be one block, or 1 day a week for 30 weeks. This will cost you $10k gross by my calculations.
Even if you get the $100k job, you are $10k up after 1 year, with no friends and family time sacrificed at all.
As a bonus you were effectively paid for 6 weeks to learn CS skills rather than bash out features and not learn any new computer science skills.
Just FYI - this interview process isn't a one and done thing. You have to refresh yourself at least every year with ~80 hours of prep. Otherwise, you're going to be really bad at it when you search again.
Don't you mean "effective"? I assume that given the ratio of applicants to positions, the primary purpose of the interview process is to eliminate as many unacceptable candidates as possible, not to identify as many acceptable candidates as possible.
If you can do random LC mediums in ~40 minutes you’re in pretty good shape.
https://codebreakersacademy.com/about-us/
In the workplace, it's kind of a double-edged situation. FAANGs and similar big companies will be really generous with equipment, accommodations, and so forth in general. On the other hand, if the disabled person isn't visibly (emphasis on visibly) as productive as others, well, they can become persona non grata very, very quickly. The disabled person is competing with non-disabled people who are smart, aggressive, and eager to get ahead (promotions and bonuses add up to big money), so expect no mercy beyond whatever little your friendships get you.
CodeBreakers is for those who fee like they would benefit from the support network of our coaches, community of students, resources and structures curriculum. Most of our students once they get the job they want, they are pretty happy with the ISA.
Plenty of people would gladly accept this offer. I would accept the google offer with a 15% pay cut in a heartbeat. No hesitation at all.
I don’t collect any referral bonuses from google nor do I provide any internal google questions to students. What we do is teach data structures and how to communicate these ideas in an interview setting.
The parts that’s “gaming” is that the interview process is quite standardized which I’ve found a way to prepare others for.
Regarding conflict of interest, big tech companies have decided being good at hackerrank interviews = being a good engineer. So I’m training good engineer in their eyes which is a good thing for tech giants.
So, I still kind of wonder what it takes to be hired for a job that isn't the stereotypical Google SWE, because even though I didn't (and still don't) think of myself as a super genius, it's a fact that I was doing data processing for them which they were paying a handsome amount for (which didn't trickle down to me) so I felt I was qualified by definition.
Upfront pricing is paid 2-weeks after starting the program for the exact same coaching the ISA students receive and will work with you until you get hired.
Something new we’ve implemented is that we can adjust the mentor ship fee depending on your experience interviewing. Usually this involves just having a chat with me with a mini mock interview. If you’re already pretty strong, then we can give a discount.
Do I still owe you the % fee? or is it only after actually taking the job?
I mean, if I don't taje the job but got the training anyway, that seems like I would be "pirating" the course. But if I am not comfortable taking the offer because partner/kids/rent/whatever, I would still be out of pocket several thousands without the high paying job.
Interesting concept nonetheless and definitely would consider it!
If the standard ISA listed on our FAQ page doesn't work for you (maybe you already have lots of experience and are looking for something far north of $80k), then we can discuss alternatives that make sense for your goals and life situation.
What does the curriculum look like? I’m on a phone and it wasn’t obvious
What percentage take the course and don’t succeed at getting a job offer?
What percentage get a FAANG level offer?
What does the typical successful “candidate” look like that takes the course?
How is this better than just doing leetcode/CTCI/CIU[0]?
How does this differ from /better than similar programs like techlead’s one[1]
What happens if you pay the $8k upfront and fail to get an offer?
[0] https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university
[1] https://www.techseries.dev/
Edit: FYI your domain is 1 letter away from https://www.codebreakeracademy.com (which is a very different thing)
So far over 90% of our students succeed at getting a job offer. We rarely give up on students seeking jobs and we work with them until the are hired.
~70% end up getting a job paying >125k. Sometimes it's not FAANG, but still a really good tech company.
Our candidates come from very diverse backgrounds. Most have some CS or a STEM background, but the best predictor we've found is consistency; will you sit down and work through our curriculum consistently.
The difference is that you get a community/network of coaches and other students preparing for interviews as well as the structure.
I didn't buy techleads' but I've noticed it's been on a "limited time" sale since August. Looks like they just charge 1k for an online course with fairly little guarantee of results.
Thankfully it hasn't come up yet, but we're not in this to take $8k from someone and not help them. If there's a good reason why CodeBreakers wasn't a good fit and you paid upfront, we're open to discuss refunds.
I know, I already got the domain so I didn't think of changing it -_- maybe down the road I will haha.