I signed up for a dedicated coaching program with interviewing.io and ended up getting a refund because I didnt think they were actually very good at coaching.
The platform seems like its mostly useful for people who are already good at technical interviews, or at least good at solving technical problems, and just need practice writing code in front of other people or in a live setting.
Has anyone used interviewing.io with good/great results?
at least good at solving technical problems, and just need practice writing code in front of other people or in a live setting.
I think you mean this as a minor criticism, but this seems to be exactly the point of the service. To figure out a way to find people that are actually competent at the work itself, but not in the somewhat uncorrelated skill of public speaking & live coding w/ an audience.
Also a good way of identifying people that haven't gone to top tier elite schools but are just as good or better as those graduates: Recruiters at a FAANG might disregard a graduate from Generic State University w/ 2-3 years of experience under normal conditions, but if you get one that is willing to place a $1024 bet on themselves and then passes the tech interview with flying colors, it's a much easier sell.
Now, with all that said, after 6 years I'd still really like to know what their long-term outcomes are. What's their typical tenure at that job, where do they land for $job +1, +2, etc.?
I should have been more specific. Has anyone had a good experience with the dedicated coaching program? I know the value of a mock interview. The coaching program didnt see to provide the value that they advertised for me. I wanted to know if I'm unique or if other have had the same experience.
i did one session of the system design interview, it was a good way to check my interviewing skills and what i needed to improve on. The most effective way to use this service is for yourself to study your ass of first then just use one or two sessions to validate that.
I don't see the word "coaching" anywhere on interviewing.io. Mock interviews are usually done at the last stage when you have already done the rest of the prep work. I haven't used this platform but did get friends to help me with them and they were immensely helpful. You can have all the technical knowledge in the world but end up crumbling under the pressure of a live interview setting. If you are unfamiliar with the material in the first place then mock interviews are pointless.
Yeah. This is what I was talking about. It's $4000 to $3500 for 10 mock interviews and there is supposed to be some type of training/coaching build it. But it's basically just 10 mock interviews.
Hey Taylor, OP and founder here. I've shared your feedback with our team. The purpose of this program is to go beyond just mock interviews, and it looks like we've not done a good job here. I'm glad you got a refund already, but if have more feedback you can share, please email me at aline@interviewing.io
Sure. I'll forward along my conversations with Shamiya and Lauren. They were fine during my interactions with them but it didnt seem like they had much ability to do anything other than just match me with another mentor.
After 3 unsuccessful/unfruitful coach matches I asked for the refund.
They have a dedicated coaching program (https://start.interviewing.io/dashboard/interviewee/dedicate... - not sure if that link works unless you are logged in) which is what my critique was of. The FAQ says if you can write a loop that returns some data then it's worth signing up for dedicated coaching for FAANG companies. I found that claim not to be true.
I did a 10 session package (got it on sale) that focused on (distributed) system design and ML system design. I felt confident in the coding piece, but I didn't have the opportunity to work on large scale systems in my previous role. I believed that I could obtain a sufficient level of knowledge by self-study and practice, but I also have a toddler that takes up a lot of time and energy, so I wanted to be more efficient. I think it was valuable to absorb knowledge from a mentor that has real experience working in my target role. It turned out that was very successful in my real interviews. I think that I would have still done OK had I not done the interviewing.io, but, by my estimate, the return on investment was high, since I received multiple offers and negotiated up.
e: I wanted to add that my mentor and I decided that we would do 4 pure teaching sessions, and then the remainder would be partial mock interviews that would transition over sessions from them doing most of the talking to me doing most of the talking. I found this format to be good for building my own confidence.
That is interesting. Glad to hear it worked well for you.
Having the coach be upfront about some being teaching and some being mock interviews is helpful. The FAQ doesnt really address HOW they are going to coach or help you get better and in my experience it was, "Do a lot of leetcode".
I guess saying, "We will help you with the last 20% of interview prep" or polishing doesnt sounds as good.
If you view every minute an interviewer is doing actual work as harmful to the world, then wasting said interviewers time would be even more of an ethical good would it not?
I know this wasn’t your point, but I’d like to call out the common assumption that interviewing isn’t “actual work”. It is. Recruiting, interviewing, mentoring, all of that is just as important as shipping code.
I don’t think that was the assumption here. They were saying that interviewing someone who doesn’t want the job isn’t actual (useful) work in the sense it can’t produce the goal (a good hire).
I have a friend who does this with companies that he finds morally repugnant, except he takes it a step further and gets free vacations out of it by having them fly him in for the onsite in New York and put him up in a nice hotel the day before and the day after. He usually walks out after a couple of hours and spends the day visiting tourist stuff.
You either accept that "people who take your free stuff might not be profitable" or you do a better job screening who you give free stuff to. Zoom exists.
Cute, but nope. With no intent to return the books, that would be theft. The library owns the book and you would be stealing them.
Hard to find the crime or tort in the other thing? I've been flown places for interviews, I don't recall ever contractually agreeing to consider working at the place, and I can't imagine how the heck you'd prove that (unless your interviewee was an absolute idiot and tweeted "Woo free trip!").
I suppose you'd be jerk or something if it were a non-profit, but I don't think anyone ought to lose sleep over this high-risk business decision being abused, given the razor thin line between "I'm going to screw this company" and "Oh, looks like this place isn't for me."
If you walked up to the person at Costco and said "I have no intent to buy the product; will you give me a free sample anyway?" They're likely to say "sure, I don't care". This is not a likely response if you were to do the analogous thing with an interview, particularly one where the company has to spend some resources on it.
While I personally wouldn’t do it, I could see the argument that tying up resources of a morally repugnant company is a worthwhile act because it prevents them being as terrible for a day?
I think it depends. When the Iraq war was starting, I could see the justification for wasting a bunch of Haliburton's time as a form of civil disobedience or protest, for example.
Personally though, I don't do this, nor would I. I think it's too easy become corrupt from doing things this way.
If a company does shady enough business that it has problems hiring developers, and decides to spend money on flying and lodging remote candidates rather than improve its practices, why should we feel bad about having them spend that money?
You don't force them to do it, you don't lie in your resume that they decided was a desirable candidate. If they can't convince you to come on board, that's on them; hiring is a mutual negotiation.
>You don't force them to do it, you don't lie in your resume that they decided was a desirable candidate.
When you apply, the implication is that you might accept an offer and that if you don't, it will be based on things that you learn during the interview, rather than on things you've determined before the interview. Just because you didn't sign a piece of paper saying 'I claim there is some chance of my accepting an offer' and just because you didn't literally utter any untrue words doesn't change that; human society depends on these unsaid implications to function. If you deliberately flout them, you are abusing social trust for your own benefit.
(And enough of abusing trust leads to a low trust world. If enough people thought like you, companies would start requiring signed statements that you agree with the ethics of the company and that you could be sued if you are found to have wasted the company's money.)
>If they can't convince you to come on board, that's on them; hiring is a mutual negotiation.
If you know very well, ahead of time, that there's nothing practical that they could do to hire you, coming to an interview is abusing the system. The fact that it's not literally impossible for them to convince you to take the job doesn't change this.
I get your point, but on the other hand this is money the company chose to spend. This is a cost they factored into their HR budget in an attempt to impress and retain better employees; it is not done because companies are nice. They are also always free to change their circumstances to hire you; it is never "literally impossible" to hire someone...
If I was really interested in the job, and they end up hiring another candidate, I just wasted 4 days flying to New York while they never told me my odds, what they thought of other candidates' resumes before I flew out, or even how many there were. Probably not even give me feedback on their final decision. Is that fair?
Because they chose to spend some money, candidates have to repay them with complete honesty through the process, even when they don't have to do the same? This is not a fair negotiation scheme either. At some point, you have to accept that both sides understand how the system work, and are making deliberate decisions to get the most they can out of it. Don't forget that one side gets to do that professionally full time out of a dedicated budget, and that's not you.
> This is a cost they factored into their HR budget in an attempt to impress and retain better employees; it is not done because companies are nice.
There are things factored into budgets that you're still not supposed to do. Stores have a cost set aside for shoplifting. That doesn't mean you're supposed to go shoplifting.
>They are also always free to change their circumstances to hire you; it is never "literally impossible" to hire someone...
I was using that phrase in exactly the opposite way from how you seem to have misread it. The fact that it's not literally impossible doesn't matter, because it's practically impossible.
>If I was really interested in the job, and they end up hiring another candidate... Is that fair?
Proper social skills requires understanding what's going on in social situations even if you have not been told everything. In our world, one of those situations is knowing that you are supposed to be willing to accept the chance of not getting the job when you spend your time applying.
In the same situation, the company is not supposed to be willing to accept the risk of the jobseeker fraudulently expressing interest in a job in order to get the free plane flight.
Now, the thing is, these are unsaid. You are won't find a big sign saying "chance of not getting job acceptable, chance of fake jobseeker unacceptable". If you're one of those Internet literalists who says "well, they didn't explicitly prohibit it", both of those look pretty similar. This is why social skills are a thing. If you're at a party and the host says "take as much soda as you want", you're not supposed to get a box, put ten bottles of soda in it, and take that out to your car. That's not acceptable, and you're supposed to know it's not acceptable, without being told.
Wow, that was just rude. You don't have to argue with me, but if you do I'd appreciate you doing it without insulting the social skills of perfect strangers.
Obviously we disagree on what is proper... both for hiring and for Internet forums.
Not understanding the existence of unspoken social conventions that have no written rules and nothing explicitly preventing you from violating them, is the definition of poor social skills.
And you did that on the forum, so people get to point it out on the forum.
I don't refute the existence of social conventions, I disagree about where the line is. I thought we were arguing about where it lies, and whether this is comparable to theft and whether that is a breach of said social norms.
Then you assume your own conclusion I use that to lecture me and call me names. This is just not how arguing works.
You and I are obviously of a different mind, that does not prove that I'm wrong and that certainly does not mean you get to be this rude. I am sorry you didn't convince me. Now let's go our separate way, though I feel another Kafka trap is coming...
GP here was not being rude, and addressing the tone is a way to avoid addressing the facts.
Your story reads like sour grapes. The company you interviewed at was not dishonest with you, so it doesn't justify being dishonest back with them (or other companies).
We are here having an argument about whether doing this is improper social etiquette and whether it is theft. Then jiro assumes that it is and uses that conclusion to use a condescending tone to compare me to shoplifters and lecture me on what "I'm supposed to be willing to accept" "in our world", calling me names such as "internet literalist".
There is nothing further to be said. This is no longer an argument. We disagree, and that's fine, you don't have to be rude about it.
I receive emails every week from AWS and others offering me to join this and that team, this and that "confidential project", asking me to call them or send a CV on every email I use on GitHub, PyPI, or HN. Would I feel bad to finally accept their non-stop pleas and tell them "no" face-to-face? Absolutely not.
For your own information, I have never done it, to date.
OP here. Yeah... throwaway interviews are a way to do it. The nice thing about interviewing.io is that you don't have to deal with all the recruiter stuff and scheduling and getting in their process in the first place. You just book practice whenever you want it. AND you actually get interview feedback (with specific actionable things you need to work on... way beyond just pass/fail).
I found this to be inefficient use of my time personally. 30 minute interview to go over what's already written on the job description. A 30 minute to 60 minute interview with the manager or some higher up to see if you're the right cultural fit. Only after can you go through the on-site process.
Heck I've done it with companies that are (probably) not doing anything wrong ethically, simply because it was their recruiters who hounded me in the first place. If you are that desperate for me to interview despite me telling you I'm not interested, don't then blame me for wasting your time by doing mock interviews with your engineers.
I would do this, except even an interview for a position I didn't want would make me dreadfully nervous. There's something about paying for someone to help that reduces the anxiety. That said, I'm not an engineer so this particular service isn't for me.
Anecdotal but the secret to success from my personal experience is to:
1) Never stop looking around (okay, may be not when you have less than one year tenure in the current company)
2) Interview when you really can afford to fail the interview and still not care (for example when things are going well in your current company)
3) Treat it like a collaborative session than a actual interview.
4) Don't reject offers for petty reasons like not agreeing with a companies ethics/tools they use/what work they do. It's work and that is why they pay people to do it. So consider all these factors and ask for a higher package and if you really like to work on something else, aim for good work life balance and use that time to do what you want.
5) Shamelessly sell yourself. The 5 mins intro that you provide in each round in a lot of cases can decide how the rest of the round goes.
just reply to FB/Google/AMZN recruiters. These FAANG companies are basically running "practice-interview-as-a-service", and as a bonus if you happen to like their offer (it seems though that their offers on second and further attempts are pretty low - as you're put into "benchwarmers") you can even spend some time working there.
OP here. If you do well in practice, you can book interviews with companies through us (we hire for Amazon, Dropbox, Clubhouse, MongoDB, and a bunch of others). You skip all the recruiter calls and scheduling and just go straight to the real interview.
And if you find a job through us, you don't have to pay for practice.
Here is what workred in my recent job search, that just ended this week:
1. Messgae people on LinkedIn, the more senior in the company, the better. This was by far the fastest and most reliable way for me to get to the first round.
2. Message the company via a recruiting@, or contact@, even a support@ email they have on their website. Not as reliable as option 1 but better than the job application forms.
3. Have them contact you via a "HN who is hiring?" post, it's rare, but it does happen.
If it's a job post form, then personally I'd just consider it a loss. Don't know why, it's not like I provide different or less info compared to direct messaging, but that just leaves me ignored for weeks, or rejected with a template message.
Coding interviews are the easiest interviews. There’s very little difference between the problems, and they usually don’t need a trick. Just discuss your solution before you start writing the code, and assuming you don’t get a jerk or completely blank, you’ll be fine. It’s the most objective of all the rounds. It’s literally just practice. The fact that it’s so paint by numbers, is probably one of the reasons why interview coaching focuses on it. Manufacture some demand, and you have a low effort company.
Technical design is a bit harder to prepare for, because it’s more about trying pattern match systems you know against the problem presented. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of high level case studies or design discussions.
The ones that are hardest to prepare for, and no doubt has sunk many a candidate are the softer interviews, particularly management interviews and cultural fit interviews. Those are a complete crapshoot. There’s probably stock answers to prepare, but the questions are pretty random. If you can figure out how to coach the those in 202X (as opposed to recycling 1965’s advice), then you’ve got something.
I’ve interviewed at four of the five FAANGs, and got offers from three of them, including one of them twice. I’ve interviewed at I don’t know how many startups and midsized companies as well. All the technical interviews are the same. You might get some better interviewers at the bigger companies, but that’s more due to practice on their part. They just have interviewed more people overall, and have asked this question enough times they know the common mistakes.
There’s this belief that FAANG interviews are somehow harder, and you need to study for months to prepare, and it’s not really true. It’s the same MO as the test prep business, but with less obvious metrics for success. (You don’t get standardized test scores to compare, you just get an offer… eventually. Did the interview prep business help? Who knows?)
The interview prep businesses push the specious idea that FAANGs are tougher, and people believe it. (eg Less than 1% of FAANG applicants get an offer! Well, yeah. Do you know how many people apply? A lot. Do you know how many are nowhere near qualified for the job they’re applying for? Probably more than half.) They keep repeating these claims, they end up scaring people into paying for something that’s not needed. That’s the manufacturing demand part.
The low effort part is that technical interview questions and programming puzzles are a penny for two dozen. You give the question and the solution in maybe three different languages (say, JavaScript, Python, and Java) and you’re done. Charge $500 for ten questions, give them a HackerRank link, and you’re done. You’ll spend more on advertising and paid testimonials than anything else.
The interview prep companies don’t focus on the noncoding interviews, because they’re harder to find questions for, and harder to grade. When it comes to personal interviews, you have work with each student one on one to help them talk about their experiences most effectively. That’s high touch. If you’re trying to maximize volume, you don’t do that.
Makes sense, thanks for clarification. But there could be people who are some where in between you and not-qualified, whom this site might be helpful, it's connecting people for specific purpose.
The site says you can request somebody from FAANG for mock interview, without knowing quality of these interviews, I assume that would require this company pay for their time.
I find that for more problems you do need a trick. Once you memorize some of the main algorithms asked, usually the questions are a twist on common algorithms + some trick that is not obvious.
Sure you it can become easy if you "Practice" but everything gets easier the more you do it.
People who pass these either have have IQ or have grit, thats why companies use this to judge canidates, either you spent 500 hours on learning it or DS/A just sticks to your head like glue.
the main problem is that you can get caught in an interviewing pet project, so it seems obvious for them, but not for you. Properly done, a code interview could not require clever tricks, but the problem is that it's just too easy to slip into that realm...
The quality of the interviewer is one thing that the interviewee can’t control. The main interviewer failures are:
1) Letting the interviewer struggle. By the end of the interview, the candidate should know what the solution looks like, even if they couldn’t solve the problem themselves. If you let someone struggle too long, you’re failing them. Give feedback early. Point out caveats. Don’t have them code up a dumb a solution, and then in the last 10 minutes tell them to redo it with a completely different approach because it’s suboptimal. (Im not talking about special cars they can retrofit, or if the original wrong solution was trivial. Use your judgement.) The interviewer understands the nuances of the problem. The candidate probably doesn’t. After all, they just heard problem.
2) DO NOT CONFUSE THEM! This happens by giving the wrong feedback. You might think you’re helping someone, but you could be knocking them off their game. If they’re going for the optimal solution, and they know the approach, just let them. It’s not wrong, I’m fact it’s the most correct answer. It’s very easy to confuse someone in these timed and stressful situations. Don’t don’t do it!
3) If it’s a design question, or something else with multiple reasonable answers, then there are multiple correct answers. Make them state their assumptions. Ask how the solution would change if something was different.
Don’t expect someone to come in off the street and understand the nuances of your use case and data issues. You didn’t understand them until you were confronted with the obstacles either.
Make sure you know the recursive versions of the algorithms, and that’s pretty much everything you ever need for a generic coding interview, and you might not even get asked a dynamic programming or a producer-consumer question.
Maybe you need some more specialized data structures for a more specialized role (eg tries[0] and inverted indices, for a search job), but you probably already knew those if you were already doing that job.
Absolutely agree. I’ve found that behavioral interviews are harder than technical interviews at this point. If you don’t have the set of experiences they’re looking for then it’s game over.
This can be ameliorated slightly if the interviewer is willing to accept a hypothetical, but this has rarely been the case for me recently.
Or if your management philosophy doesn’t mesh with theirs.
“Tell me about the last time you had make your team work late for a deadline.”
“I don’t. It’s been my experience as both an IC and a a manager that crunches just burn people out, and you end up getting less quality work out of them. It’s much better to communicate early and either adjust deadlines or deliverables.”
“What if you can’t?”
“Unless there is an external forcing function on the company, everything should be negotiable. Does this happen a lot here?”
“One or twice a year.”
“Huh. It’s only happened to me once in ten years, and that was due to a multimillion dollar contract deadline. If it happens regularly here, then the company should fire the directors of engineering for gross incompetence. They can’t project manage.”
Needless to say, I didn’t get the job, but at that point, why would I have wanted it?
For you. I am a bit over a year into my eng career and coding interviews are far harder than any other type of interview for me. I have a handful of stock behavioral question answers that I can adjust for most non technical interviews. I do minimal prep before hand looking up who I am interviewing with to have a few questions for them and try to find a way to relate to them during the interview.
That is much easier than someone asking me anything from fizz buzz to red black trees.
I'm giving examples of the range of questions that exist. I've been given Fizz Buzz in a real coding interview. I'm sure someone has been asked to implement a red-black tree before.
Replace red-black tree implementation with some other silly overly complex question that isnt related to the actual job.
They might ask you to implement sqrt(), but the question being asked isn’t “Can this person implement square root using Newton’s Method?”, it’s “How does this person tackle a problem without an obvious solution?”
I don't understand this. Why wouldn't you just practice by interviewing with random companies? If you are hired, just counteroffer with an absurd salary requirement. And if they accept, then congrats you don't need to practice interviewing anymore.
I did about session a day for maybe two or three weeks. I'll compare it to trying to practice by doing real interviews. I got much more detailed and honest feedback from my practice interviews than any real one I've had. I got to practice just the interview type I wanted, algorithms, without doing other things that would come up in a series of interviews (culture, system design, etc). I also didn't have to contact and coordinate with >= 10 companies to get 10 sessions. I just booked 10 sessions.
I used to do interviews for interviewing.io, and it's a bit different. For my work, I'm not going to give any feedback, and will try leave early if it's not going well. When I was being paid for it via interviewing.io, I would give people fairly detailed feedback on what went well and what went wrong, and also answer any questions the mock candidate had.
For me, I'd use a platform like interviewing.io where you'll GET actionable feedback -- most companies won't give you feedback at all, other then "here's your offer" or "nah, thanks anyway"
Applied for their site a while back, but was put on hold because there were too many applicants. Have yet to get a response from them.
Meanwhile got the job I was looking for, without any mock interview sites.
Come on, this interview process is going too far... I think most of the people working in tech knows that the interview process is just plain silly, but we keep doing it because reasons...
And, the worst of it, it doesn't make any sense that for a senior role you get a code interview (or multiple), and then, if you don't pass it, they encourage you to re-apply in 6 months or a year...
I actually made some friends over discord who ran mocks with me. Being a person who spent most of university partying rather than hanging out with the studious people, I didn't have much friends who had the same programming skill as I was.
Just look around, I'm sure you can find people with similar skill to run mocks with you (without having to go through some paid service that most likely employs desperate people ergo less qualified people). Plus, running the interviews yourself could be more valuable than going through one.
OP here. Our interviewers are all senior engineers from FAANG and FAANG-adjacent companies. Average is 8 years of experience. They've also all conducted at least 20 interviews on behalf of their employer.
They're not desperate... they're doing this because they 1) get paid and 2) enjoy helping people get better at this stuff.
Happy to set you up with an account so you can get a feel for the quality.
I'm senior at a large bay area tech co. I used this service a few years ago and actually got great feedback and tips (11 offers during that search, almost 100% offer rate for onsite). I'm also on the recorded interviews list
One of my interviewer (from ms) actually had too high a bar and was good to see an upper bound for coding interviews
Have you tried to flip the script and allow people training for interviewing to interview master interviewees? So they can see what success looks like?
Given the widespread (and not unreasonable) belief that FAANG-style interview processes function as more of a quantity filter (quite arbitrarily reduce the candidate pool down to a size that human hiring teams can deal with) rather than a quality filter (find ideal workers), it's quite humorous to see the same people running those ineffective interviews profiting off of making them a worse quantity filter. If you squint at it, you can see this is graft/corruption but legalized through layers of indirection (a classic practice in the US).
One thing I wish people leeny (who work with hiring managers) tell companies is that as people start hitting 35-40, they dont' have same motivation to solve a trick coding question in 40 min interview. I can demonstrate that I have all the knowledge to do the problem, but if you want me to write compilable (throwaway) code with absolutely no mistakes, you have to loose some candidates. As you age, solving one off puzzles is a nuisance.
You're saying you can demonstrate that you have the knowledge to do the problem, but you can't actually do the problem? I'm 43 myself, it's not something I do for fun but I can certainly code up a DFS/BFS implementation or something similar in 40 minutes. With a modern IDE it's not unreasonable for me to expect it to work correctly on the first try.
Try doing it with coderpad IDE with no autcommplete. On top of that, for Java, make sure you declare everything as static, because top level class has static on it.
A reasonable middle ground is that I demonstrate I know all the concepts in the interview and I can send a fully compilable version after the interview.
>>I'm 43 myself, it's not something I do for fun but I can certainly code up a DFS/BFS implementation or something similar in 40 minutes.
Do you think you can do or have you done this? There is a difference between the two.
For me it's experience in the industry. If you can see my work history, that I have >25 years in the industry, working for mid and large size companies, and lots and lots of startups, why do I need to do something like a 2-pointer / heap / etc kind of problem to prove I can code?
One of my favorite job offers was literally a conversation that played out like:
Manager: Cool, come to our office and meet the team
Me: Want me to prep for a tech challenge or something?
Manager: Nah, you were employed by ____ for __ years -- if you were incompetent, they would have fired you years ago.
That's a cool story. However, I would say there are good reasons to test whether I can actually implement something. Mostly it tells the hiring manager about my quality of my work rather than a simple yes (s)he can do or no (s)he can't.
However, as with anything else, there are exceptions one should be cognizant of.
I don't get why everyone seems so hung up on the interview.
Relax, talk about yourself, talk about what you've done.
I think doing things like this and from the thousands of Reddit posts about "the dreaded interview problem" only leads people to over think it and have worse anxiety and performance, not better.
The interview to my first job was just listening to my then-boss talk about the company for 30 minutes, the second was stonewalling while my boss grilled me to make sure I know what I said I know.
You're not going to be able to "train" for that just like you can't "train" for getting rejected for dating, you just have to learn social interactions and go do it a couple of times.
----
I did just remember my worst interview experience, where, after being jobless for a number of years (early on, mind. I'm still young) I applied for phone IT support. - the interviewers asked me to:
"describe the best vacation you had"
"I haven't really been on a vacation" (I haven't been working, poor family, etc)
"Ok describe the vacation you would like to have"
"... I literally don't want a vacation.. I am looking to find work." (Jobless.for.years. every day has been a mediocre vacation up until this point.)
"..... Ok just tell us a story about a vacation"
"....... Ok I suppose I'll go to Rome then? And uh... " Draws blanks
You can't be prepared for interviews where the interviewers are shit, nor if they blindside you with questions like that.
You also might lose your ability to detect bullshit if you try.
If the company you're interviewing for is just some boss rambling about his wife, then sure, don't bother training for it or doing everything you can to increase your chances of success.
If the company you're interviewing for is among the highest paying companies in the world, where you can literally change the quality of your life and your family's life by making enough money to comfortably retire as a multimillionaire by the time you're 35-40... then investing months doing the dreaded leetcode grind, mock interviews, and doing everything in your power to prepare for it is absolutely worth it.
In fact, seeing just how few people are willing to actually invest time and effort into excelling at an interview process that can tangibly improve ones life in ways very few other professional careers can is even more of a reason to do it. Every time I see people who are dismissive of technical questions, rant about how it's unfair that interviewers expect them to understand fundamental data structures, algorithms, time complexity, and think that all they should need to know to be a developer is how to glue a few APIs together, it makes me both sad to see how low of a standard we hold ourselves to, but also in a selfish way it makes me happy knowing that the competition for competent developers is so low.
> I don't get why everyone seems so hung up on the interview.
Because if you need a job, the wild asymmetry between you and the interviewers.
You have to be ON for that short time and ready to deal with questions like what you got about "best vacation" or in the next question code a red-green tree implementation, followed seconds later by describing a full scale cloud architecture.
All of that in an hour.
And if you falter anywhere along the line, they reject you and you worry about how you will feed and clothe yourself and your family.
No offense, but the difficult in a job interview for IT Support and a SWE position at a FAANG+ company could not be wider.
I had a career in recruiting before moving into eng and I loved interviewing. I'd bullshit with the interviewer, we'd talk about shared interests, and we'd talk about recruiting techniques for a little while. I passed the vast majority of interviews with absolutely minimal prep.
I'm a year into an eng career and I've already failed more technical interviews than I failed in my entire recruiting career.
I've watched some of the interviews they put up on youtube, but one thing I found lacking was an actual answer of "I would pass you, but maybe 20% of my peers wouldn't" vs. "This is a hard no for me at my current company, but previous companies you have a 50/50 shot".
Instead all the feedback seems like "you did good, but you should work on..."
Regarding the 'pay later' thing, I wonder if the term is too short? Let's say theoretically I sign up, completely and utterly bomb the first mock interview, and decide I need to spend 3 months doing hackerrank every weekend. Then I do another one, and i'm doing better, by the time I get the actual job the time period has expired?
I found Pramp to be useful, if you need practice with LeetCode style questions and explaining yourself to the interviewer, a peer in the same situation. It's free (technically you have to pay after the free interviews count, but being reviewed positively by the other interviewer gives you free interviews, so I've done 10 and still have free ones to spare). The participants skew junior but I still feel it's worthwhile.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadThe platform seems like its mostly useful for people who are already good at technical interviews, or at least good at solving technical problems, and just need practice writing code in front of other people or in a live setting.
Has anyone used interviewing.io with good/great results?
I think you mean this as a minor criticism, but this seems to be exactly the point of the service. To figure out a way to find people that are actually competent at the work itself, but not in the somewhat uncorrelated skill of public speaking & live coding w/ an audience.
Also a good way of identifying people that haven't gone to top tier elite schools but are just as good or better as those graduates: Recruiters at a FAANG might disregard a graduate from Generic State University w/ 2-3 years of experience under normal conditions, but if you get one that is willing to place a $1024 bet on themselves and then passes the tech interview with flying colors, it's a much easier sell.
Now, with all that said, after 6 years I'd still really like to know what their long-term outcomes are. What's their typical tenure at that job, where do they land for $job +1, +2, etc.?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d7mJDPkEykKzSYjj-Wmza-UX...
After 3 unsuccessful/unfruitful coach matches I asked for the refund.
e: I wanted to add that my mentor and I decided that we would do 4 pure teaching sessions, and then the remainder would be partial mock interviews that would transition over sessions from them doing most of the talking to me doing most of the talking. I found this format to be good for building my own confidence.
Having the coach be upfront about some being teaching and some being mock interviews is helpful. The FAQ doesnt really address HOW they are going to coach or help you get better and in my experience it was, "Do a lot of leetcode".
I guess saying, "We will help you with the last 20% of interview prep" or polishing doesnt sounds as good.
But outsiders may agree with the interviewers ethics, and would see wasting their time as unethical.
Yes, it's legal to do, but isn't it a shade hypocritical?
Aka, who cares?
Are you serious?
>Aka, who cares?
Surely the company would rather not waste the money.
You either accept that "people who take your free stuff might not be profitable" or you do a better job screening who you give free stuff to. Zoom exists.
Hard to find the crime or tort in the other thing? I've been flown places for interviews, I don't recall ever contractually agreeing to consider working at the place, and I can't imagine how the heck you'd prove that (unless your interviewee was an absolute idiot and tweeted "Woo free trip!").
I suppose you'd be jerk or something if it were a non-profit, but I don't think anyone ought to lose sleep over this high-risk business decision being abused, given the razor thin line between "I'm going to screw this company" and "Oh, looks like this place isn't for me."
Personally though, I don't do this, nor would I. I think it's too easy become corrupt from doing things this way.
You don't force them to do it, you don't lie in your resume that they decided was a desirable candidate. If they can't convince you to come on board, that's on them; hiring is a mutual negotiation.
When you apply, the implication is that you might accept an offer and that if you don't, it will be based on things that you learn during the interview, rather than on things you've determined before the interview. Just because you didn't sign a piece of paper saying 'I claim there is some chance of my accepting an offer' and just because you didn't literally utter any untrue words doesn't change that; human society depends on these unsaid implications to function. If you deliberately flout them, you are abusing social trust for your own benefit.
(And enough of abusing trust leads to a low trust world. If enough people thought like you, companies would start requiring signed statements that you agree with the ethics of the company and that you could be sued if you are found to have wasted the company's money.)
>If they can't convince you to come on board, that's on them; hiring is a mutual negotiation.
If you know very well, ahead of time, that there's nothing practical that they could do to hire you, coming to an interview is abusing the system. The fact that it's not literally impossible for them to convince you to take the job doesn't change this.
If I was really interested in the job, and they end up hiring another candidate, I just wasted 4 days flying to New York while they never told me my odds, what they thought of other candidates' resumes before I flew out, or even how many there were. Probably not even give me feedback on their final decision. Is that fair?
Because they chose to spend some money, candidates have to repay them with complete honesty through the process, even when they don't have to do the same? This is not a fair negotiation scheme either. At some point, you have to accept that both sides understand how the system work, and are making deliberate decisions to get the most they can out of it. Don't forget that one side gets to do that professionally full time out of a dedicated budget, and that's not you.
There are things factored into budgets that you're still not supposed to do. Stores have a cost set aside for shoplifting. That doesn't mean you're supposed to go shoplifting.
>They are also always free to change their circumstances to hire you; it is never "literally impossible" to hire someone...
I was using that phrase in exactly the opposite way from how you seem to have misread it. The fact that it's not literally impossible doesn't matter, because it's practically impossible.
>If I was really interested in the job, and they end up hiring another candidate... Is that fair?
Proper social skills requires understanding what's going on in social situations even if you have not been told everything. In our world, one of those situations is knowing that you are supposed to be willing to accept the chance of not getting the job when you spend your time applying.
In the same situation, the company is not supposed to be willing to accept the risk of the jobseeker fraudulently expressing interest in a job in order to get the free plane flight.
Now, the thing is, these are unsaid. You are won't find a big sign saying "chance of not getting job acceptable, chance of fake jobseeker unacceptable". If you're one of those Internet literalists who says "well, they didn't explicitly prohibit it", both of those look pretty similar. This is why social skills are a thing. If you're at a party and the host says "take as much soda as you want", you're not supposed to get a box, put ten bottles of soda in it, and take that out to your car. That's not acceptable, and you're supposed to know it's not acceptable, without being told.
Obviously we disagree on what is proper... both for hiring and for Internet forums.
And you did that on the forum, so people get to point it out on the forum.
Then you assume your own conclusion I use that to lecture me and call me names. This is just not how arguing works.
You and I are obviously of a different mind, that does not prove that I'm wrong and that certainly does not mean you get to be this rude. I am sorry you didn't convince me. Now let's go our separate way, though I feel another Kafka trap is coming...
Your story reads like sour grapes. The company you interviewed at was not dishonest with you, so it doesn't justify being dishonest back with them (or other companies).
There is nothing further to be said. This is no longer an argument. We disagree, and that's fine, you don't have to be rude about it.
I receive emails every week from AWS and others offering me to join this and that team, this and that "confidential project", asking me to call them or send a CV on every email I use on GitHub, PyPI, or HN. Would I feel bad to finally accept their non-stop pleas and tell them "no" face-to-face? Absolutely not.
For your own information, I have never done it, to date.
And if you find a job through us, you don't have to pay for practice.
1. Messgae people on LinkedIn, the more senior in the company, the better. This was by far the fastest and most reliable way for me to get to the first round.
2. Message the company via a recruiting@, or contact@, even a support@ email they have on their website. Not as reliable as option 1 but better than the job application forms.
3. Have them contact you via a "HN who is hiring?" post, it's rare, but it does happen.
If it's a job post form, then personally I'd just consider it a loss. Don't know why, it's not like I provide different or less info compared to direct messaging, but that just leaves me ignored for weeks, or rejected with a template message.
Technical design is a bit harder to prepare for, because it’s more about trying pattern match systems you know against the problem presented. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of high level case studies or design discussions.
The ones that are hardest to prepare for, and no doubt has sunk many a candidate are the softer interviews, particularly management interviews and cultural fit interviews. Those are a complete crapshoot. There’s probably stock answers to prepare, but the questions are pretty random. If you can figure out how to coach the those in 202X (as opposed to recycling 1965’s advice), then you’ve got something.
What do you mean by that?
There’s this belief that FAANG interviews are somehow harder, and you need to study for months to prepare, and it’s not really true. It’s the same MO as the test prep business, but with less obvious metrics for success. (You don’t get standardized test scores to compare, you just get an offer… eventually. Did the interview prep business help? Who knows?)
The interview prep businesses push the specious idea that FAANGs are tougher, and people believe it. (eg Less than 1% of FAANG applicants get an offer! Well, yeah. Do you know how many people apply? A lot. Do you know how many are nowhere near qualified for the job they’re applying for? Probably more than half.) They keep repeating these claims, they end up scaring people into paying for something that’s not needed. That’s the manufacturing demand part.
The low effort part is that technical interview questions and programming puzzles are a penny for two dozen. You give the question and the solution in maybe three different languages (say, JavaScript, Python, and Java) and you’re done. Charge $500 for ten questions, give them a HackerRank link, and you’re done. You’ll spend more on advertising and paid testimonials than anything else.
The interview prep companies don’t focus on the noncoding interviews, because they’re harder to find questions for, and harder to grade. When it comes to personal interviews, you have work with each student one on one to help them talk about their experiences most effectively. That’s high touch. If you’re trying to maximize volume, you don’t do that.
The site says you can request somebody from FAANG for mock interview, without knowing quality of these interviews, I assume that would require this company pay for their time.
Sure you it can become easy if you "Practice" but everything gets easier the more you do it.
People who pass these either have have IQ or have grit, thats why companies use this to judge canidates, either you spent 500 hours on learning it or DS/A just sticks to your head like glue.
1) Letting the interviewer struggle. By the end of the interview, the candidate should know what the solution looks like, even if they couldn’t solve the problem themselves. If you let someone struggle too long, you’re failing them. Give feedback early. Point out caveats. Don’t have them code up a dumb a solution, and then in the last 10 minutes tell them to redo it with a completely different approach because it’s suboptimal. (Im not talking about special cars they can retrofit, or if the original wrong solution was trivial. Use your judgement.) The interviewer understands the nuances of the problem. The candidate probably doesn’t. After all, they just heard problem.
2) DO NOT CONFUSE THEM! This happens by giving the wrong feedback. You might think you’re helping someone, but you could be knocking them off their game. If they’re going for the optimal solution, and they know the approach, just let them. It’s not wrong, I’m fact it’s the most correct answer. It’s very easy to confuse someone in these timed and stressful situations. Don’t don’t do it!
3) If it’s a design question, or something else with multiple reasonable answers, then there are multiple correct answers. Make them state their assumptions. Ask how the solution would change if something was different.
Don’t expect someone to come in off the street and understand the nuances of your use case and data issues. You didn’t understand them until you were confronted with the obstacles either.
Quicksort
Mergesort
Dijkstra’s algorthim
Depth first search
Breadth first search
Doubly linked list
Semaphores and mutexes
Make sure you know the recursive versions of the algorithms, and that’s pretty much everything you ever need for a generic coding interview, and you might not even get asked a dynamic programming or a producer-consumer question.
Maybe you need some more specialized data structures for a more specialized role (eg tries[0] and inverted indices, for a search job), but you probably already knew those if you were already doing that job.
There’s just not that much to know.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie
This can be ameliorated slightly if the interviewer is willing to accept a hypothetical, but this has rarely been the case for me recently.
“Tell me about the last time you had make your team work late for a deadline.”
“I don’t. It’s been my experience as both an IC and a a manager that crunches just burn people out, and you end up getting less quality work out of them. It’s much better to communicate early and either adjust deadlines or deliverables.”
“What if you can’t?”
“Unless there is an external forcing function on the company, everything should be negotiable. Does this happen a lot here?”
“One or twice a year.”
“Huh. It’s only happened to me once in ten years, and that was due to a multimillion dollar contract deadline. If it happens regularly here, then the company should fire the directors of engineering for gross incompetence. They can’t project manage.”
Needless to say, I didn’t get the job, but at that point, why would I have wanted it?
For you. I am a bit over a year into my eng career and coding interviews are far harder than any other type of interview for me. I have a handful of stock behavioral question answers that I can adjust for most non technical interviews. I do minimal prep before hand looking up who I am interviewing with to have a few questions for them and try to find a way to relate to them during the interview.
That is much easier than someone asking me anything from fizz buzz to red black trees.
Fizz buzz is a hello world problem. That’s why it exists.
Replace red-black tree implementation with some other silly overly complex question that isnt related to the actual job.
I did about session a day for maybe two or three weeks. I'll compare it to trying to practice by doing real interviews. I got much more detailed and honest feedback from my practice interviews than any real one I've had. I got to practice just the interview type I wanted, algorithms, without doing other things that would come up in a series of interviews (culture, system design, etc). I also didn't have to contact and coordinate with >= 10 companies to get 10 sessions. I just booked 10 sessions.
And, the worst of it, it doesn't make any sense that for a senior role you get a code interview (or multiple), and then, if you don't pass it, they encourage you to re-apply in 6 months or a year...
Just look around, I'm sure you can find people with similar skill to run mocks with you (without having to go through some paid service that most likely employs desperate people ergo less qualified people). Plus, running the interviews yourself could be more valuable than going through one.
They're not desperate... they're doing this because they 1) get paid and 2) enjoy helping people get better at this stuff.
Happy to set you up with an account so you can get a feel for the quality.
One of my interviewer (from ms) actually had too high a bar and was good to see an upper bound for coding interviews
Highly recommend this service
A reasonable middle ground is that I demonstrate I know all the concepts in the interview and I can send a fully compilable version after the interview.
>>I'm 43 myself, it's not something I do for fun but I can certainly code up a DFS/BFS implementation or something similar in 40 minutes.
Do you think you can do or have you done this? There is a difference between the two.
One of my favorite job offers was literally a conversation that played out like: Manager: Cool, come to our office and meet the team Me: Want me to prep for a tech challenge or something? Manager: Nah, you were employed by ____ for __ years -- if you were incompetent, they would have fired you years ago.
However, as with anything else, there are exceptions one should be cognizant of.
Relax, talk about yourself, talk about what you've done.
I think doing things like this and from the thousands of Reddit posts about "the dreaded interview problem" only leads people to over think it and have worse anxiety and performance, not better.
The interview to my first job was just listening to my then-boss talk about the company for 30 minutes, the second was stonewalling while my boss grilled me to make sure I know what I said I know.
You're not going to be able to "train" for that just like you can't "train" for getting rejected for dating, you just have to learn social interactions and go do it a couple of times.
----
I did just remember my worst interview experience, where, after being jobless for a number of years (early on, mind. I'm still young) I applied for phone IT support. - the interviewers asked me to:
"describe the best vacation you had"
"I haven't really been on a vacation" (I haven't been working, poor family, etc)
"Ok describe the vacation you would like to have"
"... I literally don't want a vacation.. I am looking to find work." (Jobless.for.years. every day has been a mediocre vacation up until this point.)
"..... Ok just tell us a story about a vacation"
"....... Ok I suppose I'll go to Rome then? And uh... " Draws blanks
You can't be prepared for interviews where the interviewers are shit, nor if they blindside you with questions like that.
You also might lose your ability to detect bullshit if you try.
If the company you're interviewing for is among the highest paying companies in the world, where you can literally change the quality of your life and your family's life by making enough money to comfortably retire as a multimillionaire by the time you're 35-40... then investing months doing the dreaded leetcode grind, mock interviews, and doing everything in your power to prepare for it is absolutely worth it.
In fact, seeing just how few people are willing to actually invest time and effort into excelling at an interview process that can tangibly improve ones life in ways very few other professional careers can is even more of a reason to do it. Every time I see people who are dismissive of technical questions, rant about how it's unfair that interviewers expect them to understand fundamental data structures, algorithms, time complexity, and think that all they should need to know to be a developer is how to glue a few APIs together, it makes me both sad to see how low of a standard we hold ourselves to, but also in a selfish way it makes me happy knowing that the competition for competent developers is so low.
Because if you need a job, the wild asymmetry between you and the interviewers.
You have to be ON for that short time and ready to deal with questions like what you got about "best vacation" or in the next question code a red-green tree implementation, followed seconds later by describing a full scale cloud architecture.
All of that in an hour.
And if you falter anywhere along the line, they reject you and you worry about how you will feed and clothe yourself and your family.
I had a career in recruiting before moving into eng and I loved interviewing. I'd bullshit with the interviewer, we'd talk about shared interests, and we'd talk about recruiting techniques for a little while. I passed the vast majority of interviews with absolutely minimal prep.
I'm a year into an eng career and I've already failed more technical interviews than I failed in my entire recruiting career.
Apples to oranges.
Instead all the feedback seems like "you did good, but you should work on..."
Regarding the 'pay later' thing, I wonder if the term is too short? Let's say theoretically I sign up, completely and utterly bomb the first mock interview, and decide I need to spend 3 months doing hackerrank every weekend. Then I do another one, and i'm doing better, by the time I get the actual job the time period has expired?