Slack Thread |
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Sean |
couple of thoughts after going through some FAANG onsites. I see that there are some materials that say that the interviewers guide you through the interviews and give you hints but I experienced that wasn't always the case. When doing system design or coding interviews I was given a problem and the interviewer didn't really care to correct me or guide me throughout during the entire session. Even when I asked for some clarification on the requirements during system design, or when I asked whether I was doing down the right path during coding interviews, I got little to no feedback from the interviewers which left me fishing for information in the dark. I don't know if this was intentional or if there was some under-preparation from the interviewer's side but it threw me off balance during interviews. Just a heads up for people who haven't experienced this yet and just be aware. (fyi I haven't heard back from them but I'm not really optimistic about it) |
Abhishek Sheshagiri |
Hey Sean, I am really sorry that you had such an experience but do let the recruiter know about this. If they feel you deserve a second chance, you might get one. As far as I have heard so far the interviews are meant to be a discussion is what the FAANG companies recruiters wants. |
Alex Chiou |
Yeah, even at Big Tech, you can roll a bad interviewer - Sorry that you didn't have a good experience. The interview process also varies among Big Tech - I feel like Google and Facebook are more standardized, but I've heard the other 3 have more variance, especially Amazon as they are in hypergrowth from a headcount perspective. Something important I want to mention here is that the interviewer is meant to bring out the best in you and this will require some talking on their end, but there's some nuance to this. I can elaborate by breaking down more of how I was trained as an interviewer at Facebook. In particular, a good interviewer's job is to get signal of the candidate's skills. This means that even though the interview should feel like more of a conversation, the candidate has to be clearly driving the conversation. When it comes to how much the interviewer responds, this means that we need to be on the lookout for what I call "fishing". Fishing is when the candidate doesn't seem to have a very clear idea of what they're doing, so they just propose something without a lot of conviction and hope the interviewer will tell them yes or no. The idea is that the candidate wins either way: If yes, then proceed down the path, if no, then propose other things. The problem here is that the interviewer is doing most of the work here crafting the solution, when it should be the other way around. This means that I would describe a good interviewer as more of a slight helping hand rather than a guide, which implies a more proactive stance. To clarify, let's have an example where I'm the interviewer giving a tricky graph traversal problem where the solution is DFS-based. If the candidate says something like, "Well, this seems like a graph problem, so I think DFS would be good here. Does that make sense?", I would perceive this as fishing as they aren't really justifying their strategy. I would say something more neutral like, "Well, we can code it up and find out if it works.", because I can't really say yes or no without doing a good amount of the problem for them. However, let's say that the candidate says something like, "We can envision X as nodes and Y as edges, so we can treat this as a graph or tree. Given that the problem requires us to prioritize the leaf nodes, we can use DFS to find the solution. I will implement DFS by doing A, B, C. It's better than BFS because of D, and these other solutions E, F, and G don't work as well because of these reasons. Does this make sense?" To me, this candidate clearly has a very strong grip of the problem. They are 95% sure, so they have done a lot of the work already. In this case, I would say something more affirmative like, "Yep, this makes sense!". Overall, this is a really tricky balance to strike, and obviously, we don't always get it right. At least for me, I'm always rooting for the candidate, which is why I don't want to give too many hints - This means you don't get enough signal and you need to fail them. Anyways, hope this helps @Sean and sheds light on what the perspective is like on the other side of the table (Big Tech interviewer's side) for folks in this channel. |
Sean |
thanks for the encouragement @Abhishek Sheshagiri and thanks for the valuable insight @Alex. This is giving me something to think about when framing my answers |