Panel Discussion With FAANG Engineering Hiring Managers at Silicon Valley Code Camp 2019

all right folks thank you all for being here my name is so hum around the two founders of interview kick-start you if you're here you probably cannot miss it there are a few posters and everything around here we are in nutshell just to get going there a school for technical interview prep as as you might know we have been around for about five years we have about 2,500 alumni all across us we have generated offers north of 100 million dollars at this point and the focus is to crack technical interviews at some of the toughest companies or what they say Fang companies for those of you do not know F e ng or F Aang depending on who you ask well it is not a government certified acronym is just human said if our acronym Facebook Amazon Apple Netflix Google and elaborate on that a little bit later we are here for the for a panel discussion of of hiring managers from these companies generally very difficult to actually get hiring managers from top companies talking at at one place at one time when you are interviewing problem the interviewing process easy to get a hold of recruiters it's easy to hear from them much more than it is it is to hear from hiring managers so figured we should have a little chat with hiring managers as well just wanted to introduce the panel today Nick Hill and Nick Hill is at Google in one of the core engineering teams and a very delightful guy a very happy delightful guy I've had a very good conversations with him over time that's that's him Monell same thing one of nicholae the coach on our platform whenever kids talk platform so is monel morale teachers is it Netflix and very good on the system design side of things when I when teaching system design the reviews are just stellar so welcome Nikhil Oh No thank you being here Geraldo Geraldo is at Facebook he manages one of the teams at Facebook Harold got to know last year before that he worked at hacker rank doing a lot of their content possibly all of their content as well managing that thank you welcome please Jonnie Jonnie Jonnie and i have known each other for a long time now lord knows like five years or something like that for years yeah still yeah I still here despite despite knowing me for swimming so long and Yanni is also coaching our platform source and although Yanni teaches concurrency extremely well some of some of the reviews it should read it's amazing anyway he's Rani's at Apple he he was an engineering manager on Siri and he's now at one of their stealth projects do not ask him what it is I want to be very clear the opinions and the discussion are are not the company's necessarily these are their personal opinions from their own cognitive understanding of how the world works and and don't necessarily just line it up to the company's yeah so with that I'll let Ryan take over Ryan is an is my partner in crime for the the for enemy kickstart he used to work at accel partners before this accel partners is VC firms they have invest Excel is invested in practically all big names that you have heard of Dropbox and slack and a number of other things he was there Facebook as well use it for five years I'll let Ryan Ryan go from here okay so as you can tell we seem to be missing somebody from Amazon that's right it's no bias against Amazon not at all we actually had a last minute cancellation and so tom is going to be stepping in yeah because what you know while while this is a frank panel the reality is that if you look if you look at the top companies right even beyond this LinkedIn uber Airbnb box Dropbox they all have very tough interview processes or quite quite challenging and so soham is going to be stepping in also Thomas thought more deeply about technically into used and really I think was conceivable so he's he's going to be adding some stuff to this as well okay so just quick anecdote to get started right I have a question who knows how the acronym Frank ape about now obviously it stands over the stands but who does anybody know how who-who who came up with the acronym close jim cramer in Mad Money I was impressive yeah I don't know do you know that exactly yes Jim Cramer in one of his moments on Mad Money came up with Fang and now it's stuck also quick show of hands how many of you here have either thought of or are thinking of applying to any of the fine companies Oh everybody great somebody asked me the other day what is the one question that all software engineers think about at least once in their life that is a question that is a question usually multiple times in your life because many people fail the first time around right so so so that's what we're gonna be talking about today I'm gonna be asking a bunch of questions we try and glean some insight some of it is generic across the companies and we'll try to get some specific insights on specific companies as well and then we'll have a lot of opportunity for everybody to ask questions so you know first question to each of you maybe Jana we start from you this direction why do you work at Apple well why work at Apple is half why work anywhere and half why work at Apple specifically so why worked anywhere is I talk to people and I look for opportunities and sometimes opportunities present themselves for example I'm wearing right now a Bloomberg hoodie and if you look at my LinkedIn I've worked at Intel and AMD and Microsoft and and Apple and Bloomberg you might say well why do Berg well because I met a guy I responded to a recruiter and I met a guy in and I wanted a free trip to New York because why not and then they told me well we actually are opening up an office in San Francisco do you want to come in be the first local hire and help this guy open the office in San Francisco and I thought well that's something I've never done right so a lot of times I choose companies based on something I've never done it doesn't have to be Fang or it doesn't have to have to be a top-tier name now why Apple Apple gave me one of these unique opportunities I'm more a concurrency a SOHO mentioned machine concurrency low-level like Triple A games streaming video person and I met a guy who sold his startup to Apple Daniel gross was a really cool guy and he was really excited about hiring very technical managers and they were working on NLP ml which I'd never done before but he said look you know you're smart guy you can figure it out and so I joined that that team for that opportunity so that's how I got that awesome haroldo what makes you work at Facebook yes good question well I failed the Google interview I'm kidding actually funny thing is today's exactly five days five years I got a reminder on my phone from my first on site with Facebook which I failed five years ago and now I'm kind of like happy to be here as a hiring manager from Facebook eventually I made it in Y Facebook for me I I kind of always wanted to go to one of the fine companies what made me choose Facebook specifically is that I'm finding the right balance of all the perks and all the advantages of working at a big company compensation and perks they they they really treat us well there but at Facebook I feel like the pace of learning the pace of work there is still a little bit of that hack culture that is still alive at least I see it in my team now I see it I see it everywhere around it so the pace of learning and just overall kind of that pace of work you don't get that like big company slowdown that some people say happens in the other companies so for me it made sense that kind of balance on top of that more specifically when I interviewed and I'm only I've only been there for about five months now I really connected and clicked well with the team that I'm managing now with a hiring manager with a director with the entire organization so it was also from like a people perspective I really enjoyed like from from all the interviews that I went it was like my favorite day of incites ever so that's what's the kind of like a personal reason the second one again apart from all the great shows [Laughter] so again disclaimer I'm here for myself what he hears from me I think I never looked at joining Netflix is like it's a big company I look at few things for me it was the unique culture which I don't think is for everyone so if you should really look into it what it means to you and if it's actually gonna work for you second one was opportunities for impact you know pretty much working most of the areas that Netflix functions internally I worked on building their media cloud infrastructure I build a stream processing platforms done large-scale data stores and set out so ability to work at on the cloud and at scale I think those four things were the reasons why I ended up at Netflix and I've been there for about eight years now so Wow thank you so if you asked the question to my wife her only answer is the food if while it is as close as it gets Google has been one of my dream companies that I always wanted to join and I'm glad I actually entered into it and I would say if I had to put my finger on one reason why I kind of continue to stay there and probably stay there for some time to come is you are let's say you're in a meeting room or discussing a problem at Google for any situation you are you can practically be sure that you are never the smartest man in the room that to me has been one of the most interesting learning place at Google because you just cannot be the smartest man in the room at Google and that's it that is the reason I'm gonna stay there for a while okay so box why did they hire you that's a top-secret man why would they hire me now pretty quickly so I was coming out of eBay eBay one thing eBay done really well was killing sorry for those of you don't know so hum was the first director of engineering at box and stayed with box to the IPO I didn't join his obviously I joined us and I see and then I box was looking to scale at the time and of the few companies that had actually scaled this is 2005 1/8 sorry eBay was one that had done really really good scale and and that's how I got hired and and why one condition when I got hired was that I will work everywhere in the stack like you you can't tell me to just work here and that's it because that's how I had done that anyway and and they laughed at me literally and said of course you don't know where to start up is do you I'm like yes I don't this is my first startup and since then I worked an entire stack there was a point when I knew the entire stack inside and out what of that company so I wanted that feeling I wanted that impact and and the company gave me even today in boxes boxes a is one of the best-kept secrets in the Bay Area like a really good culture like no culture it's really supportive fun culture as well should have asked me why do you work at interview kickstart I suppose I just have fun various okay so you know the one of the things that is common across all of these companies is that the hiring bar is really high right it they have incredibly tough interview processes very challenging Heraldo talked about how you know he just got the reminder five years later you know and is happy to be there so what I want to do is we know that there are three or four areas that all of these companies look at right we know that they look at algorithmic interviews system design interviews domain-specific interviews behavioral interviews broadly right so I'm gonna go very quickly down the path maybe start with nickel this time if you guys could just tell me what the typical mix is is there a typical mix is there any area that they focus on particularly more versus the others anything you know is there any type of area within algorithms that you know you tend to get more questions by luck or you know whatever just give me a mix in a sense of what the interview process is like very quickly so very quickly I have to go through it right the most important thing over here is if you get like five or six rounds the most important thing is you don't have to ace all the rounds actually is one thing I would like to specify over here so if you go into your first round and if it does not turn out well that's absolutely fine because every round is different every interview feedback is sent out differently and across all these companies I'm guessing there is a panel sitting outside who have no idea about what these things are doing so that would be my only one thing like every round is different and if you mess up one round it's still not end of story at all and in terms of a mix nickel is there some sort of you know is there is there more focus on technical more focus on behavior do you see any of those patterns at all not relevant question I think the behavioral part is interesting because you can only fail a behavioral round you can't like a sit so behavioral round cannot be a like a thing that okay this person is so amazing and behavioral that let's let it go on the technical side but if you are really an a-hole as he pointed out some time back then it's gonna be a problem so the technical right what are the types of areas that you need it's a mix of types of skin it's it's at least at Google however many interviews I have done or I have gotten read the read the feedback from the interviews it's always about take the simplest problem scale it that has been the theme throughout so it's it could be the easiest problem of reversing the string but once you make it to go scale how do you do that is always I've seen okay what about you is there any area that Netflix you know I know you guys have this really unique culture right which I'm going to come to great but in the general interview process is there any area that they focus on more or less so so let me give a little bit of context right so Netflix the teams and manager hats for the team what that means is you're not getting hired for the company you're not getting hard for a Central Committee to you would on you it's a team that decides what gaps there are in the teams what skill sets they need and the look for a person that can come at that skill or increase the skill level of the whole team right so you're coming in to raise the level of the team so every team's experience might be slightly unique although there's a common ground across all of them and so there's technical there's behavioral and both of them carry equal weight so you have to kind of be a good at both the reason for that is a portion of it is culture right I mean we look at hiring senior people we give them the freedom and responsibility and and we hold them responsible for doing what the do the decisions they take so we expect them to use good judgement right that means there's a lot of responsibility riding in your shoulders and that means you might end up communicating a lot with other folks other teams so if you're not great at behavioral it makes it a little challenging environment for you to succeed at right so that's one area of course is the based technical skill in algorithms system design again scale as I mentioned the same thing so I think that's one area the second one that I see people trip over is and again this has been talked about before as well is recruiters that Netflix are not recruiters in the traditional sense they're actually true business partners to the hiring manager there are really seasoned professionals and so they also have a say in really good say and how the outcome of the interview is so the way you interact with the recruiters that we work with it what with them they'll also be interviewing you right so it's it's sort of a HR / recruiter combination so in addition to the you know setting up here or logistics around interviews closing if you are successful they're also evaluating you on a behavioral perspective so I think that's a slightly unique part okay anything in particular Facebook that you've seen Facebook is kind of the opposite with Netflix most of the hiring happens in general you don't need to be assigned to a team unless you are a senior very special engineer like less a senior network engineer for the typical software engineering interviews the team gets assigned at bootcamp later on so what that means is the interview process is quite standardized across the company and it does focus really on like the core skills or basically just looking to hire smart people or people that that have really like prepared well for for that type of interview which means a lot of algorithmic questions and a lot of system design questions and it's very rare that there is domain-specific or language specific or questions in the interview process okay I think that's one thing that is absolutely common across these companies right no domain specific questions for these generalists is one thing that I would like to stress on yes so Apple is like Netflix and like a lot of companies out there you know we target we say thing and it's easy to think Google Facebook but think Microsoft think HP think these kind of companies they do not do the hiring committee thing they hire for a specific team and that doesn't mean it's necessarily a specific role on that team if you're an engineering director and you have a hundred person org and you're hiring 10-15 people you might slot somebody in depending on how they do on the interview but as you heard from my story in terms of joining Apple it would not have been like for example the Google or the Facebook track where you're hiring someone's gonna be an m/l manager and so they're on the m/l ladder so they're gonna get an ml generic interview I got a engineering manager interview and because there was a really strong fit and there was a specific profile that this person was looking for they were willing to hire and they could make that decision as a director by themselves so what I'll say about this is that ask the recruiter and look online these are not secrets we don't hide whether we are interview committee hiring whether we're like a GM style the director controls the hiring this is not secret information this is totally legit to ask your recruiter ask him what the process is and even the questions ask them I always ask for all my interviews what I do is I say hey can you tell me who's interviewing me can you send me their LinkedIn profile and can you give me the topic area that they're gonna talk to me about and they've never heard no sometimes they're proactive and they just give it to you sometimes you ask for it and they'll prepare it but nobody has ever said no why because it's not a secret we're not trying to like trick you like oh we're not going to tell this person we're gonna ask them a scaling question right we want you to feel comfortable in the interview and so we want you to be as as comfortable with the process as possible we're not gonna tell you yes here's the question we're gonna ask you but we'll tell you we're gonna talk about data structures or hey make sure you're familiar with hash tables and lists or these kind of things that that allow you to feel comfortable when you come in in terms of the general area you're looking at so ask your recruiter be open with them say hey what can you tell me who I'm gonna talk to can you tell me the general areas and the LinkedIn page is always great because we talked about behavioral connecting with people is important maybe less so at Facebook and Google because it goes to committee and they don't have a direct role in hiring you but in any team that's gonna hire directly and I do this as a hiring manager I ask everybody do you want to work with this person right and the way you you get everyone say yes is you do well behaviorally and one way to do well behaviorally is to know who you're talking to and to talk to them the way they expect to be spoken to so if you look on people's LinkedIn page and you say hey this person who's gonna interview a third person they are low level concurrency people well you can talk about that if the next person is a marketing person who's there to get your product experience don't talk to them about registers on CPUs like that that's not gonna help you right so I think if you approach it that way you can get a lot of insight before you show up and be more comfortable awesome so that's really interesting right because we have four folks here it's split two and two right so two sets of companies hire by our hiring committees and two it's more the team right so so very interesting right to understand the nuances and prepare accordingly now before we go with me Edward so another nuance is when you apply to Netflix the internal recruiting machinery is extremely well connected so if they find that your applique or more suited for a different role or there are couple roles that you're really well-suited for then they'll automatically match you as well so you're mindful so that we can get you to the right team and make sure you're really successful so sometimes when you apply they might say haters is another role that might be more suitable or more exciting for you do you want to check it out or not so you'll have an option if they find something else for you interesting that's another reason not to screw up on the behavioral side you want people do to connect you okay so on the behavioral side maybe I start with mono and then I have a follow-up question or so on so on the behavioral side ammonal Netflix is known to have this is like yeah I read that doc write this radical culture title openness right it's actually quite amazing it's it's quite amazing to read I think the only other company that I've seen which has put out stuff in a similar vein is Amazon right with their 14 leadership principles so talk to us about the behavioral interview process of it right we've talked about a technical it's algorithms data structures system design what are you asking on the behavioral side of stuff so I think everything is out there in the open people don't realize like it's the same document that's out there is the same document views internally you don't have a you know second version of it or a third version of it it's the same thing that you guys get to see online is what we get to see so whatever culture attributes there are and anytime you connect with Netflix the first thing they'll send you out is a link to the culture deck right this it'll read it if you have any questions so that's the first thing I mean take a look at it thoroughly see if attributes of that resonate with you or if you have any questions be curious about it and most of the behavioral stuff it's there I mean they're telling you what they're looking for in very explicit terms in over 10 plus pages right so you just have to go through it like this freedom there's responsibility this context of control do you work in an environment where you're more self driven right all these kind of attributes kind of come directly from these principles so I'd say just read the document and if you are able to exude those characteristics when you're working then you'd be a great fit if you see a there is half of the things here actually don't make sense me I don't like it then you may actually not like working on it right so I think that's a good thing that they put it completely out there and so you have a better idea of what's gonna happen internally right you can you can take one of those nine to ten attributes that we internally follow culture wise and there's detailed paragraph on it so you know actually what happens you get a glimpse of it internally and you can ask as many questions you want to directly or on any of those areas or the hiring manager when they talk to you so you can go into depth of any of those culture areas in a night you can ask them like what does this mean what are you looking for and they'll be happy to actually answer all the questions awesome so I don't know if you guys picked up on something that it Aldo said just now it was very passing comment but it was a really interesting comment and I want to go to that so Geraldo said and what she recorded Facebook interviews are set up to hire the smartest people or the people who prepare right and and it just moved on after that right but that's the reality right and so I you know I want to talk to all four of you about you guys have ended up in companies that people are desperate to get it right and you know what do you guys do so you know maybe start start with with who have I not started so far Nicola no I have sorry little yeah Geraldo right so how did you guys let's go one by one right how do you guys prepare folks for how they can prepare oh yeah yeah absolutely so my background is a little unique because I came from hacker rank and hacker rank is in a similar space where people use the site to practice for coding interviews and also kind of like the the main offering of the product to businesses is how to how can how can companies be better at testing the skills of Engineers so in a way I cheated the system a little bit because I was on the inside of it literally day in and day out I was working on coding questions algorithmic questions with my team but apart from that kind of like side note in general I would say that it does take a lot of work and a lot of preparation even if you knew how to do this kind of interviewing let's say like three four years ago and now you're considering of change jobs the skillset for interviewing is not the exact same thing as what you're doing on a day-to-day basis as an engineer for good or for bad and that we could have a whole other session about kind of like the interview process right now but overall I want to say a few things basically it does take a lot of work it takes a lot of practice I would say you know reading books going online and practicing coding exercises as much as possible or attending a kind of real kind of like boot camp experience like interview kick start are gonna put you at a much much higher chance of succeeding into this interviews the good thing is you prepare you don't have to prepare in a different way for the different companies even like smaller companies and startups they do follow a very similar format of of interviewing even as a manager at hacker rank I was talking to a lot of hiring managers in the industry in Silicon Valley the guidelines that I was personally giving them was keep your interviews as general as possible keep them in a way as similar to Google Facebook's apples interviews as possible because you're gonna lose out on candidates because people are preparing kind of like a certain way for those interviews you need to compare kind of like you know apples to apples and not apples to oranges so overall the guideline in the industry was try to keep the the interviewing as standardized as possible focusing on core skills and not make a domain specific so long story short practicing a lot for this type of interviewing this type of technical interviewing pays off in the end and and I really like starting and putting in the effort Yani how do you provide you well everything he said what I would say is I have I optimized for certain things in my career and it depends what you're optimizing for some people like to be somewhere 20 years and that's cool me I like to try different things every now and then so every 3-4 years I end up moving and part of that is because whenever you're given the next challenge it it's probably not right in front of you is probably you'd like down there part of it is in Silicon Valley we have four-year vests on our rsu's and you don't always get the best deal staying where you're at it's just the way the world works so what I would add to this is saying that I would I practice in ways that are artificial for me but are natural in the interview so for example when I code I don't just code on my computer I'll write it down with a paper and pencil or I'll write it on the whiteboard right because it's a different skill it's a different way of thinking you don't write code on the whiteboard every day you just don't write so just take that variable away don't just practice that so you don't have to think about it right and and what you really are practicing is not a specific problem it's just getting in that mindset like remembering how a hash-table works inside you don't have to remember the perfect hash table you don't have to be familiar with like papers on this no one's ever going to use this crappy hash table I wrote in my interview but I just need the general concepts that the basic idea and I just need to refresh that because as I see and now as an engineering manager for so long I don't deal with this stuff every day so just bring it up and bring it up in the context in the way that I'm gonna have to present it in the interview awesome yeah watch a bunch of Netflix shows I think I think I'll break it down to three things right anytime you go into an interview you have a you're there to impress them you're there to show what your skill sets are so you have a pretty short window in proving that whether it's tech whether it's behavioral at the system design so I think it takes some prep to figure out how you're going to concisely put yourselves across how are you gonna concisely express yourself right on a day to day basis you get multiple chances you're in meetings you can go back to your colleague on your desk you can tap on the shoulder and correct yourself or if you think about something else you can go back and do it right here you have to be you know really alert make sure you've practiced how you use certain terminology certain phrase phrases that are common when you want to express something so you end up saving a little bit more time than you're expressing things right I think that helps really in the system design quoting of course it's been covered you have to you know practice on the board good use of the whiteboard with behavioral this practice a few questions that you think you might get you know try and anticipate a few things and see how you communicate about it like for example you know tell me something about what you've been doing your team right what's your role that that's an amazing time to shine like if you don't have an elevator pitch then you you kind of lose out on it so that first one or two minutes nail it down if you have to write it down like showcase what you did like how your role was crucial in your team how did it end up impacting the team what technical skills that you either learnt or leverage to kind of make that happen so I think those you know sometimes you have this one to five minutes to kind of really shine the balls in your court something it's extremely important to kind of prep for that right yeah if I think of any so I'll probably share my own story that might be the most apt over here and I'll share the story starting from five years back when I thought I was doing really good at my previous job kind of really happy with the team the work that we were doing and then an intake you recall I was like okay yeah let's do it I went and like I feel like really bad and I'm like wait what what just happened to here I thought I was doing really well and it didn't work out and then I took a pause from this whole thing three years later I was again interviewing but this time it was a little different and that's what I would like to categorize myself in the block and you know people hate categorizing but I will do anyways so I feel like you know when I was trying to go out there interviewing I belong to the second category which probably is the biggest lot of the three categories I'm going to describe one is those kind of people who are the real go-getters dude really no I'll got an editor which was really well they know the ins and outs of technology really really well and at the same time they might also happen to be amazing at behavior rounds so they don't need to do anything they just need to go out there step into entry process one two three someone will catch them and in there I knew I was not that guy so realizing that was the biggest kind of aha moment for me and I knew it but let's just acknowledge it and second was this big category in the middle they're probably most of us I'm just gonna claim it fall where it's like we are good at what we do we probably suck at some other things but it may or may not be converting when we actually step into an interview round if you belong to you this category I was there and then there's this third who probably are just not meant for software they have something some other calling I belong to the second and the one thing that changed my whole set of was kind of preparing for it so either you can do it this way where you can say I'll keep interviewing and over the pay year here I'll end up somewhere that's one way of going about interviews so you basically go every interview every two months and then find a job and join that or other kind we like I'm gonna really interview I'm gonna change this thing and I'm gonna change one time only so I'm gonna prepare for it this is where I started preparing a lot I think I made a decision in January as a resolution that I'm gonna change a company my February excited really preparing and and then in February I took vacation I marked a vacation day in my calendar for May or June for 14 days and in those 14 days I was going to interview at all the top tech companies is what I had decided in February and then I prepared when Feb March and those 14 days of that two weeks I interviewed at 10 top-tier companies and converted many of them that was the difference in my preparation in those five months versus what I had done before and at a time I was very happy to say like okay there were five companies dropped here who were ready to hire me like they were competing with each other that does not happen for me so yeah I mean that's how I landed it it took me about five months and I'm just glad it happened ok awesome another thank you for sharing so some based on what we see at at work right when we are working so we work with a whole bunch of folks talk about the prep process right what are you seeing people do what do you see people do when they come to the course what did you see people doing beyond that how are they actually preparing for these interviews not very different from what what everybody has said here the path that what we have done is we have structured entire path through this so so people coming to the program know where to start where to end how much effort to put where generally two to four months four months five months some people take longer to eight months but very very persistently people prepare our Gardens on data structures on system design on a variety of system design things as well as behavioral so pretty much exactly in lines a little bit on domain stuff as well okay so you know one thing I just want to add very quickly mock interviews whether it is your friends or go to LinkedIn there are people who take mock interviews or I care does micro and mock interviews mock interviews change the game like you being in that set up at least for me being in that set up doing those mock interviews tens of them and then go into an interview was buried very very different once again either you are that category number two if you're one you know we're at the wrong place right now ya know so that that's actually exactly what I'm gonna point out the the the thing about this interview process is that you don't get feedback right and so because there's no feedback loop it's very difficult to get better right you're essentially flying blind so whenever you are preparing to Yanni's point right it was a very good point and nickels mention the same thing it's simulate those environments right get yourself into a deliberate practice kind of situation right do mock interviews to stuff on whiteboard actually time yourself when you're solving questions right it's a lot about prep now sorry saw me only see some should yeah last couple of questions before we throw this open to each of you what is the one thing you wish somebody told you five years ago which you think will help folks now let's go back about interviewing about about changing I'll say one line which is and Sylla billion now interviewing is not an art it's a skill is what I say now after clearing it so it's not an art it's a skill I I think keeping a tab on the evolving space though in the sense that if you're not in the market for a while the market space and the way the interview is changing so much that it helps to get a gauge of what they're what are they asking now right it's significantly different from what it used to be four or five years ago versus what it's now and it's constantly evolving okay great for me I think it will be things that already got mention a little bit but mock interviews and whiteboarding when I was failing five years ago when I failed the Facebook interview and a few others I had only practiced by coding on my laptop and not putting myself on the real mind set of interviews I went through a loop of like not managing to get offers and then I went back and like with mock interviews with whiteboards by looking at real interview questions so putting yourself in that mindset for as long as possible is what what made a difference everything people have said so far is really important probably even more important what I'm about to say but what I will say is every one of us have interviewed and failed and so you should never approach us as a hundred percent accident no one gets 100 percent so you should talk to people but don't emotionally invest everything in one interview Google Facebook talk to lots of different companies and be open to them because one thing I didn't realize my my first company I interned at a company because my mom had worked there and then I went to Microsoft and so early in my career I was always the big company and sometimes you get these random opportunities like the Bloomberg opportunity I told you guys about be open to the opportunities right like if you're open to those opportunities you can talk to five six seven companies you only need one at the end right so don't think you have to do a hundred percent and don't feel bad if you don't get a hundred percent so what's the one thing that you wish people told you five years ago it's a date not a test you have to prepare for it like it's a test and at the end of the day it's a it's it's a date and you have to convince the other person that that you want to work they want to work with you right that that is a big part of it right that's a big part of if you convince you can convince that and you are on the fence on the technical side will still go in your favor I think somebody here said something interesting your goal of the date is to get the second date yes it's it's a speed date from the day it's a speed date you know Oh No on a lighter note when when I was coming on board to join Ikey as a co-founder and so um told me this he said you know this interview is a date I think this guy's got this all wrong but it makes so much of sense right you can't predict the outcome it's not a standardized test okay so before I throw this open to questions a couple of interesting things that have come up today that I just want to wrap up with and then I'm gonna take a couple of questions because we are running out of time one I think is the fact that while these companies are all out there there are nuances to all these companies some in the way they hire like hiring committees versus non hiring committees so there are differences a lot of this stuff is out there to the points that they made right you know go online read about it it's a well-documented process go look make the effort a second point third point everybody prepares everybody prepares you know the sad fact of the matter is that people don't say they prepared right but everybody progress now they say it also all the top companies send out prep material for you to go through and you think about it if you only sitting in an interview he is a super valuable resource so cerrado so is monel so is Nikhil the company doesn't want them to waste their time I saw so right companies don't want to waste their time right they don't want the engineers to waste their time they want the engineers to be building the world-changing products that they are known for they are investing really valuable resources in these folks coming to interview you all these guys are actually trained interviewers right so you must prepare they want you to prepare number three the third interesting point is it's not only about technical prep you also need to prepare behaviorally right that's not something most engineers think about right you don't have to pass every round nickel bar at the point you can afford to make mistakes and still get in everybody fails this is not a hundred percent hit rate there is no way you should be completely dejected pick up move on second attempt at Facebook Google Yanni talked about failing everybody's stock Rafi right that that's that is a key learning in this process right and the last point is that today there is no ambiguity in how you should prepare there are structured very concise approaches I K is one of them right but they are out there they involve taking time preparing we believe that it makes sense to actually learn from experts that's why all of these guys teach on the platform you know it only makes sense to learn from hiring managers but there are other schools of thought as well and simulate those environments tests classes mock interviews talk to these experts it can absolutely be done it is science there's very little art it's largely science right now with that let me throw this open to questions I think we have time only for a couple of questions maybe two three questions so whoever wants to start Kevin okey can borrow my mic sorry while he's taking the mic I thought of a very interesting thing one really important thing when you're prepping is look at any material that's being put out by your interviewers because you know who's it going to interview you look at the LinkedIn profile look at YouTube have given presentations look at what the company has put out in that domain or the team you are working for you kill a lot of pointers on what preference they have for scaling what preference they have for how they build technology the preference of how they communicate what they're passionate about and just mirror some of that stuff and you you'll be under you know good foot to start off with okay you've mentioned a few things already but can can each of you mention a favorite resource that in your preparation that you might have utilized I I agree and post that by the way pause there it will be lead code and geeks for geeks I when I was used to commuting else really geeks for geeks just for fun it was a lot of fun just to read it I mean it I still read it I think you covered coding so I will mention a few things about system design so there's a really good book called designing data intensive applications that's a great book and there's some blogs high scalability what I do is I look at specific companies the top tier companies and their interview blogs I follow that and if you're targeting a certain company just lead to a bunch of blogs interview for so I think that significantly helps in before interviewing for the last month I was reading white papers all through for every major open source technology out there and I read that in and out before interviewing high scalability so I scalability dorg and then each of the companies they again go to Google Facebook Apple likes uber lyft named them right Airbnb they have their engineering blogs and sometimes they have interesting content they put out there so it just takes five minutes to scan if you find anything interesting read through it and then there's designing data intensive systems it's kind of a good pace thing that covers everything there's another nice open source book called distributed systems of fun and profit it's a pretty small one as you could just read through that you get a feel of what's out there for scaling systems right there are some conferences that you might end up going for software architecture where there are some speakers and I ended up following their blogs like martin Lippmann was speaking one day I ended up following his blog has helped tremendously what is your advice for somebody who is trying to break into the industry but has limited professional experience so I think start by putting out some projects on github I think that's a great way to showcase what you can do if you have a open source project of interest pick a few tickets there and get involved it's a it's a design to get documentation ticket or a small coding ticket right so that way you established experience even before you get in no not any more than what one and I said just expect that the the road is going to be somewhat longer it is it is quite normal when you're trying to get on the industry especially the bigger better companies it is going to be somewhat longer there are these companies also have peripheral roles so to speak these are not core software engineering roles but like similar to software engineering where the interview processes are slightly lighter as well so that might be a very good stepping stone as well like support engineering or SWAT engineering tier 3 customer success which also needs bug fixes to be done so that that's a very good way to get the foot into the door don't get stuck with just like the top 10 or top yes getting your foot in the door is important I almost becoming a software engineer into an unknown company then like a tech support role in a bigger company because I've had a few friends that have been stuck in these support roles for way too long well I've seen some friends who did the opposite approach and a year later they managed to get it unfortunately I do not disagree with you there yes yes how do you guys feel about the interview process in Silicon Valley do you feel like it's effective or something I should change or is it broken well I guess my two cents on it is I'm curious what the alternative approaches are I I think for what it does it works fairly well you have to remember that the goal of the process isn't to hire you it's to hire lots of people and to not make a mistake one thing you'll learn I think we all know as managers at larger companies is that it is extremely hard to get rid of people who are not performing well like there there's a there's a lot of documentation involved there's a lot of risk to the team right I'm sure lots of people myself included have worked on a team that has maybe one person who is a bad apple let's say and it affects the entire productivity of the team so they are risk-averse in hiring and for being risk averse in hiring and for one analytical process and not a process that minimizes subjective bias you could you could say it has objective bias and that it does this really matter what we're asking you but there's no subjective bias it's like it's the same question whether you're a man or a woman or whether you're five years experience or ten years experience so so it's an objective process and it's optimizing for not making a mistake so I think in that sense it is doing what it's doing and it's doing a good job at it I think there are rare cases where there have been alternate ways of how people get hired like if you are really good in a certain domain some of the other stuff might be overlooked a little because you didn't know what you're getting onto the table the second one might be if you can show a big body of code that you've done right maybe you participate in an open-source project or you ask them like some companies give home exercise right you you really Excel treated like a product give it back there might be a little lenient on you on on the stuff that you do on the white board so I think there are slight some variations of it but that means you'll have to work in that area to make yourself known you know create your own branding I think that's something they haven't talked about but there ways to create your own brand you know blogs conference talks put out ideas start an open-source project their multitude ways of building an engineering brand I think that would help as well one thing though to Satan I think it's it's a good question to ask but for if I'm an individual looking for a job it's not a productive question for me because you're not gonna change the process this is the process and and what you can do is prepare for it like I want to go to Hawaii and domestic carriers seat with Sox names crammed like this but go to Hawaii that's what you're gonna do right orange hi and I totally understand the scalability of recruitment and efforts that are needed and we need objective bias when we are hiring somebody I totally understand that and I'm also thinking at the same time so I I came from India and India there's a lot of population and a lot of students and when college admissions are done in India a long time back not now necessarily when college admissions were done in India you know there were lots of students who want to get into very good colleges or want to get into colleges so I'm just comparing that with the recruitment over here where there are lots of people who want to get into very good companies or general companies and there is a problem of scale and one of the ways the college admissions were done back in India when I please when I was there were you know you you do your homework you prep your studying you do everything and then there are standardized tests there are some standardized tests and you get kind of a score and things like that and admissions are based on that for and so students don't have to do that again and again for each company or they don't have to just have one you know 30-minute session or a one-hour session to prove them themselves I'm just wondering like you know maybe there are other ways to solve this scalability recruitment problems combining some of the solutions like this where we can get better candidates also but not have to go through I'm totally there for prep but just to do this for each and every company and keep on doing it until an infinite loop until you break out where you get somebody you know you'll get a job so no you're not preparing for each and every company right you're preparing once you preparing you're getting better at algorithms you're getting better at designing systems you're getting better at your behavioral answers you are sharpening your domain skills those are the four things that these companies look for right now beyond that it is it is in the interview room if that person happens to ask you about a project you had done 10 years ago then that's their curiosity rate that's that's the reality of that moment that's where it's the date not a test your preparation is very much like a test yeah I think the other thing that's very which is that this is the process now there are because that is something that I need to change if at all and we don't know what is so right now if you are in the mindset of thinking that everybody right it's nice to think about what could be next and here is the question who knows whether this is the wrong but right now this is because that's the only way other people have said which is on much longer and just real quick and related to the same topic I agree that this is the way that's not gonna change anytime soon but I'm wondering from someone who's been in a higher hiring position I've been happy even though I'm quite young to build a team from scratch and whatnot and I wonder if you guys have had to have any different methods that are different from the standard way of going into an interview grilling somebody and the white board asking them to reverse a binary tree that I've worked successfully for you because I agree that the goal is for actually to find people that are aligned with your company goals with your group calls with and making sure that it doesn't turn out to be a bad apple right actually somebody that in the interview process it's very hard to actually find those skills because people who go to the interview they go with a single motivation of getting the job so they're going to portray their best selves I mean my experience when I've been in that position would have real people on the white board it's been harder much harder for me to see those skills then actually for example sitting down and pairing program with that person so right on doing things are more practical and related for example I love to give problems of my everyday company and then asking them to solve it and see how they come up with that there is a session called end residency in lot of companies by the way thank the panel thank you so much guys [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Silicon Valley Code Camp

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Id: JTopQ_u5rhc

Length: 59min 13sec (3553 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2019