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I hate what Silicon Valley companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) have done to the software engineer interviewing process. It heavily favors recent college graduates

I hate what Silicon Valley companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) have done to the software engineer interviewing process. It heavily favors recent college graduates and destroys job mobility for older senior engineers who have a busy life. For example, look at the answers to this Quora question about interviewing: http://www.quora.com/How-much-time-did-you-spend-preparing-for-Googles-interviews?share=1 http://www.quora.com/How-much-time-did-you-spend-preparing-f... The first reply mentions spending 5 weeks of studying, 2.5 hours every weekday and 8 hours on every weekend day. That's 28.5 hours of studying every week. 5 weeks of that is 142.5 hours. And he also spent time doing mock interviews. I have a family and as a senior engineer I'm busy with work. What little free time I have is spent keeping up with new technologies. It has been many years since college. This process is basically very hostile to most senior engineers who have years of experience. I wish more companies would recognize this and change their process.

crucifiction 12y ago
People who are studying that much for the interview are never going to make it at those companies even if they "pass" the interview. They will be managed out in a year or so since weeks of studying to produce actual work isn't really a viable strategy. Having done 200+ interviews at one of the Big Companies you can generally see through "studied and memorized the question" from earnest attempts at solving it as well (asking them WHY they are doing something is an easy tell). If I were going out to interview again, the main thing I would brush up on is coding small example problems on a piece of paper/white board. The transition from IDE+internet -> whiteboard in a high pressure situation is not something you want to be coming in cold for. If you are a senior engineer, the problems/coding themselves shouldn't be that hard to tackle blind, but doing them on a whiteboard will throw you off if you haven't tried recently.

crucifiction 12y ago

People who are studying that much for the interview are never going to make it at those companies even if they "pass" the interview. They will be managed out in a year or so since weeks of studying to produce actual work isn't really a viable strategy. Having done 200+ interviews at one of the Big Companies you can generally see through "studied and memorized the question" from earnest attempts at solving it as well (asking them WHY they are doing something is an easy tell). If I were going out to interview again, the main thing I would brush up on is coding small example problems on a piece of paper/white board. The transition from IDE+internet -> whiteboard in a high pressure situation is not something you want to be coming in cold for. If you are a senior engineer, the problems/coding themselves shouldn't be that hard to tackle blind, but doing them on a whiteboard will throw you off if you haven't tried recently.