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Actually, I think I did apply to Amazon at one point. Haven't received any word on it.
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Jun 8, 2017 22:38
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return0 posted:You should apply to Amazon, it's actually cool and good. Having worked there, it depends. There's a reason that the average job lifespan of an SDE is 3 years there. (Or is it 2?) Doc Hawkins posted:I'm rooting for you, Pollyanna. If you're willing to do so, would you mind sharing why via post or PM?
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Jun 8, 2017 23:09
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My experience in the Google interview was that it was about 25% domain based and 75% general algorithm knowledge. My mistake in the first interview was in assuming I could let natural ability do its thing and that light study of all the materials was enough. I didn't do that poorly, but it was clear in interview that my algorithm skills weren't up to par. The second interview I took two weeks off work to prep for and actually put in the time to learn algorithms top to bottom and felt like the interview really wasn't hard at all (ironically I neglected domain knowledge and tripped up there, but whatever, I got the job). If you are interested in applying (and you really should be, this place is much better anywhere else I've worked) doing all of Cracking the Coding Interview and working on Interview Cake or CLRS or whatever should be something you do.
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Jun 9, 2017 02:47
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Is CLRS a generally accepted resource for studying algorithms and big o? My college course for software development was all practical so I don't know anything about implementing data structures, big O, or common algorithms like sorting (except bubble sort and binary search). I'm looking for what resource to study to get me up to par for tech industry interviews. Somebody on here reccomended me a different book previously, but it was extremely math based so I found it very hard to follow. Im also starting to read CtCI, it seems useful but some of the problems are pretty daunting because I lack any background knowledge about some of the structures, like the binary search trees.
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Jun 9, 2017 14:26
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Ornithology posted:Is CLRS a generally accepted resource for studying algorithms and big o? My college course for software development was all practical so I don't know anything about implementing data structures, big O, or common algorithms like sorting (except bubble sort and binary search). I'm looking for what resource to study to get me up to par for tech industry interviews. Somebody on here reccomended me a different book previously, but it was extremely math based so I found it very hard to follow. I'm in a similar position, never got taught the algorithms fun that ctci is based off of. Would like an answer to this too.
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Jun 9, 2017 14:43
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It's not like any of these things are esoteric, once you know the names of the things you should know (binary search, sorting, etc), just straight up search for those on Google and you'll find tons of stuff. Youtube has a ton of videos which visually show various sorting algorithms working, which can be a big help in understanding what they do.
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Jun 9, 2017 16:50
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Skandranon posted:It's not like any of these things are esoteric, once you know the names of the things you should know (binary search, sorting, etc), just straight up search for those on Google and you'll find tons of stuff. Youtube has a ton of videos which visually show various sorting algorithms working, which can be a big help in understanding what they do. That makes sense. I'll work through the book once I get home.
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Jun 9, 2017 16:52
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Skandranon posted:It's not like any of these things are esoteric, once you know the names of the things you should know (binary search, sorting, etc), just straight up search for those on Google and you'll find tons of stuff. Youtube has a ton of videos which visually show various sorting algorithms working, which can be a big help in understanding what they do. This one is my favorite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqI6KT6cOas
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Jun 9, 2017 17:26
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Anyone else going to the Goto conference in Amsterdam next week?
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Jun 9, 2017 17:28
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I thought that conference was considered harmful?
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Jun 9, 2017 17:37
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Skandranon posted:It's not like any of these things are esoteric, once you know the names of the things you should know (binary search, sorting, etc), just straight up search for those on Google and you'll find tons of stuff. Youtube has a ton of videos which visually show various sorting algorithms working, which can be a big help in understanding what they do. Part of the issue is that I don't know what's important to know beyond the few algorithms I mentioned. The book seems like a good resource to determine this info which is why I was asking if it's any good.
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Jun 9, 2017 17:50
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Carbon dioxide posted:Anyone else going to the Goto conference in Amsterdam next week? That conference name is an Abbott and Costello routine waiting to happen.
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Jun 9, 2017 17:52
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The Fool posted:This one is my favorite.
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Jun 9, 2017 18:03
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I never really understood how quicksort worked before I traced it on paper with a few times. Reading about these things is a good start but to really understand them you'll have to put them in real use with a pen and paper imho. Edit : phone posting typo correction AskYourself fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Jun 9, 2017 |
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Jun 9, 2017 18:54
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Ornithology posted:Is CLRS a generally accepted resource for studying algorithms and big o? My college course for software development was all practical so I don't know anything about implementing data structures, big O, or common algorithms like sorting (except bubble sort and binary search). I'm looking for what resource to study to get me up to par for tech industry interviews. Somebody on here reccomended me a different book previously, but it was extremely math based so I found it very hard to follow. CLRS covers everything you could possibly need and probably at greater depth than you actually need for an interview. The other book I used was The Algorithm Design Manual, which is much more focused but requires being able to read C.
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Jun 9, 2017 19:36
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return0 posted:You should apply to Amazon, it's actually cool and good. Compared to....?
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Jun 9, 2017 21:01
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Pixelboy posted:Compared to....? Probably compared to what we've heard/read about Amazon.
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Jun 9, 2017 22:57
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Amazon work life quality appears to vary quite a bit between departments and managers. Way more so than most other companies.
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Jun 9, 2017 23:08
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Yeah, I know a few people at Amazon who really like it there.
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Jun 9, 2017 23:37
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Yeah, likewise.
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Jun 9, 2017 23:40
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What are some solid resources out there for transitioning from the "I took a few database classes during my undergrad" to "I'm building a data warehouse for manufacturing researchers and I have no mentors at work?" I've started reading through the Data Warehousing Toolkit. We're currently in the "aggregate all of our data sources into historical DBs phase", and we have a staff of researchers making models who thus far rely on some of the systems guys to just scrap together excel spreadsheets for them to work with. I've been tasked with building or implementing whatever lays between those two problems and so far I've worked out that means a data warehouse and something to act as a front end for the researchers. I learned the phrase OLAP this week and then discovered there are like a billion software platforms that have already solved this problem to various degrees. This field seems less easy to find hard information on than stuff I'm used to. Where should I go after I finish this book?
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Jun 10, 2017 01:48
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return0 posted:You should apply to Amazon, it's actually cool and good. I remember hearing once from someone I know that used to work for Amazon that "being unable to work while on vacation" was levied as a legitimate criticism against him at some point.
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Jun 10, 2017 02:27
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How representative of 300k+ person companies have y'all generally found half-remembered anecdotes from acquaintances?
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Jun 10, 2017 02:41
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JawnV6 posted:How representative of 300k+ person companies have y'all generally found half-remembered anecdotes from acquaintances? I would say that Amazon and Uber are two well-known companies that have gotten a lot of negative press in the last few years about their work environment. Google and Microsoft are also two well-known companies that have not gotten similar negative press. Would you say that this is an untrue characterization? (If so, do you think that Amazon and Uber get no press/positive press? Or do you think that MS and Google get negative press?) If you think that's a correct characterization of the news, do you believe that it's random chance? I.e. it's a good bet that next month we'll hear stories that Microsoft harasses women and Google engineers all live in terror? Do you think that there is a vast media conspiracy against Amazon? It's fine to go #NotAllAmazons but is it unreasonable to start with the assumption that Amazon is a company that burns through engineers and doesn't give a poo poo about them?
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Jun 10, 2017 04:27
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This seems like an appropriate time to post the Steve Yegge rant, which I find fascinating, hilarious, and horrifying. It's years old and I still think it's valuable, even if the cultures and technologies have changed.
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Jun 10, 2017 05:17
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Carbon dioxide posted:Anyone else going to the Goto conference in Amsterdam next week? I live in the area, any cheap tickets left?
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Jun 10, 2017 09:51
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Keetron posted:I live in the area, any cheap tickets left? Kinda jealous that you live in Amsterdam.
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Jun 10, 2017 12:04
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Keetron posted:I live in the area, any cheap tickets left? My boss is paying so I don't know. But apparently if you know someone who went there before or who works for one of the sponsors, you can get a 15% off promo code from them. I don't have a code to share, though.
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Jun 10, 2017 20:16
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A colleague of mine is presenting there, I'll ask if there are some codes to pass around.
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Jun 10, 2017 22:11
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Volmarias posted:If you're willing to do so, would you mind sharing why via post or PM? I would not. I'm not ashamed of it, though it might not reflect well on me. Maybe it belongs in this thread anyway. I think I have an appropriate amount of impostor syndrome for someone with an extra-liberal arts degree who learned as they went through 4-5 years of web dev & ops experience. At the very beginning of that time, I was sometimes passed over for work due to (I strongly suspect) not having the right degree from the right university, or being unfamiliar with what gets covered in such programs: algorithms, O(n), data structures, C, FHS stuff, etc. But - maybe due to the webbiness or shabbiness of my work - I've never noticed a time when I or anyone I was working with could have benefited from having those things easily to mind. In my experience, people don't need to have heard the word "subexponential" to notice a hosed-up nested loop and to see a way to fix it, and it's no more practical to find a system's current bottleneck by reading through code-paths than to find a factory's by looking at the blueprints of every station. And none of it will matter if deploys happen only on Mondays, or everything's getting impulsively re-architected around an ESB, or the company is making the wrong product entirely, or has all but divided into warring tribes, all of which are the sorts of things I found myself working on more and more. When I started participating in hiring decisions a few years back, it was not at a place that put any weight on algorithms questions. But one failure mode I saw again and again was an excellent candidate getting rejected because they didn't know things which they "should know;" the interviewer and candidate will inevitably have had differing experiences with the same language or framework, but interviewers seemed to be biased towards thinking whatever only they knew was significant, and whatever only the candidate knew was, at best, interesting. The effect seemed to be stronger the more experience the candidate actually had; the longer they've worked, the more they 'should know." A friend once put it that developers are punished for everything they happen to not know, while managers are rewarded for everything they happen to know. I came to associate algorithm questions with this bias. Given what I've shared of my professional history, the reason I find this attitude personally frightening should be obvious, but I'm also convinced it harms the organizations which allow it. Companies which plan to be around in five years should also plan to continuously educate all of their employees on everything they "should know." In my view, unless you're a fly-by-night operation just looking for a fast buildout followed by an inflated exit, you should hire and promote based on integrity, motivation, capability, understanding, knowledge, and experience, in that exact order, because it's also the order of hardest to easiest to teach. (I stole the that list from Dee Hock, because I am an impostor.) I hope all that helps explain why nothing I've ever heard about Google's hiring process has told me they're looking for dev-sec-sys-org-ops ivory tower pinheads like me (though I've enjoyed keeping up with the re:Work stuff). Which, if true, is fine: they know what they need better than I do, and I know that my knowledge isn't really What's Really Important, because I've seen that exact bias at work. My mental health obliges me to think my skills are valuable, but not that everyone has to value them. Maybe to any company above a certain size and organizational competence, I couldn't be anything but a middling individual contributor. Last and least, I'm not convinced of Google's mission, either on paper or in practice, and I suspect I wouldn't be as proud of working there as some people seem to be. Thank you for asking, I hope none of my answer felt like an attack. e: and that this post hasn't completely destroyed my computer-touching-subforum reputation. Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Jun 11, 2017 |
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Jun 11, 2017 00:16
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Doc Hawkins posted:e: and that this post hasn't completely destroyed my computer-touching-subforum reputation. The forums are still semi-paywalled. I think you'll be fine. But I agree with everything here 100%. Over the last year I was preparing to go into the Google interview process and independently came up with the same reasons I don't what to go through it. Do I want Google on my resume? Yes, why not. But I don't want it bad enough to go through that process. This was after I did a test interview at Uber in which the interviewer said, "I can't believe you can't do this." It wasn't an issue that I couldn't do the problem it was that I rarely verbalize on with others my exact thought process. When I talk with problems at my company with my boss and others, it's not college-style algorithm problems we're discussing. So when I get these interview problems, I'm thinking more, "What real world problem exists that I would have to do this and is this the right problem that we should be solving?"
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Jun 11, 2017 02:48
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geeves posted:This was after I did a test interview at Uber in which the interviewer said, "I can't believe you can't do this." Well, to be fair, gently caress Uber
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Jun 11, 2017 03:53
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Steve French posted:Well, to be fair, gently caress Uber Yeah he was kind of lovely interviewer. When I finally said gently caress it (it was mostly because this was my first tech interview in 6+ years) mostly because I wanted to restructure how the problem was setup because how it was setup was completely stupid, I asked how he solved it and his reply was, "I don't have time to go into that with you."
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Jun 11, 2017 04:07
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Steve French posted:Well, to be fair, gently caress Uber Yeah, that sounds like a great reason to never work there. Among about 1000 different reasons. And I also agree with everything in your post, Doc. Hiring practices in tech have tried to boil themselves down to minutia and trivia, because that makes it easy and brainless (if ineffectual) to hire people, and the industry as a whole is not geared towards retaining people. It's a common problem everywhere because businesses are more pre-occupied with aping Google and scoring unicorn exits than anything else.
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Jun 11, 2017 04:09
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Pollyanna posted:Yeah, that sounds like a great reason to never work there. Among about 1000 different reasons. Yeah we don't want unicorns... or a carver or more specifically people who think they are unicorns. The latter usually identify themselves pretty quickly in various ways. We had one guy we interviewed that said we should change our entire rest api over to node because node.js. Couldn't back any of it up when we drilled him about versioning, security or even simply what exists in node to make a rest api. One answer he gave was, "well, everyone knows javascript." 
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Jun 11, 2017 04:36
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geeves posted:Yeah we don't want unicorns... or a carver or more specifically people who think they are unicorns. The latter usually identify themselves pretty quickly in various ways. Dear lord that guy sounds like he's a terminal case. Better implement that rest API in node because.... people know JavaScript? What a well thought out position 
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Jun 11, 2017 07:25
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Pollyanna posted:Kinda jealous that you live in Amsterdam. It is overrated but I wouldn't trade it for almost any other place on earth, mostly for how it benefits my kids to live in the burbs of Amsterdam in one of the highest rated countries on earth. Yes, I tell them often about their privilege. Carbon dioxide posted:My boss is paying so I don't know. But apparently if you know someone who went there before or who works for one of the sponsors, you can get a 15% off promo code from them. I don't have a code to share, though.
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Jun 11, 2017 07:41
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geeves posted:This was after I did a test interview at Uber in which the interviewer said, "I can't believe you can't do this." This guy is a jerk who deserves to work in a company with other jerks.
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Jun 11, 2017 07:42
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Keetron posted:This guy is a jerk who deserves to work in a company with other jerks. Rumored story about uber and lyft. When the mass exodus from twitter happened, all the poo poo heads twitter couldn't fire went to uber because managers from twitter who are now at lyft wouldn't hire them.
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Jun 11, 2017 07:58
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Keetron posted:It is overrated but I wouldn't trade it for almost any other place on earth, mostly for how it benefits my kids to live in the burbs of Amsterdam in one of the highest rated countries on earth. Yes, I tell them often about their privilege. I won't be there for the workshop days.
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Jun 11, 2017 08:09
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