Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

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It is if you want to work for a FAANG.

Step 0: manage to get an interview

Step 1: do 300 leetcode problems

Step 2: fail ("you're almost there")

Step 3: do 500 problems

Step 4: take interview

Step 5: land $300K job (see salaries on levels.fyi, depends on country and level) and relocate) + tons of benefits, include remote work nowadays

Step 6: Struggle with legacy code, buggy internal tools, stressful performance reviews, strong colleagues who set the bar very high, high turn-over, oncalls. But the money is real, and overall management and colleagues are pragmatic and skilled.

I assume a smart/lucky/fast thinking guy can do with less than 500 problems. I also assume that as these recipe is getting well-known, difficulty of problems is going to increase.

Also not that this work even if you didn't graduate from a top school, even if you don't have significant experience, even if you're an older candidate. In that sense, these companies don't lie on the "equal opportunity" stuff. It's all about how much you're willing to grind these problems.

Other may offer counter opinion, but this was my experience as well as other new recruits.

You're saying that even if you didn't graduate from a top school, you don't have significant experience, or you're older, they'll hire you if you do really well on the puzzle stuff? That's pretty great, probably why those companies are way more ethnically diverse than the news organizations that constantly criticize them for not being ethnically diverse (https://oonwoye.com/2020/07/31/tech-journalism-is-less-diver...).

What if you aren't willing or able to relocate, though?

> What if you aren't willing or able to relocate, though?

Many jobs are fully remotable now (tho it varies from almost all of them like Meta, to almost none of them like Apple). Sometimes slightly less money.

What would be a good source for non-faang fully remote jobs in Europe? I keep looking at various sites, but most companies seem to abuse remote postings by posting partially remote, on-site or only-remote-within-the-same-country jobs on sites for fully remote jobs.

> You're saying that even if you didn't graduate from a top school, you don't have significant experience, or you're older, they'll hire you if you do really well on the puzzle stuff?

I can't generalise to all the teams and companies, but this was my experience, and I've seen some similar profiles around me. I suppose if you really check all the wrong boxes, it may be hard to land an interview, but once you're in the process, you have a shot just like anybody else and it really boils down at how well you do at the leedcode questions. Concerning diversity, interviewers are trained to avoid common biases on gender, age, and recruiters have incentives to interview people from minorities. I would say that if you come from a minority, you are at an advantage and you're more likely to get an interview.

What is clear, is that not everybody graduated from top schools. There are plenty of SWEs coming from developing countries. Older people are more rare. I was hired at 45, and the bar was a bit higher as they wouldn't hire me below a certain level. I've also heard stories of people hired at 55.. so there's hope.

If you're unwilling to relocate, you may be able to remote work from a different country. This depends on the company and the role, and which country you want to remote from, but it's doable.

To me, the main issue with leetcode is that it's not transferable kills. It may be very frustrating to spend 100s of hours doing these problems and not being able to land a job in the end.

Thank you very much for sharing your experience!

I definitely know a lot of Googlers and Xooglers who didn't graduate from top schools. Or at all.

Leetcode is the kind of thing I enjoy.

I agree Leetcode can be fun and I liked it too but it's extremely different from the day-to-day job. It's something to keep in mind.

It definitely doesn't take 500 leetcode problems. If you have a solid grasp of algorithms, you can probably get by by grinding ~30 medium problems. If you're needing to do that many leetcode then you're basically solving on pattern recognition rather than understanding.

> It definitely doesn't take 500 leetcode problems.

I'd say it depends on many things. What level are you applying to. And also, how well you perform in situation of stress. And of course, in the end, it's a competition. If the other applicant can solve problems faster than you, they'll get the job and you won't.

For me the hard part wasn't solving the problem, but solving them in 15 minutes. At Google, 2/3 problems I got were hard and not medium. There would be no chance that I solved any of them if I hadn't seen them before.

Interesting, was that in the EU? I recently had a friend go through the process in the bay area, he didn't get anything harder than easy/medium. I thought that Google, at least, was trending to making their algo portion easier as they introduced design questions instead. 2/3 hard questions is pretty crazy and anyone would struggle with that unless they grind a lot like you suggest. Might be you just got really unlucky with the interviewer or there is a culture in that office of asking hard algo questions.

I kinda wonder what kind of salaries FAANGs can pay while working remotely right now, outside of US. While in US salaries can be veryy good, for example Google in Poland is known for paying pretty bad

They all adjust based on your location. Like Meta aims for top 5% pay in the market. Other places will be lower/higher accordingly.

What's "the market"? You mean, top 5% pay in the country where you live? That would probably be about US$15k/year for me, not really what I'm looking for. So they'll hire you for full remote but pay you 80% less than someone who'll move to Palo Alto?

Yep, as far as I know.

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