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Comment by ldjkfkdsjnv | Hacker News Reader

I'm at a FAANG right now. Havent interviewed in years, lead projects on one of the most critical services at my company. Just interviewed at a startup, they asked a design question, and immediately nixed me for not having the correct "design process". Meaning requirements gathering, scoping, etc. 20 minutes in the interviewing engineer basically checked out.

My resume is very good. Its a little scary, because this experience is actually common. No one trusts anything, and nothing you have done is worth anything, unless you are well known. You need to study whatever textbook answer they are looking for.

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Sounds like they care more about process. Process-centric companies tend to not do well in the long run.

I'm curious if you would share the design question. I have seen these very contrived "study guides" with questions like "how to design drop box", "how to design FB newsfeed, etc" and they all seem to just be lists for rote memorization. Was that what your experience was? You didn't satisfy the check list that the interview was looking for?

They wanted an answer you would get from one of those guides, not a discussion on technical design

even if you're well-known you can be rejected

the author of brew (popular macOS package manager) got rejected by Google

I wouldn’t want to be on call for Homebrew. In the author’s words “It doesn’t do dependency management properly. It doesn’t handle edge case behavior well. It isn’t well tested.”

This is my biggest fear that I have to study for the foreseeable future. Nothing you did matter if you can't solve a puzzle or give cut out answer.

Remember it's probabilistic, not certain. There are still companies out there where you'll get hired with just a casual 30 minute conversation about your past work and how it should help you deliver value for this new work, maybe even over lunch. Different companies, even different teams or interviewers within companies, will have their own criteria with their own quirks and sometimes mental games. Even with perfect preparation on the technical side, you can easily fail a process because you failed some mind game, and those you can't really grind for. In other words, accept that no matter how much you prepare there's still a significant chance at failure, and use that to forgive yourself for not spending all your time trying to be in a constant state of readiness and trying to minimize a small portion of that chance, and maybe chill out some.

This is true, but generally speaking the former pays better, more mature and looks better on your resume. But oh wait, yeah whats on your resume doenst matter XD

Thanks for your kind words though, I have to fail more... And be okay w it

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