Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The problem is that for a FAANMG company to throw a Leetcode question in 2019, it's equivalent to a entrance exam, especially towards thousands of applicants. Eventually, they will use something else to assess your skills that will eliminate many applicants. I wouldn't risk getting eliminated for not differentiating myself.

Leetcode questions are not enough for 'seniors', even as a interviewer, it brings the same good problem solvers, but not enough applying this into practise such as open-source projects / contributions, which is faster to review than these Leetcode questions.

> It’s nice to glamourize it a bit but you guys make it sound downright mythical.

Perhaps not in 2012-2014 but in 2019 it is the reality of many candidates getting a FAANMG level role that have to face a competition of thousands of applications every week.

I wish it were easier than this, but when I look at the following real world open-source projects:

* FB creating the Hermes JS Engine.

* Netflix submitting patches to the Linux Kernel.

* Googlers working on Fuchsia OS.

* Apple hiring dynamic linker engineers for dyld3.

* Amazon writing the firecracker virtual machine.

* Microsoft hiring engineers for Typescript and Chromium.

I think that justifies utilising the data structures and algorithms resources listed above. And now if one told me that they have some contributions to at least one of them, I'd tell them to send a link to the code-review / patch and I'd just bring them onsite and ask more questions about it.



You’re still glamorizing a select body of work and overlooking the fact that the vast majority of employees are not working on those projects.

For sure there is interesting work to be had, but don’t pretend that everyone is toiling away on what you see on GH and HN.


One of the most common joke themes inside Google is that almost everyone is just writing software that converts from one protobuf to another.


Firecracker is a Virtual Machine monitor. It uses KVM underneath.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: