Several weeks after passing the interview you start asking colleagues about their own interviews. And everyone has wastly different experience. Some were hired after being harrassed for hours. Others got job thanks to friendly tip...
I've taken to competitive programming as a way to prepare myself, but I'm a long way away from being at a level where I'm comfortable applying to the companies I'd like to work for.
I think a lot of people like you and I pretend to make the choice of, "I'd never work there" when the reality is, "They'd never hire me", and it does everyone a disservice to continue to perpetuate that lie. It's not a problem or a negative thing that FAANG would never hire me/you, it's just the truth.
FAANG would never consider hiring you or me as-is, but if we worked really hard for awhile, they would. This has nothing to do with our ability to do the job they'd hire us for, but that's the game, they want their candidates to be good at the game, and I'm at least willing to play. You aren't willing to play, and that's fine, but don't pretend like you're being the discerning one here.
Of FAANG, I only know of Google having a standard interview for all software engineers across the company (and one that is algorithms-heavy).
Plug: If you do iOS engineering, we are hiring: https://twitter.com/conradev/status/1035244142488506368
Now, that's not FAANG, technically speaking (although FAANG was always about stocks, not job culture). But for what it's worth, I've had recruiters from Google, Facebook and Amazon try to lure me over. None of them indicated that my lack of degree is an issue for them.
Maybe that's team-specific, I don't know. But it's certainly not true that they'd never hire someone without a degree.
Sorry to be a bit old-fashioned, but a degree isn't the most important part of going to university -- it's the education you get. I would argue that it is very difficult for someone to learn about data structures and algorithmic complexity (+ algorithm design) without taking a university course or doing some pretty intense self-study. It's not something you can pick up on the job. And this is knowledge that I think more folks in our industry should have.
So you might be doing totally fine without a degree, and that's great, but I imagine that you also have some CS knowledge that OP doesn't have -- and maybe you picked it up from somewhere or did some study on your own to gain it. If I was a hiring manager I wouldn't filter on degree, I would filter on some sort of working knowledge of CS (and, for reference, inverting binary trees on a whiteboard is not an example of "working knowledge").
Many, though perhaps not all, FAANG interviews do not involve needing to know THAT much CS trivia. The common topics (for many interviews, it depends on the company, and at non-homogenized companies, on the team) are:
- What’s a graph? What are some interesting strategies for walking a graph? Any gotchas to look out for?
- What is algorithmic complexity? How do you measure it? Why does it matter?
- Are you conversant with middle-school level arithmetic and geometry?
- Can you describe the strengths and weaknesses of the 4-5 most common simple data structures?
- Can you listen to problems as they’re described, and ask good clarifying questions (the most common problem is here, people didn’t bother to take the time to ask clarifying questions)?
- Once you’ve nailed down the problem, can you structure a few nested for-loops with relevant tests and perhaps a few simple auxiliary data structures?
- Once you have a potential solution, do you test your work? Do you skip over your mistakes pretending they don’t exist? Do you take hints when your mistakes are pointed out to you?
- Do you admit when you don’t know, then try exploring anyway?
Seriously, this is the entirety of what I see most FAANG interviews covering. If you’re a competent self taught programmer, you need to study a tiny bit about data structures and algorithms, stay calm, ask lots of questions, and just execute.
I get that there are lots of horror stories out there, and I genuinely feel for people who get super anxious when asked to work with an audience.
But if anxiety isn’t your problem, I encourage people to try different teams/companies if they’ve mastered what I’ve listed. FAANG really don’t want to put the bar absurdly high, they want a relatively easy level of CS knowledge.
I'm actually not interested in working at FAANG. I don't want to live in California, I don't want the long hours, I don't want the stress, and the products and culture are not very interesting to me. The salary is pretty much the only selling point IMO.
However, you make a fair point: If I _did_ want to get into one of those companies, I would need to study CS (academically or non-academically).
I assume that all FAANG interviews for entry-level software devs are akin to the standard Google interview, for which you are expected to study your ass off. I have not interviewed for one of those companies, but of course I know how much people study for them, and it disgusts me. However, I have had plenty of interviews which did have an algorithm-type section (the majority of interviews I've had have had something like that), and I no longer hate on companies for doing _that_. Plenty of the problems are relatively easy, once you figure out how to talk about them -- and being able to talk through your work is a legitimately valuable skill.
But, companies that expect applicants to put in the kind of work Google expects in order to stand a chance truly are not companies I want to work for. To some extent, it's just shitty; this "game" is mostly a test of how much time you have to spend. That cost is a lot higher for people who are less well off, which irks me, but that's true of most things in life.
The thing is, you talk about being "willing to play" the game. I don't want to work in a company of people who played that game.
First -- Playing the game means sacrificing important things; you can't spend all your free time studying which data structures to use for esoteric string manipulation problems, etc. AND spend all your free time learning the fine point weaknesses of different databases, good programming patterns, etc. By the time I started interviewing for my second job, I'd nearly burned myself out making certain I was learning how to do things right, learning how to be a good programmer. My free time was spent polishing the things I was working on and endlessly reading about how to do it even better. And then I was able to go into interviews for the jobs I was interested in and do what you're suppose to be able to do in most other interviews (programming or otherwise); actually talk about the company, their pain points, possible solutions they hadn't thought of but I had experience with, etc. At that time, I could not identify anything but the simplest algorithmic complexities... but to learn more than that would have been to choose studying useless information over useful information.
Second -- What makes a person willing to play the game, when there are plenty of other companies with interesting problems to solve and good salaries (maybe not AS good)? I can't help but feel there is a cult-like love of these big companies (or maybe it's the desire to prove oneself, since only RealProgrammers work for Amazon). And I don't want to work with a bunch of people who are extra excited about something I just don't value.
Maybe I haven't been reading the right stuff, but I just don't see the appeal. I don't particularly care for any of them as companies. Sure, if Amazon decided to pursue a pilot project aimed at providing its customers with low-carbon-footprint foods, I might want on board that project -- but not just to Amazon as a whole. Yes, these companies are large and well-known, but I don't particularly care if it's one million or one billion people who download an app I worked on. I know that getting a job in one of those companies doesn't mean you're going to do something interesting or big. I've had classmates get jobs at Google and I've worked with Google employees on certain projects, giving feedback etc. There's nothing I've seen about their jobs or projects that were particularly amazing or wonderful, except for the part where you then get to say you work(ed) for Google.
On the other hand, there's the well-known story of the Harvard MBA answering Orkut support tickets so Google probably doesn't need that level of talent. But if they can get it, why not?
