[mrweasel]

I would seriously cut the interview prep crap. It's useless in my mind. You're the person you happen to be, and that's the person that need to walk into an interview. Never prep for an interview (other than of cause figuring out what the company does and if you'd want to work there), you'll just try to remember the prep and not focus on being at the interview. Most interviewers only care about who you are, and ensuring that you didn't lie on your resume.

If you want to make difference, find a small business, no more than 30 to 50 people. The kind of company that wouldn't except a person like you to walk in the door.

[kafkaesq]

I would seriously cut the interview prep crap.

Yup. Governing principle being: if a hiring filter can be significantly "prepped" for -- then you have to ask whether it's really valid filter in the first place.

[jsmith0295]

It isn't, but if you want to work for those companies you'd better be prepared for it anyways, because they don't care if it's valid for them or not.

[kstrauser]

My problem with the approach is that you may be faking your way into a job you're not qualified for by prepping specifically for its interview. Say you want to work for Company A and get your hands on their interview questions. You memorize them forward and backward and practice until you can spit out the expected answers with confidence.

Great.

On your first day at work, you find you're actually expected to know everything related to that material. You studied for Bayes' Theorem, which is great, but your first bug is fine tuning a random forest exploration. Cue deer in the headlights face.

My favorite jobs - including the one I'm currently at - are the ones I just walked in off the street for. Sure, I did my homework about the companies, their plans, their management structure, etc., but not one second of reading up on the docs of their tech stack. Either I knew the stuff (or had enough related knowledge that I could learn it quickly), or I was honest about my shortcomings in that area. And on my first days at work, I either knew how to do the stuff they asked of me or was comfortable reminding them that I needed to bone up on it first.

TL;DR I feel like studying tech for an interview is like lying to a first date. It may impress the other party but it doesn't last. Be honest, relax, and wait for a legitimately comfortable relationship.

[jsmith0295]

In my opinion if you can prepare for the interview, then you can probably pick up anything else you might need to know for the job, too. A lot of algorithms and data structures you'd have to memorize for these interviews are also very easy to Google when you don't know them, and having to do that isn't likely to make you much less effective.

[tedmiston]

We know the filters in place today aren't the most accurate. But knowing that doesn't change that everyone is using them anyway.

[ktRolster]

A number of startups are trying to change this with things like automated testing (though imo they are currently doing worse than the status quo).

[tedmiston]

I really hope they do. I think it would be a very positive step forward for our industry.

One that comes to mind is Triplebyte (YC S15).

[jensvdh]

There's no way OP is getting into a "top 4" company without preparing for algorithms questions.

[khuey]

This is like telling someone not to study for the SAT.

[pjscott]

SAT preparation is not very effective.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Derek_Briggs/publicatio...

[khuey]

Anecdotally, the changes made to the SAT circa 2005 seemed to make it significantly more feasible to "study" for the test.

[booleandilemma]

This is only sound advice when interviewing for a non-technical position.

If you're going in for a technical position, prepare to be grilled.