[erganemic]

Oof, I've got an L3 interview with Google in a little over a week. Hearing about hiring slowdowns like this is making me wish I'd been more aggressive with my interview timeline, but I'm not sure I've prepared enough as-is. If I'd gone any faster I /definitely/ wouldn't have had enough time to refresh on DS&A and grind out Leetcode.

I know the consensus on HN is that FAANG is nothing special (and not that hard to get into!), but for a recent grad with mediocre internships from the pandemic and minimal opportunities for development in the role I'm currently in, getting clout like that on my resume early in my career would be awesome. Here's hoping the slowdowns really don't end up hitting technical roles as hard.

[edmundsauto]

I hear you about the hypercompetitive perspective. I'm 20 years older and can't believe the stress that we put learners through.

If I can offer my voice - focus on doing some real shit. Don't worry about the career ladder - find experiences where you accomplished some real goals. Getting on the FAANG career ladder too early is probably very limiting. The big differentiator is whether you can take on accountability for making decisions; this requires practice (and luck) => experience.

Don't stress it. People told me this when I was a recent college grad in the mid 2000's. Develop your own heuristic of learning and growing versus stagnating. On the outside-of-FAANG-world, there are so many more opportunities for growth than a kept engineer can imagine.

[lovich]

> Getting on the FAANG career ladder too early is probably very limiting

I can’t help but at chuckle at this with how big a barrier there is in comp between faang and non faang companies. You can get in if you spend months studying again or have a job that legitimately has you using comp sci on a day to day basis but for most folks they are gonna forget the skills needed to get a faang job shortly after college if they don’t get into one

[lumost]

I started at a FAANG as a senior swe with 8 years of experience. I did not get a comp sci degree, nor did I start my first job as SWE.

Just keep working towards your goals. When I started out I made a point to work an extra hour or two every day. If there was no work to do, I would study a topic of interest.

[lovich]

Not for nothing man, but an extra hour or two of work every day over the course of years is a high barrier.

Good for you that you made it, but it’s not so trivial a bar that I think telling people to not worry about getting into a faang early in their career is good advice if they care about money or career progression

[nvarsj]

Indeed. For lots of us, 2 hours a day is basically all the free time we have with family and other obligations. Spending all your free time for 6 months-year is a pretty brutal proposition, not to mention a huge ROI risk if you don't get the job at the end. OTOH, I think FAANG companies see this is a feature of the process (it filters out people who have a lot of external obligations).

[wdb]

How much comp sci do you use on a daily basis at a FAANG company though? Especially, if you are working on front end stuff / UI work

[lovich]

Does it matter? If you’ve got the faang title on your resume it makes it easier to get into other faangs or companies in general and you don’t have to bootstrap as hard on the comp sci.

It matters in the reverse because heavy comp sci tests are what the faangs lean on, on top of all the other interview rounds

[yegle]

AFAIKT Google's recruitment for SWE and SRE (system engineer ladder) are separate. If you did not pass the SWE interview, ask the recruiter if you can do an SRE interview. Hope this helps!

Source: I went the process of failing the SWE interview but got an offer as an SRE.

[okdood64]

SE is arguably much harder. Instead of just optimizing for coding, you need to be good at linux troubleshooting, low level kernel stuff and networking. There’s a reason most new hires come in as SWE, particularly new grads with not much real world experience.

That said, if you already possess this knowledge it could be easier as it takes a bit of the randomness out of getting a LeetCode question that you can’t figure out.

[bgro]

I don't have time to memorize leetcode, and I'm just not good at it. Even considering it can just take time for everyone, I'm somehow unexpectedly bad despite my experience. I'm actually pretty good at actual software engineering work though (8 years). I'm also pretty good at OS level stuff across the board. I didn't know there non-leetcode paths without completely changing careers and abandoning my dev history.

I was just about to schedule my 1st-set whiteboard style interview with the recruiter, which always ends in a flaming disaster, but maybe I should consider their other routes.

I'm a full stack (backend main) software engineer but I'm usually exceptional at fixing server stuff and fully understanding logs to debug problems or find potential exploits through logs or when reading through code reviews. Everyone else I've ever worked with struggles at these things. I can just naturally comprehend other's code / architecture even across technologies.

If there's a career path I can show this in interviews instead of fumbling on even easy LeetCode problems or the other silly things I randomly get stuck on only in interviews, maybe I could actually shine for once.

[evercast]

It is not harder, it is different. They just ask more system topics, while focusing less on coding. There is, however, a catch. If you get hired as a SRE-SWE, you can easily switch to a regular SWE. If you get hired as a SRE-SE, you may have to reinterview to change your job ladder. SE is okay, but you clearly have more possibilities as a SWE.

[dom96]

Why is there such a distinction? What's the difference in the day to day of a SRE-SWE vs. an SRE-SE?

[yegle]

SRE-SWE and SRE-SE on the same team will have exactly the same expectation given the same level.

Depending on the project you work on, you might have a code-heavy project that requires you to work closely with the SWE team, or an operability-heavy project that doesn't have much coding.

[smueller1234]

Entirely the same job, same pay. We just want to be open to folks with DIFFERENT yet valuable experience.

[ikiris]

You only have to take some of the coding ones though iirc

[ThePadawan]

I feel like I need to add my own 2 cents to this point:

Definitely ask your recruiter and have them confirm which track you're interviewing for.

They just have numbers to hit. They will try to drop you into whichever track they need to. If a recruiter ever "seemingly misspoke" and moved you from SWE to SWE-SRE, ask for confirmation and/or insist on interviewing the track you are actually interested in.

[ignoramous]

It isn't to mean that SRE is any easier...

[thematrixturtle]

There are two separate tracks for SRE, SRE-SWE (same bar as SRE) and SRE-SE (Systems Engineering). While SE has a lower coding bar, it's arguably the harder of the two since they make up for it with Linux internals etc.

[aeyes]

Any good resources to see how they interview for SRE-SE? For SWE you can find a lot of material on Leetcode and similar sites (and of course books) but "Linux internals" has a near infinite depth.

[dilyevsky]

https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/

I did a bunch of those panels in my time. Imo if you read 2-3 books on unix/linux/networking and can complete this wargame in a couple evenings you’ll stand out quite a bit.

[yegle]

NALSD question is a required part of the interview. https://sre.google/workbook/non-abstract-design/ I did a quick search and it looks like there are youtube videos explaining it so that might be helpful.

Other than that I was asked to implement a 'tail' command using my familiar language, and explain why deleting a file from disk doesn't free up the space.

[mandeepj]

> explain why deleting a file from disk doesn't free up the space.

Because System deletes only the “pointer” to the file and not the actual file. For the exact same reason, cut+paste is faster than copy+paste

[antoncohen]

In my experience the recruiters are great about helping you prep. They have a PDF called "Google Interview Prep Guide Site Reliability Engineer" that talks about SRE-SE vs. SRE-SWE vs. SWE, and links to books and topics to study.

Kirk McKusick's "FreeBSD Kernel Internals" course[1] was recommended to me, and it was excellent. But not cheap at $1495.

[1] https://www.mckusick.com/courses/introdescrip.html

[yegle]

No it's not easier, sorry if my reply gave that impression.

An SRE-SE requires a different skill set compared to SRE-SWE or SWE and the interview questions are different. If you have both skill sets, you effectively have two opportunities here :-)

[waynesonfire]

It precisely means that.

[titanomachy]

HN has plenty of people who say that, but I don’t think I would call it a consensus.

[frays]

The title and article literally says that Google is still hiring engineering and technical roles.

Why do you think this would affect you interviewing as a software engineer?

[wesleywt]

They might be hiring as many developers as they use to

[sangnoir]

> I know the consensus on HN is that FAANG is nothing special

It's nothing special to those who are OK with leaving 6-figures on the table per anum - or are independently wealthy.

[xvector]

I think OP called it "nothing special [on HN]" because the majority of HNers probably already work at or have worked at FAANG.

[occz]

>majority

This can't really be right though, can it? There aren't enough engineers in FAANGs to equal half of the DAUs of HN, and I kind of doubt that all of them would be on HN.

[metadat]

Good luck buddy, wish all the best for you.