That was a factor for me when I applied to Google. I asked for 4 weeks to interview - I should have asked for 4 months. I hit the algorithms textbook and I did CTCI questions, but I just wasn't ready.

Whether I could get ready is an open question, I don't want to claim I necesessarily would have passed had I studied intensely for a longer period of time.

But yeah, I have kids in school, a job, I was a baseball coach at the time, there's homework, music lessons, all that.

Honestly, I do wonder if maybe part of the purpose of the interviews is to filter out people like me who can't drop everything to prep for an interview. I'm not trying to be glib here. My inability to prepare for a white board exam at this level actually does tell you something about how much time I am able and/or willing to devote to work.

But yeah, it's a bad feeling, I'm with you there.

I'm the same as you (wife+kids, full-time job and rusty whiteboarding skills), PLUS I lived in Canada, PLUS I have no CS degree. I landed a job at Uber's San Francisco office 1.5 year ago.

Here are a few of things to be aware of that may make you feel better:

- tech companies in the bay area have extremely high churn rates (2-4 yrs is not uncommon)

- unicorns often hire constantly and in high volume (e.g. Facebook increased head count by some 8k people last year alone), so the likelihood that all hires for all unicorns are all "cream of the crop" is far lower than most will admit.

- many companies here are willing to spend significantly more on hiring process than companies in other cities/countries: I've been flown in for on-sites from Toronto on multiple occasions and when I accepted my current role, I received a generous amount of money for moving expenses ($7500) for my family of 4, in addition to getting legal support for visa/immigration procedures. This makes physical location a much smaller hurdle than one might expect.

- not all roles have algorithm-centric interviews (e.g. in my experience, interviews for web-related roles tend to be much more about day-to-day experience), and even for more "traditional" roles, there may be variations in interviewers' expectations (this is exacerbated by the high churn rate from point 1)

- interviewing doesn't need to be that intensive or stressful. I only did a few passively over several years. An interview process typically starts w/ a 1 hour phone screen, so you don't necessarily have to commit to whole-day interview marathons right off the bat. In that one hour you often get a chance to ask more about the role and get a feel for yourself if it'd be a good fit (it often isn't!) Doing this kind of fishing every once in a blue moon is fairly manageable.

>not all roles have algorithm-centric interviews

But the company you interviewed for and got into.. does..right?

Uber whiteboarded you.

I did have one whiteboard session on my onsite, but it was about high level web architecture, no code, no algorithms. None of the sessions were specifically about classic algorithms, although there was an "algorithm" session that was about writing some fairly realistic asynchronous code (which for web is something I myself consider required knowledge).

Since I've started participating in the hiring process myself, I'm not aware of people doing whiteboarding (AFAIK it's strongly discouraged because it leaves no digital record), and only the bar raiser session might ask something algorithmic-ish at their discretion (but most do coding exercises to gauge meta stuff like communication skills or methodical approach rather than things like algorithmic complexity).

Training material for tech hiring discourages looking for rote memorization of specifics and instead recommends looking for signals via an open ended exercise.

> I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills

yeah, well these companies don't want you. I mean they do but they need to make sure you have the same availability as a college hire. One way of checking that is to have you block time like that for a while.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. You're right. These companies like workers who have no other responsibilities in their lives except their jobs.

Edit: single men and exceptions to the rule, please keep downvoting me.

Eh, that's borderline conspiratory. I work at one of those companies and know for a fact that many coworkers have kids and sometimes have to leave early or get in late due to kids' doctor appointments and whatnot.

Besides, in addition for it being illegal to discriminate candidates based on marital status, in my experience nobody that does interviews ever thinks of considering that as a hiring criteria.

GP and GGP are not saying there is an overt conspiracy especially among interviewers; they are attempting to point out that the interview process itself is discriminating.

I'm sure the people that perform interviews are not discriminating and I'm certain a number of bright, older, time-squeezed people make it through. But maybe I would imply conspiracy since I'd imagine the people at the upper levels, that designed the process, have at least noticed that it's biased in favor of young, recent graduates able to give extra time to the company.

It happens all over the place all the time, if you don't stay late you're "not a team player". Of course your employer isn't going to say you're fired because you're a parent, unless their attorneys are bored. That doesn't make it any more moral to discriminate based on proxy metrics, like how much of your life you're willing to donate to an entity that cares about you only to the extent you're making them profit.

I mean, nobody goes to an interview and asks "hey how late do you work in your current job?", so I don't understand how it is possible to discriminate by proxy metrics at that point in the process.

Maybe you're arguing that people leave their jobs after the fact due to thinly disguised rationalizations of these proxy metrics affecting raises, but that's a huge stretch. I've seen plenty of cases of bosses and coworkers being understanding of personal circumstances (and I'd go as far as saying that is more so here in SF than at previous jobs in Canada) and I've yet to see these alleged backstabbing evil brogrammers. Saying that a company likes this or that is also anthropomorphizing something that isn't sentient and strikes me as a strawman.

they don't need to - your github/ side projects tell them all they need to know & you're probably required to submit them to even be considered. you think someone with a full time family is going to have the same output in code as a single person with nothing but their career going on?

discriminating is trivial if they just have your name

No offense but there's a lot wrong with this comment...

While having a github presence can help recruiters find you, you aren't required to have such presence at all; the vast majority of people I interview don't (and the same goes for coworkers).

Measuring lines of code written is another fallacy that gets thrown around easily, but that any engineer worth their salt knows is a stupid metric (1MLOC of shit code is a pile of shit). One only needs to look at their most recent perf evaluation to realize that absolute code output doesn't actually factor in - it's high level impact perception that does, if anything.

Being single doesn't in any way correlate to more dedication; plenty of singles clock 9-5 and spend free time on non-coding activities (games, TV, exercise, etc), and plenty of family people work late by choice. It's not even an either-or proposition either: there are married people w/ no kids, single people that need to pick up their dogs at daycare, people that work so late so often that they become unproductive due to fatigue, etc.

The idea that someone will take your name and go dig up all your personal info and discriminate you and cackle maniacally is just flat out absurd. As someone who's been both an outsider and an insider to bay area tech, I honestly don't see evidence of discrimination, deliberate or otherwise. I feel like the occam's razor in this discussion is that armchair speculators seal themselves in an echo chamber of delusional conspiracy theory out of self pity or to feel smug. I also noticed that there are people who have had asshat bosses/coworkers at companies w/ dysfunctional cultures and think that experience translates to there being asshats everywhere.

Yeah there is a huge amount of armchair conspiracy invention in this thread.

I think Occam's razor applies here. I don't think it's intentional, but this is the effect. I think what started off as a way of screening out completely incompetent people just turned into this arms race to be more and more selective without considering the fundamentals of the selection process.

I think these sorts of posts give people a warped view of interviewing for SWE positions. Most companies don't ask whiteboarding questions of the difficulty discussed here. If you want to work at one of the biggest corporations in the world, thats one thing - but there are plenty of good jobs out there for people like you and me who don't want to put in this sort of time commitment to interviewing.

Of that difficulty no, but I've been asked plenty of whiteboard questions from small and mid-size companies outside of the west coast.

mom here. same 2 kids, one a baby... they dont sleep man. I practice at night, about 1 hr before bed. Sometimes during lunch break at work. It takes much longer and its hard to remember all the algorithms. I hope to land a better job too. I am confident in my abilities and I've always been well liked and done great work, but I am not quite confident with interviews yet...

I'm a dad, and I feel your pain. All my kids woke at 5 am today, and they are sick, so they need that extra sleep, but...

If it makes a difference, the work you do at home is so much more important than anything you'll do in front of a keyboard. Thank you.

Thank you

I have a wife, three boys (one who doesn't sleep through the night), and a full-time job as well. Usually I just practice after putting the kids to bed. It's possible you just need to carve out some time even if it's an hour or two a night.

I have an IT YouTube channel where I discuss being a self-taught developer. I studied for years each night after getting home from my full-time non-IT job. Wife, 2 kids and mortgage as well.

Now, twenty million people have watched me and I have been in the industry for 10 years as a senior software engineer. I wouldn't pass Google's interview either I bet, but they invited me to an educational convention last year.

What kind of things do you practice?

Generally it's algorithms that I find interesting. Recently spent a couple of days trying to figure out how HyperLogLog works.

Hey man I feel your pain. Wife, two kids and not a ton of time.

I don't know your specifics, I only know mine.

I've recently started volunteering / D&D 2 nights a week. It's been good for me and the family. This spurred some interest from me in doing work when I'm sitting in the kids room waiting for them to fall asleep.

This came after I switched jobs and started working on the bus, which cut down on my total amount of time away from home.

He also did this for a month, you might have to do 30 min to 1 hr for 3 months. Set a goal and go for it. The important distinction for me was that my goal board now includes being a good dad. Part of that was realizing I wanted my kids to see someone reaching for goals and doing it.

Anyway, good luck and don't hold yourself to others ideals, shoot for your own goals. I had a short term goal to re-center myself and let some mental baggage go. It meant a lot of video-games. But now I'm onto the next goal.

It's going to be harder for you, and this is one of the reasons there is an implicit bias towards younger people in these companies. But it can be done! While this guy aced all rounds, as a member in the hiring committee for a large company, I can tell you that this level of performance is not necessary. If you do ok in the coding rounds and hit it out of the park in the design rounds, you'll still be considered.

It depends on what you know before, as well. When I interviewed the last time, I read "Cracking the Coding Interview" on the flight up to the Bay Area, just to be sure - and that was that. (And I did get an offer)

And no, I'm far from a genius programmer - it's just that I spent ~30 years working in this field, and reading a lot along the way.

If you can, go out and interview. Just to see what it's like. If you really want to find a job, start with companies you're less interested in and use their interviews as free whiteboard training.

Putting in a couple of hundred hours of work for a large, permanent jump in salary? That's a fantastic ROI. The study is a side gig with an expected monetary benifit, not an idle hobby.

It really does seem like these companies over time are converging on an interview process that (inadvertently or not) selects for "outgoing 'bros" with a lot of time on their hands to study and prep so they can "crush it" on the whiteboard. And then we're surprised at the monoculture emerging everywhere.

The whole process is a roll of the dice. The more senior the role, the less fair that roll of the dice will be. If you can accept this fact, you don't have to be "trapped". That's how I think of it anyway: I never spend more than 2 weeks (_very_ part time) preparing. I do get rejected sometimes, but I get plenty of good offers too.

I've been in a ton of debriefs at this point. I no longer feel bad about any rejection I've had from any big company. "Dice roll" is a perfect way to describe it. The number of things that someone will raise an arbitrary red flag over is endless and largely down to personal bias / mood of the interviewer.

I've seen people discredited for not setting up some large inheritance hierarchy for their whiteboard design question. What's "Doing it Right" for one person (me: avoid inheritance like the plague), is someone else's "this guy couldn't code his way out of a paper bag".

As one of my university professors said before exams: "I know which parts you don't know." Meaning that if he wanted someone to fail, he could easily arrange that. This was his way of motivating students to attend the lectures.

There's really no way to prepare for the full set of eventualities, and unless you do something spectacular (chances of which are slim in a high-stress situation), their opinion of you is formed in the first few minutes of the interview anyway.

Yeah, I agree.. Doing enough prep to get a hundred percent acceptance rate is not worth it. And it is a level I couldn't achieve anyhow. I've done fine on my career with 50 percent or lower acceptance rate at interviews. It's one of the things I'm the worst at in this industry, but you only need to change jobs fairly infrequently.

I also question a lot of these "I landed every offer" claims. People often exaggerate their victories.

It's easier to land offers for entry level positions. "Landed every offer" probably means entry level. Companies are hungry for decent devs who don't yet know their real market value.

I was able to land a couple of solid offers but you have to be really persistent. I kept chugging away a hour or so a day and 3+ on weekdays when kids slept in and basically made algos my thing apart from work and family (which worked out for me since I was able to come up with the Aho-corasick algorithm for a question I was asked). After a while I started enjoying the prep process since I was learning quite a bit too.

It may be that your situation and priorities do indeed restrict you from making the time investment to get good at whiteboarding and FAANG-style interview practice. It doesn't necessarily follow that you're stuck hard doing what you are now.

If you're using the term "trapped" to describe where you work, I'm inferring that you want a change. It's hard to get specific without knowing all your priorities, details, and life choices, but it's almost certainly worth taking a step back and evaluating if there's ways to get what you need by an alternative path that doesn't involve slotting yourself into a process that's optimized for smart single twentysomethings.

Why?

So you don't get to work at a big name tech company, big whoop. Go find one of the myriad of companies that are still doing great work, pay well, and where overtime isn't expected. There are literally thousands of them, you just won't get any name recognition from them.

You're unlikely to hit $300-400k+ TC at those though.

Pay is a huge reason why people join them. The pay scale is completely different and (practically) necessary to compete in the bay area housing market. Checkout levels.fyi.

> necessary to compete in the bay area housing market

I think there might be another solution to that problem then...

I only studied 3 hours a weekend for 3 weekends. Even for more normal interviews I did a few hours of prepwork so it wasn't anything too crazy but everyone is different. I just assumed you hear about the people who study a ton more.

The time commitment is not as bad as people make it seem. You don't have two hours to yourself every night? How about 1 hour during the week and doing 2-3 on weekends? You just have to sacrifice other leisures like tv and video games to make it work.

Exactly. Most people who say they "don't have time" are spending hours/day watching TV, on social media, etc.

https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2018/time-flies-...

It's not necessarily fair to read those charts that way.

The radio time could be while commuting to/from work. Quite a few folks have TV on in the kitchen while they prepare dinner. Social media time is frequently a minute or two at a time scattered throughout the day. etc. etc. etc.

The chart even indicates "Some amount of simultaneous usage may occur across devices".

Right, there are exceptions, but let's be real. "I don't have time" usually means "It's not a priority over TV/games/social media".

The median adult has much less free time than the mean. A parent with a full-time job has even less.

Wife and kids are (top) priorities, not excuses.

right but then you’ve made your choice and you live with it.

Interestingly, I find that most employees and applicants in high tech accept this, that they've made their choice and will live with it.

It's the tech companies that seem bitter about accepting the consequences of their own hiring practices. They have hiring practices that, by their own admission, result in a very high rate of false negatives. This is their right, they have their reasons, but there are downsides. It means their processes are designed to make hiring hard. It creates a culture where developers are disinclined to pursue new jobs, as the transition costs (intense interview exam prep) are high, and the outcome is uncertain. I actually think these practices may cause talented people to leave the field, and may deter other talented people from entering the field in the first place.

Interestingly, these companies don't seem to accept their role in creating the "shortage" that they constantly decry.

(the solution, it appears, is for the government to grant tech companies power over who is allowed to come to the United States and the conditions under which they are allowed to remain here).

It's only in the tech industry that having a family isn't a regular, normal thing people do.

Maybe it being a choice with a negative association is more of a cover for the fact that most of us who choose this industry are extremely poor communicators and that an out-sized number of us _will not_ get married or have kids (and not by our own choice).

And I say that as someone without such attachments myself.

Or maybe we're okay with being exploited by employers who want us working extremely long hours for their benefit and the choice to keep the engineers away from the older, more normal folks with families is deliberate.

I would bet if you were to sample the average mid-career folks in non-tech groups at FAANGs, you would see normal (or even above average) numbers of people who have families and normal hours.

> It's only in the tech industry that having a family isn't a regular, normal thing people do.

Getting divorced, again, is an occupational hazard of getting to the top in law firms or in finance as well. There are plenty of people with really good jobs that sacrificed family for it. I doubt it’s actuallu the norm but it’s hardky unusual.

That's honestly mostly a myth. The number one factor in divorce rates is income.

Don't believe me?

https://qz.com/1069806/the-highest-and-lowest-divorce-rates-...

Your source does not support your thesis. All of the professions with the lowest rates of divorce require high levels of intelligence but they’re not all very well paid. Clergy certainly aren’t and veterinarians generally have other, much better paid options. Looking at the low end of divorce professions it looks more like a combination of intelligence and systematic thinking being protective against divorce. The only people on the list that might not have degrees are Military Enlisted Tactical Operations and Air/Weapons Specialists and Crew Members and Graders and Sorters, Agricultural Products. I’ve no clue about the second but the first seem very likely to be the kind of people who do very well on the ASVAB and get assigned to nuke tech or aircraft mechanic.

The highest divorce rate professions aren’t particularly well paid by any measure but there are plenty of other professions with lower pay and lower divorce rates.

Clergy are such an obvious and well-understood exception that it's intellectually dishonest to use them as a counter-example.

Also veterinarians make extremely good money. Nearly all of those low-rate professions are well paid and virtually none of the high-rate professions are.

Everyone who chose to become a veterinarian could have made more money, by going to med school, law school, pharmacy school, getting an MBA, etc. No comment on the non-degreed, not particularly well paid group that’s highly selected for high intelligence with very low rates of divorce?

I have cats!

"Preparing for an interview of this nature would have a detrimental impact on my family" is a perfectly legitimate reason to opt-out.

I am not doing work around kids and I am not at home at all because my career is more fun is an excuse.

Not to be confused with "we are struggling and I do what have to do" which is different thing.

Not really sure what the point of your comment is? Are you asking the NH community to feel sorry for you? You made some life choices about what's important to you and that's great. The OP made their life choices and decided to study and work their way into on those companies.

Besides that, I work with plenty of people who are married with kids. Sure, at the end of the day, there's some amount of luck, but they didn't get in because someone felt sorry for them.

> I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.

Yes, you probably are. Just in case you were interested in a realistic answer based on the rut most family men and women themselves in.