Did they really optimize for hiring the top 0.001% of engineers or it's just that the fish is rotten from the top.
Year+ is a fair assessment. A proper Computer Science course(4 years!) is mostly about algorithms. Most of leetcode hard would qualify as warmup exercises for my class.
That was a while ago. Right now? My brain is chock full of architectural stuff, k8s, several programming languages, multiple cloud provider idiosyncrasies, etc etc. Can I do leetcode? Yeah sure. Can I do it during an interview? I've tried recently, bombed spectacularly.
I'll probably have to invest the time prepping properly because there's little choice these days. Like you said, it's using up our precious free time. I'd rather be, I don't know, writing some stuff in Rust so I can add that language to my toolbox.
We had to solve binary and hex division and multiplication on paper for exams and study Dijkstra's algoritm and binary tree traversal in highschool CS. Ugly stuff for a bunch of 16 year olds who just wanted to make Flash games. Really made me hate CS.
This is not ... hard. It's the same logic as decimal multiplication/division on paper.
> study Dijkstra's algoritm and binary tree traversal in highschool CS
That's more like it!
Do you really think tests where you gotta solve several divisions and multiplications on paper in hex and binary with no aids under time pressure is approachable for every 11 year old who just starts to learn about CS?
It's good to learn and know how such operations are done, but those tests were the bane of my 11 year old childhood.
I was solving leetcode-adjacent problems for the entire last year of high school in preparation for the final exam though.
It's no wonder that - at least for a while - Google was churning out new products left and right. It allows people to build new stuff instead of have to maintain existing stuff.
Designing url-shortner is no different than edit distance.
With Google it's actually been a pattern. Interviewed for them and passed HC three times, but each time I couldn't bring myself to work for them given how bored everyone looked.
They must be really strange folks. I can't imagine 1) a company who would propose such a thing to a (potential) employee, 2) a person who would agree to that. Seriously, WTF.
It’s optimising for the 1%.
There are many algorithms in "leetcode" style questions that almost never get used in real world software development. Tree traversal is not one of them.
Heck, the whole family of lisp languages are nothing but "(non?)abstract syntax trees". Imagine getting reprimanded by a user named `morelisp` :)
And to be pedantic, since DOM trees are not binary trees, it's not a "binary traversal" problem. I encounter binary trees a lot less than the non-binary counterparts, but the traversal algorithm is basically the same.
By the second: Holy shit go read a book. Please.
Do you seriously struggle to think of possible reasons for why someone would want to work for Meta? Something like "high pay, interesting/difficult challenges and problems to work on, large scale rarely found elsewhere, and lots of learning opportunities (including loads of great engineers to learn from)" never crossed your mind?
Not saying that those were the reasons OP used to make their choice, could have been plenty others. But given there are so many obvious possible reasons, the question in the context of the original comment feels just off.
P.S. I am neither current nor a former Meta employee. It is just jarring to see reddit-tier flamebait discourse in HN threads.
Yes, I struggle to think of a good reason to work for such a harmful company as Meta. People usually don't land there because of a desperate need for money, which would probably be one of the very few acceptable reasons for joining that company.
And why should my question be in good faith? Why should we not call out people who cheerfully join organizations that pose a threat to our future, and show no civic responsibility?
WhatsApp is an extremely useful product in my life. Instagram is nice for keeping up to date with some friends I don't get a chance to hangout in-person with often, as well as following some small local artist and museum pages. I dont care for FB as a product anymore, but pre-pandemic it was great for helping organize events with my friends. Oculus Quest 2 is a product I use daily and enjoy.
Most people outside of a subset of HN boiling in their own echochamber consider a lot of those products as useful in their lives, and will just give you the look of "huh, sounds interesting, i will look into it later. Oh, just remembered I had an appointment in an hour, welp gotta go, see ya later" if you try to give them that "harmful" spiel.
> And why should my question be in good faith?
Because that's what people come to HN for. If I wanted bad faith takes galore, I would need to go no further than reddit.
> Why should we not call out people who cheerfully join organizations that pose a threat to our future, and show no civic responsibility?
Because that's just your opinion. And it is sliding into QAnon-level justifications for using arguments like "why should we wear masks, when they pose a threat to our freedoms and the way of life!" and "why should we not storm the capitol, it is a civic responsibility to free ourselves from the shadow cabal's tyrrany and threat to our future!".
I don't agree with those QAnon takes, so I hope you realize that not everyone universally agrees with your takes either. And not because they are being paid by Meta or were "brainwashed".
It seems you also struggle to understand that the majority of the world does not consider them to be a harmful company, and do not agree with your assessment of it.
Anti-disclaimer: I do not work for FAANG, nor have I. I also never had a FB/Instagram account. I'm not fond of Facebook, but I can see other people's perspectives.
Then you aren't actually asking to learn. Instead you are judging the poster. That's a thing you can do, but couching it in a question is terrible forum etiquette.
You only asked him his reason, so you could attack him for it.
Just go and say what you really meant, instead of pretending like you had anything to contribute in the first place.
That way, at least the reasonable people can see what you wrote, and hopefully get you deplatformed.
This is the part that tells me that maybe you are a bit out of touch with the general public.
Go to any college campus or talk to any student in a good CS program in the US. Meta is going to be on the list of some of the most sought after companies to get an internship or a fresh grad offer at. People post glowing humblebrag posts on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/TikTok/LinkedIn/etc. when they get a job offer from Meta, for their friends and followers to see. I see it on my own feeds not that rarely, and often from people I went to college with a while ago.
I cannot really feel the same level of excitement about a job like that to share it with others in a similar way. But you finding it "surprising that a person would share [that they got a job at Meta] publicly at this point in the company's history", as if it was something they would be ashamed about and attempt hiding, is somewhat telling.
What warrants deplatforming is your straight up admitance that you had nothing to contribute, were not acting in good faith, and were just asking a question to attack someone.
Just say it with your chest. That way people can judge for themselves what the heck it is you are doing.
My question was not made in bad faith, but insinuated to be a bad faith question by a different user, though as I said, I do understand the people who directly call out Meta employees, which I did not do here.
It is you and your peer who attacked the question, brought up conspiracy theories and called for deplatforming. So if you continue perhaps I'll be the one to reach out to mods. I have every damn right to ask someone on HN why they would work for Meta, without expecting intimidation from other users.
And yes, I continue to be surprised by people who would join Meta given all the shady and illegal things they've been doing over the years. So maybe one of you could give an honest answer, one that does not involve an attack. Maybe they weren't fully aware of Meta's issues, or people there generally don't care about these problems? That is what I was trying to understand.
This is you basically admitting that it was all in bad faith in the first place, because, it is an attempt to justify it, by effectively questioning why your question should be asked in good faith in the first place.
For example an Amazon employee could be bothered by their union related question being perceived as critique, while also seeing no issue with someone condemning Amazon for their illegal union busting, and general disregard for the safety and well being of their warehouse staff.
Ok, so you agree that you should not ask questions in bad faith, and then when you later said "And why should my question be in good faith?", well that was a dumb question.
Glad I finally got you to the point of saying that we shouldn't ask people questions in bad faith, to attack them.
Just say what mean, and don't do this roundabout way of attacking people, with a flame-bait question.
And if you already agree that we should not ask people bad faith questions, then you saying "And why should my question be in good faith?" is bad faith itself, because you already know that we shouldn't do that.
Find a less harmful employer instead of projecting your insecurities into someone's question, and trying to silence critique of any kind to ease your conscience.
Cool, so as I suspected, you support engaging in bad faith, and asking bad faith questions.
Just say that from the very beginning if that is your opinion. Not sure why you would do this song and dance of denial, if this is just what you believe.
Awesome! Got you to admit to it them! Now don't start crying when people accuse you of supporting asking questions in bad faith.
Just say "Yep, that is a totally valid thing to accuse me of supporting. I agree that you are correct in saying that I have no problem with asking questions in bad faith!".
You could have avoided all of this, if you just said that from the beginning.
Scale, by now, is surely an operations matter. If they're still having to innovate to perform at their current scale, what the hell have they been doing? In other words, aside from the VR distraction, what interesting challenges remain at Meta?
I know they have to rebuild their ad platform since Apple devastated it. But is "convincing people to look at advertisements" really still an interesting challenge? That's the point of view I don't understand, and would like to!
Is it selfish? Perhaps. And maybe Meta will fall out of the pantheon of top tech companies at some point, but for now they’re still there.
The projects in their domain is definitely more interesting than slogging through yet another Generic Line of Business Project at Generic Tech Is A Cost Center Company where the vast majority of SWEs work.
Stipulated the rest of it -- what's the engineering challenge?
But to counter that, again, what’s the interesting or exciting engineering challenges at the various mundane companies where the vast majority of SWEs work at?
Having worked at such “boring” companies, but recently transferred to an “exciting” company in the same tier as Meta, I can say the fundamental concept of my projects or work hasn’t changed, but everything around it has. The people around you, the resources available, the respect, the culture.
It’s all a matter of context too. If you’re the type of elite SWE that can snap their fingers and land offers at any of the FAANGMULA+ companies, then sure it’s much easier to scoff at Meta and say there are many equivalently “interesting” places to work out there.
On the other hand if you’re someone that struggles with leetcode and Meta is the only company of its type that gives you an offer and the rest are cost center companies like the Wells Fargos and Home Depots of the world, then that’s another story.
Say for example using advanced engineering techniques to optimize existing processes to achieve a 0.1% speedup. That alone could save a couple million dollars with Meta's scale. And it's only possible with the kind of scale they have.
And of course outsiders wouldn't even notice such a thing.
Blue pill: I am passionate about connecting people
Red pill: Money is nice, good people and low stress job
Though it worked out for me in the end, but I was definitely annoyed for a day or two.
I told her no thank you and hung up.
I didn't practice that much since I hate wasting time on useless tasks, and the interviewer literally told me to just leetcode and read the interview book. I asked him a bunch of web questions and he had no fucking clue, all he did was leetcode and interview every year.
Funnily enough though, I heard once you join as a Front-end engineer, you are pretty much a regular SWE and can join any team and work on any tech, even backend/systems.
It means reasonably complex algorithmic and data structure problems you're supposed to solve by coding under pressure, quickly, in interview conditions.
And if you think that's not happening, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Algorithmic thinking is kinda what I do. So solving those problems doesn't feel like a bad proxy for how I might perform on the job.
However, how often do you come up with high performance, close to optimal algorithms, on your own, within 45 minutes?
How often do you implement heaps and such as part of your day job, versus using standard libraries or common ones?
Edit: In fact thinking back, they even sent me tips on how to improve my leetcode skills in preparation for the interview! The whole process was completely guided by it.
That being said, guidance is to ask 2 medium difficulty questions as opposed to 1 hard one.
The questions the human is asking you come from a big question bank and a lot of it is listed on LeetCode under the meta company tag because people leak them.
People use Leetcode to practice for those interviews, they don't use the leetcode site in the interview
I mean, now I'm just here to watch the downvotes pile on....