This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Changsin Lee
What are Big Tech interviews like? It’s not just about churning out code.
· The Process
∘ Phone Screening
∘ On-Site Interviews
∘ Internal Transfers
· Behind the Scenes
∘ No more puzzles
∘ LPs
∘ Connected or independent
· How to Prepare
∘ Coding Questions
∘ Behavioral Questions
· ‘A’ for Attitude
∘ Honesty is the best policy
∘ An interview is a two-way street
∘ An interview is a learning process itself
· References
The acronym FAANG is often used to represent Big Tech companies that pretty much every developer wants to get into. They are Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. The term is now outdated [1] since Facebook is now Meta, Google has formed a new parent company called Alphabet., and Microsoft, which has the second-highest market capitalization behind Apple, is not on the list. The new acronym is now MAMAA, Microsoft replacing Netflix.
Regardless of which acronym is used, these Big Tech companies are the trendsetters of the interview process and it is a dream for many developers to work for them. To be transparent, I did not interview all the listed companies. My experience is limited to tech roles (software developers mainly) at Microsoft and Amazon but I hope it would prove to be useful for those who want to get into the Big Tech world as a developer. There are many books and articles that go over the details of the interview process so I would focus on my personal observations and learnings.
The Process
The interview process starts with an email from a recruiter. To get such an email, you usually need to apply for a position, especially if you are a new graduate. If you have been in the industry for a while and are established yourself as an expert in the field, recruiters often contact you even if you are happily working in your current job. All you have to do once you get the email is just to say yes and then you are set for a string of interviews.
Phone Screening
The first interview is a phone conversation with a recruiter to find a suitable team. In some cases, the recruiter is assigned by a particular product team so you do not have a choice. Even in those cases, you can find more about the company and other available teams that might be more interesting to you.
Once the HR phone screening is finished, you are to do a real technical phone interview. The purpose of the phone interview is to decide whether you have a chance to come for an in-person interview. This process is important because in-person interviews are expensive because the companies need to either bring the candidates to the office or have the interviewers meet them in their location. Either way, the logistics and the time that are required are expensive for the company so the responsibility of phone interviewers is to make sure that they bring candidates who would very likely succeed in on-site interviews.
On-Site Interviews
An on-site interview consists of 4–5 interviews, each lasting about an hour. There are two components to a technical interview. The first part is coding where you are expected to solve some technical problems by writing code on a whiteboard. This is why the process is also called the “whiteboard interview.”
Behavioral questions make up the second part. The interviewers will either give hypothetical situations or prompt you to describe a similar situation in the past and ask how you would solve them. As an interviewer, I prefer candidates who answer from their own experience and I prompt them to do so if they don’t.
For Microsoft, there is also a lunch interview. During lunchtime, a different interviewer will fetch you and take you to a restaurant. Don’t be fooled by the informality of the lunch process! This is an actual part of the interview. Usually, lunch interviews focus more on the behavioral aspect, I have seen technical questions asked during the lunch interview as well so be prepared as well.
Another Microsoft-specific process is that you might see an “extra” interviewer at the end of the scheduled interviews. When the recruiter tells you that you will have 4 interviews and you are done with all 4 interviews, you would be told to wait for another interview. The last interviewer is called, the “AA” (As Appropriate) who is either the hiring manager or another senior manager in the company. If you do not see this extra interviewer, you most likely did not meet the bar and would not get an offer.
After the inter is over, your brain is fried and too tired to do anything else. At this point, the HR person will meet you again to escort you out of the building and you just need to wait for an answer from the recruiter.
For Microsoft interviewees, if you are an out-of-town interviewee, you might be invited to a dinner outing with an employee of the company. Relax. This part is not an interview. The employee is just there to introduce you to the company and the area so that you would be more likely to accept the offer, were it extended.
When I first flew in from the East Coast, I was taken to the Space Needle and dined in the revolving restaurant. I mistakenly thought that it was part of the interview and did not really enjoy the view or the meal. You can actually be at ease and get a more insider to peek at the company.
Internal Transfers
The article is mostly for the external candidates: i.e., interviewees who are from outside the company. However, there are also a lot of internal candidates who interview at other teams within the company. Since internal candidates have already gone through the whole nine yards of the Big Tech interviews themselves, I just want to briefly touch on internal transfers.
The internal interviewing process is similar, but it is a little simpler. There is an internal job posting board where you could find jobs that might be interesting to you. The difference is that you can skip the phone screening step. Instead, you schedule an “informational” with the hiring manager to find out if there is a match.
Another big difference is in the attitude of the hiring managers. Given that internal candidates already passed the company hiring bar before and that they worked there for a while, they want to sell the team to the candidates. However, that does not mean that you can be hired without the interview process. Except in a few rare cases, you still have to go through the whole length of interviews with the same or even a higher bar.
Behind the Scenes
During my twenty years tenure at the two companies (15 years at Microsoft and 5 years at Amazon), I sat on both sides of the interview process. I had to go through the interview process the first time but after a few years, I became the interviewer and was able to see what went in behind the scene. At Amazon, for instance, I conducted more than 100 interviews.
Though the overall interview process is similar, there are a few differences. (This was my personal experience and could be outdated so take it with a grain of salt.)
No more puzzles
At Microsoft, the hiring teams are more involved in the interviews so the interview questions and decisions tend to be more subjective to team culture and individual quarks. Puzzle-like questions like ‘Why are manhole covers round?’ were still popular in the early part of the 2000s. At one of the internal interviews I had at Microsoft, for instance, the interviewer asked me to think of ways to find what was behind my back (I was sitting against the door facing the interviewer)! My guess was that the interviewer wanted to see how creative I was, but I would argue that there are better ways to find creativity and problem-solving skills. Luckily, such questions were phased out by Microsoft so you should not have to cram for puzzle questions.
LPs
Amazon, on the other hand, has a more structured approach to the interview process. Before an interview, a ‘pre-brief’ session is held to discuss what to cover by whom. Coding questions are compared and assessed too during a pre-brief but the most important task is to assign specific Amazon Leadership Principles (LPs for short) to interviewers. Amazon takes LPs seriously so even the interview process reflects the company values. After the actual interviews, the interviewers get together and decide on a Hire/No Hire decision in a ‘de-brief.’ Sometimes, the decisions are easy but if there are split votes, there can be a heated and lengthy debate among interviewers. On such occasions, it is the job of the Bar Raiser (BR for short) who sways the vote one way or the other (if interested in finding more about the role of BR, read an excellent article by Carlos Argulles[2]). I once was in a de-brief that lasted almost 3 hours! Such involved de-brief is rare, however, and a typical de-brief is about half an hour to an hour.
Connected or independent
There is another big difference between Microsoft and Amazon interviews. After each Microsoft interview, the interviewer talks to the next interviewer for some quick tips for the next interview. The next interviewer takes from where the last interviewer left and goes from there. Amazon interviewers, on the other hand, are completely independent and do not talk to each other during the interview process. Only after all the interviews are finished do they compare notes and discuss. This process is called “de-brief” as mentioned above.
There are pros and cons to each approach. In Microsoft-style chain interviews, one interview (usually the first couple of interviews) tends to affect the rest of the interviews. If you happen to have started really badly for the first couple of interviews, it is almost impossible to recover. Interviewers are advised not to be influenced by previous interviews but interviewers are people too so it is really difficult to remain objective when the previous interview feedback is lopsided one way or the other. The good side is that if the candidate just does not meet the bar, the interview process can be cut short after the first couple of interviews, saving time for other interviewers.
Amazon’s siloed interviews allow independent assessments but can lead to a lot of time wasted on bad candidates and duplicate efforts. The questions might be similar and the candidates might use the same example for answering multiple questions. To prevent duplicate questions, the interviewers gather before an interview (“pre-brief”) to draw up a plan.
How to Prepare
Coding and behavioral questions are the core of a technical interview and here are my tips on how to prepare for them.
Coding Questions
There are now many online and offline resources available. LeetCode and HackerRank are some of the well-known platforms where you can practice solving coding questions.
You should definitely try these online resources, but my advice is to have a solid understanding of basic algorithms and data structures first. Why? Because the point of the coding interview is not to solve the problems but to demonstrate that you are well-grounded technically and that you have good problem-solving skills.
Blindly going through coding questions would not prepare you for the challenges during the coding interviews. Most likely, you will not encounter the same questions and even if you do, the interviewers will quickly level them up to something you are not prepared for. The point is not to solve the questions but to show your thought process. I have interviewed many candidates who claimed to know the questions and still failed to solve them when a slight change was introduced.
What worked for me was to have a study plan and set an uninterrupted time to cover the basic algorithms and data structures. This usually took me a couple of weeks to refresh my memory. And then I would start practicing HackerRank-like questions on paper first. I would start with easy to medium questions and move to more difficult questions. Writing the solution on paper forces you to focus and think through all the corner cases as well as syntax errors. In Big Tech companies, interviewers would not penalize them for not knowing a specific language (e.g., Java). They expect that a good developer would pick up a language easily. However, claiming to know a language and making stupid syntax errors makes you suspicious and you might be up for more scrutiny. So, practice on paper or on a whiteboard without any IDE.
Behavioral Questions
Developers tend to overlook behavior questions and focus purely on improving their coding skills. Big mistake! Yes, you do need to pass the technical bar but if you do not show good leadership and communication skills, you would not get an offer. Just put yourself in the hiring manager’s shoes. Would you hire a developer who kills coding questions but completely fails to answer your questions?
Amazon, especially, is very keen on making sure that all new hires follow Amazon Leadership Principles. During the interviews, however, do not expect that you will be asked explicitly about the LPs. The interviewers will not test you on the Ownership Principle by asking, “What is the Ownership Principle?” The questions are embedded in other coding and behavioral questions. For instance, the interviewer might ask, “Was there an occasion when you stepped up to fix a problem that no one dared?” Or for the “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit” Principle, they might ask, “Describe a situation that you disagreed with your manager.”
Whether it is for Amazon or other companies, the best way is to formulate an answer based on your own experience. Answering hypothetically is a red flag and the interviewers would probe you further. If you cannot think of any situation that fits the description, try to find something similar no matter how remote it might seem, and provide an explanation. For instance, even if you never disagreed with your manager, you must have asked some questions or disagreed with your colleagues and use those incidents to show that you are not just spineless and brainless pawns. This might be challenging if you come from a culture where submission to authority is touted as a virtue (Asian cultures in general). Deferring your cultural background might be acceptable in some cases, but even in a highly hierarchical culture (Korean society to a large extent), you want to show evidence that you were the owner of your work and life.
I would advise that you prepare behavioral questions just like coding questions. Amazon Leadership Principles are applicable and touted by most Big Tech companies so dividing the question according to the LPs is a good start. For each category, try to find at least one or two examples from your own experience where you demonstrated the value.
‘A’ for Attitude
In the final section, I would like to address the most important ingredient for a successful interview: namely, your attitude.
Honesty is the best policy
The intention of my sharing these tips and behind-the-scenes information is not to help you “cheat” the system. I hope that what you got out from reading the article is not to take a few tricks to somehow fool the interviewers. No, it will not work. The popular phrase, “Fake it till you make it” does not work in interviews. If you don’t know, just say it. Don’t beat around the bush or set up a smokescreen for a solution you do not have.
Trust me. After you interviewed a few dozen interviews, any fool can develop a pretty accurate sense of telling a lie. Big Tech interviewers are very well seasoned developers themselves so there is no need to make up a story. Be honest about your past experience and knowledge but share the lessons you learned and show that you are a good learner. You will be surprised how much the interviewers appreciate honest answers over fudged quasi-half-baked solutions.
An interview is a two-way street
By default, the interviewee assumes the vulnerable position. However, that does not mean that the interviewers have all the power in their hands. The interview is actually a two-way process. As a possible future employee of the company, you want to find out if the team and the company are a good fit for your career aspirations and personality traits.
Given the volatile economy and fluctuating job market situations, you are most likely looking for another job in a few years if not sooner. You need to find out if the current position is a dead-end or a door that will lead to more opportunities in the future. What better way to find the answers to your questions than interviewing current team members? Don’t miss the chance when you are prompted by the interviewer to ask any questions at the end of each interview. Prepare the questions beforehand. Find more about the culture, the process, and the growth trajectory. Yes, you are the interviewer too.
An interview is a learning process itself
Interviewing for Big Tech companies is like running in the Boston marathon for a long-distance runner: you must already be pretty damn good at your trade already. With so many developers in the market, even getting a chance to interview at these Big Tech companies is a huge privilege in itself. Obviously, you will be nervous when you first interview at these big-name companies. Don’t worry. Handling pressure is part of the unwritten job description for the Big Tech tech jobs. Make the nervousness work for you. It forces you to concentrate and you might learn how to draw from a higher power.
Whether you get an offer or not, you will learn a lot from the interview process. If you did not get an offer, reflect on what you missed and double down on the good things you did. Personally, I found preparing for the next interviews made me a better owner of my current tasks. Just imagining how I would answer one of the behavioral questions like, ‘Tell me what you did when your manager gave you a deadline that you know is impossible to meet?’ I am reminded that I cannot be the victim of the situation. To demonstrate leadership principles, I know I must rise to the occasion and make a difference. It is a sobering reminder that my current job is as important as (if not more) the next dream job.
References
[1] Jim Cramer who coined the original FAANG list came up with a new acronym: MAMAA (Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet) in 2021. We have yet to see wide adoption of the new acronym though and thus my choice of using the term, “Big Tech” instead.
[2] Carlos Arguelles, Memoirs of an Amazon Bar Raiser, Medium article 2021.
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What to Expect from Big Tech Technical Interviews was originally published in Level Up Coding on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Changsin Lee
Changsin Lee | Sciencx (2022-11-28T12:47:10+00:00) What to Expect from Big Tech Technical Interviews. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2022/11/28/what-to-expect-from-big-tech-technical-interviews/
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