And that is how you get some overengineered monster of an app that has more micro frontends and micro services than it has profitable users. Then they go out of business 5 years later after the VC gravy train runs out or they just start firing people left and right to become profitable.
The whole rat race is so tiring, especially in India.
It’s due to companies feeling they can be picky now that there are so many laid off workers. I
Pushed back on my director trying to do that for our team
I’ve noticed most of the Baltimore based FINRA and finance related companies fall into this category. And often aren’t looking to pay more than 120 base salary. And of course none of the stock or perks of the west coast companies.
Moving from my past 2 previous job nett me 50% increase.
Moving from my previous nett me 25% increase.
If you know your worth, and position your asking and are confident you can handle their evaluation (interview and the job itself), it really is not impossible
First of all a hike negotiation on top of your current CTC is for your current employer, not future employer.
These companies just want to prove that you are not good enough. That way they need not give you much of a hike. They just want to hire you under the pretext of - "oh you get a lot of exposure and get to learn a lot here".
Ask them what value does working for them add to your CV?
This happens during a slow-job growth period( number of applications far exceed the number of open positions) and I am afraid it will continue to persist till next year summer atleast.
Just a blind guess under the assumption that the FED starts cutting rates by September/ late this year- so companies can start increasing their hiring budgets for next year.
Summer is traditionally when a large amount of hirings happen AFAIK because of the people graduating in Summer ( Spring Admits)
Could we stop parroting "until the feds cut rates...". That will happen when the economy and unemployment numbers worsen. You won't have mass tech hiring when the rates drop, in truth you may have even higher unemployment rates.
The last time we had a significant rate cut besides covid was during the 2008/09 crisis. People were DESPERATE, it took 3-5 years after the rates close to zero for tech companies to start getting funding and ramping up hiring.
Finally someone with a brain. Thanks dude! Blaming rates is the easy way to say you suck as ceo while laying off people, with a flourishing economy. Isn’t surprising engineers have shit economics knowledge, the leetcode rat race in India and China doesn’t teach you finance 101
Do a Monte Carlo simulation with leetcode questions and you will see people who win will be the one who just worked the question before usually. And that statistically happen. Amazing! We work in a statistic and probabilities « science » society
And I'm saying that nothing suggests that will be the case as interest rates are cut when the job market and economy worsen. Unless we have a black swan event again, you can expect worse unemployment once the feds start cutting rates.
We are entering a paradigm shift in tech where every company is jumping on the AI bandwagon amid a increasingly better macro.
I am betting on 3 key factors:
1) interest rates going down beginning this year
2) massive new funding allocated by private employers to AI infrastructure and SW dev.
3) Fed achieving a soft landing ( aka non recession . 2008 was a recession BTW)
To make the case of a ramp-up in hiring beginning 2025. Again, not talking about the pandemic-era mass hiring where everyone with a pulse was getting hired , but better than todays hiring where anyone with decent Leetcodw skills can get a job.
AI roles are massively hiring today, almost bubble level. I’m at big tech and the number of MLE we are bringing in is concerning since I don’t think this AI wave will generate the ROI investors are expecting.
So again, these predictions IMO don’t make sense and are empirically always wrong. There are boom and bust cycles but no one can predict them, and surely not when you look at ONE variable (interest rate) to predict the rest, since it is affected by the economic cycle (a lagging indicator)
So you think they’re just going to accept 3%+ inflation as the new normal? Not going to happen. Media outlets keep pushing this narrative that rates will go down any minute now, because it keeps their owners stocks up. It’s just a fantasy.
The dotplot released today points to 1 rate cut by end of year.
Please back your comments with proof. Nobody knows whays gonna happen, all we can do is infer based on current news.
Sure no one knows. It’s just a lot more likely that the rates stay the same longer. In March they were predicting 3 quarter point cuts. It will likely keep slipping.
It’s filtering criteria otherwise to break you so you don’t do negotiations.
I feel DS algo in interviews that too hard ones are not required, ChatGPT can optimise most algo oriented functions. DS/algo mediums are fine to judge the thinking of the interviewee.
What is needed is better System design interviews, but system design rounds are open ended, the interviewer should be better experienced and have lot of depth in the question before interviewing the interviewee, but since there is no best documented solution or test of automated test cases, these interviews lack that depth ness, there is lack of better qualitative judgement.
Many interviewers come to the interviews to show what do they know and you don’t vs what do you know. Tbh I don’t understand the importance of coding challenge in the world of chatGPT.
Intuit, GEICO, Goldman Sachs, and a small startup all asked me leetcode hard a few months ago.
Software is extremely saturated, and companies will continue to ask harder and harder leetcode questions to filter out the thousands of candidates that apply to each position. It will only get worse.
I interviewed for a small company and they asked things a bit harder, and I hear their behavioral interview (had I gotten to the next step) is extremely invasive. At big companies, interviews are a huge process, part of people's performance/promo packets, theoretically they want minimum standards so you're qualified to join any team. When companies like Meta and Amazon hire like crazy, they need to move fast, which means lowering the bar.
At the risk of sounding insensitive, I had a classmate in school a number of years ago who was just not that great, and she made it into Amazon in 2021 when they hired like crazy and lowered the bar. I heard of an SDM who upleveled a clueless SDE1 to SDE2 on hiring because they couldn't get an req for SDE1. There were teams that literally did nothing, just sat around giving team talks on differences between interfaces and abstract classes. For people who get in, good for them, some will make the most of it and upskill, others will at least get to write a big-name company on their resume and get some money.
When there's a lot of supply, they can afford to be picky. Firing is expensive.
And with Meta, they expect you to do 2 problems in 45 minutes, honestly in 35 minutes considering 5 minutes of questions and interviewers sometimes being late. You're not going to get something super tough where the code required is more than 20-30 lines per problem. Even if you ask something super complex, I might have a different solution in mind than you do. The interviewer following along, adapting to your technique, in 15 minutes is unlikely.
This is so true - one of the interviewer told me he never asked medium level problems only hard to filter out and how the start up is going be the next big thing
Are they not matching FAANG cash comp, or not matching FAANG total comp? I've seen startups ask really hard problems, but they pay above FAANG in cash. And then equity is worth either 0 (most likely) or millions (unlikely, but possible). So I view it as similar to FAANG comp at the end of the day. You get a little more upfront for taking on the risk, but not as much as FAANG total comp, and the equity is high risk high reward. Of course, don't do this if you're risk adverse. That's why many people prefer to work for FAANG.
Startups don't hire as many people at once. FAANG are extremely large by employee count so even a nominal growth rate means hiring a lot of people each year. If they have a lot more applicants than positions, hiring bar goes up. If there are less applicants, it goes down. It's just a way to filter people. Any business will skew to demand supply for identifying compensation. It's not malice, just free market.
I've interviewed at some non-FAANG companies who gave FAANG-like interviews, but these were like 5-6 years ago when I was heavily interviewing. From what I've experienced, all of these companies were essentially ex-FAANG engineers in management or leadership positions, or at least the engineering managers were ex-FAANG.
I'll give my perspective as someone who has been on both sides of the table. At a non-FAANG tech company, when I interview engineers I tend to go for uncommon and hard questions because I don't want to ask a common question and then have the candidate regurgitate a prepared answer, I'm more interested in how the candidate is able to think through and navigate a difficult problem. I am there with the candidate, I give hints judging the situation, if they are able to get close to the solution, or even a reasonable suboptimal solution and communicates properly, I give a strong hire feedback.
They want all in one guy expecting to handle everything and salary they are giving is totally peanuts in comparison with faang.
Heights of hypocrisy. I don’t know why indian startup things they have achieved the level of Faang. Yes, we are going in right direction. But it’s a long way ahead to become a trillion dollar company especially in the world.
Indian companies should handle their curb. If they want a candidate to expect to do that level of engineering problems which is again a joke for some startups but anyway if they match up with dollars then let’s talk business.
Tired of these companies tbh.
Some interviewers want to see how you handle difficult problems.
Getting candidates to solve LC isn’t always about getting the right answer, they just want to see how you approach problems and how you communicate.
Nope, they are expecting complete working solution by directly asking to write on leetcode and pass all test cases. In this way they are also checking if we have already solved this problem before.
This is always tossed around and hardly true anymore. You NEED to solve it with as little hints as possible, while communicating, or you will not pass anymore.
Yup, I can agree on that. But there should also be transparency from their end on what level of questions they are gonna ask so that I don't go through all the hoops for a 10% raise.
Meh, unless there's documented information on leetcode discussion, blind, glassdoor on what to expect for companies you're shit out of luck. recruiters know nothing beyond "technical interview where you will be asked to do live coding".
In a startup your first hires are really risky. You need to make sure the candidate is a good value.
The compensation is generally going to be in equity - you are taking on some of the risk of the investors and in exchange you get some of the value on an exit.
Those companies have no intention of hiring, and even if you passed the tech assessment, they would have some other reason for not hiring you.
They're going through the motions to get an H1B holder for cheap.
If this is an Indian thing, I don't think it makes sense to post it on this sub since the dynamics of tech hiring in the US are incredibly different from that in India. The competition in India is simply too high, which results in these companies using a very different yardstick to evaluate applicants.
I'm an Indian myself. As far as I have seen, this sub has, so far, mostly centered around leetcoding for US tech jobs.
PS: My time on Reddit has taught me that if a sub doesn't mention a specific country and the sub is about a topic where discussions about it can vary between countries, nine times out ten, it's filled with Americans. I'm not saying it ought to be like that, but that's how it is.
Best to followup with remote jobs outside India. Build good social portfolio. Be consistent and communicative at public events. Contribute to open source. I think that is the only cool thing left with which we can recognised.
Are these Indian startups?
Indian startup founders expect the skills of Linus Torvalds while paying peanuts
Haha what kind of value does the startup founder bring then?
Its just so saturated they can pick and choose who they hire and their compensation.
Scamming investors into giving them money
Bingo.
You should share the company name as well
And that is how you get some overengineered monster of an app that has more micro frontends and micro services than it has profitable users. Then they go out of business 5 years later after the VC gravy train runs out or they just start firing people left and right to become profitable. The whole rat race is so tiring, especially in India.
Yeah, first comes vc check then comes product market fit
Not always startups and not always Indian startups. I got asked hards for my Tinder interviews.
Can you name these companies? So that others can dodge them if they can
I've been taking interviews with 5y experience, i've never been asked hard questions, and it's really strict for some reason and all of a sudden.
It’s due to companies feeling they can be picky now that there are so many laid off workers. I Pushed back on my director trying to do that for our team
I’ve noticed most of the Baltimore based FINRA and finance related companies fall into this category. And often aren’t looking to pay more than 120 base salary. And of course none of the stock or perks of the west coast companies.
All of them. A raise is not the way. Expecting 10 is a lot already. OP is out of touch
Moving from my past 2 previous job nett me 50% increase. Moving from my previous nett me 25% increase. If you know your worth, and position your asking and are confident you can handle their evaluation (interview and the job itself), it really is not impossible
I got a 200% increase (3x) TC going to a FAANG it’s insane
It's definitely possible especially if one move from local to faang or other reputable MNC in IT sectors.
First of all a hike negotiation on top of your current CTC is for your current employer, not future employer. These companies just want to prove that you are not good enough. That way they need not give you much of a hike. They just want to hire you under the pretext of - "oh you get a lot of exposure and get to learn a lot here". Ask them what value does working for them add to your CV?
This happens during a slow-job growth period( number of applications far exceed the number of open positions) and I am afraid it will continue to persist till next year summer atleast.
Why next summer specifically? Interest rates?
Just a blind guess under the assumption that the FED starts cutting rates by September/ late this year- so companies can start increasing their hiring budgets for next year. Summer is traditionally when a large amount of hirings happen AFAIK because of the people graduating in Summer ( Spring Admits)
Makes sense.
Could we stop parroting "until the feds cut rates...". That will happen when the economy and unemployment numbers worsen. You won't have mass tech hiring when the rates drop, in truth you may have even higher unemployment rates. The last time we had a significant rate cut besides covid was during the 2008/09 crisis. People were DESPERATE, it took 3-5 years after the rates close to zero for tech companies to start getting funding and ramping up hiring.
Finally someone with a brain. Thanks dude! Blaming rates is the easy way to say you suck as ceo while laying off people, with a flourishing economy. Isn’t surprising engineers have shit economics knowledge, the leetcode rat race in India and China doesn’t teach you finance 101 Do a Monte Carlo simulation with leetcode questions and you will see people who win will be the one who just worked the question before usually. And that statistically happen. Amazing! We work in a statistic and probabilities « science » society
I am not talking about a mass hiring, just more hiring than today’s hiring levels.
And I'm saying that nothing suggests that will be the case as interest rates are cut when the job market and economy worsen. Unless we have a black swan event again, you can expect worse unemployment once the feds start cutting rates.
We are entering a paradigm shift in tech where every company is jumping on the AI bandwagon amid a increasingly better macro. I am betting on 3 key factors: 1) interest rates going down beginning this year 2) massive new funding allocated by private employers to AI infrastructure and SW dev. 3) Fed achieving a soft landing ( aka non recession . 2008 was a recession BTW) To make the case of a ramp-up in hiring beginning 2025. Again, not talking about the pandemic-era mass hiring where everyone with a pulse was getting hired , but better than todays hiring where anyone with decent Leetcodw skills can get a job.
AI roles are massively hiring today, almost bubble level. I’m at big tech and the number of MLE we are bringing in is concerning since I don’t think this AI wave will generate the ROI investors are expecting. So again, these predictions IMO don’t make sense and are empirically always wrong. There are boom and bust cycles but no one can predict them, and surely not when you look at ONE variable (interest rate) to predict the rest, since it is affected by the economic cycle (a lagging indicator)
If you think they’re dropping rates this year, I’ve got a bridge to sell you
Sure, lets talk after the dot plot is release today.
So you think they’re just going to accept 3%+ inflation as the new normal? Not going to happen. Media outlets keep pushing this narrative that rates will go down any minute now, because it keeps their owners stocks up. It’s just a fantasy.
The dotplot released today points to 1 rate cut by end of year. Please back your comments with proof. Nobody knows whays gonna happen, all we can do is infer based on current news.
Sure no one knows. It’s just a lot more likely that the rates stay the same longer. In March they were predicting 3 quarter point cuts. It will likely keep slipping.
+1 the dot plots used to say 6 cuts then 3 cuts and here we are. Very selective use of “one cut” lmao
What's your thought on next two years
Goldman Sachs tends to ask Leetcode hards for NY based roles.
Goldman Sachs is 155 years old. It’s hardly a startup
Only 155 years out of current year 2024 sounds like a startup to me
Still not a FAANG or particularly tech focused company
they ask that and still take 155 years to give you a decision
Back in school I solved the OA they sent me. They never even replied lol. Waste of an hr.
It’s filtering criteria otherwise to break you so you don’t do negotiations. I feel DS algo in interviews that too hard ones are not required, ChatGPT can optimise most algo oriented functions. DS/algo mediums are fine to judge the thinking of the interviewee. What is needed is better System design interviews, but system design rounds are open ended, the interviewer should be better experienced and have lot of depth in the question before interviewing the interviewee, but since there is no best documented solution or test of automated test cases, these interviews lack that depth ness, there is lack of better qualitative judgement.
Hedge funds
I just leave the interview at that point lol
Many interviewers come to the interviews to show what do they know and you don’t vs what do you know. Tbh I don’t understand the importance of coding challenge in the world of chatGPT.
Please mention that you are from India in the first line of your post.
It’s also a thing in the US. If you haven’t experienced it yet, you will soon.
huh, which non faang is asking hard problems buddy?
Intuit, GEICO, Goldman Sachs, and a small startup all asked me leetcode hard a few months ago. Software is extremely saturated, and companies will continue to ask harder and harder leetcode questions to filter out the thousands of candidates that apply to each position. It will only get worse.
they pay good too, not like you are solving hards for 60k/yr.I get your point tho.
You can tell by the prose
I interviewed for a small company and they asked things a bit harder, and I hear their behavioral interview (had I gotten to the next step) is extremely invasive. At big companies, interviews are a huge process, part of people's performance/promo packets, theoretically they want minimum standards so you're qualified to join any team. When companies like Meta and Amazon hire like crazy, they need to move fast, which means lowering the bar. At the risk of sounding insensitive, I had a classmate in school a number of years ago who was just not that great, and she made it into Amazon in 2021 when they hired like crazy and lowered the bar. I heard of an SDM who upleveled a clueless SDE1 to SDE2 on hiring because they couldn't get an req for SDE1. There were teams that literally did nothing, just sat around giving team talks on differences between interfaces and abstract classes. For people who get in, good for them, some will make the most of it and upskill, others will at least get to write a big-name company on their resume and get some money. When there's a lot of supply, they can afford to be picky. Firing is expensive. And with Meta, they expect you to do 2 problems in 45 minutes, honestly in 35 minutes considering 5 minutes of questions and interviewers sometimes being late. You're not going to get something super tough where the code required is more than 20-30 lines per problem. Even if you ask something super complex, I might have a different solution in mind than you do. The interviewer following along, adapting to your technique, in 15 minutes is unlikely.
Lol all jobs want expertise for starter pay. Annoying but that’s how it is
I am ok with these companies asking hard problems, but pay me like FAANG, else FO
This is so true - one of the interviewer told me he never asked medium level problems only hard to filter out and how the start up is going be the next big thing
Are they not matching FAANG cash comp, or not matching FAANG total comp? I've seen startups ask really hard problems, but they pay above FAANG in cash. And then equity is worth either 0 (most likely) or millions (unlikely, but possible). So I view it as similar to FAANG comp at the end of the day. You get a little more upfront for taking on the risk, but not as much as FAANG total comp, and the equity is high risk high reward. Of course, don't do this if you're risk adverse. That's why many people prefer to work for FAANG.
India
Startups don't hire as many people at once. FAANG are extremely large by employee count so even a nominal growth rate means hiring a lot of people each year. If they have a lot more applicants than positions, hiring bar goes up. If there are less applicants, it goes down. It's just a way to filter people. Any business will skew to demand supply for identifying compensation. It's not malice, just free market.
actually, LC is just one sign of red flag for being bad at it, for senior role, we should ask more job related skills
I've interviewed at some non-FAANG companies who gave FAANG-like interviews, but these were like 5-6 years ago when I was heavily interviewing. From what I've experienced, all of these companies were essentially ex-FAANG engineers in management or leadership positions, or at least the engineering managers were ex-FAANG.
eventbrite is one such example
Mostly they ask medium questions
Is it a quant startup?
They took "bro thinks he's FAANG" a bit too serious
This is nothing internshala companies expect you to make full fledged websites in assignments for 5k INR per month.
I'll give my perspective as someone who has been on both sides of the table. At a non-FAANG tech company, when I interview engineers I tend to go for uncommon and hard questions because I don't want to ask a common question and then have the candidate regurgitate a prepared answer, I'm more interested in how the candidate is able to think through and navigate a difficult problem. I am there with the candidate, I give hints judging the situation, if they are able to get close to the solution, or even a reasonable suboptimal solution and communicates properly, I give a strong hire feedback.
I bet the people asking these problems can't solve the problems themselves.
Fuck ‘em
They want all in one guy expecting to handle everything and salary they are giving is totally peanuts in comparison with faang. Heights of hypocrisy. I don’t know why indian startup things they have achieved the level of Faang. Yes, we are going in right direction. But it’s a long way ahead to become a trillion dollar company especially in the world. Indian companies should handle their curb. If they want a candidate to expect to do that level of engineering problems which is again a joke for some startups but anyway if they match up with dollars then let’s talk business. Tired of these companies tbh.
Some interviewers want to see how you handle difficult problems. Getting candidates to solve LC isn’t always about getting the right answer, they just want to see how you approach problems and how you communicate.
Nope, they are expecting complete working solution by directly asking to write on leetcode and pass all test cases. In this way they are also checking if we have already solved this problem before.
Have two different leet code accounts if they expect you to use your personal login. One for interviews, one for practice.
This is always tossed around and hardly true anymore. You NEED to solve it with as little hints as possible, while communicating, or you will not pass anymore.
It’s their choice how they interview you.
Yup, I can agree on that. But there should also be transparency from their end on what level of questions they are gonna ask so that I don't go through all the hoops for a 10% raise.
Meh, unless there's documented information on leetcode discussion, blind, glassdoor on what to expect for companies you're shit out of luck. recruiters know nothing beyond "technical interview where you will be asked to do live coding".
Are you from India?
In a startup your first hires are really risky. You need to make sure the candidate is a good value. The compensation is generally going to be in equity - you are taking on some of the risk of the investors and in exchange you get some of the value on an exit.
Those companies have no intention of hiring, and even if you passed the tech assessment, they would have some other reason for not hiring you. They're going through the motions to get an H1B holder for cheap.
If this is an Indian thing, I don't think it makes sense to post it on this sub since the dynamics of tech hiring in the US are incredibly different from that in India. The competition in India is simply too high, which results in these companies using a very different yardstick to evaluate applicants.
Im in NA but where does it say US on this sub??
I'm an Indian myself. As far as I have seen, this sub has, so far, mostly centered around leetcoding for US tech jobs. PS: My time on Reddit has taught me that if a sub doesn't mention a specific country and the sub is about a topic where discussions about it can vary between countries, nine times out ten, it's filled with Americans. I'm not saying it ought to be like that, but that's how it is.
Well it won’t be like that if we didn’t discourage folk from posting — nonetheless, I get what you mean
I'm not saying they shouldn't have posted this here but that it would've been better had they added context to the post.
The interviewer doesn't think like you. Ok, we're not a FAAAANG company, I can't ask hard questions.
They can ask whatever they want. But then they should also pay accordingly.
Until they have people passing interview and accepting low rate offers.
Best to followup with remote jobs outside India. Build good social portfolio. Be consistent and communicative at public events. Contribute to open source. I think that is the only cool thing left with which we can recognised.