flushpop's blog

Preparing for big tech interviews in India
By flushpop, history, 18 months ago, In English

Hello codeforces community,

I'm preparing for interviews and online assessments for big tech companies. Unfortunately, in India, I have heard leetcode is not enough and problems generally asked in interviews are of hard cateogary (according to LC). So I was thinking of only solved binary search, graphs, DP tagged problems on codeforces as I think Constructive, ad-hoc problems are rarely asked in interviews? What do you think?

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12 months ago, # |
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Why do you want to prepare for big tech in India? In India the competition is 100x more than US, on top of that even if you manage to get in most of the works which come to India are of support and maintenance nature. So best way to prepare in India is to prepare for SAT/GRE/TOEFL. I know this doesn't answer your question directly but this is the sad truth.

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    12 months ago, # ^ |
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    comes in India are of support and maintenance nature

    really? I thought Gpay was developed in India

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      12 months ago, # ^ |
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      Core development activity in big tech is typically about 2-4% of the work and in Indian teams possibly lesser than 1% . In big tech wherever core technologies are involved typically PhDs are brought in to build the core algorithm and then western BS/MS are the thrown in to decorate the raw code given by PhDs(ie make it production ready) and then Indian BTech/MTechs are thrown in to do support and maintenance of those codes (ie fix bugs, attend customer calls, manage deployment, manage testing etc). That's how the industry works.

      However the difficulty to get in is higher in asian countries than in western countries. Sometimes back I did an analysis on difficulty of big tech in India vs US, wait I will share it.

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        12 months ago, # ^ |
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        Here you go: FAANG difficulty varies a lot based on which country you are in. If you are in India it is considerably more difficult than USA. I did an analysis for Engineering positions (as of 2023). Most people will agree that competitive programming has a strong co-relation with interview performance of interviews in FAANG type of companies. These are the number of engineering positions in each country and number of active competitive coders(the one in parenthesis includes inactive competitive coders too)

        ​

        USA India India/USA
        Facebook 25K 0
        Apple 35K 3K
        Amazon 73K 18K
        Netflix 24K 0
        Google 54K 7K
        TOTAL = 211K 28K 1/(7.5x)
        Codeforces 600(3K) 17K(61K)
        Codechef 555(7K) 180K(570K)
        Hackerrank (11K) (43K)
        Leetcode (11K) (25K)
        Spoj (37K) (399K)
        AVERAGE= 577(11K) 98K(182K) 170x(17x)
        DIFFICULTY 0.0027(0.052) 0.2857(6.5) 1275x(127x)

        • India has 17x more number of competitive coders but 7.5x fewer FAANG jobs, Hence getting into FAANG in India is about 17*7.5 = 127x more difficult than USA.

        • Now if you ask me why include all competitive coders and not just the top rated ones, this is because the interviews for these don't require you to be a top competitive programmer, moderate experience, moderate level of activity, ability to solve moderate difficulty CP problems is more than enough. In fact if you filter out the inactive profiles and only include the active profiles the difficult ratio becomes 1275x more difficult than USA.

        • On public request I further filtered out lower ranked competitive coders and did the analysis for active as well as > 1600 on CF and found India has roughly 6.5x more such competitive coders than USA, this makes overall ratio in India 6.5*7.5 = 49x more difficult than USA.

        • So the best way to maximise your chances is to move to USA for a BS/MS/Phd.

        [Data Source: LinkedIn and CP websites]

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12 months ago, # |
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The question isnt how to prepare for the interview, it's how to get one.

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    12 months ago, # ^ |
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    As I said the easiest way to get one is by preparing for SAT/GRE/TOEFL.

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