Clojurians Log v2
jobs-discuss
Has anyone interviewed for Clojure at FAANG ? What was your tech interview like?
I can only speak about my experience interviewing many years ago (10-12 years, now; in 2013, IIRC). It was a standard 4-5 technical interviews in one day kind of thing. Some programming, one design. This was when I was doing my MS and looking for a job before graduating. Wasn't Clojure, though. I haven't used Clojure in any interviews; I'm not sure I'd expect the median interviewer for non-Clojure job/team/company to know it.
Do you mean using Clojure for interviews or interviewing for a team that uses Clojure?
interviewing for a team that uses Clojure
What's the deal with FAANG, by the way, is it all about the money? From what I hear, the vast majority of the people there are just doing boring stuff most of the time. Sorry for going off-topic.
I think it’s fair to say Clojure isn’t used in faang. I’m sure someone will correct me with an example of a super niche area but for the most part it isn’t used. Clojures strengths don’t play well with what faang hires for. Also, most faang standardizes the development experience which would make using Clojure a bit awkward… But I would love to hear otherwise!
> I think it’s fair to say Clojure isn’t used in faang. not true for Apple at least
@a13 off the top of my head and in no particular order: • money & perks:moneybag: • prestige • Career opportunities (faang on resume) • technical challenges (eg huge scale) • Visa sponsorship • hope of a strong engineering culture
> money & perks yes, i mentioned that > prestige What's prestigious about doing boring things (again, besides money, which isn't prestigious per se)? > faang on resume How is this different from le prestige? > Visa sponsorship What about people who don't need one? > hope of a strong engineering culture Of course, the hope.
Everyone’s different. And many people join for a combination of those things.
Clojure is a small presence but it is used in FAANG. I know because I use it at my job. I actually interviewed twice for Clojure teams here. I didn't receive an offer the first time but did the second. The interviews were fairly different since we have no top down imposed standard for interviewing. If you're practicing, I'd suggest focus on hypothetical pairing exercises and design discussions. Most of the Clojure positions I've seen are more senior so will focus more on that. It will probably be a long interview, at least most of a day. It will probably have some leetcode type stuff but again that will depend on team.
@a13 That's not been my experience here. I get to work on really big systems in a very dynamic environment and my work affects many people inside the company and indirectly the general public. But again, since FAANG is so large there's going to be a range of experiences.
That said, it is also enjoyable that pretty much everyone knows the company I work at. This does have downsides since people make assumptions and ask about things which I cannot answer (even if I knew) but overall it's a positive. I also happened to be a pre existing fan of the company, so it's cool and a point of pride to be a (very small) part of something I enjoy.
> But again, since FAANG is so large there's going to be a range of experiences. I see, sorry, I've never met a person who worked at Apple before, probably it's different and people solve interesting problems there. I do know some people from other "letters" though.
To be fair, if you're working in a clojure team inside a huge company, chances are you are one of the lucky ones.
I can't imagine someone pushing to use a niche language just to do another CRUD app
why not? Clojure is great for CRUDs
Cutting costs can be a good idea even for larger companies.
The company already does hundreds of those in established languages, clojure might be better than those, but not to the point of justifying another language
Clojure being hosted on the JVM makes it significantly easier to sell in BigCorps, in my experience
You can reuse a lot of work that already went in to deploying JAR shaped things, and you also get to use other JAR shaped things inside Clojure
Prestige is specifically not about what you think is prestigious, but about what people at large think it is. My parents know about Apple or Google, and I'm sure they would prefer I work there instead of a startup with Clojure. So would 100% of the population, minus a rounding error.
...So... any tech interview experiences? 😅
@v1nc3ntpull1ng why do you ask? Are you preparing for an interview or trying to get one?
I used to work for Apple in a Clojure project. I would assume that pretty much every large org has some Clojure.