Victor Song
Remote-only (located in Houston)
Full-stack / back-end / pipelines
Via Linkedin @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/vms628
Brief description
Victor comes from a solid academic background (Rice), did very well on the conceptual sections of our interview, is more multidisciplinary than a lot of engineers, and is looking for a challenging/highly technical job. Our impression is that he’s probably a bit bored with his current role. He seems personally motivated and was already running small teams even in college. And, notably, his strong conceptual performance on our interview came despite an interviewer whose grading in those areas is typically fairly harsh, so that performance is if anything probably understated here.
Our main caveat in a recommendation was that he got stuck during the coding section of our interview in a way we can't really sugarcoat. But single interview sections are fairly noisy, and his performance elsewhere (particularly on the full-stack web dev section) was strong enough to compensate.
What they're looking for
Victor is looking for challenging, highly-technical products, especially those dealing with low- or OS-level problems, ML, or infrastructure. He prefers technical products and cares about finding a company that's on a good trajectory.
Interview results
If you're new to our interview, here's what you need to know:
It's a 90 minute call with one of our senior engineers. (Here's what's on it.)
Green scores = up to the bar of early-stage silicon valley startups (this is a high bar).
Any green score is a recommendation for that area.
A "good" score is approximately 90th percentile.
A "great" score is approximately 95th percentile.
An "exceptional" score (extremely rare) is approximately 99th+ percentile.
Remember that if someone appears here at all, we recommend them.
Overall:
Good
Section scores:
Timed coding
Low
This is our main reservation; he did not get very far on our coding problem. However, this was largely because he got stuck on an early data-modeling issue that forced him to backtrack. Problems like that are sometimes one-offs, and the rest of the interview went well enough to compensate.
Concepts - CS/Algos
Good
Aside from missing one of the more esoteric questions we ask, good to great on everything else. He could give lots of details and name practical applications. On the high end of this score range.
...Full-stack web
Great
His strongest section, with considerable depth. No complaints or caveats here, he knows his stuff.
...Low-level & security
Good
Unusually good for a web-focused engineer, perhaps because of his distributed-systems interest. Clear understanding of memory management/OS-level details.
Architecture
Good
Good, though not a slam-dunk. On the plus side, had the basics and gave a structure that would absolutely work at low-medium scale without problems, and he’s clearly familiar with higher-scale concepts. On the minus side, weakish discussion of trade-offs and missed some traits of the higher-scale system we ask about. Still perfectly fine and well above average for his YOE.
Technical communication
Not quite
A minor weakness. He's a little on the rambling side, but not in a way that presents significant problems.
