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The technical interviewing scheme is not great, but I haven't seen another system that works. > I cannot help but think that these big tech companies (FAANG, e

The technical interviewing scheme is not great, but I haven't seen another system that works. > I cannot help but think that these big tech companies (FAANG, et. al) are missing out on diversifying and increasing their engineering expertise by passing over developers like you. I think this is certainly true. > I often think what would Google/Facebook would be like if they hired in some experienced engineers that may not be able to whiteboard a BFS tree or can tell you Djikstra's algorithm, but have proven business track records of getting projects done, on budget, and on time. Well... how do we find these people? By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it? By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates? Practically speaking, FAANG companies do hire such individuals, they just do it through acqui-hires. If a person works at a company that is good enough to be worth acquiring, then we have a good signal that they are effective employees even absent a direct evaluation of their technical abilities.

sigstoat 8y ago
> Practically speaking, FAANG companies do hire such individuals, they just do it through acqui-hires. there's a huge pool of employees that are in companies which aren't potential acquisition targets. > Well... how do we find these people? By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it? internal references? if you've got a couple of internal folks who are doing good work, and they all worked with and vouch for old bob, maybe that's better than anything you're going to find out from <8 hours of whiteboard scribblings? > By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates? even the faintest whiff of implication that FAANG interviews might not be subjective is hilarious.
- swozey 8y ago
  I've had internal referrals at a few FAANG myself, I have one of the "unique" (no degree, some high school, ops/coding since 12 so about 15 years on/off) backgrounds and the people who referred me would be on the team that I'd be joining and all seemed incredibly excited to get me on board. I work on FOSS projects with them already. At each place it was people from other teams completely unrelated to that team who interviewed (or would interview) me and eventually turned into a decision panel where everything about me would be considered by these people who really knew nothing of my character/skills aside from the resume and white boarding. Between that and the amount of times I heard "Stanford" tossed around in a way that put down other schools (while not having a degree at all myself) I decided to give up on ever working at any of these places without being an acquihire. It just seems like a far fetched pipe-dream and I'd never check the required boxes that they expect for someone to sit in the same building with them. And honestly, none of that sat well with me. It was an interesting time and I got to finally experience SV and realized it's likely not a place for someone like me.
  - JimboOmega 8y ago
    One of my recent FAANG interviews was ENTIRELY whiteboarding. It kind of shocked me. It's weird that it's that skill, and only that skill, that gets evaluated. I did another interview at a different one where there was at least a design interview (though I flubbed it and wound up being incoherent). It really feels like they aren't even trying to evaluate anything other than whiteboard coding. Accepting that it's not a great signal and yet fully investing in it. It's such a weird skill and it's so easy to perform badly; I'd be kind of shocked if the test/retest validity wasn't very low. Also... I mentioned that working on teams with other women was important to me... but every technical onsite I've had has been given by a man. They've pitched teams led by women, and my HR/recruiting contacts have been nearly all women. But for the interview itself? All men.
    - ageek123 8y ago
      Trust me, companies would love to have at least one woman on every interview slate, and not just for women candidates. The problem is that the ratio of women engineers at the FAANG companies is such that this would put an incredibly unfair burden on women engineers. They would have to spend all of their time interviewing, or at the very least a disproportionate amount of time.
    - quanticle 8y ago
      >I'd be kind of shocked if the test/retest validity wasn't very low. It's absolutely very low, and they're okay with that. One of the things recruiters at these companies will tell you if you get rejected is some variant of, "Don't worry, you can always try next year." These companies fully understand that they're rejecting good engineers. They don't care, because, historically, the number of engineers applying has been so high that they could reject 75% of the good engineers and still have enough to fill their headcount. We'll see how that attitude towards interviewing changes when high Bay Area/Seattle housing prices make it more difficult for them to recruit.
  - rifung 8y ago
    I work for Google, opinions are my own. First of all it sounds like your interview experience was unpleasant so if this was at Google I apologize. Secondly, I can totally relate to feeling like I don't belong having also come from a nontraditional background (No college degree). > At each place it was people from other teams completely unrelated to that team who interviewed (or would interview) me and eventually turned into a decision panel where everything about me would be considered by these people who really knew nothing of my character/skills aside from the resume and white boarding. This sounds similar to what we do at Google; people who know you actually aren't allowed to interview you because they will be biased. We try to make the interview as objective as possible. Note that information from anyone who knows you or referred you will be shown to the hiring committee though so it's not as though that feedback is not used. > Between that and the amount of times I heard "Stanford" tossed around in a way that put down other schools (while not having a degree at all myself) I decided to give up on ever working at any of these places without being an acquihire. It just seems like a far fetched pipe-dream and I'd never check the required boxes that they expect for someone to sit in the same building with them. And honestly, none of that sat well with me. I understand why you feel this way but that's definitely not true! I don't think you necessarily should want to work in FAANG but I strongly think you should believe you are capable.
- scarejunba 8y ago
  > internal references? if you've got a couple of internal folks who are doing good work, and they all worked with and vouch for old bob, maybe that's better than anything you're going to find out from <8 hours of whiteboard scribblings? At big companies this is hard to scale because you have to protect against nepotism at the top layer. This forces policies protecting against the bad outcome. At small companies this does happen.
  - wolco 8y ago
    Provided references are at the core the worst way to judge if someone can do the job and the laziest way. If you want to rely on references you have to get them yourself through background check or the risk of gamification is huge. Get a sense of the projects they have worked on if those skills relate to the position. Make a decision based on that. Random coding tests, whiteboarding, buzzword dropping are only helpful to a point.
    - hluska 8y ago
      Good points - provided references are shit, simply because they can be gamed. If you work for me and I dislike you but don't have the courage to pull out the fire hammer, I can give you a great reference. If I really like you because you're extremely good (and make me look good), I can give you a horrible reference and hold onto you. However, OP was talking about internal references. This would be a situation where I work at Company A, but I know you and trust your work. Therefore, I refer you to Company A, big up you a little and suggest that they pursue hiring you. The difference is that if you suck, it reflects poorly on me (and quite likely kills my dreams of upward mobility). Normal provides references don't have the same motive to be truthful!
      - yowlingcat 8y ago
        What? Is this just conjecture? If you give a bad reference to an employee you are directly putting you and the company in harm's way in terms of litigation. Usually, you just don't give a reference other than confirming tenure existence and duration if you won't go into positive detail.
mav3rick 8y ago
Many acqui hires get interviewed again. Most acqui hires are a business deal for the company's business.
- yonibot 8y ago
  This is correct.
- mercutio2 8y ago
  Does any other company than Google interview acqui-hires? I’ve never heard of any other company doing this, but I haven’t been looking especially carefully.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - xyzzy_plugh 8y ago
    Every company I've worked for interviews acquihires. From FAANG, to start ups, to established traditional engineering companies.
    - vonmoltke 8y ago
      How is it an acquihire if the company is interviewing all the talent they acquired anyway?
      - mav3rick 8y ago
        Not all of it, but some of the force does to ensure that they meet the bar of the hiring company and also to get calibrated in the eng ladder.
      - xyzzy_plugh 8y ago
        - You are getting paid to interview - If they decline, you usually get a very generous severence package - While sometimes technical, there is usually significantly evidence of your abilities from the acquired company's records. - In my experience it's usually a cultural test more than any other. - Interviewing is part of the evaluation. If the hiring company thinks everyone is grossly incompetent they can reevaluate the acquisition or call it off entirely.
donaldknuth123 8y ago
>The technical interviewing scheme is not great, but I haven't seen another system that works. I would argue that pair programming or take home projects do a far better job than the standard Whiteboard Algo interviews. In fact I don't think it's even close but SV engineers have been captured by this Whiteboard Interview Stockholm Syndrome/Hazing and continue to perpetuate the insane idea that there is no better way.
- mav3rick 8y ago
  Many people on HN also complain about "I don't have time for pair programming, take home". They don't like interviews. People just expect to be paid top dollar on their word.
  - idontpost 8y ago
    > People just expect to be paid top dollar on their word. And their education, previous employment, etc. No one makes a neuro-surgeon perform a surgery before hiring them.
    - jedberg 8y ago
      > No one makes a neuro-surgeon perform a surgery before hiring them. True, but I also know that a neurosurgeon graduated from an accredited school, did an internship at an accredited hospital, and then passed a standardized licensing exam. If we had that for engineers we wouldn't need to test their skills either. When I was doing hiring, I would see resumes of people with 10+ years of experience who couldn't write a simple loop in their favorite language. If you've been coding for 10 years, you should be able to write a simple loop. That's the problem we're solving for here.
      - idontpost 8y ago
        > If we had that for engineers we wouldn't need to test their skills either. I think we will, eventually. Other fields of engineering already do, of course. Software is new and not that many people have been killed by bad software (unlike bad buildings), but I think we'll get there.
nategri 8y ago
>By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it? By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates? I mean... Yes? This system, backed by "trusted recommenders" is exactly what academia uses, and they seem perfectly capable of discovering Higgs Bosons and whatnot.
- mav3rick 8y ago
  "intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates" This is inherently biased and proven to be the worst way to hire people.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  They physics communinity does not seem to have the issue of being able to judge merit from resumes. When you see a physics PhD with a list of academic references, chances are that the person knows what they are doing; with computer science it’s somehow likely that the person might not know their way around the command line or when using an array might be a bad idea…
- SomewhatLikely 8y ago
  Ironic example, as the guy who theorized the Higgs Boson originally doesn't think he'd be productive enough for today's environment. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
dom96 8y ago
> Well... how do we find these people? By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it? By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates? While not perfect I wonder if a person's projects are a good signal for this. There certainly are those who have developed a significant open source project but who get rejected by the FAANG companies, the author of Homebrew being a recent infamous example.
- erik_seaberg 8y ago
  In Howell's own words from https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...: > I wrote a simple package manager. Anyone could write one. And in fact mine is pretty bad. It doesn't do dependency management properly. It doesn’t handle edge case behavior well. It isn’t well tested.
  - Pharmakon 8y ago
    From later in his same post... But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.
    - mullingitover 8y ago
      > I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things Having worked with people who are dicks but make really good things...I wouldn't want him on my team either. There are plenty of people who make really good things and aren't dicks.
      - torgian 8y ago
        Gotta agree. People sometimes underestimate the power of actually getting along with others!

sigstoat 8y ago

> Practically speaking, FAANG companies do hire such individuals, they just do it through acqui-hires. there's a huge pool of employees that are in companies which aren't potential acquisition targets. > Well... how do we find these people? By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it? internal references? if you've got a couple of internal folks who are doing good work, and they all worked with and vouch for old bob, maybe that's better than anything you're going to find out from <8 hours of whiteboard scribblings? > By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates? even the faintest whiff of implication that FAANG interviews might not be subjective is hilarious.

swozey 8y ago
I've had internal referrals at a few FAANG myself, I have one of the "unique" (no degree, some high school, ops/coding since 12 so about 15 years on/off) backgrounds and the people who referred me would be on the team that I'd be joining and all seemed incredibly excited to get me on board. I work on FOSS projects with them already. At each place it was people from other teams completely unrelated to that team who interviewed (or would interview) me and eventually turned into a decision panel where everything about me would be considered by these people who really knew nothing of my character/skills aside from the resume and white boarding. Between that and the amount of times I heard "Stanford" tossed around in a way that put down other schools (while not having a degree at all myself) I decided to give up on ever working at any of these places without being an acquihire. It just seems like a far fetched pipe-dream and I'd never check the required boxes that they expect for someone to sit in the same building with them. And honestly, none of that sat well with me. It was an interesting time and I got to finally experience SV and realized it's likely not a place for someone like me.
- JimboOmega 8y ago
  One of my recent FAANG interviews was ENTIRELY whiteboarding. It kind of shocked me. It's weird that it's that skill, and only that skill, that gets evaluated. I did another interview at a different one where there was at least a design interview (though I flubbed it and wound up being incoherent). It really feels like they aren't even trying to evaluate anything other than whiteboard coding. Accepting that it's not a great signal and yet fully investing in it. It's such a weird skill and it's so easy to perform badly; I'd be kind of shocked if the test/retest validity wasn't very low. Also... I mentioned that working on teams with other women was important to me... but every technical onsite I've had has been given by a man. They've pitched teams led by women, and my HR/recruiting contacts have been nearly all women. But for the interview itself? All men.
  - ageek123 8y ago
    Trust me, companies would love to have at least one woman on every interview slate, and not just for women candidates. The problem is that the ratio of women engineers at the FAANG companies is such that this would put an incredibly unfair burden on women engineers. They would have to spend all of their time interviewing, or at the very least a disproportionate amount of time.
  - quanticle 8y ago
    >I'd be kind of shocked if the test/retest validity wasn't very low. It's absolutely very low, and they're okay with that. One of the things recruiters at these companies will tell you if you get rejected is some variant of, "Don't worry, you can always try next year." These companies fully understand that they're rejecting good engineers. They don't care, because, historically, the number of engineers applying has been so high that they could reject 75% of the good engineers and still have enough to fill their headcount. We'll see how that attitude towards interviewing changes when high Bay Area/Seattle housing prices make it more difficult for them to recruit.
- rifung 8y ago
  I work for Google, opinions are my own. First of all it sounds like your interview experience was unpleasant so if this was at Google I apologize. Secondly, I can totally relate to feeling like I don't belong having also come from a nontraditional background (No college degree). > At each place it was people from other teams completely unrelated to that team who interviewed (or would interview) me and eventually turned into a decision panel where everything about me would be considered by these people who really knew nothing of my character/skills aside from the resume and white boarding. This sounds similar to what we do at Google; people who know you actually aren't allowed to interview you because they will be biased. We try to make the interview as objective as possible. Note that information from anyone who knows you or referred you will be shown to the hiring committee though so it's not as though that feedback is not used. > Between that and the amount of times I heard "Stanford" tossed around in a way that put down other schools (while not having a degree at all myself) I decided to give up on ever working at any of these places without being an acquihire. It just seems like a far fetched pipe-dream and I'd never check the required boxes that they expect for someone to sit in the same building with them. And honestly, none of that sat well with me. I understand why you feel this way but that's definitely not true! I don't think you necessarily should want to work in FAANG but I strongly think you should believe you are capable.
scarejunba 8y ago
> internal references? if you've got a couple of internal folks who are doing good work, and they all worked with and vouch for old bob, maybe that's better than anything you're going to find out from <8 hours of whiteboard scribblings? At big companies this is hard to scale because you have to protect against nepotism at the top layer. This forces policies protecting against the bad outcome. At small companies this does happen.
- wolco 8y ago
  Provided references are at the core the worst way to judge if someone can do the job and the laziest way. If you want to rely on references you have to get them yourself through background check or the risk of gamification is huge. Get a sense of the projects they have worked on if those skills relate to the position. Make a decision based on that. Random coding tests, whiteboarding, buzzword dropping are only helpful to a point.
  - hluska 8y ago
    Good points - provided references are shit, simply because they can be gamed. If you work for me and I dislike you but don't have the courage to pull out the fire hammer, I can give you a great reference. If I really like you because you're extremely good (and make me look good), I can give you a horrible reference and hold onto you. However, OP was talking about internal references. This would be a situation where I work at Company A, but I know you and trust your work. Therefore, I refer you to Company A, big up you a little and suggest that they pursue hiring you. The difference is that if you suck, it reflects poorly on me (and quite likely kills my dreams of upward mobility). Normal provides references don't have the same motive to be truthful!
    - yowlingcat 8y ago
      What? Is this just conjecture? If you give a bad reference to an employee you are directly putting you and the company in harm's way in terms of litigation. Usually, you just don't give a reference other than confirming tenure existence and duration if you won't go into positive detail.

mav3rick 8y ago

Many acqui hires get interviewed again. Most acqui hires are a business deal for the company's business.

yonibot 8y ago
This is correct.
mercutio2 8y ago
Does any other company than Google interview acqui-hires? I’ve never heard of any other company doing this, but I haven’t been looking especially carefully.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- xyzzy_plugh 8y ago
  Every company I've worked for interviews acquihires. From FAANG, to start ups, to established traditional engineering companies.
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    How is it an acquihire if the company is interviewing all the talent they acquired anyway?
    - mav3rick 8y ago
      Not all of it, but some of the force does to ensure that they meet the bar of the hiring company and also to get calibrated in the eng ladder.
    - xyzzy_plugh 8y ago
      - You are getting paid to interview - If they decline, you usually get a very generous severence package - While sometimes technical, there is usually significantly evidence of your abilities from the acquired company's records. - In my experience it's usually a cultural test more than any other. - Interviewing is part of the evaluation. If the hiring company thinks everyone is grossly incompetent they can reevaluate the acquisition or call it off entirely.

donaldknuth123 8y ago

>The technical interviewing scheme is not great, but I haven't seen another system that works. I would argue that pair programming or take home projects do a far better job than the standard Whiteboard Algo interviews. In fact I don't think it's even close but SV engineers have been captured by this Whiteboard Interview Stockholm Syndrome/Hazing and continue to perpetuate the insane idea that there is no better way.

mav3rick 8y ago
Many people on HN also complain about "I don't have time for pair programming, take home". They don't like interviews. People just expect to be paid top dollar on their word.
- idontpost 8y ago
  > People just expect to be paid top dollar on their word. And their education, previous employment, etc. No one makes a neuro-surgeon perform a surgery before hiring them.
  - jedberg 8y ago
    > No one makes a neuro-surgeon perform a surgery before hiring them. True, but I also know that a neurosurgeon graduated from an accredited school, did an internship at an accredited hospital, and then passed a standardized licensing exam. If we had that for engineers we wouldn't need to test their skills either. When I was doing hiring, I would see resumes of people with 10+ years of experience who couldn't write a simple loop in their favorite language. If you've been coding for 10 years, you should be able to write a simple loop. That's the problem we're solving for here.
    - idontpost 8y ago
      > If we had that for engineers we wouldn't need to test their skills either. I think we will, eventually. Other fields of engineering already do, of course. Software is new and not that many people have been killed by bad software (unlike bad buildings), but I think we'll get there.

nategri 8y ago

>By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it? By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates? I mean... Yes? This system, backed by "trusted recommenders" is exactly what academia uses, and they seem perfectly capable of discovering Higgs Bosons and whatnot.

mav3rick 8y ago
"intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates" This is inherently biased and proven to be the worst way to hire people.
saagarjha 8y ago
They physics communinity does not seem to have the issue of being able to judge merit from resumes. When you see a physics PhD with a list of academic references, chances are that the person knows what they are doing; with computer science it’s somehow likely that the person might not know their way around the command line or when using an array might be a bad idea…
SomewhatLikely 8y ago
Ironic example, as the guy who theorized the Higgs Boson originally doesn't think he'd be productive enough for today's environment. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...

dom96 8y ago

> Well... how do we find these people? By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it? By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates? While not perfect I wonder if a person's projects are a good signal for this. There certainly are those who have developed a significant open source project but who get rejected by the FAANG companies, the author of Homebrew being a recent infamous example.

erik_seaberg 8y ago
In Howell's own words from https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...: > I wrote a simple package manager. Anyone could write one. And in fact mine is pretty bad. It doesn't do dependency management properly. It doesn’t handle edge case behavior well. It isn’t well tested.
- Pharmakon 8y ago
  From later in his same post... But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.
  - mullingitover 8y ago
    > I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things Having worked with people who are dicks but make really good things...I wouldn't want him on my team either. There are plenty of people who make really good things and aren't dicks.
    - torgian 8y ago
      Gotta agree. People sometimes underestimate the power of actually getting along with others!