9 ms·
Is it necessarily gaming? It seems to me that this a focused opportunity for self-aware and ambitious folks to carefully study what's actually really important
by blazespin 7y ago
Is it necessarily gaming? It seems to me that this a focused opportunity for self-aware and ambitious folks to carefully study what's actually really important to organizations.
Honestly, I think 80% of what keeps candidates from succeeding is an unwillingness to conform their character and personality to the needs of the institution that is recruiting them.
That said, I don't want to be a corporate drone either. There are more important things in my life. Like family, health, my hobbies, etc.
Yes, I know that if I lived the organizational values of my company I'd get ahead. But honest, I'd rather go play catch with my kids than obsess about customers[1]
[1] https://sellernexus.com/amazon-mission-statement https://sellernexus.com/amazon-mission-statement
- coachdarek 7y agoI think people consider it gaming because hackerrank is not accurately representative of day to day as a FAANG engineer. That being said I don’t think there’s a really great way to assess that in a 5 hour onsite interview. So hackerrank ends up being the best they’ve got.
- Spooky23 7y agoIf you can’t assess a candidate in 5 hours, you’re doing something wrong or don’t know what you want.
- coachdarek 7y agoPredicting the success of an employee and how well they will perform on a brand new team/stack over the course of potentially several years is very challenging and likely impossible especially when the people interviewing you aren’t even on the team you’ll work on. Hence this is why leetcode interviews are the best they’ve got.
- BubRoss 7y agoSaying that tiny puzzles are the best you can do is a very large leap from saying that you can't predict an employee's performance. Someone's job performance over time depends on lots of different factors, many out of the control of the company. Understanding someone's potential and risk can be the result of conversations about what they have already done and possibly looking at what they've done. No irrelevant puzzles needed.
- Spooky23 7y agoNo doubt. That’s my point — if you have a process that’s easy to effectively game with coaching, what’s the point? A company could probably save lots of time and money by cutting some of the fluff in the process. From the pov of a candidate with a good job already testing the waters, these companies come off as trying to hard to add objectivity in situations where it doesn’t exist.
- cyberbanjo 7y agoMotivation to game and being coachable seem like desirable skills.
- coachdarek 7y agoThese are also the things that we are looking for most in CodeBreakers students.
- dilyevsky 7y agoIt is gaming if some online class and/or few weeks of prep give you an edge.
- coachdarek 7y agoI don’t think it’s just a few weeks of gaming. Maybe if you do 60 hours a week. We’ve found that an average undergraduate or masters in CS or STEM field who just knows how to code basic Python will require ~250 hours of total work to become interview ready for FAANG. That’s a lot of time which is why I wouldn’t consider it gaming a system.
- dilyevsky 7y ago“An average” is not what google is after (at least officially).
- coachdarek 7y ago"Average" is the starting point. After learning data structures algorithms and how to communicate, they are no longer an average candidate (by FAANG standards)
- dilyevsky 7y agoI guess if you really think 250 hours is what separates average from faang level that answers it.
- coachdarek 7y ago250 hours is a lot of time!
- quickthrower2 7y agoIt’s not. It’s about 30 full time days. 6 weeks unpaid leave gets you there.