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It seems to be a mostly US-centric thing. I live in Scandinavia, and I have yet to encounter the levels of rigor I see in the US (tech) interviewing process -

It seems to be a mostly US-centric thing. I live in Scandinavia, and I have yet to encounter the levels of rigor I see in the US (tech) interviewing process - which is kind of weird, as we have much, much more stringent workers rights/laws, making it more difficult to get rid of a bad hire. Sure, US companies, especially in tech hubs, operate on a completely different scale than companies over here - at least in terms of funding/capital, size, and impact; So one might suspect your companies and startups to be more selective. But yet, it seems like a completely different world. Over here, there seems to be much more emphasis (and trust) on your resume, and the hiring process is more focused on fit. If you have the basics down, most can be thought - but it's pretty difficult to teach culture.

lowiqengineer 6y ago
> Over here, there seems to be much more emphasis (and trust) on your resume, and the hiring process is more focused on fit. If you have the basics down, most can be thought - but it's pretty difficult to teach culture. That's probably because OP makes triple to quadruple your total compensation at minimum as an L5 ML Engineer at Google. https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ Total: $356,119
- TrackerFF 6y ago
  Obviously the salaries are quite different, but at the same time - you're pretty much walking around in golden shackles, no? I can't imagine those salaries being relevant, other than a handful of places in the US. And for the price of a small 2-bedroom apartment in the SF-area, you can pretty much buy a mansion where I live. Then you have things like healthcare, school costs, daycare / cost of raising a child, etc. etc.
  - lowiqengineer 6y ago
    Cost of healthcare is minimal at Google. And yeah, you can easily afford a mansion if you want to commute long enough. 300k to 500k is enough for nice housing - unfortunately, as someone making $150k at 24 I’ll never have this American dream.
    - abnercoimbre 6y ago
      This is a rather damning statement and it saddens me that wealth keeps concentrating in such small pockets of America. I'm in Seattle but I have engineer friends in Florida making your salary and they definitely have nice houses.
      - lowiqengineer 6y ago
        I live in the northeast - even if I get promoted it’s unlikely I’ll break 200k. Down payment for a house around here is like 150k or more :/
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    The US is a large place, you can save money for a decade in one location and then use that $1-2 million you built up to move somewhere cheap, buy a mansion and not give much a shit for the next 40 years. Taxes are also generally lower so you keep more. Healthcare costs don't matter since your employer pays for that and gives you good health insurance. School/child only matters later, and you can either move away by then or get promoted to making $600k+. edit: Two engineers together can make $700k+ which is $450+k after taxes per year. After one year and reasonable spending that's enough for a down payment on a house in the Bay Area. Every single year you get enough to pay for 1.5 kid's worth of college education at a top private school. Very few costs actually matter in comparison at that point.
    - lowiqengineer 6y ago
      I grew up with a dad working for 70-120k and a mom at home. I can’t even imagine how nice the lifestyles of Bay Area kids are.
      - gcheong 6y ago
        Housing prices and the cost of any good school beyond a select few good public ones pretty much brings the lifestyle down to the same level. My friends with kids and solid incomes live comfortably but not extravagantly considering one lay-off can take your income from comfortable to 0 at a moment’s notice.
      - bradlys 6y ago
        Judging by the Palo Alto train tracks - it might not be as bright as you might be imagining.
      - marcinzm 6y ago
        As I see it, beyond a certain level money and things don't make you much happier. They just give you a different set of things to feel the same level of happiness about. edit: This is as someone who has experienced household lifestyles going from <$40k/year to >$250k/year.
  - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    Not really. Many people earn those salaries for 5-10 years and then move literally wherever they want to raise families. It’s not hard to save a million or more on those salaries before you turn 30. That’s a lot of freedom.
marcinzm 6y ago
The US pays a lot and there's a lot of competition for positions. The H1B system doesn't help that competition. When you have 50 well qualified applicants (ie: could pass most interviews) per position then you need some way to weed out 49 of them. Resumes can be exaggerated and downright lied on so once there's enough competition using them just means you're selecting the best liars/sociopaths.
- rhexs 6y ago
  I think there's certainly some truth to coding interviews being an effective mechanism in shifting hiring towards H1Bs. It's much easier to say that Americans can't do the job when you create a test around studying for 500 hours to memorize hundreds upon hundreds of coding puzzles in order to build up a mental encyclopedia of how to quickly apply your algorithmic "training" to the puzzle of the day. I'd bet H1Bs are going to be much more motivated to jump through that hoop. Benefits them and the company doing the hiring that conveniently just can't find enough qualified American engineers to do the job.
  - creato 6y ago
    This is an absurd characterization of coding interviews. I've been on both sides of big tech interviews, and I've been at a few companies. I've seen two extremes. At one end, the company had pretty lax interviews, and I rarely interviewed anyone while I was there. The quality of people at this company was relatively low, from my small sample size of coworkers. At the other end, a company well known for challenging coding interviews, and I regularly interview people. The quality of people at this company was relatively high, again from my small sample size of coworkers. I think coding interviews are actually working fairly well. They divide people into at least two groups: a first group is people that can pass them without too much trouble, and they mostly seem to get hired, but of course there are mistakes. A second group is people that need to spend 500 hours cramming to appear qualified, and basically are trying to game the system. These people mostly don't get hired, and I suspect also are completely driving the conversation on HN and elsewhere about how coding interviews are a terrible failure.
    - 6y ago
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
As a counterpoint, I had to intervene when I discovered one of our European offices was interviewing mobile developers with a 40-80 hour take home project. They were not happy when we made them reduce it to a 4-5 hour take home problem.
bosie 6y ago
Mind expanding on how a regular senior SWE or analyst interview works? How many stages, what are the questions etc?
dudul 6y ago
I definitely went through a stupid interview process when I lived and worked in Sweden. "Name and define 5 design patterns", "sort this array", followed by the "personality test". Everyone was nice and all, and I got the job, but it was definitely on par with what I see now in the US.
- xtracto 6y ago
  this_array.sort() I hate stupid leetcode based interviews. It's like "gotcha journalism " just to have a justification for a subjective rejection It's like when as couple of weeks ago some random recruiter was interviewing me and asked "what's your weak point as a manager" ... I was sincere and if course the reason I was rejected is because they are looking for someone who doesn't have THAT exact weakness. GOTCHA!!
  - toomanybeersies 6y ago
    I feel that asking candidates negative questions gives you a better idea of a programmers aptitude than asking positive questions. Asking a candidate to give an example of a problem they couldn't solve, what they attempted when trying to solve it, and why they couldn't solve it, gives you an idea of their problem solving process and a real sense their upper limit of ability. Any candidate can gas themselves up and cherrypick some impressive achievements, or provide a laundry list of tools they have "experience" with. Rejecting candidates based on their response to those types of questions is completely counter-productive. You'll just end up with a bunch of employees who are either liars, or very good at delegating blame. You want employees who take ownership of their work and assigned tasks. As for programming tasks/questions in interviews. I think that it's important to test applicants' practical knowledge of sorting and other enumerable operations as it's a common task that's often done wrong, often with significant performance impacts. However, requiring a candidate to re-implement a common sorting algorithm for an array of numbers does nothing but stroke the interviewer's ego. The last time I actually had to write a sorting algorithm from scratch was in a 200-level computer science paper. An actually sane interview question/task would be to ask the candidate to sort an array by an unconventional comparison, using a language's standard sorting functionality. For example: sorting an array of coordinates by their absolute distance from (0, 0), or sorting an array of RGB colours by intensity. They're problems that a programmer would realistically encounter in a real-life application, and test that the candidate actually understands how to manipulate non-trivial enumerable/comparable data. Asking candidates to implement quicksort selects for applicants who have a case of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome. You don't want to hire programmers who implement their own sorting algorithms from scratch, there's a >90% chances they'll implement it worse than the language's standard implementation, while wasting a bunch of time that could be spent solving actual business problems, and creating technical debt to boot.
denvrede 6y ago
Same thing in Germany. I've had just a few interviews for the last three jobs. None of them was a multi day (or even one whole day) interview. The max. that was asked was a (really short) coding challenge with a salary at 80k - to put in perspective I pay 600€ / 105m² for rent and live near some big cities in western Germany.

lowiqengineer 6y ago

> Over here, there seems to be much more emphasis (and trust) on your resume, and the hiring process is more focused on fit. If you have the basics down, most can be thought - but it's pretty difficult to teach culture. That's probably because OP makes triple to quadruple your total compensation at minimum as an L5 ML Engineer at Google. https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ Total: $356,119

TrackerFF 6y ago
Obviously the salaries are quite different, but at the same time - you're pretty much walking around in golden shackles, no? I can't imagine those salaries being relevant, other than a handful of places in the US. And for the price of a small 2-bedroom apartment in the SF-area, you can pretty much buy a mansion where I live. Then you have things like healthcare, school costs, daycare / cost of raising a child, etc. etc.
- lowiqengineer 6y ago
  Cost of healthcare is minimal at Google. And yeah, you can easily afford a mansion if you want to commute long enough. 300k to 500k is enough for nice housing - unfortunately, as someone making $150k at 24 I’ll never have this American dream.
  - abnercoimbre 6y ago
    This is a rather damning statement and it saddens me that wealth keeps concentrating in such small pockets of America. I'm in Seattle but I have engineer friends in Florida making your salary and they definitely have nice houses.
    - lowiqengineer 6y ago
      I live in the northeast - even if I get promoted it’s unlikely I’ll break 200k. Down payment for a house around here is like 150k or more :/
- marcinzm 6y ago
  The US is a large place, you can save money for a decade in one location and then use that $1-2 million you built up to move somewhere cheap, buy a mansion and not give much a shit for the next 40 years. Taxes are also generally lower so you keep more. Healthcare costs don't matter since your employer pays for that and gives you good health insurance. School/child only matters later, and you can either move away by then or get promoted to making $600k+. edit: Two engineers together can make $700k+ which is $450+k after taxes per year. After one year and reasonable spending that's enough for a down payment on a house in the Bay Area. Every single year you get enough to pay for 1.5 kid's worth of college education at a top private school. Very few costs actually matter in comparison at that point.
  - lowiqengineer 6y ago
    I grew up with a dad working for 70-120k and a mom at home. I can’t even imagine how nice the lifestyles of Bay Area kids are.
    - gcheong 6y ago
      Housing prices and the cost of any good school beyond a select few good public ones pretty much brings the lifestyle down to the same level. My friends with kids and solid incomes live comfortably but not extravagantly considering one lay-off can take your income from comfortable to 0 at a moment’s notice.
    - bradlys 6y ago
      Judging by the Palo Alto train tracks - it might not be as bright as you might be imagining.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      As I see it, beyond a certain level money and things don't make you much happier. They just give you a different set of things to feel the same level of happiness about. edit: This is as someone who has experienced household lifestyles going from <$40k/year to >$250k/year.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  Not really. Many people earn those salaries for 5-10 years and then move literally wherever they want to raise families. It’s not hard to save a million or more on those salaries before you turn 30. That’s a lot of freedom.

marcinzm 6y ago

The US pays a lot and there's a lot of competition for positions. The H1B system doesn't help that competition. When you have 50 well qualified applicants (ie: could pass most interviews) per position then you need some way to weed out 49 of them. Resumes can be exaggerated and downright lied on so once there's enough competition using them just means you're selecting the best liars/sociopaths.

rhexs 6y ago
I think there's certainly some truth to coding interviews being an effective mechanism in shifting hiring towards H1Bs. It's much easier to say that Americans can't do the job when you create a test around studying for 500 hours to memorize hundreds upon hundreds of coding puzzles in order to build up a mental encyclopedia of how to quickly apply your algorithmic "training" to the puzzle of the day. I'd bet H1Bs are going to be much more motivated to jump through that hoop. Benefits them and the company doing the hiring that conveniently just can't find enough qualified American engineers to do the job.
- creato 6y ago
  This is an absurd characterization of coding interviews. I've been on both sides of big tech interviews, and I've been at a few companies. I've seen two extremes. At one end, the company had pretty lax interviews, and I rarely interviewed anyone while I was there. The quality of people at this company was relatively low, from my small sample size of coworkers. At the other end, a company well known for challenging coding interviews, and I regularly interview people. The quality of people at this company was relatively high, again from my small sample size of coworkers. I think coding interviews are actually working fairly well. They divide people into at least two groups: a first group is people that can pass them without too much trouble, and they mostly seem to get hired, but of course there are mistakes. A second group is people that need to spend 500 hours cramming to appear qualified, and basically are trying to game the system. These people mostly don't get hired, and I suspect also are completely driving the conversation on HN and elsewhere about how coding interviews are a terrible failure.
  - 6y ago

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

As a counterpoint, I had to intervene when I discovered one of our European offices was interviewing mobile developers with a 40-80 hour take home project. They were not happy when we made them reduce it to a 4-5 hour take home problem.

bosie 6y ago

Mind expanding on how a regular senior SWE or analyst interview works? How many stages, what are the questions etc?

dudul 6y ago

I definitely went through a stupid interview process when I lived and worked in Sweden. "Name and define 5 design patterns", "sort this array", followed by the "personality test". Everyone was nice and all, and I got the job, but it was definitely on par with what I see now in the US.

xtracto 6y ago
this_array.sort() I hate stupid leetcode based interviews. It's like "gotcha journalism " just to have a justification for a subjective rejection It's like when as couple of weeks ago some random recruiter was interviewing me and asked "what's your weak point as a manager" ... I was sincere and if course the reason I was rejected is because they are looking for someone who doesn't have THAT exact weakness. GOTCHA!!
- toomanybeersies 6y ago
  I feel that asking candidates negative questions gives you a better idea of a programmers aptitude than asking positive questions. Asking a candidate to give an example of a problem they couldn't solve, what they attempted when trying to solve it, and why they couldn't solve it, gives you an idea of their problem solving process and a real sense their upper limit of ability. Any candidate can gas themselves up and cherrypick some impressive achievements, or provide a laundry list of tools they have "experience" with. Rejecting candidates based on their response to those types of questions is completely counter-productive. You'll just end up with a bunch of employees who are either liars, or very good at delegating blame. You want employees who take ownership of their work and assigned tasks. As for programming tasks/questions in interviews. I think that it's important to test applicants' practical knowledge of sorting and other enumerable operations as it's a common task that's often done wrong, often with significant performance impacts. However, requiring a candidate to re-implement a common sorting algorithm for an array of numbers does nothing but stroke the interviewer's ego. The last time I actually had to write a sorting algorithm from scratch was in a 200-level computer science paper. An actually sane interview question/task would be to ask the candidate to sort an array by an unconventional comparison, using a language's standard sorting functionality. For example: sorting an array of coordinates by their absolute distance from (0, 0), or sorting an array of RGB colours by intensity. They're problems that a programmer would realistically encounter in a real-life application, and test that the candidate actually understands how to manipulate non-trivial enumerable/comparable data. Asking candidates to implement quicksort selects for applicants who have a case of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome. You don't want to hire programmers who implement their own sorting algorithms from scratch, there's a >90% chances they'll implement it worse than the language's standard implementation, while wasting a bunch of time that could be spent solving actual business problems, and creating technical debt to boot.

denvrede 6y ago

Same thing in Germany. I've had just a few interviews for the last three jobs. None of them was a multi day (or even one whole day) interview. The max. that was asked was a (really short) coding challenge with a salary at 80k - to put in perspective I pay 600€ / 105m² for rent and live near some big cities in western Germany.