11 ms·

Hiring Myths Common in Hacker News Discussions

116 points by Ozzie_osman 6y ago

juskrey 6y ago
Hiring is not broken, it's just a two way filter, tried to be cheated both ways.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- thatcat 6y ago
  One side has a way bigger pump
seibelj 6y ago
> Diversity. We really, really suck at diversity. We’re getting better, but we have a long way to go. Most of the industry chases the same candidates and assesses them in the same way. I would pass this buck way, way earlier. Many diverse future candidates (non-white) are educated at awful public schools. When you begin your education at a miserable daycare-school then you are far less likely to make it all the way through the life-pipeline and get in front of a high tech recruiter. I have hired diverse candidates and they are great just like all candidates I hire. There simply aren't that many that apply, and the pool of diverse candidates is sucked up by way better-funded FAANGs and similar. I would argue we need to completely reinvent our primary education system from the ground up to offer more choice and make them way less depressing for lower-income students. You can't expect a tech recruiter to fix 2 decades of mistakes through their hiring system.
- dheera 6y ago
  While that does explain part of the issue for racial discrimination, gender discrimination is much less well explained by gaps in public school systems. The medium- and higher-income districts are all still close to a 1:1 gender ratio but tech companies are really, really far from that.
  - ethanwillis 6y ago
    It doesn't have to start early in the pipeline. https://educationdata.org/number-of-college-graduates https://educationdata.org/number-of-college-graduates It's only relatively recently that female graduates even reached parity with (and now outnumber) male graduates. It will take even longer for the male:female divide to be closed in STEM.
- Swizec 6y ago
  I have some insight into this. My schooling was in eastern-ish europe growing up in a low middle class environment. My girlfriend grew up in SFBA and went to high school in Palo Alto. The difference in perspective is astounding. Even simple things like what you consider normal. Like, I grew up knowing that The Boss is someone you hate and despise who makes your life miserable. Becoming the boss is villified. Rich people are bad. Everyone is out to screw you. That includes rich people, poor people, the government, the police. Everyone. It’s you against the world. The forgotten class everyone exploits and nobody helps. High taxes, no help. Oh and teachers are all dumb. Otherwise they wouldn’t be teachers. By comparison the normal for my girlfriend is “You invent google street view or cofound the next ebay, obviously. That’s just basics”. At the least you do well in school, get great grades, and climb a corporate hiwrarchy to near top. That’s the failure mode if nothing else works. Learning the US corporate/business culture has been imo my biggest challenge moving here.
  - commandlinefan 6y ago
    While attending a poor school and growing up in a poor environment gives you a completely different life perspective than growing up in a rich one, it's worth noting that this isn't what people mean when they talk about "diversity".
    - TameAntelope 6y ago
      It's what I mean. It's not only what I mean, but that diversity of viewpoint is incredibly valuable when trying to solve problems as a group.
    - Swizec 6y ago
      I know it isn’t and that makes it even harder to talk about. Classism is understood and recognized in Europe and people are working on it. USA is still stuck pretending it doesn’t exist. Similar to how 50 years ago it was pretendint sexism isn’t a problem. Imo it’s important to talk about all types of systemic issues, not just the popular ones. And to quote one of my well meaning friends: ”Oh pfft your issues don’t count because you can pass (look white and male)”
  - 6y ago
- azernik 6y ago
  Generally there is a disproportionate dropoff among minority and female candidates at every stage of the career pipeline, not just in the pre-interview parts.
- Kalium 6y ago
  There's a reflexive tendency for people to assume that a problem manifests at whatever point it is measured. It's an easy assumption to make. However, estimating malnutrition by measuring the heights of adults is not a great way to get a read on current food supplies.
  - seibelj 6y ago
    You make a fair point, but it is very hard to snap my fingers and make more competent programmers of all races that perfectly align with society's representation of them.
- User23 6y ago
  As far as I can tell White Americans are a super-minority in Silicon Valley hiring pipelines. Of the 100 or so interviews I've done in the past few years I'd say about 2% were White American, 5% were of East Asian origin, and the rest of South Asian origin. Fact is if Silicon Valley firms actually want to be diverse, that is to say accurately represent the demographics of the USA, they need to hire more White Americans, not fewer.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    You're saying that you interviewed 100 people and 93 of them where South Asian? That seems insane unless you're actively hiring talent from India.
    - commandlinefan 6y ago
      I've observed similar demographics in North Texas, consistently over a 20-year period.
      - mcguire 6y ago
        For meat processing plants?
    - actuator 6y ago
      Yeah, this doesn't seem believable at all. East and South Asians are definitely overrepresented (compared to US population) in tech but not by these numbers. Luckily some big companies do publish diversity reports which will easily give information about the actual stats. FB's diversity report. https://diversity.fb.com/read-report/ https://diversity.fb.com/read-report/ White Americans make up 37% in tech, 63% in leadership positions in Facebook. GitHub is 70% White and 15% Asian. https://github.com/about/diversity/report https://github.com/about/diversity/report Apple is 50% White and 23% Asian. https://www.apple.com/diversity/ https://www.apple.com/diversity/
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- Ozzie_osman 6y ago
  (Author here) This is the "pipeline problem" debate. You're right, it does start much earlier than tech companies, but also, it's too easy for hiring managers at tech companies to just throw up their hands and say "we can't do much, it's just the pipeline that isn't giving us enough diversity." There is plenty of evidence that it's not just a pipeline problem. One of my co-authors wrote a really solid piece on this: https://www.holloway.com/g/technical-recruiting-hiring/sections/its-not-just-a-pipeline-problem https://www.holloway.com/g/technical-recruiting-hiring/secti...
  - seibelj 6y ago
    I agree with you that tech companies can do better and have done better. But this is like, they are doing 1.5x better. To do 10x better the educational system needs to be totally reworked.
    - forbiddenvoid 6y ago
      I think it's far more likely that there are numerous 1.5x improvements to be made along the entire funnel than that there exists a 10x solution at any one point. Making each person who 'owns' a piece of the process accountable for optimizing their portion is going to yield far better results than passing the buck.
  - SamReidHughes 6y ago
    Why is that "solid piece" acting like stereotype threat is an actual thing, and not the totally debunked replication study failing pseudoscience that it is?
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    > Overreliance on requirements like four-year degrees from the same few top schools, and on referrals from current employees, limits the number and kind of people considered “qualified” for technical roles. It's a simple signal to noise ratio issue. Sure you might be leaving out "diamonds in the rough" candidates, but how many mediocre interview will it take to find one?[0] [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
- monksy 6y ago
  I'm convinced that the best way is to have a beer with someone and to get them to start ranting about the bugs they've had to catch and resolve. The more swearing about the technical stuff, the more confident I am about that they solved it. I'm more interested in hearing about the problem solving in the contexts that they've worked through, what they learned, and their experience over all. Experience is universal. Telling someone to get 3 values of a list that create the high product isn't going to solve your production issue on a saturday night.
- fastball 6y ago
  Non-white is an interesting definition of diverse.
- SamReidHughes 6y ago
  Explaining things as problems of lower-income students doesn't really work, and "solutions" built around this assumption will fail, because even if you consider higher-income subsets of the racial demographics, or otherwise control for parental income, you still get huge disparities in the numbers of high-performance students.
librish 6y ago
Another benefit of whiteboard interviews that I often see left out is how well they scale. You can train a lot of engineers in how to conduct these interviews fairly quickly and you tell them what information to focus on and how to document it. You can then pass this information to a hiring committee that has a lot of experience in evaluating candidates. Having sat in on some hiring committee meetings I can see how little weight is given the algorithm if the candidate has a good reference or highly relevant experience. The issue with the interview alternatives that most people suggest is that they would require your most senior engineers to spend a really really large portion of their day on hiring which can burn people out quickly.
- dheera 6y ago
  My main issue with whiteboard interviews is that they often ask you to code something that is completely unrelated to the job, and is not representative of your normal work efficiency at a task that is within your area of expertise. For example, I've had several machine learning engineer interviews in which I was asked to write some variation of NMS (non-max suppression) or gradient descent on the whiteboard. What machine learning engineer writes that kind of code anymore? I can write it, yes I can fumble (a lot) and figure out how to optimize it, but in reality these are the type of algorithms that you almost always use some library that someone has already written for you for that kind of stuff. They spend the entire hour nitpicking at your implementation of NMS, base their entire impression of you on that implementation of NMS, and never in your entire interview ask you anything about, say, what the state-of-the-art object detectors are, what their breakthroughs are, how their networks are roughly structured, what you might think about doing to improve on them, what you could do if you only had limited annotation data, and other real machine learning questions.
  - blamestross 6y ago
    Actually evaluating your knowledge is hard. Picking something to be a rough litmus test and testing that, despite it not being directly related to the job seems reasonable. It has been 3 years since I interviewed somebody for a ML position. Mostly I focused on knowledge of model execution. Most ML libraries were horrible for use in production at the time and I was more worried that a candidate wouldn't be able to productionize a good model than I was worried they wouldn't be able to build that model.
the_reformation 6y ago
As somebody who's somewhere between mediocre to good at whiteboard interviews (passed the loop at 1 FAANG, rejected by the rest), I think they're pretty solid. Most programming challenges, even at FAANG-scale, ultimately decompose into some family of classic interview problems (usually a graph or a hash table.) Everything else I do at work is implementation or stack specific. The average programmer will pick it up with enough exposure. But problem solving is somewhat binary (yes I realize thats an oxymoron) and not easily pick-up-able, at least on the time horizon a hiring manager wants to deal with. I realized this when I got a lot better at whiteboard interviews after a FAANG job for a couple years. A coding challenge that I took the full hour on and bombed out of college was now done in twenty. I just picked up the problem solving intuition by writing a ton of code.
- louthy 6y ago
  How much code do you normally write on whiteboards in front of people? It is such an artificial and for some, confrontational, way of problem solving, that it just filters for people who can stand in-front of whiteboards. It's a discriminatory process that shows pretty much nothing about the individual's capacity to function as a software engineer in a team.
  - blamestross 6y ago
    I realized 4 years of teaching in grad-school precisely prepared me for whiteboard interviews. I literally spent 3 days a week working out problems on whiteboards in front of bored/annoyed people.
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
      Good practice, yes. However what if those bored/annoyed people decided you were a failure and couldn't feed your family if a single unseen problem is not done in 15 minutes?
      - mcguire 6y ago
        Ultimately, I'm not sure what form of interview process would satisfy you.
dadrian 6y ago
This is a really good overview, one of the better things I've read about hiring in a while. I led engineering hiring at a ~25 person startup last year and I strongly agree with the authors description of the differences between FAANG hiring and smaller company hiring. The part about fit resonates with me as well---everyone we recruited and hired with specific ideas about how they'd mesh with the team outperformed the hires who were closer to just "filling seats".
goi 6y ago
> Diversity. We really, really suck at diversity. We’re getting better, but we have a long way to go. Most of the industry chases the same candidates and assesses them in the same way. What about neurodiversity and hiring neuroatypicals? "Culture fit" is often a euphemism for discrimination against them and others with poor social skills. Also, call me cynical, but I've come to view blogposts like this as little more than marketing for the author and whatever company they started/work for. They're always vague, self-congratulatory, studiously avoid saying anything genuinely controversial, and to the extent that they're critical, it's often just as a way of contrasting themselves with the competition.
- lliamander 6y ago
  Everything I've seen suggests that neuroatypicals are over-represented in tech relative to the wider population. I'm not saying there isn't anything more to be done for them, but I expect they're still going to have a more welcoming environment in tech than just about anywhere else.
  - goi 6y ago
    The industry isn't nearly as accepting of them as it was ten or twenty years ago. To those downvoting: if Linus Torvalds was 30 years younger and just as competent, yet completely unknown, do you really think he wouldn't have a lot of trouble getting hired at a FANG company because of his poor social skills?
    - rodgerd 6y ago
      If you mean that the industry is less likely to allow a self-diagnosis of "it's the autism" as an excuse for sexual harrassment, sure.
- avip 6y ago
  Cultural fit sucks, but working with developers who cannot communicate clearly and effectively also sucks. The "how to interview" discussion must always focus on what sucks less as the whole framework of thinking sucks here.
MattGaiser 6y ago
> find a friend who’s spent time on hiring, and ask them for their favorite battle story. Anyone here have good hiring stories?
- sokoloff 6y ago
  We make business cards sold online. ~Half-billion-USD/yr of them. Literal sheets of uncut cards are under glass in the interview rooms. Final round with a candidate who’s “near the bubble”. Me: “Do you have any questions?” Him: “Yeah; have you guys ever thought about selling business cards online?” Me: “Uh, we’ve uh, given it some thought.” To this day, I’m not sure what he thought we did.
- jzwinck 6y ago
  At a university recruiting event I asked one candidate if he was willing to move to NYC to work with us. Most people say yes, a few say no thanks and move on. This candidate said "Well my partner is considering a job in Texas." I asked candidate if he preferred Texas to NYC. "Not really, they have scorpions."
- munchbunny 6y ago
  I don't have good stories (or rather, none that I would want to share), but I do have battle scars. Hiring is hard. It's really complex to get right, and I spent years tuning the process. Having done both, I'd much rather be on the hiring end than the candidate end. But as the hiring manager, I mostly just felt weariness at the process.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  The biggest revelation of being on the hiring end is that we generally know whether we want to hire someone a second after the interview ends. The most interesting thing I’ve heard I guess has been the guy who replied ‘Well, they’re all idiots there’ when asked why he wanted to move. Like someone else said, hiring is mostly just tiresome.
- mundo 6y ago
  A former job of mine forced candidates to fill out a form for one of those abominable HR candidate tracking sites, maybe ICIMS, and I saw the following gem from one applicant: Q: "One of CompanyCo's core values is Openness. How have you demonstrated openness in your career?" A: "I am open about my contempt for bullshit questions like this one."
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Well, all that said, it's been interesting that no one has wanted to work with me. Frankly, it was shocking, as I definitely have the skills, experience and "soft" skills, like Accountability and Responsibility, as well as years of experience at selling difficult projects to real hard-nosed, empirical managers. I also would have been quite willing to work for a fraction of what people that don't have my chops would want. The worst was working with recruiters. They are downright insulting. Quite jarring. Whiteboard/LeetCode tests are a flat-out insult to me. I won't do well at them, and I'm quite aware that people spend huge amounts of time, practicing for them, so I don't have a chance. I do have a few hundred thousand lines of code, dozens of blog articles, dozens of repos, and a decade or more of checkin history. I've been told that I "faked" it, which would be hilarious, if it weren't so insulting. In the end, I just decided to stop looking for work, and I'm working in a small startup team, writing some fairly powerful software, for free; because I enjoy doing this stuff. It's pretty odd that the current scene is actively hostile towards folks like me. I feel that it's fairly self-destructive.
- chrismcb 6y ago
  Why do you feel whiteboard problems are an insult? And why do you feel you don't do well on them? Just because others spend a ton of practice on them, didn't mean you don't have a chance.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    Because most are "young-pass filters," and that makes itself obvious, as soon as I see them. I've learned that when I see a binary tree question, I might as well just wrap up the interview. They have no intention of hiring me. I am mediocre at them. Most represent stuff I haven't done. A lot of it is common sense, but I'm solving them for the first time, so my approach is usually sub-optimal (I tend to start with naive approaches, then refine, if necessary). The testers are usually looking for a formulaic approach. A lot of my approaches are orthogonal to the "classics." I started as an EE, so I'm pretty good with things like drivers, SDKs and APIs, but they aren't really something that you can do in a 50-line test. What's really insulting, is that when I'm asked, I usually send links to relevant gists or repos; often focused on the exact method that addresses the question asked. It's ignored (so far, 100% of the time -the "faker" comment was made by someone that was explaining why they ignored it).
m0zg 6y ago
I don't see how it's a "myth" that "whiteboard interviews suck". You never write code on a whiteboard in the course of your day job. The obsession with whiteboard interviews is absolutely idiotic IMO, as is the obsession with asking deep algorithmic questions which the candidate will definitely not be able to answer convincingly if they didn't encounter them before. It's idiotic that someone has to prepare for a month to do a 5-7 hour whiteboard interview loop that has no relation whatsoever to the job duties. You don't quiz a barbecue chef on Michelin star molecular cuisine, yet this is considered totally normal in our profession. At a minimum, ask questions that one could figure out without knowing the answer beforehand, and at a minimum let them use their text editor. Better yet, don't do this shit at all, and ask people to solve a _practical_ problem similar to ones they're likely to encounter if they take the job. It still provides a good filter, arguably better even. As things are now, interviews test for academic credentials, memory, and lack of flight response from candidate's amygdala, not practical technical skill per se.
- blamestross 6y ago
  > As things are now, interviews test for academic credentials, memory, and lack of flight response from candidate's amygdala, not practical technical skill per se. Those sound like they might correlate well with the traits desired.
  - m0zg 6y ago
    I wish I could quote some paper or otherwise confirm this for you, but when I was at Google, Google itself has disproven this by hiring a cohort irrespective of their interview outcome (you can imagine what this did to googlers' impostor syndrome when they shared the results), and then tracking their performance for a few years. They did about as well as people who were subject to traditional scoring in interviews. Now granted, this is not a viable option for all of their interviewing, but at a minimum it suggests that interview scores aren't as strong an indicator of future job performance as people assume.
    - username90 6y ago
bulatb 6y ago
The article explains in detail how a pressure difference can create a force, and how the process generates these differences and how the force is felt as suction, but still argues that the process doesn't suck. A process good at testing applicants should 1) identify the good ones and 2) identify the bad ones. The standard whiteboard interview makes no attempt at (1) and works by throwing almost everyone in bucket (2) regardless of potential. This is plainly, in general, a process that sucks. It just happens that the way it sucks is not a problem if you're FAANG.
- pm90 6y ago
  The fetishization of Google (specifically their interview process) has really hurt the industry and caused a lot of unnecessary stress for a lot of engineers.
  - filereaper 6y ago
    Agreed, lots of companies have Google style interviews when they are clearly not Google. You better have quality work to do and equivalent perks as Google to put candidates through their style of interviews. Otherwise those companies are delusional and I have the world's smallest violin for their recruiting woes.
    - cvhashim 6y ago
      If you interview like Google, you better pay like Google.
      - jldugger 6y ago
        > pay like Google. So notoriously low that the CEO had to approve a company wide raise of 10 percent one year?
        conro1108 6y ago
        To "pay like Google" compared to industry in general and to "pay like Google" compared to the places Google is competing for hires with are very different things.
soared 6y ago
#2 made me smile because Amazon is so blatantly against this. Amazon gives you their 12 principles and wants you to come up with 36 stories (3 per principle) about how you used these principle at work. My interviews were far and away the least thoughtful hiring experience I’ve ever had. It was clear each person was filling out a form while I was talking, and followed up with pre-written questions. There was nothing non-traditional, and the 6 hour loop definitely did not respect my time. ~50 hours of prep, 10 total hours of interviews ( 2 hours of screening, 6 hour loop, 2 additional interviews for other roles). I had really great interactions... after the forms we’re filled out. Interviews went well - I was put into the “recycle” status but never found a role there that really fit my experience. Nontechnical but still tech consulting, not aws.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  I passed the phone interview for an Amazon position a few years back and when the hiring person told me that before the next interview I'd have to come up with stories for 14 principles (I thought it was 14 not 12?) I thought in my head "This is a cult" and then politely told the hiring manager no thanks.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    I don’t work at Amazon, but have many close friends who do. The 14 LPs are a strong attractant to me, especially since it’s obvious how they actually use them day-to-day instead of just being posters on a wall somewhere.
mixmastamyk 6y ago
Didn't find this one compelling. "Some truth to it..."! Please, it's an industry-wide disaster, aka billion-dollar mistake. Granted some of the test fashion is useful for computer scientists and the fraction implementing algorithms. But the other 80% are being selected for the wrong thing. These other folks that are curious could be trained on the job (the growth mindset) in a few weeks, if that were still a thing.
_qulr 6y ago
The author contradicts himself in trying to argue that hiring isn't a crapshoot. On the one hand, he says the best hiring managers "didn’t chase the same pool of candidates everyone else was chasing—instead, they found non-traditional ways to discover really talented and motivated people who weren’t in the pool of usual suspects". But then in the very next paragraph he cites Google, Facebook, Stripe, and Dropbox as examples. Huh? It's so misleading to cite BigCos as examples of excellent hiring, because the founders of the companies and the initial employees are never hired in the same way that their engineers are currently hired. They're usually just people who happened to know each other in a dorm. It's only after the company gets a bunch of funding that they need to fill seats with a bunch of warm bodies. But the success wasn't because of the assembly-line style hiring, it's the product idea and the personal qualities of the founders that drove the success of the company. Engineers throw themselves at those companies because of the compensation and prestige. It's not because they have a magical snowflake hiring process.
- jaredtn 6y ago
  I think he's saying that Google at a certain point in time managed to hire the talented & motivated people. So it can be done, because these companies have done so successfully at points in their past.
  - _qulr 6y ago
    > Google at a certain point in time managed to hire the talented & motivated people Google started with talented and motivated people. They also hired talented and motivated people, but that in itself is not proof of anything. Did they hire talented and motivated people because of their hiring process, or for other reasons, such as that Google is a place where a lot of talented and motivated people really wanted to work? There are different spins you could put on the hiring process: (1) it's extremely difficult in order to pick out "the best" engineers or (2) it's extremely difficult in order to pick out the engineers will do anything to work there.
    - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
andrewprock 6y ago
One thing that most people, including the OP, don't seem to understand is that the heavy process and rigid structuring of the FAANG interviews is to transform the "Optimal Stopping Problem" (aka the "Secretary Problem") from one of of ordinal evaluation to one of cardinal evaluation. Extracting a cardinal evaluation goes a long way towards solving the "Optimal Stopping Problem" more tractable and efficient.
pmiller2 6y ago
I see where the author is coming from, certainly. But, you have to realize, most hiring discussions on HN end up emphasizing the candidate's perspective. From my POV as an interviewee, I don't actually care about any of these myths. What I do care about is being tested fairly, using problems and scenarios that could come up in real work, not whether I can regurgitate some DP algorithm. IMO, this is what's lacking in most interview processes I have participated in, and most of these issues can be fixed by following a structured interview process. As a side benefit, you may end up with better candidates, as well. At the very least, you can actually tell if the candidates you choose to hire are as good or better than other people who have gone through your interview process, and that's worth something.
ozim 6y ago
I disagree with the article because author seems to miss the point of a lot of comments in here and is reaching simplistic conclusions. Lots of people don't nag about whiteboard interviews at FAANG, I think a lot of people who are commenting here don't even send their CV to any of those companies. People nag about other companies using whiteboard interviews as some kind of "silver bullet" of hiring. Most of the time I see negative comments about it, it is that some small startup which is trying to get people to work below market price is grilling people on interview like Facebook or Google. (as a side note there is whole list of bad stuff that medium/small companies do just because "goog/fb does that", but they should never do) Other negative that I see in discussions is, technical interviewers are assholes that want to show you how smart they are. Which FAANG interviewing style is helping to spread. Asking random algo question, that you know answer to and the person you are interviewing does not, makes it easy to feel superior. Being thoughtful about hiring... Yes if hiring manager has resources to do that then he might build amazing hiring engine. Again most of the companies have scarce resources, and entrepreneurs probably spend more time on sales than on hiring, because you should hire only if you really have to. Probably hiring is also not their core business.
- est31 6y ago
  > as a side note there is whole list of bad stuff that medium/small companies do just because "goog/fb does that", but they should never do Indeed. There is a great post about this mistake causing companies to do wrong technical choices titled "you are not Google". Worth a read if you're not familiar with it already (already been on hn twice as well). https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/you-are-not-google-84912cf44afb https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/you-are-not-google-84912cf44afb
dia80 6y ago
Can anyone comment on the authors book? https://www.holloway.com/g/technical-recruiting-hiring/about https://www.holloway.com/g/technical-recruiting-hiring/about
nawitus 6y ago
>On the other hand, if you’re a brilliant engineer who struggles with being told what to do or doing work that you can’t immediately connect to something intrinsically motivating to you, that FAANG interview just did both you and the company a favor by weeding you out of the process. Or maybe the candidate is willing to do that type of work during work hours, but lacks the time and motivation to do it at home after work.
- username90 6y ago
  I made way more money practicing interview questions than I did working for a shit company. If I didn't practice I would have stayed at shit companies and continue earning half the salary I got at Google. In the end when I look at the difference in salary progression between me and those who didn't join Google I earned around $300k after taxes for practicing algorithm problems for a few months so far. I'd say anyone who don't want to do that is just plain stupid. When people say "work smarter not harder", practicing algorithm interviews on your free time instead of trying to get a raise at shit companies is exactly the smarter thing to do. By choosing not to do this you make your life way harder.
  - bloodorange 6y ago
    > I'd say anyone who don't want to do that is just plain stupid. Please elaborate.
    - username90 6y ago
      You have two options for a job: A. Boring big corporation paying $80k. B. Boring big corporation paying $160k, but you need to spend a few weeks practicing to pass their tests before joining. Many people say they choose A since they don't want to waste their free time coding, like the guy I responded to. That is just plain stupid. Money is ultimately free time, you don't have to work as long as you have money, and many of these well paying companies lets you go down in time.
      - bloodorange 6y ago
dia80 6y ago
Lots of criticism of various points in TFA here. I really need to make a senior hire. Where can I learn to do it right?
cosmotic 6y ago
I'd give FAANG more credit if they had better track records of producing good products with good design and good engineering, but the track record is mostly a trail of failures in terms of bad design and bad engineering. Facebook has largely stagnated aside from acquisitions. Most of their scaling issues were resolved a decade ago. If you consider the repeated, practically universally hated redesigns, how is their hiring process working for them exactly? Amazon has numerous, obvious, long standing problems with their web store and cloud services. Maybe they are engineering toward higher profits instead of satisfied customers. Fire stick and amazon video UI is a trash fire. Regardless, I don't see any amazing engineering coming from amazon. Maybe its all in fulfillment? From what I can tell, Amazon just finds okay engineers that are willing to be exploited until they run away when they realize how awful it is to work there. When you consider the fulfillment employees things don't get rosier. Apple basically forces a curated design aesthetic down their users throats. Some like it, some hate it. I use a mac and android. As a user, iOS and macOS literally sicken me; I have to go into the accessibility and turn off all the animations and transparency. Apple's software has notoriously gone down hill for many years in terms of bugs and performance. I'm sure there's a lot of great engineering work that goes into a lot of what apple does, but it's almost all throw away. They focus on trendy features that no one wants. It sells a new year of iPhone upgrades, then it's abandoned because no one used those features. I still feel bad for all the companies that have been swindled into adding touchbar support and all the users that were swindled into paying $200 for the touchbar they won't use. Netflix hasn't changed in a decade. Maybe their backend systems have improved? I still regularly encounter buffering issues and the UI has been terrible since the first iteration. I still get DVDs in the mail and they visually downgraded the UI for that a few years ago but otherwise the feature set has never changed. The quality and selection of the petrol-disks transported using petrol is still superior to the largely-free-to-them transmission of the digital versions. I presume their hiring is largely focused on content creation at this point. Maybe their backend systems are more reliable now through engineering? Google is so infamous for product failures theres a metaphorical graveyard. How many times have they tried on the messaging front? I think we are at iteration 6? That's 5 failures in a row. The things they've succeeded at like search, mail, and maps were all done over a decade ago. Since then it's just been repeated downgrade after downgrade. Maybe all their engineering work is going into search rankings and anti-spam which are decent but not obviously better than its been in the past. Point of diminishing returns probably. I'm sure there are brilliant engineers working at all those companies, but it largely isn't demonstrated in overall output from the sector. Now considering the quantity multiplied by the quality of engineers, it's truly shocking I can't reliably send a text based message to an arbitrary person in the same city. I think FAANG's success is more easily attributed to non-engineering related choices that have hurt users and the industry to a much larger degree than it has benefited them. All things considered, the efficacy of their hiring practices can't be too far ahead of the industry average so I don't think it's fair to hold them up on a pedestal and claim 'Regardless of how bad you think they are at hiring, FAANG's hiring practices are effective'.
908B64B197 6y ago
> They've spent hours trying to convince people to talk to them. They've spent even more time getting candidates to the offer stage, only to lose out to the FAANG / startup-du-jour. Maybe they should ask themselves why they ended-up losing?

116 points by Ozzie_osman 6y ago

juskrey 6y ago

Hiring is not broken, it's just a two way filter, tried to be cheated both ways.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thatcat 6y ago
One side has a way bigger pump

seibelj 6y ago

> Diversity. We really, really suck at diversity. We’re getting better, but we have a long way to go. Most of the industry chases the same candidates and assesses them in the same way. I would pass this buck way, way earlier. Many diverse future candidates (non-white) are educated at awful public schools. When you begin your education at a miserable daycare-school then you are far less likely to make it all the way through the life-pipeline and get in front of a high tech recruiter. I have hired diverse candidates and they are great just like all candidates I hire. There simply aren't that many that apply, and the pool of diverse candidates is sucked up by way better-funded FAANGs and similar. I would argue we need to completely reinvent our primary education system from the ground up to offer more choice and make them way less depressing for lower-income students. You can't expect a tech recruiter to fix 2 decades of mistakes through their hiring system.

dheera 6y ago
While that does explain part of the issue for racial discrimination, gender discrimination is much less well explained by gaps in public school systems. The medium- and higher-income districts are all still close to a 1:1 gender ratio but tech companies are really, really far from that.
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  It doesn't have to start early in the pipeline. https://educationdata.org/number-of-college-graduates https://educationdata.org/number-of-college-graduates It's only relatively recently that female graduates even reached parity with (and now outnumber) male graduates. It will take even longer for the male:female divide to be closed in STEM.
Swizec 6y ago
I have some insight into this. My schooling was in eastern-ish europe growing up in a low middle class environment. My girlfriend grew up in SFBA and went to high school in Palo Alto. The difference in perspective is astounding. Even simple things like what you consider normal. Like, I grew up knowing that The Boss is someone you hate and despise who makes your life miserable. Becoming the boss is villified. Rich people are bad. Everyone is out to screw you. That includes rich people, poor people, the government, the police. Everyone. It’s you against the world. The forgotten class everyone exploits and nobody helps. High taxes, no help. Oh and teachers are all dumb. Otherwise they wouldn’t be teachers. By comparison the normal for my girlfriend is “You invent google street view or cofound the next ebay, obviously. That’s just basics”. At the least you do well in school, get great grades, and climb a corporate hiwrarchy to near top. That’s the failure mode if nothing else works. Learning the US corporate/business culture has been imo my biggest challenge moving here.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  While attending a poor school and growing up in a poor environment gives you a completely different life perspective than growing up in a rich one, it's worth noting that this isn't what people mean when they talk about "diversity".
  - TameAntelope 6y ago
    It's what I mean. It's not only what I mean, but that diversity of viewpoint is incredibly valuable when trying to solve problems as a group.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    I know it isn’t and that makes it even harder to talk about. Classism is understood and recognized in Europe and people are working on it. USA is still stuck pretending it doesn’t exist. Similar to how 50 years ago it was pretendint sexism isn’t a problem. Imo it’s important to talk about all types of systemic issues, not just the popular ones. And to quote one of my well meaning friends: ”Oh pfft your issues don’t count because you can pass (look white and male)”
- 6y ago
azernik 6y ago
Generally there is a disproportionate dropoff among minority and female candidates at every stage of the career pipeline, not just in the pre-interview parts.
Kalium 6y ago
There's a reflexive tendency for people to assume that a problem manifests at whatever point it is measured. It's an easy assumption to make. However, estimating malnutrition by measuring the heights of adults is not a great way to get a read on current food supplies.
- seibelj 6y ago
  You make a fair point, but it is very hard to snap my fingers and make more competent programmers of all races that perfectly align with society's representation of them.
User23 6y ago
As far as I can tell White Americans are a super-minority in Silicon Valley hiring pipelines. Of the 100 or so interviews I've done in the past few years I'd say about 2% were White American, 5% were of East Asian origin, and the rest of South Asian origin. Fact is if Silicon Valley firms actually want to be diverse, that is to say accurately represent the demographics of the USA, they need to hire more White Americans, not fewer.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  You're saying that you interviewed 100 people and 93 of them where South Asian? That seems insane unless you're actively hiring talent from India.
  - commandlinefan 6y ago
    I've observed similar demographics in North Texas, consistently over a 20-year period.
    - mcguire 6y ago
      For meat processing plants?
  - actuator 6y ago
    Yeah, this doesn't seem believable at all. East and South Asians are definitely overrepresented (compared to US population) in tech but not by these numbers. Luckily some big companies do publish diversity reports which will easily give information about the actual stats. FB's diversity report. https://diversity.fb.com/read-report/ https://diversity.fb.com/read-report/ White Americans make up 37% in tech, 63% in leadership positions in Facebook. GitHub is 70% White and 15% Asian. https://github.com/about/diversity/report https://github.com/about/diversity/report Apple is 50% White and 23% Asian. https://www.apple.com/diversity/ https://www.apple.com/diversity/
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
Ozzie_osman 6y ago
(Author here) This is the "pipeline problem" debate. You're right, it does start much earlier than tech companies, but also, it's too easy for hiring managers at tech companies to just throw up their hands and say "we can't do much, it's just the pipeline that isn't giving us enough diversity." There is plenty of evidence that it's not just a pipeline problem. One of my co-authors wrote a really solid piece on this: https://www.holloway.com/g/technical-recruiting-hiring/sections/its-not-just-a-pipeline-problem https://www.holloway.com/g/technical-recruiting-hiring/secti...
- seibelj 6y ago
  I agree with you that tech companies can do better and have done better. But this is like, they are doing 1.5x better. To do 10x better the educational system needs to be totally reworked.
  - forbiddenvoid 6y ago
    I think it's far more likely that there are numerous 1.5x improvements to be made along the entire funnel than that there exists a 10x solution at any one point. Making each person who 'owns' a piece of the process accountable for optimizing their portion is going to yield far better results than passing the buck.
- SamReidHughes 6y ago
  Why is that "solid piece" acting like stereotype threat is an actual thing, and not the totally debunked replication study failing pseudoscience that it is?
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > Overreliance on requirements like four-year degrees from the same few top schools, and on referrals from current employees, limits the number and kind of people considered “qualified” for technical roles. It's a simple signal to noise ratio issue. Sure you might be leaving out "diamonds in the rough" candidates, but how many mediocre interview will it take to find one?[0] [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
monksy 6y ago
I'm convinced that the best way is to have a beer with someone and to get them to start ranting about the bugs they've had to catch and resolve. The more swearing about the technical stuff, the more confident I am about that they solved it. I'm more interested in hearing about the problem solving in the contexts that they've worked through, what they learned, and their experience over all. Experience is universal. Telling someone to get 3 values of a list that create the high product isn't going to solve your production issue on a saturday night.
fastball 6y ago
Non-white is an interesting definition of diverse.
SamReidHughes 6y ago
Explaining things as problems of lower-income students doesn't really work, and "solutions" built around this assumption will fail, because even if you consider higher-income subsets of the racial demographics, or otherwise control for parental income, you still get huge disparities in the numbers of high-performance students.

librish 6y ago

Another benefit of whiteboard interviews that I often see left out is how well they scale. You can train a lot of engineers in how to conduct these interviews fairly quickly and you tell them what information to focus on and how to document it. You can then pass this information to a hiring committee that has a lot of experience in evaluating candidates. Having sat in on some hiring committee meetings I can see how little weight is given the algorithm if the candidate has a good reference or highly relevant experience. The issue with the interview alternatives that most people suggest is that they would require your most senior engineers to spend a really really large portion of their day on hiring which can burn people out quickly.

dheera 6y ago
My main issue with whiteboard interviews is that they often ask you to code something that is completely unrelated to the job, and is not representative of your normal work efficiency at a task that is within your area of expertise. For example, I've had several machine learning engineer interviews in which I was asked to write some variation of NMS (non-max suppression) or gradient descent on the whiteboard. What machine learning engineer writes that kind of code anymore? I can write it, yes I can fumble (a lot) and figure out how to optimize it, but in reality these are the type of algorithms that you almost always use some library that someone has already written for you for that kind of stuff. They spend the entire hour nitpicking at your implementation of NMS, base their entire impression of you on that implementation of NMS, and never in your entire interview ask you anything about, say, what the state-of-the-art object detectors are, what their breakthroughs are, how their networks are roughly structured, what you might think about doing to improve on them, what you could do if you only had limited annotation data, and other real machine learning questions.
- blamestross 6y ago
  Actually evaluating your knowledge is hard. Picking something to be a rough litmus test and testing that, despite it not being directly related to the job seems reasonable. It has been 3 years since I interviewed somebody for a ML position. Mostly I focused on knowledge of model execution. Most ML libraries were horrible for use in production at the time and I was more worried that a candidate wouldn't be able to productionize a good model than I was worried they wouldn't be able to build that model.

the_reformation 6y ago

As somebody who's somewhere between mediocre to good at whiteboard interviews (passed the loop at 1 FAANG, rejected by the rest), I think they're pretty solid. Most programming challenges, even at FAANG-scale, ultimately decompose into some family of classic interview problems (usually a graph or a hash table.) Everything else I do at work is implementation or stack specific. The average programmer will pick it up with enough exposure. But problem solving is somewhat binary (yes I realize thats an oxymoron) and not easily pick-up-able, at least on the time horizon a hiring manager wants to deal with. I realized this when I got a lot better at whiteboard interviews after a FAANG job for a couple years. A coding challenge that I took the full hour on and bombed out of college was now done in twenty. I just picked up the problem solving intuition by writing a ton of code.

louthy 6y ago
How much code do you normally write on whiteboards in front of people? It is such an artificial and for some, confrontational, way of problem solving, that it just filters for people who can stand in-front of whiteboards. It's a discriminatory process that shows pretty much nothing about the individual's capacity to function as a software engineer in a team.
- blamestross 6y ago
  I realized 4 years of teaching in grad-school precisely prepared me for whiteboard interviews. I literally spent 3 days a week working out problems on whiteboards in front of bored/annoyed people.
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    Good practice, yes. However what if those bored/annoyed people decided you were a failure and couldn't feed your family if a single unseen problem is not done in 15 minutes?
    - mcguire 6y ago
      Ultimately, I'm not sure what form of interview process would satisfy you.

dadrian 6y ago

This is a really good overview, one of the better things I've read about hiring in a while. I led engineering hiring at a ~25 person startup last year and I strongly agree with the authors description of the differences between FAANG hiring and smaller company hiring. The part about fit resonates with me as well---everyone we recruited and hired with specific ideas about how they'd mesh with the team outperformed the hires who were closer to just "filling seats".

goi 6y ago

> Diversity. We really, really suck at diversity. We’re getting better, but we have a long way to go. Most of the industry chases the same candidates and assesses them in the same way. What about neurodiversity and hiring neuroatypicals? "Culture fit" is often a euphemism for discrimination against them and others with poor social skills. Also, call me cynical, but I've come to view blogposts like this as little more than marketing for the author and whatever company they started/work for. They're always vague, self-congratulatory, studiously avoid saying anything genuinely controversial, and to the extent that they're critical, it's often just as a way of contrasting themselves with the competition.

lliamander 6y ago
Everything I've seen suggests that neuroatypicals are over-represented in tech relative to the wider population. I'm not saying there isn't anything more to be done for them, but I expect they're still going to have a more welcoming environment in tech than just about anywhere else.
- goi 6y ago
  The industry isn't nearly as accepting of them as it was ten or twenty years ago. To those downvoting: if Linus Torvalds was 30 years younger and just as competent, yet completely unknown, do you really think he wouldn't have a lot of trouble getting hired at a FANG company because of his poor social skills?
  - rodgerd 6y ago
    If you mean that the industry is less likely to allow a self-diagnosis of "it's the autism" as an excuse for sexual harrassment, sure.
avip 6y ago
Cultural fit sucks, but working with developers who cannot communicate clearly and effectively also sucks. The "how to interview" discussion must always focus on what sucks less as the whole framework of thinking sucks here.

MattGaiser 6y ago

> find a friend who’s spent time on hiring, and ask them for their favorite battle story. Anyone here have good hiring stories?

sokoloff 6y ago
We make business cards sold online. ~Half-billion-USD/yr of them. Literal sheets of uncut cards are under glass in the interview rooms. Final round with a candidate who’s “near the bubble”. Me: “Do you have any questions?” Him: “Yeah; have you guys ever thought about selling business cards online?” Me: “Uh, we’ve uh, given it some thought.” To this day, I’m not sure what he thought we did.
jzwinck 6y ago
At a university recruiting event I asked one candidate if he was willing to move to NYC to work with us. Most people say yes, a few say no thanks and move on. This candidate said "Well my partner is considering a job in Texas." I asked candidate if he preferred Texas to NYC. "Not really, they have scorpions."
munchbunny 6y ago
I don't have good stories (or rather, none that I would want to share), but I do have battle scars. Hiring is hard. It's really complex to get right, and I spent years tuning the process. Having done both, I'd much rather be on the hiring end than the candidate end. But as the hiring manager, I mostly just felt weariness at the process.
Aeolun 6y ago
The biggest revelation of being on the hiring end is that we generally know whether we want to hire someone a second after the interview ends. The most interesting thing I’ve heard I guess has been the guy who replied ‘Well, they’re all idiots there’ when asked why he wanted to move. Like someone else said, hiring is mostly just tiresome.
mundo 6y ago
A former job of mine forced candidates to fill out a form for one of those abominable HR candidate tracking sites, maybe ICIMS, and I saw the following gem from one applicant: Q: "One of CompanyCo's core values is Openness. How have you demonstrated openness in your career?" A: "I am open about my contempt for bullshit questions like this one."

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Well, all that said, it's been interesting that no one has wanted to work with me. Frankly, it was shocking, as I definitely have the skills, experience and "soft" skills, like Accountability and Responsibility, as well as years of experience at selling difficult projects to real hard-nosed, empirical managers. I also would have been quite willing to work for a fraction of what people that don't have my chops would want. The worst was working with recruiters. They are downright insulting. Quite jarring. Whiteboard/LeetCode tests are a flat-out insult to me. I won't do well at them, and I'm quite aware that people spend huge amounts of time, practicing for them, so I don't have a chance. I do have a few hundred thousand lines of code, dozens of blog articles, dozens of repos, and a decade or more of checkin history. I've been told that I "faked" it, which would be hilarious, if it weren't so insulting. In the end, I just decided to stop looking for work, and I'm working in a small startup team, writing some fairly powerful software, for free; because I enjoy doing this stuff. It's pretty odd that the current scene is actively hostile towards folks like me. I feel that it's fairly self-destructive.

chrismcb 6y ago
Why do you feel whiteboard problems are an insult? And why do you feel you don't do well on them? Just because others spend a ton of practice on them, didn't mean you don't have a chance.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  Because most are "young-pass filters," and that makes itself obvious, as soon as I see them. I've learned that when I see a binary tree question, I might as well just wrap up the interview. They have no intention of hiring me. I am mediocre at them. Most represent stuff I haven't done. A lot of it is common sense, but I'm solving them for the first time, so my approach is usually sub-optimal (I tend to start with naive approaches, then refine, if necessary). The testers are usually looking for a formulaic approach. A lot of my approaches are orthogonal to the "classics." I started as an EE, so I'm pretty good with things like drivers, SDKs and APIs, but they aren't really something that you can do in a 50-line test. What's really insulting, is that when I'm asked, I usually send links to relevant gists or repos; often focused on the exact method that addresses the question asked. It's ignored (so far, 100% of the time -the "faker" comment was made by someone that was explaining why they ignored it).

m0zg 6y ago

I don't see how it's a "myth" that "whiteboard interviews suck". You never write code on a whiteboard in the course of your day job. The obsession with whiteboard interviews is absolutely idiotic IMO, as is the obsession with asking deep algorithmic questions which the candidate will definitely not be able to answer convincingly if they didn't encounter them before. It's idiotic that someone has to prepare for a month to do a 5-7 hour whiteboard interview loop that has no relation whatsoever to the job duties. You don't quiz a barbecue chef on Michelin star molecular cuisine, yet this is considered totally normal in our profession. At a minimum, ask questions that one could figure out without knowing the answer beforehand, and at a minimum let them use their text editor. Better yet, don't do this shit at all, and ask people to solve a _practical_ problem similar to ones they're likely to encounter if they take the job. It still provides a good filter, arguably better even. As things are now, interviews test for academic credentials, memory, and lack of flight response from candidate's amygdala, not practical technical skill per se.

blamestross 6y ago
> As things are now, interviews test for academic credentials, memory, and lack of flight response from candidate's amygdala, not practical technical skill per se. Those sound like they might correlate well with the traits desired.
- m0zg 6y ago
  I wish I could quote some paper or otherwise confirm this for you, but when I was at Google, Google itself has disproven this by hiring a cohort irrespective of their interview outcome (you can imagine what this did to googlers' impostor syndrome when they shared the results), and then tracking their performance for a few years. They did about as well as people who were subject to traditional scoring in interviews. Now granted, this is not a viable option for all of their interviewing, but at a minimum it suggests that interview scores aren't as strong an indicator of future job performance as people assume.
  - username90 6y ago

bulatb 6y ago

The article explains in detail how a pressure difference can create a force, and how the process generates these differences and how the force is felt as suction, but still argues that the process doesn't suck. A process good at testing applicants should 1) identify the good ones and 2) identify the bad ones. The standard whiteboard interview makes no attempt at (1) and works by throwing almost everyone in bucket (2) regardless of potential. This is plainly, in general, a process that sucks. It just happens that the way it sucks is not a problem if you're FAANG.

pm90 6y ago
The fetishization of Google (specifically their interview process) has really hurt the industry and caused a lot of unnecessary stress for a lot of engineers.
- filereaper 6y ago
  Agreed, lots of companies have Google style interviews when they are clearly not Google. You better have quality work to do and equivalent perks as Google to put candidates through their style of interviews. Otherwise those companies are delusional and I have the world's smallest violin for their recruiting woes.
  - cvhashim 6y ago
    If you interview like Google, you better pay like Google.
    - jldugger 6y ago
      > pay like Google. So notoriously low that the CEO had to approve a company wide raise of 10 percent one year?
      - conro1108 6y ago
        To "pay like Google" compared to industry in general and to "pay like Google" compared to the places Google is competing for hires with are very different things.

soared 6y ago

#2 made me smile because Amazon is so blatantly against this. Amazon gives you their 12 principles and wants you to come up with 36 stories (3 per principle) about how you used these principle at work. My interviews were far and away the least thoughtful hiring experience I’ve ever had. It was clear each person was filling out a form while I was talking, and followed up with pre-written questions. There was nothing non-traditional, and the 6 hour loop definitely did not respect my time. ~50 hours of prep, 10 total hours of interviews ( 2 hours of screening, 6 hour loop, 2 additional interviews for other roles). I had really great interactions... after the forms we’re filled out. Interviews went well - I was put into the “recycle” status but never found a role there that really fit my experience. Nontechnical but still tech consulting, not aws.

UncleOxidant 6y ago
I passed the phone interview for an Amazon position a few years back and when the hiring person told me that before the next interview I'd have to come up with stories for 14 principles (I thought it was 14 not 12?) I thought in my head "This is a cult" and then politely told the hiring manager no thanks.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I don’t work at Amazon, but have many close friends who do. The 14 LPs are a strong attractant to me, especially since it’s obvious how they actually use them day-to-day instead of just being posters on a wall somewhere.

mixmastamyk 6y ago

Didn't find this one compelling. "Some truth to it..."! Please, it's an industry-wide disaster, aka billion-dollar mistake. Granted some of the test fashion is useful for computer scientists and the fraction implementing algorithms. But the other 80% are being selected for the wrong thing. These other folks that are curious could be trained on the job (the growth mindset) in a few weeks, if that were still a thing.

_qulr 6y ago

The author contradicts himself in trying to argue that hiring isn't a crapshoot. On the one hand, he says the best hiring managers "didn’t chase the same pool of candidates everyone else was chasing—instead, they found non-traditional ways to discover really talented and motivated people who weren’t in the pool of usual suspects". But then in the very next paragraph he cites Google, Facebook, Stripe, and Dropbox as examples. Huh? It's so misleading to cite BigCos as examples of excellent hiring, because the founders of the companies and the initial employees are never hired in the same way that their engineers are currently hired. They're usually just people who happened to know each other in a dorm. It's only after the company gets a bunch of funding that they need to fill seats with a bunch of warm bodies. But the success wasn't because of the assembly-line style hiring, it's the product idea and the personal qualities of the founders that drove the success of the company. Engineers throw themselves at those companies because of the compensation and prestige. It's not because they have a magical snowflake hiring process.

jaredtn 6y ago
I think he's saying that Google at a certain point in time managed to hire the talented & motivated people. So it can be done, because these companies have done so successfully at points in their past.
- _qulr 6y ago
  > Google at a certain point in time managed to hire the talented & motivated people Google started with talented and motivated people. They also hired talented and motivated people, but that in itself is not proof of anything. Did they hire talented and motivated people because of their hiring process, or for other reasons, such as that Google is a place where a lot of talented and motivated people really wanted to work? There are different spins you could put on the hiring process: (1) it's extremely difficult in order to pick out "the best" engineers or (2) it's extremely difficult in order to pick out the engineers will do anything to work there.
  - ThrowawayR2 6y ago

andrewprock 6y ago

One thing that most people, including the OP, don't seem to understand is that the heavy process and rigid structuring of the FAANG interviews is to transform the "Optimal Stopping Problem" (aka the "Secretary Problem") from one of of ordinal evaluation to one of cardinal evaluation. Extracting a cardinal evaluation goes a long way towards solving the "Optimal Stopping Problem" more tractable and efficient.

pmiller2 6y ago

I see where the author is coming from, certainly. But, you have to realize, most hiring discussions on HN end up emphasizing the candidate's perspective. From my POV as an interviewee, I don't actually care about any of these myths. What I do care about is being tested fairly, using problems and scenarios that could come up in real work, not whether I can regurgitate some DP algorithm. IMO, this is what's lacking in most interview processes I have participated in, and most of these issues can be fixed by following a structured interview process. As a side benefit, you may end up with better candidates, as well. At the very least, you can actually tell if the candidates you choose to hire are as good or better than other people who have gone through your interview process, and that's worth something.

ozim 6y ago

I disagree with the article because author seems to miss the point of a lot of comments in here and is reaching simplistic conclusions. Lots of people don't nag about whiteboard interviews at FAANG, I think a lot of people who are commenting here don't even send their CV to any of those companies. People nag about other companies using whiteboard interviews as some kind of "silver bullet" of hiring. Most of the time I see negative comments about it, it is that some small startup which is trying to get people to work below market price is grilling people on interview like Facebook or Google. (as a side note there is whole list of bad stuff that medium/small companies do just because "goog/fb does that", but they should never do) Other negative that I see in discussions is, technical interviewers are assholes that want to show you how smart they are. Which FAANG interviewing style is helping to spread. Asking random algo question, that you know answer to and the person you are interviewing does not, makes it easy to feel superior. Being thoughtful about hiring... Yes if hiring manager has resources to do that then he might build amazing hiring engine. Again most of the companies have scarce resources, and entrepreneurs probably spend more time on sales than on hiring, because you should hire only if you really have to. Probably hiring is also not their core business.

est31 6y ago
> as a side note there is whole list of bad stuff that medium/small companies do just because "goog/fb does that", but they should never do Indeed. There is a great post about this mistake causing companies to do wrong technical choices titled "you are not Google". Worth a read if you're not familiar with it already (already been on hn twice as well). https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/you-are-not-google-84912cf44afb https://blog.bradfieldcs.com/you-are-not-google-84912cf44afb

dia80 6y ago

Can anyone comment on the authors book? https://www.holloway.com/g/technical-recruiting-hiring/about https://www.holloway.com/g/technical-recruiting-hiring/about

nawitus 6y ago

>On the other hand, if you’re a brilliant engineer who struggles with being told what to do or doing work that you can’t immediately connect to something intrinsically motivating to you, that FAANG interview just did both you and the company a favor by weeding you out of the process. Or maybe the candidate is willing to do that type of work during work hours, but lacks the time and motivation to do it at home after work.

username90 6y ago
I made way more money practicing interview questions than I did working for a shit company. If I didn't practice I would have stayed at shit companies and continue earning half the salary I got at Google. In the end when I look at the difference in salary progression between me and those who didn't join Google I earned around $300k after taxes for practicing algorithm problems for a few months so far. I'd say anyone who don't want to do that is just plain stupid. When people say "work smarter not harder", practicing algorithm interviews on your free time instead of trying to get a raise at shit companies is exactly the smarter thing to do. By choosing not to do this you make your life way harder.
- bloodorange 6y ago
  > I'd say anyone who don't want to do that is just plain stupid. Please elaborate.
  - username90 6y ago
    You have two options for a job: A. Boring big corporation paying $80k. B. Boring big corporation paying $160k, but you need to spend a few weeks practicing to pass their tests before joining. Many people say they choose A since they don't want to waste their free time coding, like the guy I responded to. That is just plain stupid. Money is ultimately free time, you don't have to work as long as you have money, and many of these well paying companies lets you go down in time.
    - bloodorange 6y ago

dia80 6y ago

Lots of criticism of various points in TFA here. I really need to make a senior hire. Where can I learn to do it right?

cosmotic 6y ago

I'd give FAANG more credit if they had better track records of producing good products with good design and good engineering, but the track record is mostly a trail of failures in terms of bad design and bad engineering. Facebook has largely stagnated aside from acquisitions. Most of their scaling issues were resolved a decade ago. If you consider the repeated, practically universally hated redesigns, how is their hiring process working for them exactly? Amazon has numerous, obvious, long standing problems with their web store and cloud services. Maybe they are engineering toward higher profits instead of satisfied customers. Fire stick and amazon video UI is a trash fire. Regardless, I don't see any amazing engineering coming from amazon. Maybe its all in fulfillment? From what I can tell, Amazon just finds okay engineers that are willing to be exploited until they run away when they realize how awful it is to work there. When you consider the fulfillment employees things don't get rosier. Apple basically forces a curated design aesthetic down their users throats. Some like it, some hate it. I use a mac and android. As a user, iOS and macOS literally sicken me; I have to go into the accessibility and turn off all the animations and transparency. Apple's software has notoriously gone down hill for many years in terms of bugs and performance. I'm sure there's a lot of great engineering work that goes into a lot of what apple does, but it's almost all throw away. They focus on trendy features that no one wants. It sells a new year of iPhone upgrades, then it's abandoned because no one used those features. I still feel bad for all the companies that have been swindled into adding touchbar support and all the users that were swindled into paying $200 for the touchbar they won't use. Netflix hasn't changed in a decade. Maybe their backend systems have improved? I still regularly encounter buffering issues and the UI has been terrible since the first iteration. I still get DVDs in the mail and they visually downgraded the UI for that a few years ago but otherwise the feature set has never changed. The quality and selection of the petrol-disks transported using petrol is still superior to the largely-free-to-them transmission of the digital versions. I presume their hiring is largely focused on content creation at this point. Maybe their backend systems are more reliable now through engineering? Google is so infamous for product failures theres a metaphorical graveyard. How many times have they tried on the messaging front? I think we are at iteration 6? That's 5 failures in a row. The things they've succeeded at like search, mail, and maps were all done over a decade ago. Since then it's just been repeated downgrade after downgrade. Maybe all their engineering work is going into search rankings and anti-spam which are decent but not obviously better than its been in the past. Point of diminishing returns probably. I'm sure there are brilliant engineers working at all those companies, but it largely isn't demonstrated in overall output from the sector. Now considering the quantity multiplied by the quality of engineers, it's truly shocking I can't reliably send a text based message to an arbitrary person in the same city. I think FAANG's success is more easily attributed to non-engineering related choices that have hurt users and the industry to a much larger degree than it has benefited them. All things considered, the efficacy of their hiring practices can't be too far ahead of the industry average so I don't think it's fair to hold them up on a pedestal and claim 'Regardless of how bad you think they are at hiring, FAANG's hiring practices are effective'.

908B64B197 6y ago

> They've spent hours trying to convince people to talk to them. They've spent even more time getting candidates to the offer stage, only to lose out to the FAANG / startup-du-jour. Maybe they should ask themselves why they ended-up losing?