10 ms·

> - it's not enough to be able to solve the problems, you need to be able to solve them on the spot, without much thinking, in an interview context Sounds like

> - it's not enough to be able to solve the problems, you need to be able to solve them on the spot, without much thinking, in an interview context Sounds like they're looking for assembly line programmers - crank out the code, pass it off, then on to the next piece of code without pause. This would be a nightmare for me. The high salaries and prestige of these companies definitely would not be worth it. I'm not neurotypical. I met an older man when younger who recognized this when he hired me so he left me alone. I worked at home and provided him programming solutions on my time schedule, which turned into millions of dollars for me and much more for him. I'm happy to let the fast programmers do the speed programming.

yodsanklai 6y ago
I think what is required for the interviews is very different than the actual work you do once you are hired. It 's also very team dependent. The reason why you're expected to be fast during the interviews is that you're competing with people who are fast (either because they are smart, or because they've practiced a lot). That being said, this type of interviews is clearly not for everyone. There are tons of skilled people who (for good reasons) don't want to play that game, and there'll always be a market for them.
- danilocesar 6y ago
  Not at FAANG
- okareaman 6y ago
  > I think what is required for the interviews is very different than the actual work you do once you are hired I'm sure that's true once you achieve seniority. I'd wager that the first couple of years, at least, you're not solving problems, but implementing solutions designed by higher ups. You need to do this fast to be useful.
brightball 6y ago
One of my big impressions of Go is that it's designed to facilitate exactly that. I've also heard comments in that vein.
- okareaman 6y ago
  Exactly: (from https://arto.s3.amazonaws.com/notes/go https://arto.s3.amazonaws.com/notes/go) "The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they're not researchers. They're typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They're not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt." Rob Pike [1] "It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical." Rob Pike [2] [1] http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/From-Parallel-to-Concurrent http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Fro... [2] http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    This sort of "programming language designed for people we apparently have a very low opinion of" approach also greatly informed the design of Java, though Java has spent the last 20 years slowly retreating from it. It looks like Go might be following the same path; it's apparently getting generics at some point!
    - okareaman 6y ago
      Can you imagine how many times Google was burned by junior devs writing C++ no matter how smart they were? Memory bugs at Google scale must be expensive. They had to come up with Go.
      - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
        How about hiring better engineers instead?
        okareaman 6y ago
IshKebab 6y ago
That's not it - it's that interviewers set problems that they already know how to solve. They forget how hard it is to solve new problems on the spot in an interview setting. In my experience technical interview questions are usually way harder than they need to be. I don't agree with getting rid of HackerRank style filters entirely because they save you a ton of time with candidates who just can't code at all (or candidates that think they aren't applying for a coding job). But the questions should definitely err on the easy side.
- randomswede 6y ago
  As an ex-Googler who's done a fair bit of interviewing, my bar for "will I use this coding question" is to look at the problem statement, do a from-fresh implementation in a suitable language, and if it took me more than 7 minutes, it is not suitable for a 45-minute interview slot (I would expect the candidate to have a solution in ~20 minutes, then maybe 10 minutes of follow-up questions, then flip to "do you have any questions for me"). I thus gave the candidates roughly three times longer than I needed to solve the problem myself, which should pretty much account for the interview situation.
neverminder 6y ago
It's because when companies get that big and famous they no longer need that many creative individual thinkers, they need obedient drones. With disproportionately large numbers of applicants they get, they are able to make you jump through all the hoops they put in front of you, because if you won't there are thousands of others who will.
- vsareto 6y ago
  NGL, I'd jump through hoops for 250k + other compensation Part of why this has stuck around for so long is that so many people are willing to do that because it's a life-altering amount of money
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    Plus the prestige of being able to walk into your next job and captain the ship. I've been at a few places that hired former Googlers, and they were all treated like gods.
    - SQueeeeeL 6y ago
      Yeah, the ex-Googler's I've met have always been average; but I guess if no one will say the emperor has no clothes it doesn't matter
      - data_spy 6y ago
        It used to mean something more than it does now. I noticed ex-Googlers were well above average in 2012, now they can be below avg. I have a colleague of mine at my current job that makes a point of being an ex-Googler but they only worked there for 6 months, so it is kind of meaningless.
        vsareto 6y ago
        Global average or people-who-work-at-FAANG average? The frame of reference here is important, otherwise average is pretty meaningless since we have no objective list of what an average developer consists of.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> Sounds like they're looking for assembly line programmers Sounds like the exact opposite - they're specifically looking for people who can actually solve algorithmic problems, rather than just code them up.
- okareaman 6y ago
  I didn't say you didn't need to solve algorithmic problems. That's why you study and go to college. I said you needed to be fast.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    But an 'assembly line', line-of-business programmer has almost no need to solve algorithmic problems. Why would they test that if that's what they needed?
    - imtringued 6y ago
      It's the wedding ring of interviews. You're supposed to show that you are invested. The fact that the diamond in the wedding ring is worthless is actually a feature.
shaftway 6y ago
I'm in the interviewer pool at Google. Other FAANGs might be different. I've had candidates ask me why we do this, and my answer is that once you're in the company, transferring to another job on the same ladder is fairly trivial and requires no technical re-interviews. I go on to describe how I've been around for 10 years and am on my 5th team. None of those transfers required any sort of technical re-check. Teams trust me when I say what my abilities are. Sometimes they'll look at past CLs, and we certainly have a couple interviews to make sure that the fit is good, but nothing technical. In none of my positions has it been "crank out the code, pass it off, then on to the next piece". There has always been a clear sense of ownership of my code, where I've been responsible for both the code and a steward of where and how it's used and modified.
- goldenManatee 6y ago
  I’m not sure how unique that is, though. Most companies once you’re in doing technical, your peers will trust you to switch teams or broaden out a little. Re-testing a coworker would come off anywhere between amusing and insulting.
  - mattst88 6y ago
    We would always interview internal candidates for technical abilities at Intel.
  - chillacy 6y ago
    At larger companies I've worked at without central hiring committees it was common to get re-interviewed unless you were vouched for by someone pretty senior.
- okareaman 6y ago
  I don't doubt that you're required to maintain your own code after you've checked it in for others to use ("pass it off") but have you always designed your own solution or have you had to implement designs by higher ups for some not insignificant percentage of the time?
SZJX 6y ago
> Sounds like they're looking for assembly line programmers Feels to me there are a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions about FAANG floating around in this thread, which I guess is not exactly surprising given the type of post this is (criticism of the "broken" interview process). In your case it's more understandable if you wouldn't like working a conventional job, since you mentioned you're not neurotypical (though I guess you would most likely find work at most smaller software shops even more suffocating). However, for the majority of commentators, it almost feels like some people find excuses to not even try, or have some sort of sour grape mentality/avert their eyes from the issue, if they feel themselves unlikely to pass the interview, even though they haven't spent the time required to master the algorithms questions at all. (Of course, there might also be people who simply find it quite hard to find such time, as mentioned in the article, which is understandable.) My understanding is that those companies themselves also freely acknowledge that interviewing is hard. Due to the sheer volume of applicants, fast algorithms questions is the most reasonable compromise they can find at the moment. If you were in the position of the interviewer, it would also be hard for you to come up with an alternative that works for all sides involved. So instead of complaining about this reality, one needs to face up to the challenge. I would conjecture that most lower-paying "programming" jobs, e.g. writing enterprise Java, are much much more "assembly line" and "soul-sucking" than jobs at top-notch tech companies, which should offer a decent amount of creativity and freedom for one as an ordinary employee. It is actually a paradox: You seem to be unfree and doing something pointless when you were grinding interview questions. But after you've made it, it would suddenly be very easy for you to have a lot of freedom and security in your life with all the capital you have accumulated. In a sense it's like how college entrance exams work. It's unfortunate but again, if no better practical solution could be found at the moment, one just has to face the reality and do it. It could even be fun. Talking about "ideals" wouldn't get you anywhere in the real world. The one valid thing I think you may get by not working for FAANG is complete freedom in shaping what you're working on. However this is hard anywhere unless you're the founder/executive of the company yourself. If that's what you're after and you have the safety to pursue it, sure. However, in terms of working as an ordinary employee, there are very few possible reasons why a place could be better than big tech.
ehonsey33 6y ago
Agreed. >The tests are therefore all about excluding candidates rather than identifying brilliant young mavericks with potential. The author assumes that companies want mavericks. Maybe the FAANGs and other high tech firms still search for a few innovators, but wouldn’t they look at other networks besides the typical interview process to identify these candidates? We are living in an age of developer commoditization, and for many large tech companies the army of assembly line programmers can churn through enough peripheral work at the right price.

yodsanklai 6y ago

I think what is required for the interviews is very different than the actual work you do once you are hired. It 's also very team dependent. The reason why you're expected to be fast during the interviews is that you're competing with people who are fast (either because they are smart, or because they've practiced a lot). That being said, this type of interviews is clearly not for everyone. There are tons of skilled people who (for good reasons) don't want to play that game, and there'll always be a market for them.

danilocesar 6y ago
Not at FAANG
okareaman 6y ago
> I think what is required for the interviews is very different than the actual work you do once you are hired I'm sure that's true once you achieve seniority. I'd wager that the first couple of years, at least, you're not solving problems, but implementing solutions designed by higher ups. You need to do this fast to be useful.

brightball 6y ago

One of my big impressions of Go is that it's designed to facilitate exactly that. I've also heard comments in that vein.

okareaman 6y ago
Exactly: (from https://arto.s3.amazonaws.com/notes/go https://arto.s3.amazonaws.com/notes/go) "The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they're not researchers. They're typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They're not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt." Rob Pike [1] "It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical." Rob Pike [2] [1] http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/From-Parallel-to-Concurrent http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Fro... [2] http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article
- rsynnott 6y ago
  This sort of "programming language designed for people we apparently have a very low opinion of" approach also greatly informed the design of Java, though Java has spent the last 20 years slowly retreating from it. It looks like Go might be following the same path; it's apparently getting generics at some point!
  - okareaman 6y ago
    Can you imagine how many times Google was burned by junior devs writing C++ no matter how smart they were? Memory bugs at Google scale must be expensive. They had to come up with Go.
    - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
      How about hiring better engineers instead?
      - okareaman 6y ago

IshKebab 6y ago

That's not it - it's that interviewers set problems that they already know how to solve. They forget how hard it is to solve new problems on the spot in an interview setting. In my experience technical interview questions are usually way harder than they need to be. I don't agree with getting rid of HackerRank style filters entirely because they save you a ton of time with candidates who just can't code at all (or candidates that think they aren't applying for a coding job). But the questions should definitely err on the easy side.

randomswede 6y ago
As an ex-Googler who's done a fair bit of interviewing, my bar for "will I use this coding question" is to look at the problem statement, do a from-fresh implementation in a suitable language, and if it took me more than 7 minutes, it is not suitable for a 45-minute interview slot (I would expect the candidate to have a solution in ~20 minutes, then maybe 10 minutes of follow-up questions, then flip to "do you have any questions for me"). I thus gave the candidates roughly three times longer than I needed to solve the problem myself, which should pretty much account for the interview situation.

neverminder 6y ago

It's because when companies get that big and famous they no longer need that many creative individual thinkers, they need obedient drones. With disproportionately large numbers of applicants they get, they are able to make you jump through all the hoops they put in front of you, because if you won't there are thousands of others who will.

vsareto 6y ago
NGL, I'd jump through hoops for 250k + other compensation Part of why this has stuck around for so long is that so many people are willing to do that because it's a life-altering amount of money
- mywittyname 6y ago
  Plus the prestige of being able to walk into your next job and captain the ship. I've been at a few places that hired former Googlers, and they were all treated like gods.
  - SQueeeeeL 6y ago
    Yeah, the ex-Googler's I've met have always been average; but I guess if no one will say the emperor has no clothes it doesn't matter
    - data_spy 6y ago
      It used to mean something more than it does now. I noticed ex-Googlers were well above average in 2012, now they can be below avg. I have a colleague of mine at my current job that makes a point of being an ex-Googler but they only worked there for 6 months, so it is kind of meaningless.
      - vsareto 6y ago
        Global average or people-who-work-at-FAANG average? The frame of reference here is important, otherwise average is pretty meaningless since we have no objective list of what an average developer consists of.

chrisseaton 6y ago

> Sounds like they're looking for assembly line programmers Sounds like the exact opposite - they're specifically looking for people who can actually solve algorithmic problems, rather than just code them up.

okareaman 6y ago
I didn't say you didn't need to solve algorithmic problems. That's why you study and go to college. I said you needed to be fast.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  But an 'assembly line', line-of-business programmer has almost no need to solve algorithmic problems. Why would they test that if that's what they needed?
  - imtringued 6y ago
    It's the wedding ring of interviews. You're supposed to show that you are invested. The fact that the diamond in the wedding ring is worthless is actually a feature.

shaftway 6y ago

I'm in the interviewer pool at Google. Other FAANGs might be different. I've had candidates ask me why we do this, and my answer is that once you're in the company, transferring to another job on the same ladder is fairly trivial and requires no technical re-interviews. I go on to describe how I've been around for 10 years and am on my 5th team. None of those transfers required any sort of technical re-check. Teams trust me when I say what my abilities are. Sometimes they'll look at past CLs, and we certainly have a couple interviews to make sure that the fit is good, but nothing technical. In none of my positions has it been "crank out the code, pass it off, then on to the next piece". There has always been a clear sense of ownership of my code, where I've been responsible for both the code and a steward of where and how it's used and modified.

goldenManatee 6y ago
I’m not sure how unique that is, though. Most companies once you’re in doing technical, your peers will trust you to switch teams or broaden out a little. Re-testing a coworker would come off anywhere between amusing and insulting.
- mattst88 6y ago
  We would always interview internal candidates for technical abilities at Intel.
- chillacy 6y ago
  At larger companies I've worked at without central hiring committees it was common to get re-interviewed unless you were vouched for by someone pretty senior.
okareaman 6y ago
I don't doubt that you're required to maintain your own code after you've checked it in for others to use ("pass it off") but have you always designed your own solution or have you had to implement designs by higher ups for some not insignificant percentage of the time?

SZJX 6y ago

> Sounds like they're looking for assembly line programmers Feels to me there are a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions about FAANG floating around in this thread, which I guess is not exactly surprising given the type of post this is (criticism of the "broken" interview process). In your case it's more understandable if you wouldn't like working a conventional job, since you mentioned you're not neurotypical (though I guess you would most likely find work at most smaller software shops even more suffocating). However, for the majority of commentators, it almost feels like some people find excuses to not even try, or have some sort of sour grape mentality/avert their eyes from the issue, if they feel themselves unlikely to pass the interview, even though they haven't spent the time required to master the algorithms questions at all. (Of course, there might also be people who simply find it quite hard to find such time, as mentioned in the article, which is understandable.) My understanding is that those companies themselves also freely acknowledge that interviewing is hard. Due to the sheer volume of applicants, fast algorithms questions is the most reasonable compromise they can find at the moment. If you were in the position of the interviewer, it would also be hard for you to come up with an alternative that works for all sides involved. So instead of complaining about this reality, one needs to face up to the challenge. I would conjecture that most lower-paying "programming" jobs, e.g. writing enterprise Java, are much much more "assembly line" and "soul-sucking" than jobs at top-notch tech companies, which should offer a decent amount of creativity and freedom for one as an ordinary employee. It is actually a paradox: You seem to be unfree and doing something pointless when you were grinding interview questions. But after you've made it, it would suddenly be very easy for you to have a lot of freedom and security in your life with all the capital you have accumulated. In a sense it's like how college entrance exams work. It's unfortunate but again, if no better practical solution could be found at the moment, one just has to face the reality and do it. It could even be fun. Talking about "ideals" wouldn't get you anywhere in the real world. The one valid thing I think you may get by not working for FAANG is complete freedom in shaping what you're working on. However this is hard anywhere unless you're the founder/executive of the company yourself. If that's what you're after and you have the safety to pursue it, sure. However, in terms of working as an ordinary employee, there are very few possible reasons why a place could be better than big tech.

ehonsey33 6y ago

Agreed. >The tests are therefore all about excluding candidates rather than identifying brilliant young mavericks with potential. The author assumes that companies want mavericks. Maybe the FAANGs and other high tech firms still search for a few innovators, but wouldn’t they look at other networks besides the typical interview process to identify these candidates? We are living in an age of developer commoditization, and for many large tech companies the army of assembly line programmers can churn through enough peripheral work at the right price.