19 ms·

The technical interview practice gap

146 points by leeny 6y ago

120bits 6y ago
I haven't cleared a single technical interview after applying to FAANG companies in last 5 years. I'm currently employed and I have been working for than 8 years. I'm good at what I do. I might not the greatest programmer but I can come up with a approach to solve a problem. My past experiences have been terrible, not a single person who interviewed me wanted to know what I worked on or what I have achieved or how I solved a given problem. Few introductory questions and jump into coding questions. Some of them are medium and few of them were hard. But at most I was able to find a way to solve(not completely code a solution). It seems lot easier when you are in college and are surround by students who are practicing coding interviews. You can talk, discuss and gain more experience. I don't know how I can do that, when I'm busy maintaining and coding for my current job. Its just so demotivating.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  This is pretty explicit in interview training at least at Google. Nobody cares how you solved some problem because inside the Google none of your experience applies. What are needed are people who can read and write code, who know algorithms and can discuss the complexity of them.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  The usual HackerNews advice here is something like find a way to commit a few hours a week to LeetCode.
  - EVdotIO 6y ago
    This entire industry is just awful, and the antithesis of anything resembling the compassionate virtues they claim to espouse. I'm done with programming, and maybe that's what is supposed to happen, but it has left a very bitter taste in my mouth. If you have serious chops, go for it. Otherwise, give it a wide berth.
    - Ancalagon 6y ago
      To continue the normal HackerNews go-around on this topic: there are plenty of companies that don't interview like this, at least outside of Silicon Valley.
    - jrib 6y ago
      > I'm done with programming Curious: what did you switch to?
      - EVdotIO 6y ago
        I DJ. Not something I would recommend as a career choice. Pay isn't as good and I don't have benefits, but the lack of dread is nice.
        danlugo92 6y ago
        Never thought of freelancing?
        BossingAround 6y ago
        Oh I don't know that freelancing is the best choice when one wants "lack of dread"... :))
  - danjac 6y ago
    It's like tech interviewing has become the modern equivalent of the old Chinese Imperial examination: keep your head down, don't rock the boat, study these arbitrary tests to rise in status. A far cry from the early days of HN when the culture was more "think different".
    - pavas 6y ago
      I would be wary of new teammates whose motto is "think different" when it comes to operating services at $B scale, because if they break something, someone else on the team will have to work all day and night to get things fixed and it won't be them. That does probably depend on whether you're doing greenfield work or not, but even then these costs are there but just not immediately visible.
      - danjac 6y ago
        Which is understandable, if you have services at $B scale. It's a bit like teams that adopt microservices or Kubernetes for their three-person startup: just because Amazon or Facebook do it doesn't mean you should.
  - nexus2045 6y ago
    The usual HN sentiment seems to be that take-home assignments are degrading, whiteboarding interviews are broken, which can be summarized as "I take a lot of pride in my craft, how dare you ask me undergrad trivia"; whereas the Blind sentiment is that all you need to do to get a 300K+ salary is to grind Leetcode and system design prep, which can be summarized as "I'll do anything to get money and that's the only thing that matters". I guess there's also cscareerquestions, which is more "I've applied to 500 jobs and heard back from none, help!".
    - Apocryphon 6y ago
      So you're saying we need more different programmer communities.
- arebop 6y ago
  Practice definitely helps. There's a lot luck involved because there are so many candidates, most of whom cannot come up with an approach to solve a problem (let alone to solve it well enough to serve billions of users well). So even most candidates who are qualified can't convincingly demonstrate that given the time constraints and pressure etc. It is hard to get into FANG for college new grads, it is even harder if you're trying to break into the tech industry from outside without the schedule flexibility and focused community support of a top tier university. It is possible but you need a combination of high ability, strong drive, and luck. At my FANG, we've made some interviewing changes over the past 5 years such that these days you'd spend at least 20% of your day interviewing talking about what you worked on and achieved and how you solved problems, whereas in the past it would be entirely at your interviewer's discretion and typically only be a few minutes of unscored small talk. FANG is an interesting life experience and it pays well, but plenty of people find it is not all it is cracked up to be. Just as in every job, a lot depends on the particular people you work with and whether you enjoy the particular problems you are solving. So maybe also consider whether you really need to go FANG (right now) or whether you could be just as happy at a place that's willing to take a more individual approach on hiring. That place could even be a stepping stone to reach FANG later on if that's what you want to do later.
- BossingAround 6y ago
  An honest question; do you need to work for FAANGs if this is the case? I think it's fairly accepted that you need X amount of hours per week to designate only to studying for your FAANG interview if you want to pass. This might be 10h a week for the next 3-6 months, or 15 for the next 10 months (or any other number of hours a week for any other number of months/weeks), as it wholly depends on you. You can either dedicate the time and practice, or decide you don't want to do it since your situation does not enable you to do so (e.g. due to kids, family, or simply lack of motivation). Of course, there are people who do not have to study. It seems you are not one of them. (Neither am I to be honest, this is just an observation, not an offensive remark). What else is there to do other than studying or not passing the interview in such a case?
- pavas 6y ago
  The interview process for FAANG companies is primarily focused on preventing false positives because of the damage that can be done by individuals when working at scale. Unless you have a really large sample size I wouldn't take any of that personally because for each interview, luck is involved. Furthermore, the process is partly about how good you are at being able to learn, and partly about how well you are able to keep yourself motivated to grind something out, or a combination of the two. Given enough time, FAANG interviews are 100% something you can study for, and furthermore, it is expected that you spend the time to study for them as that is also a signal of something in itself. On the job, you'll either have to be smart enough to pick stuff up quickly or spend the time to grind out the work (working overtime, etc). You also can't fuck things up too much because the fallout can be really expensive, so it helps to be able to do things right the first time. I think what is generally tested in the interview correlates with these requirements, and prevents false positives (and probably lots of false negatives too but you can just study more and try again at that point).
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    I would guess, with some evidence from experience, that all FAANG companies have sufficiently bureaucratic process, checks, and balances, to largely mitigate the risk of a disaster caused by a lone wolf screwing something up. Multiple cross-functional sign-offs whenever you deploy something to production, mandatory code reviews, gatekeeping access to push changes for junior folks, etc. This has got to be a mostly solved problem for companies of that size. I'm not denying they are primarily focused on preventing false positives, but not for the reason you mentioned.
    - pavas 6y ago
      Yeah there are definitely other reasons but this is one of the biggest in my opinion. There's always a tradeoff between security/bureaucracy and speed in delivery so as to remain competitive. This does matter even at large scale. I would agree that if one were purposefully trying to cause as much damage as possible, that impact would be contained by these processes. But one can still make mistakes or be a drain on the team's energy and focus which increases the chance of mistakes team-wide. At scale, even minor mistakes are costly, not just in terms of direct impact but in terms of the opportunity-cost of developer effort that could be better spent elsewhere. Of course, my direct knowledge has sample size of n=1 here so it likely does not apply uniformly across all large companies. I would love to hear contrasting opinions on this topic. I've spent a lot of time thinking about what would help developer teams increase their productivity w/ regards to adding value.
- MrMan 6y ago
  Start or find a company that takes a "value" approach to investing in humans. There are a lot of undervalued people out there, in North America many if not most people's potential is being wasted. SV / FAANG is a land of, in some ways, artificial scarcity. The reason jobs are hard to get is not just that the work is so demanding, it is not true. The rewards are high, and this is part of the reason that not everyone is allowed to partake. I am oversimplifying it, but the same forces that created the FAANGs can allow you to avoid them and companies like them, avoid SV. The world has become more evenly distributed in some ways, but HN and channels like it can make you think you have to pass through these certain gates.
aphextron 6y ago
I'll preempt the usual discussion on these posts with this: Everything in life is a game. You can choose to learn the rules, and play to win it, or you can call foul and take what's given to you easily. Either one is valid. But don't act entitled to the gold medal if you choose to prioritize other things over practice.
- dominotw 6y ago
  Agreed 100%. FB has the right to conduct interviews however they see fit.
- bidirectional 6y ago
  Yep. Quant finance has a very similar culture to FAANG companies when it comes to interviewing style. Yet practically every one in the field just realises that's how the game works, does some practice and gets on with it. No one likes going through this process, but once you realise that well-paying, prestigious jobs just require you to take a roughly standardised, undergrad-level test, it almost feels like cheating.
- blacktriangle 6y ago
  And in fairness to the FAANGs, it seems like we actually know the rules: review your fundamental CS algorithms and grind leetcode. Compare this to any other company who is looking for whatever the fuck culture fit means and how to get a job there is anybody's guess.
high_derivative 6y ago
I have mixed feelings about this. I despise white board and leet code. I hate it when we (at a FAANG) cannot hire some otherwise excellent candidate. One interesting thing though is that from a market perspective, it still ends up making sense for our org (ML research lab). There are simply so many applicants, that we can afford to pass on anyone. All the candidates hired tend to still be excellent on all other fronts AND they can do these quizzes. And it does result in some hires not being the most credentialed ones with the longest CVs but the ones who outperformed during the interview for whatever reasons. So..I can see it makes sense for the most prestigious orgs, but I still hate it, and I especially do not see why startups who are struggling to hire feel the need to copy this when they clearly do not have the same options. Another thing that really irritates me when people in hiring committees actually pretend passing them means something about candidates' innate skill. Like, I get it, these are the rules we made up, but do we have to pretend they are that meaningful?
- aduitsis 6y ago
  This. If you're paying good, practically everyone will come to interview for you, so your supply is inexhaustible. So you can afford false negatives.
treis 6y ago
Company that sells interview practice says interview practice is important... more at 11
posharma 6y ago
I said this yesterday and will say it again. We discuss interviewing a lot here. Despite all the proposals things don't really change. FA(A)NG style interviews are just that - whiteboarding solutions to N algorithmic problems in M minutes (or minor variants of this). Either we accept this and move on with solid preparation or modify our priorities such that we're fine with not wanting the money and/or the quality of work (debatable) offered by these companies. At the end of the day, it's a choice and it's still in our hands.
- trap_chateau 6y ago
  I'm not entirely sure I'm getting what you're conveying here. Are you just reminding everyone that change is slow to come, and to be pragmatic about these applications? (I agree with that.) Are you also claiming it's futile to attempt to change or push back against this interviewing process, at least through discussion about it? With enough push back, I do think it's possible that those in charge of hiring in the world might reconsider how valuable leetcode tests are to judging potential employees.
  - posharma 6y ago
    Change is slow to come and be pragmatic.
  - Kranar 6y ago
    These kinds of discussions are futile yes. It's been well over 10 years and the only change in this discussion is the introduction of racial and gender discrimination, whereas 10 years ago the focus was on age discrimination. I'd be happy to hear alternative approaches to conducting a technical interview, but no one presents any. There are 100 comments in this topic and hardly any discussion of what a good hiring process would look like.
  - tamrix 6y ago
    If you don't like the method of interviewing. Don't apply to join the company. Simple.
jdlyga 6y ago
I get contacted by a ton of recruiters, as I'm sure most of you do. But do I have the time to practice for programming interviews? No.
bidirectional 6y ago
Here's a serious question, does any job paying over 250k have an easier hiring process than FAANG? The thought of going through an investment banking, white-shoe law firm or medical residency pipeline seems utterly terrifying compared to 'show up in jeans and take this algorithms test which has near-infinite practice material available'.
- endisneigh 6y ago
  When you consider the risk involved, no.
- draw_down 6y ago
  Exactly. I don't like going through these interviews, nobody does, but there does seem a lack of perspective in how this issue gets discussed. You can really leave a lot of money on the table with this attitude of "oh well, I dodged a bullet, if the interview was hard then the job is probably bad and the whole company too."
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    "I cannot afford to waste my time making money." - Louis Agassiz I'm not quite there, but if I leave money on the table to avoid a place that treats people in an abusive way, I'm okay with that. I don't need the extra money that badly - it's too expensive.
    - josephg 6y ago
      I’m confused - are you saying you find the programming interview process abusive? In what way is it abusive?
      - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
        "We expect you to study for months, on your own time, unpaid, so that our interviewing process can throw questions at you that are unrelated to the actual job we're hiring you for. Because we can, and because we do it that way, and because we don't care about how it comes down on you." Yes, I find that abusive.
endisneigh 6y ago
I wonder what percentage of people at their current job would pass if they had to re-interview without preparation. In general, companies with more money than they know what to do with can offer increasingly larger wages to make people jump through arbitrary hoops. I know people get frustrated with this, but it's really the rational thing to do. When you consider the expected value, siphoning up 10 to 25% of your employers time to practice leetcode at work will benefit you more than doing most things at work.
- bluefirebrand 6y ago
  I can say with certainty that I would pass the interview if I had to do it again without prep. Mostly because when I was interviewed the company liked me enough to skip half the process, including their code challenge stuff.
  - endisneigh 6y ago
    Is this supposed to be a joke on how you're confident because you skipped half the process?
    - bluefirebrand 6y ago
      I'm joking that because I skipped half the process (which I can't take any credit for, it was an accidental mixup on their end not because I am that impressive) it was a very easy interview. Didn't have to do a code test or defend my code or anything like that.
tomatohs 6y ago
A big reason we use leetcode style challenges is because they can be automatically scored, while take-homes take a lot more to review. I'm building a developer screens sharing app that, among other things, automates non-whiteboard interviews. Typically we can review a 60 minute take-home in 10 minutes, without cloning the repo. http://paircast.io http://paircast.io If you're an engineering manager that wants to move away from the leetcode challenges, please get in touch with me. ian@haxor.sh Also see http://they.whiteboarded.me/ http://they.whiteboarded.me/
- dominotw 6y ago
  > Typically we can review a 60 minute take-home in 10 minutes So a candidate a invests 60 minutes of their time and a multi million dollar company invests 10 minutes. We should all boycott these asymmetrical "take home" tests.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    This is an almost inextricably linked effect of allowing anyone who thinks (or wishes) they have the skills to compete for a $250K/yr job. If you put a grand prize out there, lots of people are motivated to go after it, including the ultra-long shots. On of my favorite interviews was for Acclaim in the mid-90s. Take home (download a zip file with a skeleton app, read the code, write the strategy element that’s stubbed out). I don’t recall how much time they allowed but it was at least 24 hours. Mine was “navigate an airplane from left of screen to right of screen against a fixed set of blocked squares[mountains]” Probably spent a little over an hour on it, enjoyed doing it, and remember it 25 years later. They can score such a test (at least initially) totally mechanically, weeding out the “couldn’t get anything to work” subset of the population in zero minutes of engineer time per new application. It tests something quite close to what you’d do as a game programmer for them. You can do it at home, at your own pace, in your normal environment. If you pass, then you might have to get an airplane and travel to interview, which is a multi-day disruption to your life. I’m on the employer side now; I see the value in asymmetric tests at the initial filtering stage for entry-level, because I don’t see any workable alternatives that don’t introduce other, likely worse, forms of credential-checking. I’m sure we miss some good candidates this way; false negatives are bad but less costly than false positives.
tharne 6y ago
These posts are getting tiresome. There's way too much focus on FAANGs and SV in general. Most of us work in hum-drum industries for companies no one's heard of, in towns no one's heard of, and have reasonable hours, good enough pay, and have never logged onto leetcode for anything other than to briefly see what all the fuss is about. I will guarantee that at least half the developers I work with have never logged onto leetcode and many have not even heard of it. They're too busy working, raising kids, and coaching little league to be wringing their hands about the latest nonsense in SV.
- Swizec 6y ago
  As a lucratively employed Silicon Valley engineer, I’ve never seen leetcode. Not even sure what it looks like or how it works. And that’s with being an immigrant from eastern-ish europe. But it sure is fun to flog on it as a meme. I doubt more than 30% of engineers working in SV startups ever actually used leetcode. And I certainly wouldn’t hire anyone above absolute junior based on their leeting skillz.
  - novok 6y ago
    Have you worked at a publicly traded SV company that pays comparable to MSFT, Amazon, FB, Google or Apple with good stock growth? Nowadays there are startups that don't do algo interviews, so if you've been lucky, then you've never encountered that interview type. Leetcode is shorthand for algo interview prep, there are many alternatives to leetcode itself.
    - bradlys 6y ago
      No, he's only worked at Yup in SV AFAICT. Maybe he's making $400K+/yr there but I'm somewhat skeptical. It could be his perspective on what is lucrative is very different having come from eastern europe and maybe comparing to there rather than to FAANG TC or what a soon-to-IPO company TC would be. (e.g. Instacart) I've interviewed with 100+ companies in the bay. His experience is not representative of the industry at all, IMO... 90% of companies use leetcode here. Again, I need to emphasize, I've interviewed with way more companies than most people and most of my peers interview with dozens as well and they all have to grind leetcode.
SavageBeast 6y ago
When there is a cottage industry focused on training people to pass your interview then you have a problem. I think Allen Iverson said it well: "We're talking about practice, man. [laughter from the media crowd] We're talking about practice. We're talking about practice. We ain't talking about the game. [more laughter] We're talking about practice, man." Fun fact: I had a recruiter reach out about interviewing at a non-FAANG company that is private. Being private there are no RSUs on offer but instead some kind of Company Funny Bucks doled out based on "performance" etc. Whatever, all well and good so far. Competitive salary but TC wont be anywhere in the same solar system as some of the FAANG total comps Im aware of for a position of similar level. Then the kicker comes - I get an email about "interview preparation" and I kid you not it was every bit as intensive as AMZN. Do they really expect me to put up with this hazing for the same money I can go make without it? For Company Funny Bucks (told to expect 10-15% of my salary at best with a whole lot of qualifying "if's" in there indicating this was mostly fiction). Needless to say I performed a quick analysis of the value of my time and opted to politely pass on the interview.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > When there is a cottage industry focused on training people to pass your interview then you have a problem. Doctors have board exams. Lawyers have bar exams. Financial professionals have their own set of exams. Electrical and mechanical engineers have professional engineer exams. The difference is that they're standardized, so the prep industry caters to passing those exams more so than passing the interviews. Software engineering is far from standardized because the subject matter is far too varied, so instead companies handle their own type of exams customized to their needs. There is also a cottage industry around interview prep for lawyers, doctors, and other professions. It's just not well known because it's extremely expensive relative to spending a couple hundred bucks (if that) on Leetcode. It often takes the form of expensive 1:1 coaching that starts in the hundreds of dollars and can easily enter five figures. Students from wealthy families frequently have private coaches for this.
  - peruvian 6y ago
    Yep. I hate interviews as much as everyone else but I'll take grinding Leetcode or Interview Cake for a month or two over having to deal with law school and the bar, for example.
gkoberger 6y ago
This blog post is selling an agenda (as is what i'm about to say :) ), and that agenda is that you should pay Interviewing.io to help you get through interviews. I think the bigger problem is that technical interviews are broken. I ask everyone to bring their own project to work on, since I hate the traditional tech interview process so much. And it goes incredibly well. It could be adding a feature to a side project, starting something new, or contributing to open source. (Or, we have some stock ideas if people need inspiration.) Rather than asking them to solve a problem they had never heard of before or use a codebase they're not familiar with, I get so much more out of watching them work in their own environment. I can ask them questions about why they're doing something, and they tend to have much more detailed answers because they've been thinking about it for weeks. They're solving a problem they care about in a codebase they know, which mimics how working with them will be a few months in. We could all just buy into this notion that tech interviews suck but we have to deal with them. And then, like SAT Prep classes, there's a whole industry around how to pass them. Or, we can spend more time talking about how there's definitely a better way.
- josephg 6y ago
  I know this is controversial around here, but I think technical interviews are a fine tool when done well. I interviewed for triplebyte for a year (interviewing about 400 candidates). The triplebyte interview has a series of different parts assessing different skills (live coding, knowledge, debugging, etc). There’s plenty of room for candidates to be weak in some sections of the test but still pass with flying colours. We had a hypothesis internally that some parts of the interview were redundant. The interview was certainly tweaked over time, but the data science team found otherwise. All scores are positively correlated. And removing any major part of our interview would have made the interview worse. Given all my experience with it, I believe the triplebyte interview to be a fair assessment of candidates, and respectful to everyone involved. (Though I’d be very interested to know how much 5+ practice interviews would move the needle on scores, as this article claims.) The hardest part of my job was nervous candidates. Stress is designed to help us survive running away from a lion. When we get stressed, we shut down our ability for creative thought and our memory gets weaker - which is literally the opposite of what you want in a job interview. Most of my energy as an interviewer went into helping candidates stay calm throughout the process, and I wasn’t always successful. I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with whiteboard interviews. You’re right - we could probably rearrange the professional world to avoid all stressful assessments but I tend to agree with this article. Just do a bunch of them and you’ll get used to them. Being interviewed is just talking for an hour or two with someone smart about something you care about. Usually you get to talk to someone you would have no access to in your daily life. If you can get past your terror of being judged, they can be a lot of fun.
mLuby 6y ago
Forget for a minute who won't get through the "broken tech interviews" and instead consider the types of bad hires that could get through these filters: - Take-home LeetCode: poor communication skills, bad at workflows, unpleasant personality, poor architecture, write-only, cheaters. - Live LeetCode: same as take-home LeetCode but at least they have communication skills and aren't cheating so you know they can write efficient functions. - Resume: all the issues with take-home LeetCode. - Culture fit/behavioral: all the issues of take-home LeetCode, but at least they're good at communication and have a good personality. - Take-home project: same as take-home Leetcode but instead of efficient functions you know they can at least architect and implement a small, standard application (if they didn't cheat). - Show me your side project: Same as take-home project, plus they might work extremely slowly, and might only be passionate about that one side project, but you know they have communication skills. - Architecture whiteboarding: can't actually code to implement the systems they're drawing, but you know they have communication skills. So it's no surprise that companies wanting to reduce the risk of a costly bad hire (a bad fit, not necessarily a bad person) evaluate the candidate from different angles to check for red flags. I sympathize with the frustration of those who present false negatives and are filtered out despite actually being a good fit, for example working parents who can't spend a whole weekend polishing a take-home project.
- faeyanpiraat 6y ago
  It is very hard to parse your comment, a bit better formatting may help I guess?
  - mLuby 6y ago
    Better now? HN's need for extra newlines between bullets always gets me.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  with take-home there's also the fact that the great candidates will probably have an offer before they even get to start working on your take-home, unless you are Google/SpaceX or pays extremely well. Students sort companies they are interested in in descending order so your take-home will get done whenever they have some time available.
908B64B197 6y ago
> I won’t name any specific companies here, but tech giants (many with good intentions and with marching orders to boost their diversity numbers) often do a considerable amount of outreach and pre-interview engagement with candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. This outreach is usually an info session where one engineer speaks to a virtual room of candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. The engineer tells them what to expect in technical interviews, encourages them to learn how to articulate their thought process out loud while solving a problem, and recommends resources like Cracking the Coding Interview. Some companies even go so far as to offer their underrepresented candidates a mock interview or two. [...] Unfortunately, for candidates who are unfamiliar with the process, neither of these interventions is nearly enough. At some point how much hand-holding is enough? They pretty much told candidates where to get sample problems, gave a session showing what the interview is like, did one mock interview... Pretty much all what prospective applicants have to do is pair up and do a few more practice rounds. How is it the evil tech company's fault? They gave them the toolbox with all the tools in it and instruction on what to do. And the material to practice building whatever they said they will test them on.
- claudiulodro 6y ago
  I haven't participated in too many FAANG interviews and even with the recruiter handholding it's still super confusing if you're not familiar with the scene: What difficulty of questions will be asked? Easy? Hard? Do people actually want to "hear the thinking process" or do they just want an optimum answer regurgitated quickly? Do I need to practice "regular" interview questions also ("What's your greatest weakness?")? All of this with a life-changing, potential millionaire amount of money at stake, which isn't great for the nerves.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    > What difficulty of questions will be asked? Easy? Hard? Do people actually want to "hear the thinking process" or do they just want an optimum answer regurgitated quickly? Do I need to practice "regular" interview questions also ("What's your greatest weakness?")? Isn't it what they talk about in the outreach session described above?
scott_codie 6y ago
Predicting future productivity is hard and there is no magic set of questions that will predict it. It seems tech companies worry too much about the questions they ask rather than interpreting the answers that they were given. The solution seems to be to not worry about it too much and just hire (and fire) liberally.
twp 6y ago
This is simultaneously so wrong and so right. So wrong because it equates passing the interview with being good at the job. These two things have almost nothing in common. So right because practicing jumping though artificial hoops is exactly what you need to do to succeed at a large corporate. This skill is orthogonal to contributing actual value.
s17n 6y ago
I went to a bootcamp (one of the more reputable ones at the the at least - they didn't charge the attendees) and it was basically 75% interview prep, 20% working on a project designed for the job search (highest possible ratio of buzzwords/effort) and 5% everything else. If bootcamps aren't doing a good job of interview prep I doubt it's for a lack of trying.
rabbits77 6y ago
When did working at one of these places start to be of any significant status? I question being concerned about a “gap” when the only outcome is a better chance for working at some advertising company.
- bradlys 6y ago
  When they started paying well above what startups pay. Ever since FAANG started paying senior engineers $250k+/yr and now closer to $350k+, it quickly became a go to place to work. The TC is unmatched by startups and other firms unless you’re on a rocketship or similar company as FAANG.
mihaitodor 6y ago
After numerous attempts at these software engineer interviews, I added the following disclaimer to my LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtodor/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtodor/ and cover letters: "I have a personal policy against any type of live coding or online coding tests during interviews and I don't enjoy or engage in any form of competitive programming. Otherwise, I am happy to work offline on coding assignments with reasonable goals and deadlines and to have in-depth technical discussions about software architecture and design as well as relevant technologies." I'm still perfectly able to find suitable jobs with good pay as a software engineer and being upfront about the above policy prevents a lot of frustration and wasted time on my side. Yes, I do have to invest a lot more effort into looking for a suitable job, but, then again, I'd very much rather spend my free time doing that than going again through one of these interviews. PS: I have 14 years of work experience, currently working as a senior engineer / tech lead on cloud infrastructure and this is my 8th job.
isoblvck 6y ago
the only difference between an ivy league graduate and a state school is rich parents.
spiderPig 6y ago
Very clever post encouraging companies to spend more on this trite style of interviewing perpetuated by Aline, Gayle and the leetcode gang. Who offers said mock interviews at $100 a pop? Well interviewing.io of course!
kodah 6y ago
I don't buy this explanation. I fall into the category the author is talking about but I'm not in an underrepresented group unless you consider enlisted war time veterans one. Some background so you understand context: I dropped out in 2009 because I lost the programming job I used to pay the bills. At the time I mostly worked on PHP web apps and did some microcontroller testing for a local business. I joined the military shortly after, served my time, and worked my way from desktop support to network engineering, to "DevOps" (in it's early stages), to being an SRE-SE, to a SWE again over the course of six years. I never did go back to school, I can go into the myriad of reasons that affect the statistics that the DOD and VA will happily show you on the way out the door but don't seem to post publicly, but I think that's for another post. I could not get a job programming again. Logically, no one wanted a programmer four years out of practice, but I quickly learned that big tech has a major shortage of Systems Engineers and an even much more major shortage of Systems Engineers that can write full applications as opposed to scripting. Large firms tend to focus on one skillset and that is mathematics. The reason for this isn't very illusive, they hire mostly people with mathematics degrees (CS and CE) and interview based on the skillset they know best. The problem is that the people who dominate this group know nothing to very little about systems. I have been on countless interview panels and often I find that people will pass abstract systems design but when you make them directly apply this theoretical knowledge to an OS they will fall flat on their faces. Ask them questions about network sizing and you'll get networks that are incredibly huge or don't make sense at all. The problem is that the reverse is true too, when you take a Systems Engineer who could walk you through kernel process scheduling, the order of operations in calling execve on a binary, etc they often struggle in algorithm application. They may pass your algorithm test if it is pretty plain to see what algorithm needs to be applied and it requires pretty straight forward implementation but if you tweak the process a bit, they fall flat on their faces. This doesn't disambiguate from Systems Engineers that can't code, I'm purposefully excluding these folks because we're talking about variants of programmers. I have spent years trying to get myself up to the level that college graduates have with algorithm recognition and application. I'll stop here and say if you find yourself in the same boat, frustrated and upset over interviews, I see you. Cracking the Coding Interview and Leetcode are okay for practice, but if you're struggling to identify less-common data structures and algorithms or how they relate to one another there are two books that helped me infinitely: Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein and Algorithm Design by Skiena. Python and Java are good for playing with most of these. It took me about two years to get up to par with college graduates. What people from bootcamps struggle with, in my experience, is the same thing that systems engineers who can code struggle with. Algorithm recognition, selection, and application skills are not on par with that of a newly minted mathematician. Do you want to solve this? Teach. I teach programmers about systems all the time, mainly because if programmers want to learn about systems there's a myriad of books like The Linux Programming Interface to Linux Kernel Development that are all very indicative of how nix systems and kernels work. These assume a pretty cushiony set of knowledge to begin with, so their foundational knowledge has to be increased first. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of material on the internet for this beyond shallow tutorials on Linux and Unix commands, some StackOverflow answers, etc that will inevitably guide a trainee in more wrong directions before they find the right one. If your career counts on this knowledge this is doubly sub-optimal. Go teach foundational math and logic at your company. Don't just buy courses for engineers or throw the UCSD Discrete course from Coursera at them; get up in front of some people, answer questions, and show them how to love math the way you do. Stop using mathematics as a gate and use it as an opportunity for investment. That's how you fix it.
flashgordon 6y ago
This article (whether we like the current practises or not) highlights the value of practice. What is interesting is the (anecdotal) trend of "reverse abuse"? I know several folks who routinely take time out of their schedule each month to go through one or two interviews with real companies just to not get rusty. This way when the faang time comes they are ready and don't have to block out 2-3 months leetcoding again. Clearly if you cannot beat them take advantage of them!

146 points by leeny 6y ago

I haven't cleared a single technical interview after applying to FAANG companies in last 5 years. I'm currently employed and I have been working for than 8 years. I'm good at what I do. I might not the greatest programmer but I can come up with a approach to solve a problem. My past experiences have been terrible, not a single person who interviewed me wanted to know what I worked on or what I have achieved or how I solved a given problem. Few introductory questions and jump into coding questions. Some of them are medium and few of them were hard. But at most I was able to find a way to solve(not completely code a solution). It seems lot easier when you are in college and are surround by students who are practicing coding interviews. You can talk, discuss and gain more experience. I don't know how I can do that, when I'm busy maintaining and coding for my current job. Its just so demotivating.

jeffbee 6y ago
This is pretty explicit in interview training at least at Google. Nobody cares how you solved some problem because inside the Google none of your experience applies. What are needed are people who can read and write code, who know algorithms and can discuss the complexity of them.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
The usual HackerNews advice here is something like find a way to commit a few hours a week to LeetCode.
- EVdotIO 6y ago
  This entire industry is just awful, and the antithesis of anything resembling the compassionate virtues they claim to espouse. I'm done with programming, and maybe that's what is supposed to happen, but it has left a very bitter taste in my mouth. If you have serious chops, go for it. Otherwise, give it a wide berth.
  - Ancalagon 6y ago
    To continue the normal HackerNews go-around on this topic: there are plenty of companies that don't interview like this, at least outside of Silicon Valley.
  - jrib 6y ago
    > I'm done with programming Curious: what did you switch to?
    - EVdotIO 6y ago
      I DJ. Not something I would recommend as a career choice. Pay isn't as good and I don't have benefits, but the lack of dread is nice.
      - danlugo92 6y ago
        Never thought of freelancing?
        BossingAround 6y ago
        Oh I don't know that freelancing is the best choice when one wants "lack of dread"... :))
- danjac 6y ago
  It's like tech interviewing has become the modern equivalent of the old Chinese Imperial examination: keep your head down, don't rock the boat, study these arbitrary tests to rise in status. A far cry from the early days of HN when the culture was more "think different".
  - pavas 6y ago
    I would be wary of new teammates whose motto is "think different" when it comes to operating services at $B scale, because if they break something, someone else on the team will have to work all day and night to get things fixed and it won't be them. That does probably depend on whether you're doing greenfield work or not, but even then these costs are there but just not immediately visible.
    - danjac 6y ago
      Which is understandable, if you have services at $B scale. It's a bit like teams that adopt microservices or Kubernetes for their three-person startup: just because Amazon or Facebook do it doesn't mean you should.
- nexus2045 6y ago
  The usual HN sentiment seems to be that take-home assignments are degrading, whiteboarding interviews are broken, which can be summarized as "I take a lot of pride in my craft, how dare you ask me undergrad trivia"; whereas the Blind sentiment is that all you need to do to get a 300K+ salary is to grind Leetcode and system design prep, which can be summarized as "I'll do anything to get money and that's the only thing that matters". I guess there's also cscareerquestions, which is more "I've applied to 500 jobs and heard back from none, help!".
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    So you're saying we need more different programmer communities.
arebop 6y ago
Practice definitely helps. There's a lot luck involved because there are so many candidates, most of whom cannot come up with an approach to solve a problem (let alone to solve it well enough to serve billions of users well). So even most candidates who are qualified can't convincingly demonstrate that given the time constraints and pressure etc. It is hard to get into FANG for college new grads, it is even harder if you're trying to break into the tech industry from outside without the schedule flexibility and focused community support of a top tier university. It is possible but you need a combination of high ability, strong drive, and luck. At my FANG, we've made some interviewing changes over the past 5 years such that these days you'd spend at least 20% of your day interviewing talking about what you worked on and achieved and how you solved problems, whereas in the past it would be entirely at your interviewer's discretion and typically only be a few minutes of unscored small talk. FANG is an interesting life experience and it pays well, but plenty of people find it is not all it is cracked up to be. Just as in every job, a lot depends on the particular people you work with and whether you enjoy the particular problems you are solving. So maybe also consider whether you really need to go FANG (right now) or whether you could be just as happy at a place that's willing to take a more individual approach on hiring. That place could even be a stepping stone to reach FANG later on if that's what you want to do later.
BossingAround 6y ago
An honest question; do you need to work for FAANGs if this is the case? I think it's fairly accepted that you need X amount of hours per week to designate only to studying for your FAANG interview if you want to pass. This might be 10h a week for the next 3-6 months, or 15 for the next 10 months (or any other number of hours a week for any other number of months/weeks), as it wholly depends on you. You can either dedicate the time and practice, or decide you don't want to do it since your situation does not enable you to do so (e.g. due to kids, family, or simply lack of motivation). Of course, there are people who do not have to study. It seems you are not one of them. (Neither am I to be honest, this is just an observation, not an offensive remark). What else is there to do other than studying or not passing the interview in such a case?
pavas 6y ago
The interview process for FAANG companies is primarily focused on preventing false positives because of the damage that can be done by individuals when working at scale. Unless you have a really large sample size I wouldn't take any of that personally because for each interview, luck is involved. Furthermore, the process is partly about how good you are at being able to learn, and partly about how well you are able to keep yourself motivated to grind something out, or a combination of the two. Given enough time, FAANG interviews are 100% something you can study for, and furthermore, it is expected that you spend the time to study for them as that is also a signal of something in itself. On the job, you'll either have to be smart enough to pick stuff up quickly or spend the time to grind out the work (working overtime, etc). You also can't fuck things up too much because the fallout can be really expensive, so it helps to be able to do things right the first time. I think what is generally tested in the interview correlates with these requirements, and prevents false positives (and probably lots of false negatives too but you can just study more and try again at that point).
- ryandrake 6y ago
  I would guess, with some evidence from experience, that all FAANG companies have sufficiently bureaucratic process, checks, and balances, to largely mitigate the risk of a disaster caused by a lone wolf screwing something up. Multiple cross-functional sign-offs whenever you deploy something to production, mandatory code reviews, gatekeeping access to push changes for junior folks, etc. This has got to be a mostly solved problem for companies of that size. I'm not denying they are primarily focused on preventing false positives, but not for the reason you mentioned.
  - pavas 6y ago
    Yeah there are definitely other reasons but this is one of the biggest in my opinion. There's always a tradeoff between security/bureaucracy and speed in delivery so as to remain competitive. This does matter even at large scale. I would agree that if one were purposefully trying to cause as much damage as possible, that impact would be contained by these processes. But one can still make mistakes or be a drain on the team's energy and focus which increases the chance of mistakes team-wide. At scale, even minor mistakes are costly, not just in terms of direct impact but in terms of the opportunity-cost of developer effort that could be better spent elsewhere. Of course, my direct knowledge has sample size of n=1 here so it likely does not apply uniformly across all large companies. I would love to hear contrasting opinions on this topic. I've spent a lot of time thinking about what would help developer teams increase their productivity w/ regards to adding value.
MrMan 6y ago
Start or find a company that takes a "value" approach to investing in humans. There are a lot of undervalued people out there, in North America many if not most people's potential is being wasted. SV / FAANG is a land of, in some ways, artificial scarcity. The reason jobs are hard to get is not just that the work is so demanding, it is not true. The rewards are high, and this is part of the reason that not everyone is allowed to partake. I am oversimplifying it, but the same forces that created the FAANGs can allow you to avoid them and companies like them, avoid SV. The world has become more evenly distributed in some ways, but HN and channels like it can make you think you have to pass through these certain gates.

aphextron 6y ago

I'll preempt the usual discussion on these posts with this: Everything in life is a game. You can choose to learn the rules, and play to win it, or you can call foul and take what's given to you easily. Either one is valid. But don't act entitled to the gold medal if you choose to prioritize other things over practice.

dominotw 6y ago
Agreed 100%. FB has the right to conduct interviews however they see fit.
bidirectional 6y ago
Yep. Quant finance has a very similar culture to FAANG companies when it comes to interviewing style. Yet practically every one in the field just realises that's how the game works, does some practice and gets on with it. No one likes going through this process, but once you realise that well-paying, prestigious jobs just require you to take a roughly standardised, undergrad-level test, it almost feels like cheating.
blacktriangle 6y ago
And in fairness to the FAANGs, it seems like we actually know the rules: review your fundamental CS algorithms and grind leetcode. Compare this to any other company who is looking for whatever the fuck culture fit means and how to get a job there is anybody's guess.

high_derivative 6y ago

I have mixed feelings about this. I despise white board and leet code. I hate it when we (at a FAANG) cannot hire some otherwise excellent candidate. One interesting thing though is that from a market perspective, it still ends up making sense for our org (ML research lab). There are simply so many applicants, that we can afford to pass on anyone. All the candidates hired tend to still be excellent on all other fronts AND they can do these quizzes. And it does result in some hires not being the most credentialed ones with the longest CVs but the ones who outperformed during the interview for whatever reasons. So..I can see it makes sense for the most prestigious orgs, but I still hate it, and I especially do not see why startups who are struggling to hire feel the need to copy this when they clearly do not have the same options. Another thing that really irritates me when people in hiring committees actually pretend passing them means something about candidates' innate skill. Like, I get it, these are the rules we made up, but do we have to pretend they are that meaningful?

aduitsis 6y ago
This. If you're paying good, practically everyone will come to interview for you, so your supply is inexhaustible. So you can afford false negatives.

treis 6y ago

Company that sells interview practice says interview practice is important... more at 11

posharma 6y ago

I said this yesterday and will say it again. We discuss interviewing a lot here. Despite all the proposals things don't really change. FA(A)NG style interviews are just that - whiteboarding solutions to N algorithmic problems in M minutes (or minor variants of this). Either we accept this and move on with solid preparation or modify our priorities such that we're fine with not wanting the money and/or the quality of work (debatable) offered by these companies. At the end of the day, it's a choice and it's still in our hands.

trap_chateau 6y ago
I'm not entirely sure I'm getting what you're conveying here. Are you just reminding everyone that change is slow to come, and to be pragmatic about these applications? (I agree with that.) Are you also claiming it's futile to attempt to change or push back against this interviewing process, at least through discussion about it? With enough push back, I do think it's possible that those in charge of hiring in the world might reconsider how valuable leetcode tests are to judging potential employees.
- posharma 6y ago
  Change is slow to come and be pragmatic.
- Kranar 6y ago
  These kinds of discussions are futile yes. It's been well over 10 years and the only change in this discussion is the introduction of racial and gender discrimination, whereas 10 years ago the focus was on age discrimination. I'd be happy to hear alternative approaches to conducting a technical interview, but no one presents any. There are 100 comments in this topic and hardly any discussion of what a good hiring process would look like.
- tamrix 6y ago
  If you don't like the method of interviewing. Don't apply to join the company. Simple.

jdlyga 6y ago

I get contacted by a ton of recruiters, as I'm sure most of you do. But do I have the time to practice for programming interviews? No.

bidirectional 6y ago

Here's a serious question, does any job paying over 250k have an easier hiring process than FAANG? The thought of going through an investment banking, white-shoe law firm or medical residency pipeline seems utterly terrifying compared to 'show up in jeans and take this algorithms test which has near-infinite practice material available'.

endisneigh 6y ago
When you consider the risk involved, no.
draw_down 6y ago
Exactly. I don't like going through these interviews, nobody does, but there does seem a lack of perspective in how this issue gets discussed. You can really leave a lot of money on the table with this attitude of "oh well, I dodged a bullet, if the interview was hard then the job is probably bad and the whole company too."
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  "I cannot afford to waste my time making money." - Louis Agassiz I'm not quite there, but if I leave money on the table to avoid a place that treats people in an abusive way, I'm okay with that. I don't need the extra money that badly - it's too expensive.
  - josephg 6y ago
    I’m confused - are you saying you find the programming interview process abusive? In what way is it abusive?
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      "We expect you to study for months, on your own time, unpaid, so that our interviewing process can throw questions at you that are unrelated to the actual job we're hiring you for. Because we can, and because we do it that way, and because we don't care about how it comes down on you." Yes, I find that abusive.

endisneigh 6y ago

I wonder what percentage of people at their current job would pass if they had to re-interview without preparation. In general, companies with more money than they know what to do with can offer increasingly larger wages to make people jump through arbitrary hoops. I know people get frustrated with this, but it's really the rational thing to do. When you consider the expected value, siphoning up 10 to 25% of your employers time to practice leetcode at work will benefit you more than doing most things at work.

bluefirebrand 6y ago
I can say with certainty that I would pass the interview if I had to do it again without prep. Mostly because when I was interviewed the company liked me enough to skip half the process, including their code challenge stuff.
- endisneigh 6y ago
  Is this supposed to be a joke on how you're confident because you skipped half the process?
  - bluefirebrand 6y ago
    I'm joking that because I skipped half the process (which I can't take any credit for, it was an accidental mixup on their end not because I am that impressive) it was a very easy interview. Didn't have to do a code test or defend my code or anything like that.

tomatohs 6y ago

A big reason we use leetcode style challenges is because they can be automatically scored, while take-homes take a lot more to review. I'm building a developer screens sharing app that, among other things, automates non-whiteboard interviews. Typically we can review a 60 minute take-home in 10 minutes, without cloning the repo. http://paircast.io http://paircast.io If you're an engineering manager that wants to move away from the leetcode challenges, please get in touch with me. ian@haxor.sh Also see http://they.whiteboarded.me/ http://they.whiteboarded.me/

dominotw 6y ago
> Typically we can review a 60 minute take-home in 10 minutes So a candidate a invests 60 minutes of their time and a multi million dollar company invests 10 minutes. We should all boycott these asymmetrical "take home" tests.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  This is an almost inextricably linked effect of allowing anyone who thinks (or wishes) they have the skills to compete for a $250K/yr job. If you put a grand prize out there, lots of people are motivated to go after it, including the ultra-long shots. On of my favorite interviews was for Acclaim in the mid-90s. Take home (download a zip file with a skeleton app, read the code, write the strategy element that’s stubbed out). I don’t recall how much time they allowed but it was at least 24 hours. Mine was “navigate an airplane from left of screen to right of screen against a fixed set of blocked squares[mountains]” Probably spent a little over an hour on it, enjoyed doing it, and remember it 25 years later. They can score such a test (at least initially) totally mechanically, weeding out the “couldn’t get anything to work” subset of the population in zero minutes of engineer time per new application. It tests something quite close to what you’d do as a game programmer for them. You can do it at home, at your own pace, in your normal environment. If you pass, then you might have to get an airplane and travel to interview, which is a multi-day disruption to your life. I’m on the employer side now; I see the value in asymmetric tests at the initial filtering stage for entry-level, because I don’t see any workable alternatives that don’t introduce other, likely worse, forms of credential-checking. I’m sure we miss some good candidates this way; false negatives are bad but less costly than false positives.

tharne 6y ago

These posts are getting tiresome. There's way too much focus on FAANGs and SV in general. Most of us work in hum-drum industries for companies no one's heard of, in towns no one's heard of, and have reasonable hours, good enough pay, and have never logged onto leetcode for anything other than to briefly see what all the fuss is about. I will guarantee that at least half the developers I work with have never logged onto leetcode and many have not even heard of it. They're too busy working, raising kids, and coaching little league to be wringing their hands about the latest nonsense in SV.

Swizec 6y ago
As a lucratively employed Silicon Valley engineer, I’ve never seen leetcode. Not even sure what it looks like or how it works. And that’s with being an immigrant from eastern-ish europe. But it sure is fun to flog on it as a meme. I doubt more than 30% of engineers working in SV startups ever actually used leetcode. And I certainly wouldn’t hire anyone above absolute junior based on their leeting skillz.
- novok 6y ago
  Have you worked at a publicly traded SV company that pays comparable to MSFT, Amazon, FB, Google or Apple with good stock growth? Nowadays there are startups that don't do algo interviews, so if you've been lucky, then you've never encountered that interview type. Leetcode is shorthand for algo interview prep, there are many alternatives to leetcode itself.
  - bradlys 6y ago
    No, he's only worked at Yup in SV AFAICT. Maybe he's making $400K+/yr there but I'm somewhat skeptical. It could be his perspective on what is lucrative is very different having come from eastern europe and maybe comparing to there rather than to FAANG TC or what a soon-to-IPO company TC would be. (e.g. Instacart) I've interviewed with 100+ companies in the bay. His experience is not representative of the industry at all, IMO... 90% of companies use leetcode here. Again, I need to emphasize, I've interviewed with way more companies than most people and most of my peers interview with dozens as well and they all have to grind leetcode.

SavageBeast 6y ago

When there is a cottage industry focused on training people to pass your interview then you have a problem. I think Allen Iverson said it well: "We're talking about practice, man. [laughter from the media crowd] We're talking about practice. We're talking about practice. We ain't talking about the game. [more laughter] We're talking about practice, man." Fun fact: I had a recruiter reach out about interviewing at a non-FAANG company that is private. Being private there are no RSUs on offer but instead some kind of Company Funny Bucks doled out based on "performance" etc. Whatever, all well and good so far. Competitive salary but TC wont be anywhere in the same solar system as some of the FAANG total comps Im aware of for a position of similar level. Then the kicker comes - I get an email about "interview preparation" and I kid you not it was every bit as intensive as AMZN. Do they really expect me to put up with this hazing for the same money I can go make without it? For Company Funny Bucks (told to expect 10-15% of my salary at best with a whole lot of qualifying "if's" in there indicating this was mostly fiction). Needless to say I performed a quick analysis of the value of my time and opted to politely pass on the interview.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> When there is a cottage industry focused on training people to pass your interview then you have a problem. Doctors have board exams. Lawyers have bar exams. Financial professionals have their own set of exams. Electrical and mechanical engineers have professional engineer exams. The difference is that they're standardized, so the prep industry caters to passing those exams more so than passing the interviews. Software engineering is far from standardized because the subject matter is far too varied, so instead companies handle their own type of exams customized to their needs. There is also a cottage industry around interview prep for lawyers, doctors, and other professions. It's just not well known because it's extremely expensive relative to spending a couple hundred bucks (if that) on Leetcode. It often takes the form of expensive 1:1 coaching that starts in the hundreds of dollars and can easily enter five figures. Students from wealthy families frequently have private coaches for this.
- peruvian 6y ago
  Yep. I hate interviews as much as everyone else but I'll take grinding Leetcode or Interview Cake for a month or two over having to deal with law school and the bar, for example.

gkoberger 6y ago

This blog post is selling an agenda (as is what i'm about to say :) ), and that agenda is that you should pay Interviewing.io to help you get through interviews. I think the bigger problem is that technical interviews are broken. I ask everyone to bring their own project to work on, since I hate the traditional tech interview process so much. And it goes incredibly well. It could be adding a feature to a side project, starting something new, or contributing to open source. (Or, we have some stock ideas if people need inspiration.) Rather than asking them to solve a problem they had never heard of before or use a codebase they're not familiar with, I get so much more out of watching them work in their own environment. I can ask them questions about why they're doing something, and they tend to have much more detailed answers because they've been thinking about it for weeks. They're solving a problem they care about in a codebase they know, which mimics how working with them will be a few months in. We could all just buy into this notion that tech interviews suck but we have to deal with them. And then, like SAT Prep classes, there's a whole industry around how to pass them. Or, we can spend more time talking about how there's definitely a better way.

josephg 6y ago
I know this is controversial around here, but I think technical interviews are a fine tool when done well. I interviewed for triplebyte for a year (interviewing about 400 candidates). The triplebyte interview has a series of different parts assessing different skills (live coding, knowledge, debugging, etc). There’s plenty of room for candidates to be weak in some sections of the test but still pass with flying colours. We had a hypothesis internally that some parts of the interview were redundant. The interview was certainly tweaked over time, but the data science team found otherwise. All scores are positively correlated. And removing any major part of our interview would have made the interview worse. Given all my experience with it, I believe the triplebyte interview to be a fair assessment of candidates, and respectful to everyone involved. (Though I’d be very interested to know how much 5+ practice interviews would move the needle on scores, as this article claims.) The hardest part of my job was nervous candidates. Stress is designed to help us survive running away from a lion. When we get stressed, we shut down our ability for creative thought and our memory gets weaker - which is literally the opposite of what you want in a job interview. Most of my energy as an interviewer went into helping candidates stay calm throughout the process, and I wasn’t always successful. I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with whiteboard interviews. You’re right - we could probably rearrange the professional world to avoid all stressful assessments but I tend to agree with this article. Just do a bunch of them and you’ll get used to them. Being interviewed is just talking for an hour or two with someone smart about something you care about. Usually you get to talk to someone you would have no access to in your daily life. If you can get past your terror of being judged, they can be a lot of fun.

mLuby 6y ago

Forget for a minute who won't get through the "broken tech interviews" and instead consider the types of bad hires that could get through these filters: - Take-home LeetCode: poor communication skills, bad at workflows, unpleasant personality, poor architecture, write-only, cheaters. - Live LeetCode: same as take-home LeetCode but at least they have communication skills and aren't cheating so you know they can write efficient functions. - Resume: all the issues with take-home LeetCode. - Culture fit/behavioral: all the issues of take-home LeetCode, but at least they're good at communication and have a good personality. - Take-home project: same as take-home Leetcode but instead of efficient functions you know they can at least architect and implement a small, standard application (if they didn't cheat). - Show me your side project: Same as take-home project, plus they might work extremely slowly, and might only be passionate about that one side project, but you know they have communication skills. - Architecture whiteboarding: can't actually code to implement the systems they're drawing, but you know they have communication skills. So it's no surprise that companies wanting to reduce the risk of a costly bad hire (a bad fit, not necessarily a bad person) evaluate the candidate from different angles to check for red flags. I sympathize with the frustration of those who present false negatives and are filtered out despite actually being a good fit, for example working parents who can't spend a whole weekend polishing a take-home project.

faeyanpiraat 6y ago
It is very hard to parse your comment, a bit better formatting may help I guess?
- mLuby 6y ago
  Better now? HN's need for extra newlines between bullets always gets me.
908B64B197 6y ago
with take-home there's also the fact that the great candidates will probably have an offer before they even get to start working on your take-home, unless you are Google/SpaceX or pays extremely well. Students sort companies they are interested in in descending order so your take-home will get done whenever they have some time available.

908B64B197 6y ago

> I won’t name any specific companies here, but tech giants (many with good intentions and with marching orders to boost their diversity numbers) often do a considerable amount of outreach and pre-interview engagement with candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. This outreach is usually an info session where one engineer speaks to a virtual room of candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. The engineer tells them what to expect in technical interviews, encourages them to learn how to articulate their thought process out loud while solving a problem, and recommends resources like Cracking the Coding Interview. Some companies even go so far as to offer their underrepresented candidates a mock interview or two. [...] Unfortunately, for candidates who are unfamiliar with the process, neither of these interventions is nearly enough. At some point how much hand-holding is enough? They pretty much told candidates where to get sample problems, gave a session showing what the interview is like, did one mock interview... Pretty much all what prospective applicants have to do is pair up and do a few more practice rounds. How is it the evil tech company's fault? They gave them the toolbox with all the tools in it and instruction on what to do. And the material to practice building whatever they said they will test them on.

claudiulodro 6y ago
I haven't participated in too many FAANG interviews and even with the recruiter handholding it's still super confusing if you're not familiar with the scene: What difficulty of questions will be asked? Easy? Hard? Do people actually want to "hear the thinking process" or do they just want an optimum answer regurgitated quickly? Do I need to practice "regular" interview questions also ("What's your greatest weakness?")? All of this with a life-changing, potential millionaire amount of money at stake, which isn't great for the nerves.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > What difficulty of questions will be asked? Easy? Hard? Do people actually want to "hear the thinking process" or do they just want an optimum answer regurgitated quickly? Do I need to practice "regular" interview questions also ("What's your greatest weakness?")? Isn't it what they talk about in the outreach session described above?

scott_codie 6y ago

Predicting future productivity is hard and there is no magic set of questions that will predict it. It seems tech companies worry too much about the questions they ask rather than interpreting the answers that they were given. The solution seems to be to not worry about it too much and just hire (and fire) liberally.

twp 6y ago

This is simultaneously so wrong and so right. So wrong because it equates passing the interview with being good at the job. These two things have almost nothing in common. So right because practicing jumping though artificial hoops is exactly what you need to do to succeed at a large corporate. This skill is orthogonal to contributing actual value.

s17n 6y ago

I went to a bootcamp (one of the more reputable ones at the the at least - they didn't charge the attendees) and it was basically 75% interview prep, 20% working on a project designed for the job search (highest possible ratio of buzzwords/effort) and 5% everything else. If bootcamps aren't doing a good job of interview prep I doubt it's for a lack of trying.

rabbits77 6y ago

When did working at one of these places start to be of any significant status? I question being concerned about a “gap” when the only outcome is a better chance for working at some advertising company.

bradlys 6y ago
When they started paying well above what startups pay. Ever since FAANG started paying senior engineers $250k+/yr and now closer to $350k+, it quickly became a go to place to work. The TC is unmatched by startups and other firms unless you’re on a rocketship or similar company as FAANG.

mihaitodor 6y ago

After numerous attempts at these software engineer interviews, I added the following disclaimer to my LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtodor/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtodor/ and cover letters: "I have a personal policy against any type of live coding or online coding tests during interviews and I don't enjoy or engage in any form of competitive programming. Otherwise, I am happy to work offline on coding assignments with reasonable goals and deadlines and to have in-depth technical discussions about software architecture and design as well as relevant technologies." I'm still perfectly able to find suitable jobs with good pay as a software engineer and being upfront about the above policy prevents a lot of frustration and wasted time on my side. Yes, I do have to invest a lot more effort into looking for a suitable job, but, then again, I'd very much rather spend my free time doing that than going again through one of these interviews. PS: I have 14 years of work experience, currently working as a senior engineer / tech lead on cloud infrastructure and this is my 8th job.

isoblvck 6y ago

the only difference between an ivy league graduate and a state school is rich parents.

spiderPig 6y ago

Very clever post encouraging companies to spend more on this trite style of interviewing perpetuated by Aline, Gayle and the leetcode gang. Who offers said mock interviews at $100 a pop? Well interviewing.io of course!

kodah 6y ago

I don't buy this explanation. I fall into the category the author is talking about but I'm not in an underrepresented group unless you consider enlisted war time veterans one. Some background so you understand context: I dropped out in 2009 because I lost the programming job I used to pay the bills. At the time I mostly worked on PHP web apps and did some microcontroller testing for a local business. I joined the military shortly after, served my time, and worked my way from desktop support to network engineering, to "DevOps" (in it's early stages), to being an SRE-SE, to a SWE again over the course of six years. I never did go back to school, I can go into the myriad of reasons that affect the statistics that the DOD and VA will happily show you on the way out the door but don't seem to post publicly, but I think that's for another post. I could not get a job programming again. Logically, no one wanted a programmer four years out of practice, but I quickly learned that big tech has a major shortage of Systems Engineers and an even much more major shortage of Systems Engineers that can write full applications as opposed to scripting. Large firms tend to focus on one skillset and that is mathematics. The reason for this isn't very illusive, they hire mostly people with mathematics degrees (CS and CE) and interview based on the skillset they know best. The problem is that the people who dominate this group know nothing to very little about systems. I have been on countless interview panels and often I find that people will pass abstract systems design but when you make them directly apply this theoretical knowledge to an OS they will fall flat on their faces. Ask them questions about network sizing and you'll get networks that are incredibly huge or don't make sense at all. The problem is that the reverse is true too, when you take a Systems Engineer who could walk you through kernel process scheduling, the order of operations in calling execve on a binary, etc they often struggle in algorithm application. They may pass your algorithm test if it is pretty plain to see what algorithm needs to be applied and it requires pretty straight forward implementation but if you tweak the process a bit, they fall flat on their faces. This doesn't disambiguate from Systems Engineers that can't code, I'm purposefully excluding these folks because we're talking about variants of programmers. I have spent years trying to get myself up to the level that college graduates have with algorithm recognition and application. I'll stop here and say if you find yourself in the same boat, frustrated and upset over interviews, I see you. Cracking the Coding Interview and Leetcode are okay for practice, but if you're struggling to identify less-common data structures and algorithms or how they relate to one another there are two books that helped me infinitely: Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein and Algorithm Design by Skiena. Python and Java are good for playing with most of these. It took me about two years to get up to par with college graduates. What people from bootcamps struggle with, in my experience, is the same thing that systems engineers who can code struggle with. Algorithm recognition, selection, and application skills are not on par with that of a newly minted mathematician. Do you want to solve this? Teach. I teach programmers about systems all the time, mainly because if programmers want to learn about systems there's a myriad of books like The Linux Programming Interface to Linux Kernel Development that are all very indicative of how nix systems and kernels work. These assume a pretty cushiony set of knowledge to begin with, so their foundational knowledge has to be increased first. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of material on the internet for this beyond shallow tutorials on Linux and Unix commands, some StackOverflow answers, etc that will inevitably guide a trainee in more wrong directions before they find the right one. If your career counts on this knowledge this is doubly sub-optimal. Go teach foundational math and logic at your company. Don't just buy courses for engineers or throw the UCSD Discrete course from Coursera at them; get up in front of some people, answer questions, and show them how to love math the way you do. Stop using mathematics as a gate and use it as an opportunity for investment. That's how you fix it.

flashgordon 6y ago

This article (whether we like the current practises or not) highlights the value of practice. What is interesting is the (anecdotal) trend of "reverse abuse"? I know several folks who routinely take time out of their schedule each month to go through one or two interviews with real companies just to not get rusty. This way when the faang time comes they are ready and don't have to block out 2-3 months leetcoding again. Clearly if you cannot beat them take advantage of them!