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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-sho

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.
      - josephg 6y ago
        There’s a trope in kids cartoons, where everyday objects becoming scary looming nightmare things at night time. We can play that game with anything! Cars: “a 2 ton metal box we hurl through space in a life ending daily slalom”. Careers: “underhanded slavery - don’t work and you don’t eat. We make you choose your poison so you’re complicit in crafting the chains around your ankles”. Children: “Biologically enforced obligations which destroy the best years of your life...”. The fact that we can tell scary stories doesn’t make the stories true. With interviews - my claim is this: A well designed interview has a high statistical correlation between passing the interview and being useful on the job. Eg when I was interviewing we gave candidates some buggy code (with failing tests) and asked them to find and fix the problems. The ability to debug unfamiliar code in a job interview is correlated with the ability to do the same thing at work. If you can’t read code, I don’t want to employ you. Please practice and reapply, or find work elsewhere. This is a reasonable position - and probably the only reasonable position for an employer to hold. There’s lots of skills other than debugging: coding, profiling, algorithmic analysis, CS fundamentals, architecture, communicating with coworkers, etc. A mediocre interview assesses 1 of these skills. A good interview assesses 5+. Are there bad interviews out there? Yes, lots. But interviews themselves - even badly designed ones - aren’t abusive. (Unless you think a rejection is abuse). I get that some people put themselves through leetcode practice hell to get a job because they’re unemployable otherwise. I have sympathy for this but I don’t think this is the fault of the interview process. I suspect any decent assessment process would have the same result - where some people need to improve before they can get hired.
        AnimalMuppet 6y ago
        > With interviews - my claim is this: A well designed interview has a high statistical correlation between passing the interview and being useful on the job. Eg when I was interviewing we gave candidates some buggy code (with failing tests) and asked them to find and fix the problems. The ability to debug unfamiliar code in a job interview is correlated with the ability to do the same thing at work. > If you can’t read code, I don’t want to employ you. Please practice and reapply, or find work elsewhere. This is a reasonable position - and probably the only reasonable position for an employer to hold. > There’s lots of skills other than debugging: coding, profiling, algorithmic analysis, CS fundamentals, architecture, communicating with coworkers, etc. A mediocre interview assesses 1 of these skills. A good interview assesses 5+. I agree with every bit of that. I'd be happy to interview at your place, if I were looking. My objection isn't even just to interviews that ask you random stuff that doesn't correlate with being useful on the job. My objection is to interviews that ask you random stuff that doesn't correlate with being useful on the job and that requires months of your time to prepare for. I think that's abusive. I don't prepare for interviews. I just don't. My preparation is the 35 years of my career. Either that made me into someone you want, or it didn't. Sure, I'll take on your buggy code and failing tests, in an unfamiliar code base. No problem. But if an interviewer throw a bunch of leetcode questions at me, I'll fail (by the interviewer's standards). And I don't care. I'll go work for someone else.
  - draw_down 6y ago
    "A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire What it comes down to in my opinion is that these jobs are ultimately not really that different, except for how they pay. (Put another way, the main difference between jobs I've had in my career is how much they paid. The other stuff was basically the same; pay radically different.) And if we're at the point of working tech jobs then guess what, Mr Agassiz, we're already wasting our time. The way we waste less of our time is by making our money and getting the hell out. So we can waste our time however we like. But if you like, you can instead console yourself with, wow my boss is such a nice guy or whatever
jeffbee 6y ago
People who are on the IB side of IB, who are making way more than 250k/year, were just born into the right social set and got hired by their dad's pals from Yale. Easier, much easier, but requires more luck.
- BossingAround 6y ago
  What does IB stand for? Probably not internet banking? :)
  - arafa 6y ago
    Probably investment banking.
grumple 6y ago
Do physicians have to perform surgery to demonstrate their knowledge when they change hospitals? Do executives have to demonstrate their knowledge of acquisitions or something similar? Also let’s not act like this only applies to FAANG. Every dev job from internships and 50k entry level positions and up require the same testing. How many 70k/year jobs require testing every time you change positions outside of tech? Very few. Law, some medical fields, and a few other highly skilled fields do require licensing, but you only do that once per state at most. Tech is the only field I’ve ever seen where your experience doesn’t matter and you have to prove your skills with every interview. In other industries, it’s mostly about personality.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  > Tech is the only field I’ve ever seen where your experience doesn’t matter and you have to prove your skills with every interview. In other industries, it’s mostly about personality. This sounds like a good thing to me (for tech). The interview process may suck, but at least everybody has to endure it. And then you're in a meritocracy. That's the theory, anyway.
- Kranar 6y ago
  >Do physicians have to perform surgery to demonstrate their knowledge when they change hospitals? Not sure how serious you're being but the answer is yes, surgeons seeking to change from hospital A to hospital B have interviews where a surgeon from hospital B will visit hospital A to supervise a surgery or other operation. Depending on how critical the position it may even be a partner from one hospital doing the supervision. In fact nowadays the supervision can be done remotely. Furthermore surgeons are required to maintain their accreditation by earning credits on a yearly basis through continuing education and/or training and they do so on their own time. These guys don't mess around and if you think surgeons get hired because of their wonderful personality then you sorely underestimate the medical profession (and overestimate their personality ;P ). It's incredibly competitive, demanding, and prestigious in almost every sense imaginable.
  - cynoclast 6y ago
ipaddr 6y ago
It is not as easy as passing a test. Rounds of interviews, hiring hiring committee approvals to follow. Plenty of easier process exist but they are not jobs you can apply for. A baseball special assistant hired by an owner can be hired after drinks. In terms of regular jobs a sales staff working on commission could be easier.
spaetzleesser 6y ago
From what I have seen outside of tech a lot of these 250k+ jobs go by track record, references and being able to talk well. You definitely don’t have to study and practice for weeks or months.
zerkten 6y ago
The process is quite a lot easier for the hire and the outcomes are frequently better for employer. A key point is that it is a much more substantial process than it is in tech, and the qualitative aspects are understood/accepted/managed. Tech hires quickly and frequently for the short-term. The algorithms test approach is intended to condense what would be a much more expansive investigation into something straightforward (and supposedly quantifiable.) This discards a significant amount of information which is considered in other high-end jobs.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  You’re right, the way that other jobs that pay as much hire is far more biased to people of the right social class who have been trained into the correct expectations of how one is supposed to act. Tech’s hiring process is more open to people without that kind of experience.
jerf 6y ago
While I won't accuse any one person of this exact opinion, I do enjoy that the gestalt of HN appears to believe that for this upper-middle class job from which you'll have the power to easily destroy millions of dollars' worth of value if you screw up hard enough, you should not have to 1. solve problems in front of someone in an interview 2. bring your laptop to your interview 3. have to provide any evidence of your programming ability via open source samples or past work 4. have a take-home work problem 5. be hired to do the job on a trial basis for a period of time 6. put up with the fact that the interviewer has power if for no other reason than you are one of multiple candidates 7. essentially prove your ability to do the job in any manner whatsoever. I can understand the arguments for many of those, but... uh... somehow you're going to need to prove yourself. We can't just throw everyone who shows up into the position to see how they'd do... and the HN gestalt would presumably complain about how awful that is, too.
- hackinthebochs 6y ago
  >somehow you're going to need to prove yourself You could just, like, ask me! Talk to me like a human being. You'll quickly see I'm all the things I claim to be on my resume. /s
  - grillvogel 6y ago
    once you start drilling down into the details of things they claimed that they worked on its usually pretty clear if they are BSing or not
    - maerF0x0 6y ago
      Used to play this game where we'd ask the interviewer to "go deeper" on how something worked to see where there limits of their technical understanding was. Depending on the level expected (eg junior vs senior) you could expect certain depth. Eg: "Tell me what happens when you type an address into your browser bar" Someone junior might say "You type in the address, it fetches HTML from their server, and your browser shows it" -- "go deeper" -- "Their server uses HTTP or something.." etc.. Someone senior might get to something like "Well when you press the first 'w' key it triggers a hardware interrupt ..." or more likely something about TCP/IP and the rest of the network stack...
tidepod12 6y ago
My experience with consulting jobs is that while the interviews themselves are still difficult, they do not require nearly as much of this "devote your life to studying and taking practice tests" that the tech industry is enamored with. Consulting interviews are almost all behavioral, and sometimes require a short case presentation, but even the case rarely requires days and days worth of preparation. Yes, there are some who do prepare endlessly (like "Cracking the Case Interview"), but I know far fewer people who go that route and even those that do still spend only a fraction of the time on it compared to leetcoders. The mindset during consulting recruiting seems to be more of "we want to make sure you have a decent base level of knowledge and problem solving skills, but if you don't know how to code/make a PPT/whatever, that's fine, because we can teach you that stuff". Big tech recruiting seems to be the opposite: even when big tech companies claim "you don't need to know everything, because we'll teach you", they still require you to jump through these leetcode-style hoops to prove your skills. And this is echoed beyond the hiring process too, in my experience. Consulting companies hire smart people and want to keep them for a long time, so they invest a lot of money into training those people and attempting to keep attrition down. FAANG on the other hand seems to care less about attrition (sometimes even embracing it, eg Amazon) and wants to hire people that require minimal training, and thus wants people that have immediately demonstrable knowledge so they can be immediately productive.
- spaced-out 6y ago
  >My experience with consulting jobs is that while the interviews themselves are still difficult, they do not require nearly as much of this "devote your life to studying and taking practice tests" that the tech industry is enamored with. What type of consulting are you talking about, and are these jobs really paying >$250k? What would someone have to do to get a shot at one of these jobs?
- candybar 6y ago
  Top management consulting firms (McKinsey, BCG, ec) are insanely competitive and won't consider anyone without elite credentials, i.e. top grads from elite undergraduate programs, MBAs from top schools, Ph.Ds from good research programs, etc. These opportunities are far more scarce and require more effort overall as well. I suspect that some of these firms could hire more or less randomly from those who make it to the interview stage and do nearly as well, since their resume filtering is extremely rigorous, while their skill requirements for most roles aren't that high outside of being smart, analytical and willing to travel and work insane hours. Big Tech is substantially more egalitarian in terms of who they let through to the interview stage, while the actual job demands somewhat esoteric skills that go beyond just being a smart, analytical hard-working person, which necessitates a more meaningful filter. I suppose Big Tech could do something similar (skip leetcode stuff for people who have credentials such as prior experience at top tech firms and/or tangible research experience at top research institutions) but I suspect that would not go over well with most people that have issues with the current hiring processes.
novok 6y ago
From what I know from doctors, what FANG does is basically the equivalent of doing your board exams every time you want to change jobs. Which usually gets a reaction of dread & disgust when you couch it in those terms to doctors. Interviews are significantly easier as far as prep time goes for doctors & psychologists. BUT, you don't have to go through the entire med school & residency rigamarole as a software engineer either, so as far as total effort goes FANG is probably easier. I posit that software engineering is probably the most egalitarian method of socioeconomic mobility, because the only real barrier is time, a laptop, the internet and motivation, while all the other methods require an upper-middle class background and expensive schooling (law, medicine, finance) or just plain luck (business, celebrity art & sports) But being an interviewer in FANG, I've actually found it rare to find the self taught type in practice. But we do leave that door open unlike medicine.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > From what I know from doctors, what FANG does is basically the equivalent of doing your board exams every time you want to change jobs. Which usually gets a reaction of dread & disgust when you couch it in those terms to doctors. If Software Engineers want to get rid of algorithmic interviews, all they have to do is come up with a professional exam and a strict licensing body... just like most professions carrying a tittle (MD, Lawyers...). But as long as "3 months js bootcamp grad" can advertise himself as a software engineer just as much as a guy from Stanford CS then we'll keep having these interviews.
  - jonas21 6y ago
    > But as long as "3 months js bootcamp grad" can advertise himself as a software engineer just as much as a guy from Stanford CS then we'll keep having these interviews. The fact that a bootcamp grad can compete for the same software engineering jobs as a Stanford CS grad is one of the very best parts of the hiring process in our industry. Are you proposing that we start using credentials as gatekeeping?
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
bwestergard 6y ago
My partner is a lawyer and I am a software developer. We've both been in these fields for about a decade. The key difference between our professional experiences is that the legal profession is self-regulating, whereas software devs/qa/pms are totally socially atomized. Lawyers have their own organizations, which give them some independence from their clients. Society accepts that this is desirable for the maintenance of the legal order. Software occupations should move in this direction, for the good of practitioners (wages, working conditions, fairness in promotions and hiring) and the wider society (complement to government regulation around security, privacy, fairness in hiring and promotion). The bar association defines the examination that lawyers must pass to practice. Employer/client interviews focus more on "culture fit" and familiarity with specific practice areas than on certifying basic competence. The bar also administers "continuing education" to ensure that a lawyer who passed the bar decades ago isn't totally out of the loop on recent developments. I would love to see the software sector move toward this kind of self-regulation through unionization. We have the power, we just need to coordinate. Instead of a high-stakes and all-too-often arbitrary interview every single time you want to change jobs, you could prove your basic competence to practice through an exam, and elect to fulfill your continuing education requirements however makes sense for you, within a framework decided upon by workers themselves. Such a system would not be perfect. No set of examinations is ever going to perfectly capture ever-shifting real world requirements, for example. But we can hardly do worse that the sector is doing now. We have to stop letting recruiters (i.e. middlemen) and employers (i.e. counter-parties in the employment relation) dictate terms to software workers arbitrarily. The wider society should support tech worker organization in unions because these organizations would provide a check on executive and investor power. Without such checks and balances, we can only expect more of the same short-term thinking and ethical corner cutting.
- returningfory2 6y ago
  The problem with this approach is that it creates serious barriers to entry. I'm an immigrant who finished a pure-math PhD and went into software engineering afterwards by building up a portfolio and leetcoding in my spare time. With your system there is no chance I could have done that. Passing all of the exams would not have been possible without a strictly CS education, and I couldn't have studied for the exams after my PhD finished because my visa status at the time was tied to being actively employed. So many people nowadays are becoming productive software engineers from slightly unconventional backgrounds (pure math, physics, boot camps) and this would stop immediately if CS certification became part of the job requirements.
colinmhayes 6y ago
I've got two doctors in my family, and from how they describe it getting into med school is easier than FAANG. Once you're in you're practically guaranteed 250k after 7 years of training and 500k debt. Residency definitely sounds like a pain in the ass, but if you graduate from a reputable American med school it's very unlikely that you don't match. I guess it depends on how you define easy. Some may define it as amount of work required, I tend to think as chance of success.
- sfashset 6y ago
  Getting into any US med school is definitely harder than getting into FAANG. [0] Part of it is things like the MCAT and organic chemistry are hard, part of it is there's a whole "hidden" component of med school applications related to volunteering, shadowing, research etc, that is opaque to most. This is part of the reason 50% of med school students already have a parent working in medicine. [0] https://www.aamc.org/system/files/2020-10/2020_FACTS_Table_A-23.pdf https://www.aamc.org/system/files/2020-10/2020_FACTS_Table_A...
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    I'm not sure what the table proves without FAANG statistics. I don't think 65% of students with a 3.8 are getting accepted at FAANG.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > Some may define it as amount of work required, I tend to think as chance of success. I don't understand how anyone can think that 7 or more years of med school and grueling residency is somehow easier than studying Leetcode for a few weeks or months. Med school has a very different selection bias than FAANG interviews. No one seriously attempts to attend medical school unless they've committed to 7 years of grueling training. A FAANG interview, on the other hand, is barely a blip on the radar over the course of an engineering career. A lot of people apply to FAANG jobs just to try their chances at the application process. Not so for medical school.
  - 6y ago
the_only_law 6y ago
From what I’ve been told instead of an obnoxious interview process, they require expensive credentials and are siloed by the prestige of their schools. I sure don’t think leetcode interviews are great, but I’ll take it compared to that.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
eyelidlessness 6y ago
This isn’t a serious question if you consider that the people who struggle with them have spent their time optimizing for delivering real value and the problems don’t demonstrate or even provide entry from that.
jjav 6y ago
Doctors and lawyers certainly have a much easier hiring process, from all the ones I know. And in both fields experience is respected, the opposite of software development. Doctors in particular (with residency) and lawers to a lesser degree (bar exams) have a more difficult path into the profession. But they don't have to prep and go through the bar exam for every single interview after that. It would be unthinkable to make an established surgeon balance chemical reaction equations or something obscure like that from their undergrad days as part of the interview! But that's what software engineers must deal with.
- SkyPuncher 6y ago
  Doctors have an easier hiring process because they have a licensing board. Getting that license is significantly harder, though
iandouglas 6y ago
"You're a surgeon, you say? Go operate on that patient, and if they live, we'll CONSIDER you for the job..."

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.
    - josephg 6y ago
      There’s a trope in kids cartoons, where everyday objects becoming scary looming nightmare things at night time. We can play that game with anything! Cars: “a 2 ton metal box we hurl through space in a life ending daily slalom”. Careers: “underhanded slavery - don’t work and you don’t eat. We make you choose your poison so you’re complicit in crafting the chains around your ankles”. Children: “Biologically enforced obligations which destroy the best years of your life...”. The fact that we can tell scary stories doesn’t make the stories true. With interviews - my claim is this: A well designed interview has a high statistical correlation between passing the interview and being useful on the job. Eg when I was interviewing we gave candidates some buggy code (with failing tests) and asked them to find and fix the problems. The ability to debug unfamiliar code in a job interview is correlated with the ability to do the same thing at work. If you can’t read code, I don’t want to employ you. Please practice and reapply, or find work elsewhere. This is a reasonable position - and probably the only reasonable position for an employer to hold. There’s lots of skills other than debugging: coding, profiling, algorithmic analysis, CS fundamentals, architecture, communicating with coworkers, etc. A mediocre interview assesses 1 of these skills. A good interview assesses 5+. Are there bad interviews out there? Yes, lots. But interviews themselves - even badly designed ones - aren’t abusive. (Unless you think a rejection is abuse). I get that some people put themselves through leetcode practice hell to get a job because they’re unemployable otherwise. I have sympathy for this but I don’t think this is the fault of the interview process. I suspect any decent assessment process would have the same result - where some people need to improve before they can get hired.
      - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
        > With interviews - my claim is this: A well designed interview has a high statistical correlation between passing the interview and being useful on the job. Eg when I was interviewing we gave candidates some buggy code (with failing tests) and asked them to find and fix the problems. The ability to debug unfamiliar code in a job interview is correlated with the ability to do the same thing at work. > If you can’t read code, I don’t want to employ you. Please practice and reapply, or find work elsewhere. This is a reasonable position - and probably the only reasonable position for an employer to hold. > There’s lots of skills other than debugging: coding, profiling, algorithmic analysis, CS fundamentals, architecture, communicating with coworkers, etc. A mediocre interview assesses 1 of these skills. A good interview assesses 5+. I agree with every bit of that. I'd be happy to interview at your place, if I were looking. My objection isn't even just to interviews that ask you random stuff that doesn't correlate with being useful on the job. My objection is to interviews that ask you random stuff that doesn't correlate with being useful on the job and that requires months of your time to prepare for. I think that's abusive. I don't prepare for interviews. I just don't. My preparation is the 35 years of my career. Either that made me into someone you want, or it didn't. Sure, I'll take on your buggy code and failing tests, in an unfamiliar code base. No problem. But if an interviewer throw a bunch of leetcode questions at me, I'll fail (by the interviewer's standards). And I don't care. I'll go work for someone else.
- draw_down 6y ago
  "A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire What it comes down to in my opinion is that these jobs are ultimately not really that different, except for how they pay. (Put another way, the main difference between jobs I've had in my career is how much they paid. The other stuff was basically the same; pay radically different.) And if we're at the point of working tech jobs then guess what, Mr Agassiz, we're already wasting our time. The way we waste less of our time is by making our money and getting the hell out. So we can waste our time however we like. But if you like, you can instead console yourself with, wow my boss is such a nice guy or whatever

jeffbee 6y ago

People who are on the IB side of IB, who are making way more than 250k/year, were just born into the right social set and got hired by their dad's pals from Yale. Easier, much easier, but requires more luck.

BossingAround 6y ago
What does IB stand for? Probably not internet banking? :)
- arafa 6y ago
  Probably investment banking.

grumple 6y ago

Do physicians have to perform surgery to demonstrate their knowledge when they change hospitals? Do executives have to demonstrate their knowledge of acquisitions or something similar? Also let’s not act like this only applies to FAANG. Every dev job from internships and 50k entry level positions and up require the same testing. How many 70k/year jobs require testing every time you change positions outside of tech? Very few. Law, some medical fields, and a few other highly skilled fields do require licensing, but you only do that once per state at most. Tech is the only field I’ve ever seen where your experience doesn’t matter and you have to prove your skills with every interview. In other industries, it’s mostly about personality.

Judgmentality 6y ago
> Tech is the only field I’ve ever seen where your experience doesn’t matter and you have to prove your skills with every interview. In other industries, it’s mostly about personality. This sounds like a good thing to me (for tech). The interview process may suck, but at least everybody has to endure it. And then you're in a meritocracy. That's the theory, anyway.
Kranar 6y ago
>Do physicians have to perform surgery to demonstrate their knowledge when they change hospitals? Not sure how serious you're being but the answer is yes, surgeons seeking to change from hospital A to hospital B have interviews where a surgeon from hospital B will visit hospital A to supervise a surgery or other operation. Depending on how critical the position it may even be a partner from one hospital doing the supervision. In fact nowadays the supervision can be done remotely. Furthermore surgeons are required to maintain their accreditation by earning credits on a yearly basis through continuing education and/or training and they do so on their own time. These guys don't mess around and if you think surgeons get hired because of their wonderful personality then you sorely underestimate the medical profession (and overestimate their personality ;P ). It's incredibly competitive, demanding, and prestigious in almost every sense imaginable.
- cynoclast 6y ago

ipaddr 6y ago

It is not as easy as passing a test. Rounds of interviews, hiring hiring committee approvals to follow. Plenty of easier process exist but they are not jobs you can apply for. A baseball special assistant hired by an owner can be hired after drinks. In terms of regular jobs a sales staff working on commission could be easier.

spaetzleesser 6y ago

From what I have seen outside of tech a lot of these 250k+ jobs go by track record, references and being able to talk well. You definitely don’t have to study and practice for weeks or months.

zerkten 6y ago

The process is quite a lot easier for the hire and the outcomes are frequently better for employer. A key point is that it is a much more substantial process than it is in tech, and the qualitative aspects are understood/accepted/managed. Tech hires quickly and frequently for the short-term. The algorithms test approach is intended to condense what would be a much more expansive investigation into something straightforward (and supposedly quantifiable.) This discards a significant amount of information which is considered in other high-end jobs.

barry-cotter 6y ago
You’re right, the way that other jobs that pay as much hire is far more biased to people of the right social class who have been trained into the correct expectations of how one is supposed to act. Tech’s hiring process is more open to people without that kind of experience.

jerf 6y ago

While I won't accuse any one person of this exact opinion, I do enjoy that the gestalt of HN appears to believe that for this upper-middle class job from which you'll have the power to easily destroy millions of dollars' worth of value if you screw up hard enough, you should not have to 1. solve problems in front of someone in an interview 2. bring your laptop to your interview 3. have to provide any evidence of your programming ability via open source samples or past work 4. have a take-home work problem 5. be hired to do the job on a trial basis for a period of time 6. put up with the fact that the interviewer has power if for no other reason than you are one of multiple candidates 7. essentially prove your ability to do the job in any manner whatsoever. I can understand the arguments for many of those, but... uh... somehow you're going to need to prove yourself. We can't just throw everyone who shows up into the position to see how they'd do... and the HN gestalt would presumably complain about how awful that is, too.

hackinthebochs 6y ago
>somehow you're going to need to prove yourself You could just, like, ask me! Talk to me like a human being. You'll quickly see I'm all the things I claim to be on my resume. /s
- grillvogel 6y ago
  once you start drilling down into the details of things they claimed that they worked on its usually pretty clear if they are BSing or not
  - maerF0x0 6y ago
    Used to play this game where we'd ask the interviewer to "go deeper" on how something worked to see where there limits of their technical understanding was. Depending on the level expected (eg junior vs senior) you could expect certain depth. Eg: "Tell me what happens when you type an address into your browser bar" Someone junior might say "You type in the address, it fetches HTML from their server, and your browser shows it" -- "go deeper" -- "Their server uses HTTP or something.." etc.. Someone senior might get to something like "Well when you press the first 'w' key it triggers a hardware interrupt ..." or more likely something about TCP/IP and the rest of the network stack...

tidepod12 6y ago

My experience with consulting jobs is that while the interviews themselves are still difficult, they do not require nearly as much of this "devote your life to studying and taking practice tests" that the tech industry is enamored with. Consulting interviews are almost all behavioral, and sometimes require a short case presentation, but even the case rarely requires days and days worth of preparation. Yes, there are some who do prepare endlessly (like "Cracking the Case Interview"), but I know far fewer people who go that route and even those that do still spend only a fraction of the time on it compared to leetcoders. The mindset during consulting recruiting seems to be more of "we want to make sure you have a decent base level of knowledge and problem solving skills, but if you don't know how to code/make a PPT/whatever, that's fine, because we can teach you that stuff". Big tech recruiting seems to be the opposite: even when big tech companies claim "you don't need to know everything, because we'll teach you", they still require you to jump through these leetcode-style hoops to prove your skills. And this is echoed beyond the hiring process too, in my experience. Consulting companies hire smart people and want to keep them for a long time, so they invest a lot of money into training those people and attempting to keep attrition down. FAANG on the other hand seems to care less about attrition (sometimes even embracing it, eg Amazon) and wants to hire people that require minimal training, and thus wants people that have immediately demonstrable knowledge so they can be immediately productive.

spaced-out 6y ago
>My experience with consulting jobs is that while the interviews themselves are still difficult, they do not require nearly as much of this "devote your life to studying and taking practice tests" that the tech industry is enamored with. What type of consulting are you talking about, and are these jobs really paying >$250k? What would someone have to do to get a shot at one of these jobs?
candybar 6y ago
Top management consulting firms (McKinsey, BCG, ec) are insanely competitive and won't consider anyone without elite credentials, i.e. top grads from elite undergraduate programs, MBAs from top schools, Ph.Ds from good research programs, etc. These opportunities are far more scarce and require more effort overall as well. I suspect that some of these firms could hire more or less randomly from those who make it to the interview stage and do nearly as well, since their resume filtering is extremely rigorous, while their skill requirements for most roles aren't that high outside of being smart, analytical and willing to travel and work insane hours. Big Tech is substantially more egalitarian in terms of who they let through to the interview stage, while the actual job demands somewhat esoteric skills that go beyond just being a smart, analytical hard-working person, which necessitates a more meaningful filter. I suppose Big Tech could do something similar (skip leetcode stuff for people who have credentials such as prior experience at top tech firms and/or tangible research experience at top research institutions) but I suspect that would not go over well with most people that have issues with the current hiring processes.

novok 6y ago

From what I know from doctors, what FANG does is basically the equivalent of doing your board exams every time you want to change jobs. Which usually gets a reaction of dread & disgust when you couch it in those terms to doctors. Interviews are significantly easier as far as prep time goes for doctors & psychologists. BUT, you don't have to go through the entire med school & residency rigamarole as a software engineer either, so as far as total effort goes FANG is probably easier. I posit that software engineering is probably the most egalitarian method of socioeconomic mobility, because the only real barrier is time, a laptop, the internet and motivation, while all the other methods require an upper-middle class background and expensive schooling (law, medicine, finance) or just plain luck (business, celebrity art & sports) But being an interviewer in FANG, I've actually found it rare to find the self taught type in practice. But we do leave that door open unlike medicine.

908B64B197 6y ago
> From what I know from doctors, what FANG does is basically the equivalent of doing your board exams every time you want to change jobs. Which usually gets a reaction of dread & disgust when you couch it in those terms to doctors. If Software Engineers want to get rid of algorithmic interviews, all they have to do is come up with a professional exam and a strict licensing body... just like most professions carrying a tittle (MD, Lawyers...). But as long as "3 months js bootcamp grad" can advertise himself as a software engineer just as much as a guy from Stanford CS then we'll keep having these interviews.
- jonas21 6y ago
  > But as long as "3 months js bootcamp grad" can advertise himself as a software engineer just as much as a guy from Stanford CS then we'll keep having these interviews. The fact that a bootcamp grad can compete for the same software engineering jobs as a Stanford CS grad is one of the very best parts of the hiring process in our industry. Are you proposing that we start using credentials as gatekeeping?
  - 908B64B197 6y ago

bwestergard 6y ago

My partner is a lawyer and I am a software developer. We've both been in these fields for about a decade. The key difference between our professional experiences is that the legal profession is self-regulating, whereas software devs/qa/pms are totally socially atomized. Lawyers have their own organizations, which give them some independence from their clients. Society accepts that this is desirable for the maintenance of the legal order. Software occupations should move in this direction, for the good of practitioners (wages, working conditions, fairness in promotions and hiring) and the wider society (complement to government regulation around security, privacy, fairness in hiring and promotion). The bar association defines the examination that lawyers must pass to practice. Employer/client interviews focus more on "culture fit" and familiarity with specific practice areas than on certifying basic competence. The bar also administers "continuing education" to ensure that a lawyer who passed the bar decades ago isn't totally out of the loop on recent developments. I would love to see the software sector move toward this kind of self-regulation through unionization. We have the power, we just need to coordinate. Instead of a high-stakes and all-too-often arbitrary interview every single time you want to change jobs, you could prove your basic competence to practice through an exam, and elect to fulfill your continuing education requirements however makes sense for you, within a framework decided upon by workers themselves. Such a system would not be perfect. No set of examinations is ever going to perfectly capture ever-shifting real world requirements, for example. But we can hardly do worse that the sector is doing now. We have to stop letting recruiters (i.e. middlemen) and employers (i.e. counter-parties in the employment relation) dictate terms to software workers arbitrarily. The wider society should support tech worker organization in unions because these organizations would provide a check on executive and investor power. Without such checks and balances, we can only expect more of the same short-term thinking and ethical corner cutting.

returningfory2 6y ago
The problem with this approach is that it creates serious barriers to entry. I'm an immigrant who finished a pure-math PhD and went into software engineering afterwards by building up a portfolio and leetcoding in my spare time. With your system there is no chance I could have done that. Passing all of the exams would not have been possible without a strictly CS education, and I couldn't have studied for the exams after my PhD finished because my visa status at the time was tied to being actively employed. So many people nowadays are becoming productive software engineers from slightly unconventional backgrounds (pure math, physics, boot camps) and this would stop immediately if CS certification became part of the job requirements.

colinmhayes 6y ago

I've got two doctors in my family, and from how they describe it getting into med school is easier than FAANG. Once you're in you're practically guaranteed 250k after 7 years of training and 500k debt. Residency definitely sounds like a pain in the ass, but if you graduate from a reputable American med school it's very unlikely that you don't match. I guess it depends on how you define easy. Some may define it as amount of work required, I tend to think as chance of success.

sfashset 6y ago
Getting into any US med school is definitely harder than getting into FAANG. [0] Part of it is things like the MCAT and organic chemistry are hard, part of it is there's a whole "hidden" component of med school applications related to volunteering, shadowing, research etc, that is opaque to most. This is part of the reason 50% of med school students already have a parent working in medicine. [0] https://www.aamc.org/system/files/2020-10/2020_FACTS_Table_A-23.pdf https://www.aamc.org/system/files/2020-10/2020_FACTS_Table_A...
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  I'm not sure what the table proves without FAANG statistics. I don't think 65% of students with a 3.8 are getting accepted at FAANG.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> Some may define it as amount of work required, I tend to think as chance of success. I don't understand how anyone can think that 7 or more years of med school and grueling residency is somehow easier than studying Leetcode for a few weeks or months. Med school has a very different selection bias than FAANG interviews. No one seriously attempts to attend medical school unless they've committed to 7 years of grueling training. A FAANG interview, on the other hand, is barely a blip on the radar over the course of an engineering career. A lot of people apply to FAANG jobs just to try their chances at the application process. Not so for medical school.
- 6y ago

the_only_law 6y ago

From what I’ve been told instead of an obnoxious interview process, they require expensive credentials and are siloed by the prestige of their schools. I sure don’t think leetcode interviews are great, but I’ll take it compared to that.

deleted 6y ago

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eyelidlessness 6y ago

This isn’t a serious question if you consider that the people who struggle with them have spent their time optimizing for delivering real value and the problems don’t demonstrate or even provide entry from that.

jjav 6y ago

Doctors and lawyers certainly have a much easier hiring process, from all the ones I know. And in both fields experience is respected, the opposite of software development. Doctors in particular (with residency) and lawers to a lesser degree (bar exams) have a more difficult path into the profession. But they don't have to prep and go through the bar exam for every single interview after that. It would be unthinkable to make an established surgeon balance chemical reaction equations or something obscure like that from their undergrad days as part of the interview! But that's what software engineers must deal with.

SkyPuncher 6y ago
Doctors have an easier hiring process because they have a licensing board. Getting that license is significantly harder, though

iandouglas 6y ago

"You're a surgeon, you say? Go operate on that patient, and if they live, we'll CONSIDER you for the job..."