7 ms·

This doesn't match up with my experience as an interviewer at several FAANGs. HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay, a woman, an

This doesn't match up with my experience as an interviewer at several FAANGs. HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay, a woman, and/or black they are already incredibly inclined to hire you, as long as you pass the interviews. It's not a walk in the park, but you have this going for you and it's a big advantage imo.

tchaffee 5y ago
> as long as you pass the interviews. Aren't these are known to be extremely difficult interviews compared to most tech interviews? What percentage of candidates who apply get hired? I would imagine the numbers are quite low?
- 10x-dev 5y ago
  My opinion is that generalist interviews are difficult but not 'extremely'. For example, here is a problem I came up with at one company: Given a list of chapters in a video course, and a list of user bookmarks, write a function that groups the bookmarks by chapter. Chapters and bookmarks are defined as millisecond offsets from 0 (the start of the video file). I'd specify the data structures for junior devs and let the more senior people work those out. Your average developer that gets hired can solve and unit test the solution in less than 35 minutes. Those who don't might be having an off day, or I didn't do a good job at explaining the problem and details, or they didn't ask the right questions or who knows. The point is, a thousand things can go wrong, but the problem itself isn't that difficult. A few loops and a hashmap gets you an acceptable solution. This and the other problems in the interview question databases at FAANGs are typical of what's in the Cracking the Coding Interview book. Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate, but if one wants to join these companies, then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable and not a particularly complex process. It's high overhead for the candidate, but at the very least it proves that they can learn, and learning the custom tools and code quickly is about half the skillet required to be successful at a FAANG.
  - tchaffee 5y ago
    > then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable Have you considered that underrepresented candidates might not have the free time outside of university, family, and job responsibilities in order to compete with those whose families can support them to focus on only university and preparing for interviews? If HR wants their diversity numbers up, maybe HR needs to consider having some diversity in the interview process itself? I wouldn't expect a cookie cutter process to result in much diversity of background or thought. > Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate One of the best interviewing tips I learned that has served me extremely well is to try disprove my impression of the candidate. It seems like this process entirely fails at that.
    - edmundsauto 5y ago
      The problem is that companies also want an objective hiring process, because otherwise employee bias will seep in. The fact that these two issues are in opposition (plus the general recruiting pipeline issues) are why this is such a difficult problem to solve.
      - tchaffee 5y ago
        > The problem is that companies also want an objective hiring process Usually only at a very superficial level. Enough to comply with the law. And to be fair, some companies do have good intentions with a little extra effort and money put into diversity efforts. A truly objective hiring process would take into account that Joe and Charley who both got the same results on the coding test are not equally qualified if Joe grew up poor, with parents who never graduated high school, paid his own way through university by working full-time, and along with raising a child as a single parent. While Charley comes from a wealthy family and focused only on studying and job interview prep. With his parents passing along some of their own higher education to him as needed, connecting him to their large network for job opportunities, etc. Joe is obviously a better candidate. His starting line was far behind Charley's and yet he crossed the finish line at the same time. Joe would be a better candidate even if he passed the finish line a little after Charley. If you want a truly objective hiring process you need to look at starting lines, not just finish lines. Most companies are doing almost the opposite and only looking at the finish line. They want to look only at the skills and exclude the actual person in a misguided effort to be objective. All that really does it amplify existing societal bias and privilege by rewarding those who got the most breaks in life. > this is such a difficult problem to solve. Agreed. And it would be more expensive. Part of why the status quo is so hard to change. You've got to spend the money and do the work. Or take shortcuts and discriminate on one side or the other.
yardie 5y ago
There are a lot more people of color trying to break into the field than there are companies willing to hire them. There is a big difference between what they are saying and what they are implementing and I can say with absolute confidence that diversity is just lip service. FAANGs primarily recruit from other FAANGs. If none of those companies are diverse how are they going to diversify their recruitment?
- snakeboy 5y ago
  > FAANGs primarily recruit from other FAANGs How could that be? I was under the impression that a huge amount of new hires come in each year from fresh university graduates.
  - yardie 5y ago
    Take Apple for example, out of the 600+ jobs posted on their career website only 19 even mention students. And some of those are actual student jobs: student outreach, student recruiters. If they have a different pipeline for recruiting students I'm not aware of it. If new graduate positions are only recruited at campus job fairs that has a greater potential to be worse. FAANGs haven't been recruiting from majority minority schhols or HBCUs.
  - babyblueblanket 5y ago
    There was actually a big twitter thread by a black recruiter at Google (now cut) who out and out said that Google's interviewing engineers looked down on black seniors and ranked them universally lower than white seniors, particularly black seniors from historically black universities. She had to fight tooth and nail to accomplish getting the first black entry-level-from-college hire in all of Google's history.
    - rkk3 5y ago
      The thread https://twitter.com/realabril/status/1341135819487100928?lang=en https://twitter.com/realabril/status/1341135819487100928?lan... And it was specifically about hiring from HBU's vs other elite institutions, not about hiring black applicants in general which is how you described it.
Ensorceled 5y ago
> HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly This kind of implies that they don't actually hire diversely or the issue wouldn't be so dire ...
- zzbzq 5y ago
  It could also imply lack of candidates. Which is demonstrably true; they're not hiring from the general population they're hiring largely from universities, and you can look at those universities and see there's already an imbalance in demographics of the available job candidates.
throwtheworld 5y ago
> long as you pass the interviews. 40 applications and 2 resume consultations later and no interview even offered. Meanwhile, some guy you run circles around in real world programming/business experience is 8 for 10. My white classmates noticed this before I did because I’ve just accepted it as part of life.
- akomtu 5y ago
  Referrals is the secret sauce. Those 8/10 guys don't just send resumes to the public company address.
thinkcontext 5y ago
Your experience does not match research on the job market generally. Multiple studies show increased responses to resumes with "whitened" names. This is, of course, at odds with the white victimhood narrative that unqualified minorities are taking jobs, when it is in fact the opposite which is occurring. https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes-get-more-interviews https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...
- Kranar 5y ago
  I just went over the actual study itself and it does not support your claim: http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%20R2%20Accepted.pdf http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%... It's a sort of interesting read but nothing too dramatic and whether it's evidence of racism is subject to interpretation. What isn't subject to interpretation is the claim that the study shows that "whitened" names increase callbacks. On the contrary whitening names has no effect on callbacks as indicated on page 31: "Whitening the name only (versus not whitening at all) did not make a statistically significant difference for black applicants" The actual study shows that removing racial indicators from experience is what results in a gap in callbacks. So someone who represents themselves as the leader of their campus' "Black Student Business Association" is less likely to get a call back than someone who represented themselves as the leader of their campus' "Student Business Association". They refer to the removal of racial indicators as whitening but I think that's prematurely jumping to conclusions. The name aspect is certainly a form of whitening, since black names are being changed to white names. But it's premature to refer to the removal of racial indicators and making the experience racially neutral as a form of whitening. Other forms of experience that explicitly mention race result in less callbacks than when that same experience doesn't mention race. Whether this is racism or not can not be concluded strictly based off of the study's parameters. For example, if I were presented with one candidate who was in charge of the university's "Law Society" I would probably pick that person over someone who was in charge of that university's "Black Law Society", and I don't think I would be racist for doing so. I would consider being in charge of an organization that is open to all races or is independent of race as a more prestigious accomplishment than being in charge of an organization that is race specific. To test whether I was racist in my decision making, I would need to pick someone who was not in charge of anything over someone who was in charge of the "Black Law Society", with all else being equal. The study did not do this comparison and unfortunately the study does not present the raw data so there's no way for me to do this analysis myself. I could bicker about some of the methodological issues as well which are not exactly rigorous, as well as the fact that this study is not exactly pertinent to this conversation as they only looked at internships for jobs that are not technical in nature, with the bulk of them being sales and marketing, and customer service jobs, instead of engineering, computer science, law, or professional jobs. Ultimately no study is going to be perfect but one should not read too much into many of these studies. They are not nearly as rigorous or definitive as one would expect and furthermore they don't tend to generalize.
happythen 5y ago
> HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay You're right, I always fail that interview question where they ask me what my sexual preference is and I say women... ...Seriously? you are just making stuff up now.

tchaffee 5y ago

> as long as you pass the interviews. Aren't these are known to be extremely difficult interviews compared to most tech interviews? What percentage of candidates who apply get hired? I would imagine the numbers are quite low?

10x-dev 5y ago
My opinion is that generalist interviews are difficult but not 'extremely'. For example, here is a problem I came up with at one company: Given a list of chapters in a video course, and a list of user bookmarks, write a function that groups the bookmarks by chapter. Chapters and bookmarks are defined as millisecond offsets from 0 (the start of the video file). I'd specify the data structures for junior devs and let the more senior people work those out. Your average developer that gets hired can solve and unit test the solution in less than 35 minutes. Those who don't might be having an off day, or I didn't do a good job at explaining the problem and details, or they didn't ask the right questions or who knows. The point is, a thousand things can go wrong, but the problem itself isn't that difficult. A few loops and a hashmap gets you an acceptable solution. This and the other problems in the interview question databases at FAANGs are typical of what's in the Cracking the Coding Interview book. Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate, but if one wants to join these companies, then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable and not a particularly complex process. It's high overhead for the candidate, but at the very least it proves that they can learn, and learning the custom tools and code quickly is about half the skillet required to be successful at a FAANG.
- tchaffee 5y ago
  > then hacking the process by learning to solve algorithm and data structure problems is acceptable Have you considered that underrepresented candidates might not have the free time outside of university, family, and job responsibilities in order to compete with those whose families can support them to focus on only university and preparing for interviews? If HR wants their diversity numbers up, maybe HR needs to consider having some diversity in the interview process itself? I wouldn't expect a cookie cutter process to result in much diversity of background or thought. > Whether someone's ability to solve these types of problems quickly is indicative of their skill level is a hot topic of debate One of the best interviewing tips I learned that has served me extremely well is to try disprove my impression of the candidate. It seems like this process entirely fails at that.
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    The problem is that companies also want an objective hiring process, because otherwise employee bias will seep in. The fact that these two issues are in opposition (plus the general recruiting pipeline issues) are why this is such a difficult problem to solve.
    - tchaffee 5y ago
      > The problem is that companies also want an objective hiring process Usually only at a very superficial level. Enough to comply with the law. And to be fair, some companies do have good intentions with a little extra effort and money put into diversity efforts. A truly objective hiring process would take into account that Joe and Charley who both got the same results on the coding test are not equally qualified if Joe grew up poor, with parents who never graduated high school, paid his own way through university by working full-time, and along with raising a child as a single parent. While Charley comes from a wealthy family and focused only on studying and job interview prep. With his parents passing along some of their own higher education to him as needed, connecting him to their large network for job opportunities, etc. Joe is obviously a better candidate. His starting line was far behind Charley's and yet he crossed the finish line at the same time. Joe would be a better candidate even if he passed the finish line a little after Charley. If you want a truly objective hiring process you need to look at starting lines, not just finish lines. Most companies are doing almost the opposite and only looking at the finish line. They want to look only at the skills and exclude the actual person in a misguided effort to be objective. All that really does it amplify existing societal bias and privilege by rewarding those who got the most breaks in life. > this is such a difficult problem to solve. Agreed. And it would be more expensive. Part of why the status quo is so hard to change. You've got to spend the money and do the work. Or take shortcuts and discriminate on one side or the other.

yardie 5y ago

There are a lot more people of color trying to break into the field than there are companies willing to hire them. There is a big difference between what they are saying and what they are implementing and I can say with absolute confidence that diversity is just lip service. FAANGs primarily recruit from other FAANGs. If none of those companies are diverse how are they going to diversify their recruitment?

snakeboy 5y ago
> FAANGs primarily recruit from other FAANGs How could that be? I was under the impression that a huge amount of new hires come in each year from fresh university graduates.
- yardie 5y ago
  Take Apple for example, out of the 600+ jobs posted on their career website only 19 even mention students. And some of those are actual student jobs: student outreach, student recruiters. If they have a different pipeline for recruiting students I'm not aware of it. If new graduate positions are only recruited at campus job fairs that has a greater potential to be worse. FAANGs haven't been recruiting from majority minority schhols or HBCUs.
- babyblueblanket 5y ago
  There was actually a big twitter thread by a black recruiter at Google (now cut) who out and out said that Google's interviewing engineers looked down on black seniors and ranked them universally lower than white seniors, particularly black seniors from historically black universities. She had to fight tooth and nail to accomplish getting the first black entry-level-from-college hire in all of Google's history.
  - rkk3 5y ago
    The thread https://twitter.com/realabril/status/1341135819487100928?lang=en https://twitter.com/realabril/status/1341135819487100928?lan... And it was specifically about hiring from HBU's vs other elite institutions, not about hiring black applicants in general which is how you described it.

Ensorceled 5y ago

> HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly This kind of implies that they don't actually hire diversely or the issue wouldn't be so dire ...

zzbzq 5y ago
It could also imply lack of candidates. Which is demonstrably true; they're not hiring from the general population they're hiring largely from universities, and you can look at those universities and see there's already an imbalance in demographics of the available job candidates.

throwtheworld 5y ago

> long as you pass the interviews. 40 applications and 2 resume consultations later and no interview even offered. Meanwhile, some guy you run circles around in real world programming/business experience is 8 for 10. My white classmates noticed this before I did because I’ve just accepted it as part of life.

akomtu 5y ago
Referrals is the secret sauce. Those 8/10 guys don't just send resumes to the public company address.

thinkcontext 5y ago

Your experience does not match research on the job market generally. Multiple studies show increased responses to resumes with "whitened" names. This is, of course, at odds with the white victimhood narrative that unqualified minorities are taking jobs, when it is in fact the opposite which is occurring. https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes-get-more-interviews https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...

Kranar 5y ago
I just went over the actual study itself and it does not support your claim: http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%20R2%20Accepted.pdf http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%... It's a sort of interesting read but nothing too dramatic and whether it's evidence of racism is subject to interpretation. What isn't subject to interpretation is the claim that the study shows that "whitened" names increase callbacks. On the contrary whitening names has no effect on callbacks as indicated on page 31: "Whitening the name only (versus not whitening at all) did not make a statistically significant difference for black applicants" The actual study shows that removing racial indicators from experience is what results in a gap in callbacks. So someone who represents themselves as the leader of their campus' "Black Student Business Association" is less likely to get a call back than someone who represented themselves as the leader of their campus' "Student Business Association". They refer to the removal of racial indicators as whitening but I think that's prematurely jumping to conclusions. The name aspect is certainly a form of whitening, since black names are being changed to white names. But it's premature to refer to the removal of racial indicators and making the experience racially neutral as a form of whitening. Other forms of experience that explicitly mention race result in less callbacks than when that same experience doesn't mention race. Whether this is racism or not can not be concluded strictly based off of the study's parameters. For example, if I were presented with one candidate who was in charge of the university's "Law Society" I would probably pick that person over someone who was in charge of that university's "Black Law Society", and I don't think I would be racist for doing so. I would consider being in charge of an organization that is open to all races or is independent of race as a more prestigious accomplishment than being in charge of an organization that is race specific. To test whether I was racist in my decision making, I would need to pick someone who was not in charge of anything over someone who was in charge of the "Black Law Society", with all else being equal. The study did not do this comparison and unfortunately the study does not present the raw data so there's no way for me to do this analysis myself. I could bicker about some of the methodological issues as well which are not exactly rigorous, as well as the fact that this study is not exactly pertinent to this conversation as they only looked at internships for jobs that are not technical in nature, with the bulk of them being sales and marketing, and customer service jobs, instead of engineering, computer science, law, or professional jobs. Ultimately no study is going to be perfect but one should not read too much into many of these studies. They are not nearly as rigorous or definitive as one would expect and furthermore they don't tend to generalize.

happythen 5y ago

> HR typically wants their diversity numbers up badly so if you're gay You're right, I always fail that interview question where they ask me what my sexual preference is and I say women... ...Seriously? you are just making stuff up now.