5 ms·

One big issue with tech hiring is that the vast majority of the interview pool consists of terrible candidates. Good candidates get callbacks for (almost) every

One big issue with tech hiring is that the vast majority of the interview pool consists of terrible candidates. Good candidates get callbacks for (almost) every job they apply for, choose to interview at a few select companies, and get offers from most of the places they interview at. Thus, they’re only briefly in the interview pool. On the other hand, terrible candidates are constantly getting rejected at every step of the process, and must continually re-insert themselves into the interview pool, and thus comprise the vast majority of interviewees. Because of this, the interview process is not designed to efficiently handle the minority of qualified candidates, but rather efficiently weed out the majority of horrible candidates. It is therefore a terrible process for the people actually qualified to pass it. (Note that the majority of the interview pool being terrible does not mean the majority of programmers are terrible. Assume 80% of developers are great, and 20% are bad. If the great 80% of developers only need to interview at one company to get an offer, while the bad 20% need to interview at 10 companies before either getting an offer or giving up, then only 0.8/(0.2*10+0.8)=28% of actual interviews will be with qualified candidates.)

tomp 5y ago
Interesting, my experience is the opposite. I find various leetcode and "software architecture" questions extremely hit-or-miss, and my experience interviewing is, either I fail at the very beginning stages (CV review or first 2 interviews), or get to the end (offer stage). The very bimodal distribution is inconsistent with both options in your hypothesis (i.e. either the "terrible" or the "good" candidate).
- trhway 5y ago
  >The very bimodal distribution is inconsistent with both options in your hypothesis (i.e. either the "terrible" or the "good" candidate). it is completely consistent. When you fail at the very beginning you're a "terrible" and when you get offer you're a "good" one. The "terrible"/"good" isn't innate characteristic, it is in the eyes of beholder ... err ... interviewer. Most places pride themselves on taking only top 1|2%, and thus most candidates at any given place are "terrible" by definition, and thus the interview is built as the filter described by GP. Of course everybody hiring top 1% means that pretty much anybody would get to be a "good" at some place.
- a4a4a4a4 5y ago
  > either I fail at the very beginning stages (CV review or first 2 interviews), or get to the end (offer stage). I can echo this, same experience here and ended up landing a nice role at a big company while being rejected for objectively worse roles at tiny companies and startups. For the last round of applications, I applied to 10-15 companies, only got an interview with 2 and got an offer from both (and both raised their offers to counter the other).
decafninja 5y ago
Many engineers who I know as friends/excoworkers who are in top companies (including but not limited to FAANG) barely eeked by into their job, usually with a large string of failed interviews behind them. All of them consider themselves extremely lucky that they landed a job at a great company and believe that if they had to re-interview for the same position, odds are much more likely they'd utterly fail it. Yet they are currently working at highly respected top tech companies and are accorded a certain "elite" status by many of their peers at less prestigious/selective companies. My best friend is at Netflix and constantly dreads ever having to interview for another job again because he's dead certain he will bomb the leetcode rounds because he hasn't looked at an leetcode problem in five years. Even his current job at Netflix he considers having obtained through sheer luck, and he says none of his experience working at Netflix is of any help in solving leetcode problems. I quite often hear stories on here, Blind, Reddit, etc. of people who manage to land multiple simultaneous offers from FAANGMULA+ but have yet to meet such a person.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > because he hasn't looked at an leetcode problem in five years Am I the only one who feels like he could spend a week preparing and shred through any sort of reasonable algorithmic problem testing anybody would throw at me?
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    When is the last time you touched algos before?
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Of course not, but why would anyone assume that me, married, with children and a full time job has any inclination whatsoever to spend a whole week going over a bunch of stuff I’ll most likely never use again. First of all, I want to spend my limited free time doing other (fun) things, but more importantly, it insults my pride.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    You never know what they’ll ask, so full prep is impossible.
flerchin 5y ago
Yes. The market is tight, and mostly full of un-hireables.
bgro 5y ago
"Good candidates." I guess everyone who gets stuck in interview hell is an idiot based on your comment? Why would someone who's not trash get stuck? They wouldn't, I guess! Must be trash engineers just out there wasting everybody's time! I am awful at tech interviews. I mess up leetcode and puzzle questions even aimed for new hires. I get stuck on the wording in the question where the interviewer takes it personally if I don't understand. Sometimes I get my languages mixed up in google docs with no syntax assistance and for example could declare a new java String as a var string javascript style because I got distracted while talking to the interviewer. I have 5-10 years working as a software engineer / architect. I am frequently put on critical projects, including running 10's of thousands of critical government servers. When tech leads quit, I fill in the gap. In an actual business setting, I'm great at picking up new languages. I frequently code review the work from our top engineers and always find spots for big optimization or critical flaws, such as security issues. I'm not nitpicking for little changes-- These are real considerations. I've done front end work, back end work, created template code for other engineers, worked with the senior sql developers, senior security staff, the original legacy coders, and the senior devops on scripts. I get put on projects where I'm the only one, and been on teams of up to 20 people. I also monitored splunk and had every error sorted out: New errors I could identify the exact code spot and the original PR in minutes to fix problems. I did this on the side to monitor my work and was asked to speak to the entire engineer team on multiple occasions to get others up to speed. I'm naturally "good" at a lot of things. I hate any degree of bragging like this. I'm so tired of seeing engineers brag about themselves-- It sounds like they're dismissing everybody else's skills. But this comment is just to just show I'm not someone who comes in and can't figure out an easy story and who refuses to try to ask for help or learn on their own and they just give up work as soon as possible. I legitimately try and put a lot of effort in to my work, and I figure it out. But none of this matters in the current process.
- stnmtn 5y ago
  You don't have to say how great of an engineer you are to say that you think coding interviews are terrible. And the person you're responding to also agrees they are terrible for qualified candidates.

tomp 5y ago

Interesting, my experience is the opposite. I find various leetcode and "software architecture" questions extremely hit-or-miss, and my experience interviewing is, either I fail at the very beginning stages (CV review or first 2 interviews), or get to the end (offer stage). The very bimodal distribution is inconsistent with both options in your hypothesis (i.e. either the "terrible" or the "good" candidate).

trhway 5y ago
>The very bimodal distribution is inconsistent with both options in your hypothesis (i.e. either the "terrible" or the "good" candidate). it is completely consistent. When you fail at the very beginning you're a "terrible" and when you get offer you're a "good" one. The "terrible"/"good" isn't innate characteristic, it is in the eyes of beholder ... err ... interviewer. Most places pride themselves on taking only top 1|2%, and thus most candidates at any given place are "terrible" by definition, and thus the interview is built as the filter described by GP. Of course everybody hiring top 1% means that pretty much anybody would get to be a "good" at some place.
a4a4a4a4 5y ago
> either I fail at the very beginning stages (CV review or first 2 interviews), or get to the end (offer stage). I can echo this, same experience here and ended up landing a nice role at a big company while being rejected for objectively worse roles at tiny companies and startups. For the last round of applications, I applied to 10-15 companies, only got an interview with 2 and got an offer from both (and both raised their offers to counter the other).

decafninja 5y ago

Many engineers who I know as friends/excoworkers who are in top companies (including but not limited to FAANG) barely eeked by into their job, usually with a large string of failed interviews behind them. All of them consider themselves extremely lucky that they landed a job at a great company and believe that if they had to re-interview for the same position, odds are much more likely they'd utterly fail it. Yet they are currently working at highly respected top tech companies and are accorded a certain "elite" status by many of their peers at less prestigious/selective companies. My best friend is at Netflix and constantly dreads ever having to interview for another job again because he's dead certain he will bomb the leetcode rounds because he hasn't looked at an leetcode problem in five years. Even his current job at Netflix he considers having obtained through sheer luck, and he says none of his experience working at Netflix is of any help in solving leetcode problems. I quite often hear stories on here, Blind, Reddit, etc. of people who manage to land multiple simultaneous offers from FAANGMULA+ but have yet to meet such a person.

commandlinefan 5y ago
> because he hasn't looked at an leetcode problem in five years Am I the only one who feels like he could spend a week preparing and shred through any sort of reasonable algorithmic problem testing anybody would throw at me?
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  When is the last time you touched algos before?
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Of course not, but why would anyone assume that me, married, with children and a full time job has any inclination whatsoever to spend a whole week going over a bunch of stuff I’ll most likely never use again. First of all, I want to spend my limited free time doing other (fun) things, but more importantly, it insults my pride.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  You never know what they’ll ask, so full prep is impossible.

flerchin 5y ago

Yes. The market is tight, and mostly full of un-hireables.

bgro 5y ago

"Good candidates." I guess everyone who gets stuck in interview hell is an idiot based on your comment? Why would someone who's not trash get stuck? They wouldn't, I guess! Must be trash engineers just out there wasting everybody's time! I am awful at tech interviews. I mess up leetcode and puzzle questions even aimed for new hires. I get stuck on the wording in the question where the interviewer takes it personally if I don't understand. Sometimes I get my languages mixed up in google docs with no syntax assistance and for example could declare a new java String as a var string javascript style because I got distracted while talking to the interviewer. I have 5-10 years working as a software engineer / architect. I am frequently put on critical projects, including running 10's of thousands of critical government servers. When tech leads quit, I fill in the gap. In an actual business setting, I'm great at picking up new languages. I frequently code review the work from our top engineers and always find spots for big optimization or critical flaws, such as security issues. I'm not nitpicking for little changes-- These are real considerations. I've done front end work, back end work, created template code for other engineers, worked with the senior sql developers, senior security staff, the original legacy coders, and the senior devops on scripts. I get put on projects where I'm the only one, and been on teams of up to 20 people. I also monitored splunk and had every error sorted out: New errors I could identify the exact code spot and the original PR in minutes to fix problems. I did this on the side to monitor my work and was asked to speak to the entire engineer team on multiple occasions to get others up to speed. I'm naturally "good" at a lot of things. I hate any degree of bragging like this. I'm so tired of seeing engineers brag about themselves-- It sounds like they're dismissing everybody else's skills. But this comment is just to just show I'm not someone who comes in and can't figure out an easy story and who refuses to try to ask for help or learn on their own and they just give up work as soon as possible. I legitimately try and put a lot of effort in to my work, and I figure it out. But none of this matters in the current process.

stnmtn 5y ago
You don't have to say how great of an engineer you are to say that you think coding interviews are terrible. And the person you're responding to also agrees they are terrible for qualified candidates.