11 ms·

The article is concise but missing a lot of real-life examples: * The highest paying software companies employ LeetCode style interview. That is off-putting to

by didip 5y ago

The article is concise but missing a lot of real-life examples: * The highest paying software companies employ LeetCode style interview. That is off-putting to a lot of people even though the money would be super sweet to have. * Some wannabe startups also employ LeetCode style interview even though they don't pay anywhere near FAANG/Unicorns. * You know what's worst than LeetCode style interview? LeetCode style interview with really long rounds. It's super off-putting to be tossed around for weeks. * You know what's even worse than that? Lowball offer after completing the entire circus. * PIP culture is scary and it's hard to judge if the new company have it or not, except Amazon. We all know Amazon has PIP culture. * Long hour culture is not desirable and hard to judge. What's the point of making 20% more if you ended up working 40% more?

redisman 5y ago
> The highest paying software companies employ LeetCode style interview Ugh yeah it’s ridiculous. We can’t hire anyone! Have you considered not putting candidates through months of studying to memorize a bunch of algorithm tricks and then grilling them for 5-10 hours total on those? No - that’s not what the cargo cult manual says.
- jmchuster 5y ago
  I dunno if it's that ridiculous. Having to spend a couple of months studying to get a 100k raise, seems not a completely unfair trade.
  - pm90 5y ago
    It’s selecting for certain attributes that don’t have a major effect on job performance. I would actually paint it as pseudo scientific at this point.
    - nix9000 5y ago
      Leetcode questions are not really selecting for anything. It's mostly selecting against false positives.
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    You'll be working with other people who jumped over some arbitrary hurdle. What kind of team is that? Are you going to be surrounded by mentors? Free of bozos? In a world of competent executioners? Unlikely. Look at how terrible a lot of the products are that these companies make. They're fundamentally selecting for the wrong set of attributes. Look at the turnover rate - how many projects go nowhere and collapse, the quality of the output. Nobody ever leaves a job, they leave a team. The evidence is all around us that this process produces total shit results but it's become too much of a cult to change it. Whenever I'm looking around for potentially better work and I see companies doing that, I don't even bother. It doesn't lead to better teams, more competent execution or better products. Why on earth would I squander my time with some random ship of people who know how to do a sliding window? I'm sure they're all friendly, but we're doing hard things here and need the right mix. I mean what on earth, fix the fucking process and maybe they'll stop incinerating dumptrucks of money on badly executed technology
    - jmchuster 5y ago
      I don't know if FAANGs are so deserving of such vitriol. I would probably say that big companies overall just fundamentally have a set of issues, and FAANGs are probably above average in many aspects relative to the rest of the big ones. Now, if you prefer certain small companies, or other humanitarian or mission-focused ones, that's not a FAANG-specific complaint, in my mind. And just product-wise, it's just way too easy to find counterexamples, like, how worse would the world be off if there was never invented google, gmail, chrome, iphones. Before google, there was no reliable way to search the web. Before gmail, there was no such thing as a dynamic web application. Before chrome, we were stuck with microsoft making up their own standards with IE and an inconsistent web spec. Before iphone, we were stuck with feature phones. The list just goes on and on.
      - kristopolous 5y ago
        > google, gmail, chrome, iphones There's four excellent examples of things that were better 10 years ago before this practice was instituted. The youngest thing on that list (chrome) is 14 years old. Both Apple and Google used to not hire in this 3-4 interviews of canned programming question way. Then they did. Those products are now stagnating and deteriorating so much that it's obvious to everyone. If you think it's exclusively a FAANG practice, you're mistaken. There's tiny firms that do it and really large ones that don't. Bringing the worst practices of standardized testing into the tech hiring process produces the same kinds of problems that standardized testing does elsewhere. Silicon Valley used to be better than this. It's a dumb arbitrary ceremony - might as well be a physical challenge from Nickelodeon's Double Dare. (Also your narrative history is wrong, but that's not the point)
  - mcv 5y ago
    Spending a couple of months for a guaranteed 100k raise would be great. Spending those months for a tiny chance of that raise would not.
    - jmchuster 5y ago
      I thought the idea was that if you didn't spend months studying, you'd only have a tiny chance, regardless of how skilled you were. And that the months of studying is what's then required on top to get that offer from at least one of the big five you apply for. That I commonly see complaints about how other people "without" skill were getting job offers just because they put in the months studying, seems to indicate that it's actually quite a generous chance.
  - daniel-cussen 5y ago
    If you get it.
  - IAmNotAFix 5y ago
    That's the first interview. They usually test your ability to design systems and stuff in a second interview.
  - whiskyant 5y ago
    Yup, don’t regret spending 2 months for a $250k raise one bit. The vast majority of tech companies including startups are asking algorithm style questions these days. It’s adapt or die.
digianarchist 5y ago
The companies that pay 80% of FAANG salaries without the LeetCode whiteboard bullshit are out there.
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  Can confirm, we do a low-pressure, non-timed, non-puzzle, somewhat realistic, short take-home exercise. But we don't (and can't) add 20+% to your salary in RSUs.
  - optymizer 5y ago
    20% seems very low to me. In the 2 FAANG's I've worked at, the RSU's ended up being 100+% of my salary (which was average for my level).
    - BoorishBears 5y ago
      Initial grant was 100% of one year's salary you mean right? So +25% of yearly salary before appreciation? Otherwise you're saying something like a 250k base, 1MM RSUs before stock appreciation... which is a very lopsided looking offer
      - chillacy 5y ago
        It can be over 100% per year depending on level (more senior = more equity). Check out https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ If you're senior L5, it can be around 100% per year even before appreciation. Above that and it starts going above 100% per year.
      - pm90 5y ago
        This is actually a common offer. Some companies that wanna continue to offer high compensation without this upfront sticker cost are now resorting to one year rather than 4 year grants (stripe, Lyft).
        5y ago
tjpnz 5y ago
>* The highest paying software companies employ LeetCode style interview. That is off-putting to a lot of people even though the money would be super sweet to have. Not only off-putting but out of reach to older engineers with family responsibilities. I would also add that the value proposition for working at a FAANG isn't nearly as competitive if based outside the US.
- didip 5y ago
  I agree. I would go as far as saying that LeetCode interview is biased against older engineers with families. Especially young families.
  - voakbasda 5y ago
    What?! Age discrimination in the software industry??? Say it isn’t so!!! Seriously though, your insight is astonishingly spot on: LeetCode is a perfectly legal means of practicing age/lifestyle discrimination. Yet another innovative Silicon Valley dark pattern. Why is this the first I’m hearing it characterized this way?
    - el_benhameen 5y ago
      Yeah, this is so obvious once it's stated this way, but I'd never thought of it like that either. Every time I talk to prospective employers and they wax about their rapid fire technical challenges and 5-round interview processes that last six weeks, I wonder "how the hell do they expect someone with other commitments to do all of this?" And the answer is ... they don't!
    - kristopolous 5y ago
      They ask questions that kids are taught at 18/19. It's almost shocking; this is how you're selecting? People that are in their 40s aren't confused by the question but are more confused by why it's the question as being able to answer it is so disconnected from any metric of competency or quality. It'd be like saying "so you have an engineering degree, oh a masters from 20 years ago. Cool, remember Lagrange multipliers and Hamiltonians? I'm sure you do. Here's a problem. You have 10 minutes" That's why we keep seeing the failures of the past repeat. Tech selects for people too young to know it and too arrogant to study it.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
PIP culture? Google isn't giving me any answers here.
- square_usual 5y ago
  PIP stands for "Performance Improvement Plan". PIPs are a relatively common tool to give employees advance notice about getting fired, but Amazon has a notably brutal setup that uses stack ranking. Described here: https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/kh9ztt/can_someone_explain_this_pip_deal_with_amazon_i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/kh9ztt/can_someon...
  - harshaw 5y ago
    posting just as an acecdote, but as a AWS HM PIP is only used for really really obvious under performers. Honestly, one regret is not putting under performers on a plan fast enough because it is a big drag on team morale when someone isn't pulling their weight.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  Picture in Picture is the most common use of the acronym, but here they mean performance improvement plan, which in many places is basically a kiss of death.
  - erwincoumans 5y ago
    or pip install :)
- hellisothers 5y ago
  “Performance Improvement Plan”, it’s what you get put on when your company wants to fire you but wants to show due diligence that they tried to give you a chance so you can’t sue them. By “PIP Culture” I take it to mean Amazon where the expectation is some % of the team is always expected to be fired so PIPs are a frequent occurrence.
carabiner 5y ago
People have been bitching about LC interviews for 10 years. That's eons in tech, yet companies continue to use it. Maybe, because it works extremely well? Tech companies are taking it in more every year.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  More likely it works "good enough" rather than extremely well.
- pm90 5y ago
  People have been bitching about a lot of things for a long time and they’re still in use… amount of bitching is just not correlated with anything.
- aeternum 5y ago
  Depends on how you define works. It does effectively filter the people that can't code, but it also filters a lot of people that can code and just can't or don't care to do it under time or environment pressure. In the past that was fine, candidate pool was large enough that a heavy-handed filter was okay. That may be changing.
  - ridaj 5y ago
    > Depends on how you define works. It does effectively filter the people that can't code, but it also filters a lot of people that can code and just can't or don't care to do it under time or environment pressure. It is much more important for a company to filter out likely low performers than it is to avoid filtering out likely high performers, because the costs of hiring an incompetent person are enormous. Not only do they not produce as much, they eat up others' bandwidth by asking too many questions, implementing super buggy code, or not communicating effectively. They make other people on the team feel like they're not pulling their weight. They're a pain to fire depending on company culture and laws. This process is designed to overfilter and maintain an A-player roster as much as possible, vs putting butts in seats. It's hard to tell whether the pool is exhausted here - by some indications, there's a lot of attrition but also a lot of hiring...
shahbaby 5y ago
* The people who end up winning your Leetcode interview will have the least amount of trouble leaving your company. That's why if you're a small start up, trying to hire like Google is the dumbest thing you can do.
clement_b 5y ago
Can you define PIP, please?
- colordrops 5y ago
  "Performance Improvement Plan". The "PIP culture" mentioned is a culture where there is an (perhaps unspoken) quota of people that need to be put on PIPs, so they are quick to pull the trigger. Very uncomfortable as it keeps people on edge.
- Doxin 5y ago
  Personal Improvement Plan. Usually used as either a blunt instrument to goad people into working harder or a sneaky way to fire people. Topped with a sauce of double-speak of course.
- dmitris 5y ago
  Performance Improvement Plan https://www.perkbox.com/uk/resources/blog/a-complete-guide-to-performance-improvement-plans https://www.perkbox.com/uk/resources/blog/a-complete-guide-t...
solididiot 5y ago
There's something much worse than Leetcode. Take home unpaid long projects that end up in rejection or lowball offers.
- TurboHaskal 5y ago
  Definitely. My last job prospect would have required me to lock myself in the room for a weekend or more doing a chain of low dopamine tasks. I have done take home projects before, which often resulted in low ball offers. At most it made me angry for the time wasted, but now having children I just don't even bother anymore.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I had a take-home assignment not long ago for some... dodgy recruitment-consultancy-disguised-as-training company. It was the exact same assignment as my previous employer used ten years ago. Ended up just showing and talking about my current project, which is basically the same thing.
valenterry 5y ago
Yeah - if a company does leetcode and cannot justify it, I'm out. One justification would be that the job actually requires understanding/writing a lot of algorithmic and very performance sensitive code, but that's not the case for the vast majority of jobs. And I do the same for all other parts of an interview too. If I were asked to knit a scarf during the interview process, my reaction would be similar.
vkk8 5y ago
Related to the last point: There is no way to estimate how much work a new job is in reality. I'm currently working 10-20 hours a week remotely. I think my salary could be improved, but taking a risk of actually having to put in 40 hours or more of work every week is not worth the small(ish) increase I could reasonably get by changing jobs.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
quickthrower2 5y ago
Looking at it internationally, I could earn 3x by FAANGing in the US, but I would be on a sponsored visa and massively disrupt my life if fired. The risk factors put me off. Money should be a big factor. Imagine a job where year 1 you work and year 2,3 you get to do whatever you like and own 100% of the equity. That is what 3x TC basically could mean.

by didip 5y ago

redisman 5y ago

> The highest paying software companies employ LeetCode style interview Ugh yeah it’s ridiculous. We can’t hire anyone! Have you considered not putting candidates through months of studying to memorize a bunch of algorithm tricks and then grilling them for 5-10 hours total on those? No - that’s not what the cargo cult manual says.

jmchuster 5y ago
I dunno if it's that ridiculous. Having to spend a couple of months studying to get a 100k raise, seems not a completely unfair trade.
- pm90 5y ago
  It’s selecting for certain attributes that don’t have a major effect on job performance. I would actually paint it as pseudo scientific at this point.
  - nix9000 5y ago
    Leetcode questions are not really selecting for anything. It's mostly selecting against false positives.
- kristopolous 5y ago
  You'll be working with other people who jumped over some arbitrary hurdle. What kind of team is that? Are you going to be surrounded by mentors? Free of bozos? In a world of competent executioners? Unlikely. Look at how terrible a lot of the products are that these companies make. They're fundamentally selecting for the wrong set of attributes. Look at the turnover rate - how many projects go nowhere and collapse, the quality of the output. Nobody ever leaves a job, they leave a team. The evidence is all around us that this process produces total shit results but it's become too much of a cult to change it. Whenever I'm looking around for potentially better work and I see companies doing that, I don't even bother. It doesn't lead to better teams, more competent execution or better products. Why on earth would I squander my time with some random ship of people who know how to do a sliding window? I'm sure they're all friendly, but we're doing hard things here and need the right mix. I mean what on earth, fix the fucking process and maybe they'll stop incinerating dumptrucks of money on badly executed technology
  - jmchuster 5y ago
    I don't know if FAANGs are so deserving of such vitriol. I would probably say that big companies overall just fundamentally have a set of issues, and FAANGs are probably above average in many aspects relative to the rest of the big ones. Now, if you prefer certain small companies, or other humanitarian or mission-focused ones, that's not a FAANG-specific complaint, in my mind. And just product-wise, it's just way too easy to find counterexamples, like, how worse would the world be off if there was never invented google, gmail, chrome, iphones. Before google, there was no reliable way to search the web. Before gmail, there was no such thing as a dynamic web application. Before chrome, we were stuck with microsoft making up their own standards with IE and an inconsistent web spec. Before iphone, we were stuck with feature phones. The list just goes on and on.
    - kristopolous 5y ago
      > google, gmail, chrome, iphones There's four excellent examples of things that were better 10 years ago before this practice was instituted. The youngest thing on that list (chrome) is 14 years old. Both Apple and Google used to not hire in this 3-4 interviews of canned programming question way. Then they did. Those products are now stagnating and deteriorating so much that it's obvious to everyone. If you think it's exclusively a FAANG practice, you're mistaken. There's tiny firms that do it and really large ones that don't. Bringing the worst practices of standardized testing into the tech hiring process produces the same kinds of problems that standardized testing does elsewhere. Silicon Valley used to be better than this. It's a dumb arbitrary ceremony - might as well be a physical challenge from Nickelodeon's Double Dare. (Also your narrative history is wrong, but that's not the point)
- mcv 5y ago
  Spending a couple of months for a guaranteed 100k raise would be great. Spending those months for a tiny chance of that raise would not.
  - jmchuster 5y ago
    I thought the idea was that if you didn't spend months studying, you'd only have a tiny chance, regardless of how skilled you were. And that the months of studying is what's then required on top to get that offer from at least one of the big five you apply for. That I commonly see complaints about how other people "without" skill were getting job offers just because they put in the months studying, seems to indicate that it's actually quite a generous chance.
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  If you get it.
- IAmNotAFix 5y ago
  That's the first interview. They usually test your ability to design systems and stuff in a second interview.
- whiskyant 5y ago
  Yup, don’t regret spending 2 months for a $250k raise one bit. The vast majority of tech companies including startups are asking algorithm style questions these days. It’s adapt or die.

digianarchist 5y ago

The companies that pay 80% of FAANG salaries without the LeetCode whiteboard bullshit are out there.

reikonomusha 5y ago
Can confirm, we do a low-pressure, non-timed, non-puzzle, somewhat realistic, short take-home exercise. But we don't (and can't) add 20+% to your salary in RSUs.
- optymizer 5y ago
  20% seems very low to me. In the 2 FAANG's I've worked at, the RSU's ended up being 100+% of my salary (which was average for my level).
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    Initial grant was 100% of one year's salary you mean right? So +25% of yearly salary before appreciation? Otherwise you're saying something like a 250k base, 1MM RSUs before stock appreciation... which is a very lopsided looking offer
    - chillacy 5y ago
      It can be over 100% per year depending on level (more senior = more equity). Check out https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ If you're senior L5, it can be around 100% per year even before appreciation. Above that and it starts going above 100% per year.
    - pm90 5y ago
      This is actually a common offer. Some companies that wanna continue to offer high compensation without this upfront sticker cost are now resorting to one year rather than 4 year grants (stripe, Lyft).
      - 5y ago

tjpnz 5y ago

>* The highest paying software companies employ LeetCode style interview. That is off-putting to a lot of people even though the money would be super sweet to have. Not only off-putting but out of reach to older engineers with family responsibilities. I would also add that the value proposition for working at a FAANG isn't nearly as competitive if based outside the US.

didip 5y ago
I agree. I would go as far as saying that LeetCode interview is biased against older engineers with families. Especially young families.
- voakbasda 5y ago
  What?! Age discrimination in the software industry??? Say it isn’t so!!! Seriously though, your insight is astonishingly spot on: LeetCode is a perfectly legal means of practicing age/lifestyle discrimination. Yet another innovative Silicon Valley dark pattern. Why is this the first I’m hearing it characterized this way?
  - el_benhameen 5y ago
    Yeah, this is so obvious once it's stated this way, but I'd never thought of it like that either. Every time I talk to prospective employers and they wax about their rapid fire technical challenges and 5-round interview processes that last six weeks, I wonder "how the hell do they expect someone with other commitments to do all of this?" And the answer is ... they don't!
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    They ask questions that kids are taught at 18/19. It's almost shocking; this is how you're selecting? People that are in their 40s aren't confused by the question but are more confused by why it's the question as being able to answer it is so disconnected from any metric of competency or quality. It'd be like saying "so you have an engineering degree, oh a masters from 20 years ago. Cool, remember Lagrange multipliers and Hamiltonians? I'm sure you do. Here's a problem. You have 10 minutes" That's why we keep seeing the failures of the past repeat. Tech selects for people too young to know it and too arrogant to study it.

UncleOxidant 5y ago

PIP culture? Google isn't giving me any answers here.

square_usual 5y ago
PIP stands for "Performance Improvement Plan". PIPs are a relatively common tool to give employees advance notice about getting fired, but Amazon has a notably brutal setup that uses stack ranking. Described here: https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/kh9ztt/can_someone_explain_this_pip_deal_with_amazon_i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/kh9ztt/can_someon...
- harshaw 5y ago
  posting just as an acecdote, but as a AWS HM PIP is only used for really really obvious under performers. Honestly, one regret is not putting under performers on a plan fast enough because it is a big drag on team morale when someone isn't pulling their weight.
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
Picture in Picture is the most common use of the acronym, but here they mean performance improvement plan, which in many places is basically a kiss of death.
- erwincoumans 5y ago
  or pip install :)
hellisothers 5y ago
“Performance Improvement Plan”, it’s what you get put on when your company wants to fire you but wants to show due diligence that they tried to give you a chance so you can’t sue them. By “PIP Culture” I take it to mean Amazon where the expectation is some % of the team is always expected to be fired so PIPs are a frequent occurrence.

carabiner 5y ago

People have been bitching about LC interviews for 10 years. That's eons in tech, yet companies continue to use it. Maybe, because it works extremely well? Tech companies are taking it in more every year.

Apocryphon 5y ago
More likely it works "good enough" rather than extremely well.
pm90 5y ago
People have been bitching about a lot of things for a long time and they’re still in use… amount of bitching is just not correlated with anything.
aeternum 5y ago
Depends on how you define works. It does effectively filter the people that can't code, but it also filters a lot of people that can code and just can't or don't care to do it under time or environment pressure. In the past that was fine, candidate pool was large enough that a heavy-handed filter was okay. That may be changing.
- ridaj 5y ago
  > Depends on how you define works. It does effectively filter the people that can't code, but it also filters a lot of people that can code and just can't or don't care to do it under time or environment pressure. It is much more important for a company to filter out likely low performers than it is to avoid filtering out likely high performers, because the costs of hiring an incompetent person are enormous. Not only do they not produce as much, they eat up others' bandwidth by asking too many questions, implementing super buggy code, or not communicating effectively. They make other people on the team feel like they're not pulling their weight. They're a pain to fire depending on company culture and laws. This process is designed to overfilter and maintain an A-player roster as much as possible, vs putting butts in seats. It's hard to tell whether the pool is exhausted here - by some indications, there's a lot of attrition but also a lot of hiring...

shahbaby 5y ago

* The people who end up winning your Leetcode interview will have the least amount of trouble leaving your company. That's why if you're a small start up, trying to hire like Google is the dumbest thing you can do.

clement_b 5y ago

Can you define PIP, please?

colordrops 5y ago
"Performance Improvement Plan". The "PIP culture" mentioned is a culture where there is an (perhaps unspoken) quota of people that need to be put on PIPs, so they are quick to pull the trigger. Very uncomfortable as it keeps people on edge.
Doxin 5y ago
Personal Improvement Plan. Usually used as either a blunt instrument to goad people into working harder or a sneaky way to fire people. Topped with a sauce of double-speak of course.
dmitris 5y ago
Performance Improvement Plan https://www.perkbox.com/uk/resources/blog/a-complete-guide-to-performance-improvement-plans https://www.perkbox.com/uk/resources/blog/a-complete-guide-t...

solididiot 5y ago

There's something much worse than Leetcode. Take home unpaid long projects that end up in rejection or lowball offers.

TurboHaskal 5y ago
Definitely. My last job prospect would have required me to lock myself in the room for a weekend or more doing a chain of low dopamine tasks. I have done take home projects before, which often resulted in low ball offers. At most it made me angry for the time wasted, but now having children I just don't even bother anymore.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I had a take-home assignment not long ago for some... dodgy recruitment-consultancy-disguised-as-training company. It was the exact same assignment as my previous employer used ten years ago. Ended up just showing and talking about my current project, which is basically the same thing.

valenterry 5y ago

Yeah - if a company does leetcode and cannot justify it, I'm out. One justification would be that the job actually requires understanding/writing a lot of algorithmic and very performance sensitive code, but that's not the case for the vast majority of jobs. And I do the same for all other parts of an interview too. If I were asked to knit a scarf during the interview process, my reaction would be similar.

vkk8 5y ago

Related to the last point: There is no way to estimate how much work a new job is in reality. I'm currently working 10-20 hours a week remotely. I think my salary could be improved, but taking a risk of actually having to put in 40 hours or more of work every week is not worth the small(ish) increase I could reasonably get by changing jobs.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

quickthrower2 5y ago

Looking at it internationally, I could earn 3x by FAANGing in the US, but I would be on a sponsored visa and massively disrupt my life if fired. The risk factors put me off. Money should be a big factor. Imagine a job where year 1 you work and year 2,3 you get to do whatever you like and own 100% of the equity. That is what 3x TC basically could mean.