6 ms·
> How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a process like that? This is a straw-man. What company has to hire 50,000 engineers a year? Facebook h
by dvt 5y ago
> How are you supposed to hire 50,000 people a year with a process like that?
This is a straw-man. What company has to hire 50,000 engineers a year? Facebook has (in total) ~10,000 engineers (hired over a decade+). Someone has nothing published and no OSS? Great, ask for code samples and the candidate to walk you through the code. It's completely trivial to fix the busted status quo, but people are invested in this nonsense—there are entire companies that serve at the white-board interviewing altar (Triplebyte, Coderbyte, Hackerrank, Leetcode, Turing, Toptal).
- barry-cotter 5y agoIf it is completely trivial to fix the busted status quo you should be able to make a great deal of money doing so. Those companies you named exist to get people hired. If you have an alternative system that works you will be fishing from a different pool of candidates. That didn’t work for starfighter.io. If you can make it work for you you’ll get very rich.
- Apocryphon 5y agoDid any company even take Starfighter seriously? The companies the previous comment mentioned are at least used in industry. Even Google or ex-Google employees have gotten into this with Byteboard: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/26/byteboard-nabs-5m-seed-to-change-the-way-engineers-get-hired/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/26/byteboard-nabs-5m-seed-to-...
- jmchuster 5y agoIt's pretty simple to get a rough estimate of how many people you need to hire a year. You take your engineering count, say ~10,000, how long engineers stay at each company, say 4 years, and you come out to 2,500 engineers you need to hire every year, assuming you don't need to grow, to maintain the status quo. So then you take a larger company like google, with ~100,000 engineers, and they'll need to hire at least 25,000 engineers a year.
- erik_seaberg 5y agoGoogle’s average tenure was under three years (as of 2015 anyway), and their acceptance rate is famously below 1%, so they’re hiring at least 33k and screening three million. edit: I don’t know their boomerang rate, that might matter.
- lhorie 5y agoI think the more important overarching point is that most candidates aren't prolific github people like you, and likewise most companies are not going to cater their interviewing practices to woo your preferred flavor of interview style. Most candidates don't have code samples laying around (e.g. they only write proprietary code for work), so asking for some is a non-starter in a lot of cases. Another point worth of reflecting, your accomplishments in OSS say nothing of interviewing expertise, they are completely different skillsets. Companies may not hire in the order of 50k people a year, but interviewer calibration in a large org is absolutely a problem that isn't easily solved by just following the opinion of some random 6-digit salary SWE. As someone who's interviewed in the order of a few hundred senior SWEs, I think there are good and bad ways to go about any interview format, including leetcode-style. Complaining about how companies don't just throw away their interview practices in favor of [insert pet format here] doesn't really help, since it isn't really actionable. We talk about the perils of full software rewrites, I think similar concerns exist for hiring as well.
- ipaddr 5y agoWhat percentage of people study leetcode and can't provide coding sample vs can provide coding sample / have something on github / etc
- lhorie 5y agoAnecdotes are not data etc, but in my experience (hiring senior SWEs for a big tech co) less than 1 in 20 candidates have a link to github or side project listed in their resume. Distribution-wise, they seem to appear more frequently w/ younger candidates.