5 ms·

Author here. Yes, the skills are left to the interpretation of the interviewer, but most of our interviewers are senior engineers at FAANG. We've done quite a b

• TurkTurkleton 5y ago
  > Also, if I ever use "rockstar" or "ninja" in my posts, I hope someone finds me on the street and punches me in the face. I'd deserve it. Are you sure you'll never find yourself blogging about bands' flamboyant frontmen (or frontwomen), or covert agents in feudal Japan?
  • leeny 5y ago
    HAH.
• kieselguhr_kid 5y ago
  Is there any statistical reason I should assume an interviewer at FAANG has some kind of special insight into what good technical and communication skills are? Were any attempts made to adjust for demographic biases? Is it possible, for instance, that Dropbox engineers are disproportionately taller white dudes with nice hair? I know that sounds a bit unserious, but all of those factors would increase the likelihood of a higher score. I appreciate that you never used "rockstar" or "ninja". That dig was a bit unfair of me.
  • leeny 5y ago
    no, we didn't adjust for demographic biases because, look, we're an anonymous platform. we periodically survey our users to get demographic data, but it's not something we ask in the app because we've never been able to resolve "tell me your race & gender" with "hey we're anonymous, and you'll be judged on your performance and nothing else". last thing i want is to perpetuate stereotype threat inadvertently. it's possible to do this right, i think, but we haven't gotten there yet.
    • kieselguhr_kid 5y ago
      The point about stereotype threat is valid, although it also means that we're unable to get any insight into a major axis of interview performance. I think what we have here is an attempt to imply, consciously or not, a causal link between interview success and previous/current employment. But without drilling into the other factors underlying their success, we get a lot of noise and not enough signal. Couple that with the continued mythologizing of FAANG greatness, and you get an article that perpetuates two of the more toxic notions in tech: FAANG is the top of a pyramid and talent is concentrated in a handful of companies. Neither are true, and neither are probably your intent, but that's how this reads.
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  I suppose Douglas Hofstadter is en route to punch you right now
• CobrastanJorji 5y ago
  FAANG interviewer here. I've conducted many hundreds of interviews for multiple FAANG companies. The totality of my training in how to interview is about 4 hours (when I combine the training of each company). I have zero confidence in the usefulness of calibrating my answers and expect that neither I nor anyone else who does this would reliably score the same person with the same score most of the time, outside of a small percentage of outlier candidates.
  • commandlinefan 5y ago
    > The totality of my training in how to interview is about 4 hours Well, FWIW, that's 4 more hours than any of the rest of us...
  • smrtinsert 5y ago
    Props to the honesty
    • CobrastanJorji 5y ago
      Just to argue against myself, I do think that if enough interviewers interview a candidate, you will get an aggregate score that will give you a pretty good sense of how well that candidate is likely to do on other interviews, and I have found that candidates that do well on these interviews tend to make good employees, although that's based only on the fact that everybody I work with has passed one of these interviews and they've mostly been pretty good employees. I suspect a lot of people who fail these interviews would also make pretty good employees, but I'll never know.
      • kspacewalk2 5y ago
        >I suspect a lot of people who fail these interviews would also make pretty good employees, but I'll never know. Why don't you take a leap of faith once in a while on someone who hasn't done well? Especially if you ever interview interns and have a bunch on that team, that's a near zero-cost gamble for a large corp.
• junon 5y ago
  > senior engineers at FAANG This means absolutely nothing. It's a well known fact that SV titles hold next to no weight.
  • ThrowawayR2 5y ago
    > "It's a well known fact that SV titles hold next to no weight." Except at FAANG; the rewards are so great that the competition is fierce. Whether they gained their levels through engineering ability or savvy politicking, you can be sure they are adept in at least one of the two.
    • junon 5y ago
      This reads like satire.
  • ummonk 5y ago
    If only someone had told all the recruiters who didn't start hitting me up until I had a FAANG on my resume.
    • junon 5y ago
      That's not what I meant.
      • ummonk 5y ago
        Ah I see what you meant now. I don't think the GP was referring to titles when they said "senior" - I'm pretty sure they meant experienced engineers.
    • Dylan16807 5y ago
      Having a FAANG on your resume is a whole different topic from whether the title you had there had "senior" in it.
• potatolicious 5y ago
  > "but most of our interviewers are senior engineers at FAANG" Wait, so the result is that "interviewers from FAANG companies rate highly interviewees from FAANG (and FAANG-adjacent) companies"? Or maybe more causally: "those who have already passed FAANG-style interviews are more likely to pass interviews conducted by FAANG people"? I appreciate the mission here - but if the idea here is to give people a fair shot even if they don't have the pedigree of FAANG, building FAANG interview styles into the system seems counter to your stated goals. If anything these results are concerning - you can interpret the findings in (at least) two ways: - these companies hire or produce superior engineers, the results you got are indicative of a broader higher caliber of engineer in those companies. - the interviewing exercise is optimizing for "people who can pass/have already passed FAANG-style interviews", which rolls in all of the myriad biases of FAANG hiring and perpetuates them.