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The tech interview prep industry

149 points by otras 5y ago

thaumasiotes 5y ago
There's one very significant difference between standardized tests and tech interviews. Standardized tests are designed such that preparing for the test isn't helpful. Current tech interviews aren't like that at all.
- planetsprite 5y ago
  >Preparing for the test isn't helpful Then in your opinion are all the SAT prep books useless?
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Yes, the SAT prep industry is nearly entirely fraudulent. People will pay you for something they want, regardless of whether you can actually give it to them.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Perhaps to the degree that it presents expensive in person classes as a much superior alternative to using a test prep book for motivated people.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        This is an extensively studied question. The effect of preparation on score is negligible whenever anyone tries to measure it.
    - someguydave 5y ago
      I have noticed that people generally really hate the idea that test prep for the SAT does not really work. (parent was downvoted) I’m not entirely sure why that is.
- RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
  > Standardized tests are designed such that preparing for the test isn't helpful. Not quite --- "preparing for the test" is also known as "studying". You were probably thinking of IQ tests.
  - drc500free 5y ago
    There's also an industry to prepare kids for IQ tests, since gifted placement depends on it, and college admissions depends on gifted placement, and .... so on.
  - rahimnathwani 5y ago
    GP is mistaken for sure. But I think there's a difference between preparing for a specific test, and studying in general. Let's say you have 2 days left to study for the GMAT. You could study the relevant math, reasoning or whatever. That might help. But you'd do far better by working through problems in a Princeton Review GMAT book, and looking at their tips for the questions you got wrong. The tips might be generic test-taking tips (e.g. eliminate obviously wrong answers) or they might be more specific (e.g. relating to specific types of problems found on the GMAT).
    - RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
      True. The point of standard tests though is that it scales. The hope is that the test is able to identify at least those who have studied in general (or even better, geniuses are able to pass without studying). "Get-to-know-each-other" type of interviews are nice, but it's rather inefficient when a job posting receives hundreds of applications.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > You were probably thinking of IQ tests. Quite the opposite. The common IQ tests are not resistant to preparation. But the big standardized tests are.
    - RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
      One is expected to score higher in an ideal standardized test if they prepare for it. One should not be able to score higher in an ideal IQ test if they prepare for it, since IQ tests by definition evaluate an innate ability. Of course, in the real world no IQ test is ideal.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  "Standardized tests are designed such that preparing for the test isn't helpful." LSAT, MCAT, SAT and GMAT are all standardized tests that reward those who prepare specifically for those tests. I used a couple of books to prepare for the GMAT. I'm pretty sure that this preparation: - helped me get a better score than I would have gotten without that specific preparation, and - did not improve my 'aptitude in x, y and z' (the thing the test is designed to measure)
  - drc500free 5y ago
    Agree on both points. I crammed a lot of grammar rules to improve my score, which was apparently was the thing I was missing to be a successful business person and totally not a classist barrier erected to exclude people without a private school education. This is the downside of any test that assumes aptitude means mimicking people who have already been successful in the field.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  > Standardized tests are designed such that preparing for the test isn't helpful. And how is that supposed to be achieved? When something is standardized, it follows certain parameters. After a while, these parameters are known to the public, and people can prepare for them.
ramesh31 5y ago
This industry dug its own grave with the whole "hazing-as-interview" paradigm. As a senior dev I have zero interest in ever bothering with process again. I'll never leave my current company at this point. The possibility of making 10-20% more money simply isn't worth it.
- polio 5y ago
  The industry is doing just fine. You're assuming everybody else is as reluctant to get hazed as you are.
  - ardit33 5y ago
    No its not. Even Google has to change its hiring practices and move away with the current system, as it is creating a lot of noise. (i.e. hiring people that are good at leetcode, while great engineers are being left out just because they don't have time to practice stupid/pointless problems). The weird thing is that now you even have small dipsh!t start ups that have even harder/longer interview process and questions than some of the large tech cos, which doesn't make sense. It is a form a cargo cult following that it is detrimental to the whole industry. 1. Google is skiping phone screening for many (more experienced folks, as they found it was low value, and filtering out really good candidates. Yet many startups keep doing them. 2. Google is going towards a team hiring strategy, where specialized skills will be more valued, rather than the current 'generic leetcode' process. 3. I just went through an interview process of an old startup/not yet IPO company, and had to go through 10 stages!! 1. Recruiter screening 2. Phone Screening 3-8. A full round with 6 interviews (6 hrs long). 9. Final manager interview/round 10. Call for references, which a previous manager was a must It was insane, like I was interviewing for a CEO and not just another IC Engineer role. At some point, I started refusing companies that had extremely long processes. They almost are never worth it.
    - ramesh31 5y ago
      >Call for references, which a previous manager was a must I've literally never had references contacted. Where are you located?
spike021 5y ago
It's been interesting to watch the sort of "transformation" the industry goes through, even just since I started college back in 2011. For 5-7 years "Cracking the Coding Interview" was all the rage, practically everyone said to review it, do the practice problems, etc. In the past 3-4 years it's become "make sure you practice your Leetcode an hour a day! Even some hards!", and then from what I've seen while interviewing and practicing the past 2 months, there are websites dedicated to providing study plans, additional review, recommended problems to practice to review specific patterns, etc. Youtube channels, even. Those last few are also pretty heavily monetized. Leetcode has some limits in place to nudge people to pay for Premium plans. Some websites require a membership. Youtube videos and blogs usually have a plethora of ads. Of course you don't _need_ to pay anything, but it tends to help more people.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  We are in an era where people pirate leetcode practice questions to cheat interviews that companies designed in a way that requires you to cheat. If you show up without preparing the company looks down at you for not cheating. Then they hire these people and need to stack rank and fire the bottom because their process makes so many mistakes. A better interview process would involve lottery balls.
  - rakejake 5y ago
    Good luck on convincing people about that. When there are more qualified people than slots, the tried, tested and fair method of selection is a lottery. It has its own set of cons though (imagine repeatedly getting shafted in the lottery, which a very small minority is going to face. What are you going to do, throw a statistics book in their face?). More than that, it is the illusion of merit. A lottery is an admission that the level of talent required to be productive at these big companies is vastly overstated and that the algorithmic puzzles are just eyewash. That is way too much truth. OTOH, Passing these interviews gives you that chip on your shoulder that you passed a high hiring bar. Of course, I'm sure you know all the memorizing it took, and how you got lucky that a question you revised was asked at the interview and you feigned ignorance. It will take a critical mass of people who are willing to call out this bullshit and maybe a few really egregious cases that go viral before people start to push-back on this.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Nobody likes being judged in an interview, but on the other hand it has been fascinating to watch how the current style of tech interviews has opened doors for a lot of smart, motivated people who aren’t necessarily born into situations that usher them straight into prestigious tech jobs. Yes, there is an entire industry around interview prep. Yet it’s also possible to do all of your interview prep without ever giving a dollar to anyone. LeetCode basic is free. There are numerous free websites that will walk you through the solutions to LeetCode problems. There are countless YouTube videos helping build interview skills. Tech interviews aren’t necessarily fun, but I actually think it’s great that they’ve allowed us to move past the situations where people were trying to coast in on the reputation of their university or by getting an “internship” from their dad’s friend’s company. Letting people compete on a level playing field of technical interviews, albeit imperfect, is one of the things I’ve come to appreciate about the tech industry.
- someelephant 5y ago
  I also appreciate that anybody who puts the work in can get a good job in tech. But I don't follow your reasoning that the current tech interview process supports that in some way that another process could not.
  - lbotos 5y ago
    Sure, but at the other end of the spectrum you get "know a guy" interviews where interviewers just hire their friends if they are the only person in the hiring process. Where I work (and even other co's my friends work at) even if you wanna hire a friend as a candidate, your friend still has to go through a full interview process. What's the alternative look like?
    - ghaff 5y ago
      As someone in tech but not (professionally) a developer I have to confess that all my (few) jobs since grad school were of a “know a (senior) guy/gal” persuasion. Haven’t had a really serious interview since the 80s. Hav I optimized salary? Likely not but things have worked OK. But it’s very “unfair.”
drc500free 5y ago
The Product interview has also become a fascinating game. You need to be able to apply specific case frameworks that you would never use in real life, at breakneck speeds that you would never work at in real life. Stumbling into one of these without prep is like showing up for a tryout on a football team and finding out that you'll actually be playing Tecmo Super Bowl with a controller you've never held before. And slowly realizing that all the people interviewing you are fantastic video game players who have never been in the weight room, and they spend all day LARPing.
- paxys 5y ago
  > And slowly realizing that all the people interviewing you are fantastic video game players who have never been in the weight room, and they spend all day LARPing Are these people not actual product managers at the (presumably successful) company that you want to work for? What is the basis of accusing them of being LARPers?
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    A bunch of past threads on this: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/. Google engineers do not so much solve problems as create them and pretend to solve them.
    - nowherebeen 5y ago
      This indirectly summarizes the problem with prep industry. When you optimize for interviews, you are going to get a lot of people that are pros at the interview game.
  - drc500free 5y ago
    I guarantee that some of this is un-processed bitterness over my eventual rejection after 3 or 4 rounds of interviewing. :-D This particular FAANG does have a poor track record on products that have any kind of real-world component. I tend to approach products from an issue-spotting, pre-mortem perspective that's focused on mitigating roadblocks. I could tell where I was falling short was that they wanted to hear about how it would scale to billions of users rather than overcoming the 0-to-1, 1-to-10 barriers that I was focused on. The response was always that they could skip those steps because of their massive resources.
RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
To me, the rationale behind interviewing by programming puzzles seems to be: the candidates who pass are either truly smart to be able to solve the problems on the spot without preparing or diligent enough to have prepared for them. As such, puzzle-based interviews are optimised to reject candidates who are not smart enough and have either not bothered to play the interview game or those who don't have what it takes to learn to play the game.
- skeeter2020 5y ago
  Draw a Venn diagram of your conclusion. the smart people who cannot be bothered to play these games is the biggest segment. They're busy getting shit done.
  - bckr 5y ago
    Maybe those people would actually not succeed in Big Tech. There may be a certain amount of "plays the game" necessary to succeed in one of these roles. If your first thought is "well what I would do for these companies is better than what they would want me to do", then that's exactly my point point---They may actually care more about your ability to take orders than about your ability to solve problems independently (even if they say the exact opposite in their culture talking points). Is that optimal for the company over 100 years? I don't know. Is it even possible to know? Just speculation.
ford 5y ago
What few people put to words is that prepping for tech interviews can be the single most significant financial decision of a person's life. Working at BigCo. vs Normal Tech vs Traditional Company can have 1.5x to 2x impact on compensation in a single year - let alone an entire career. When you consider the work you do to earn money/whatever else you value at a job the step increase by passing tech interviews at a big company is almost always worth way more time and/or money than many people put towards it. I think students in particular need to realize the importance of these kinds of interviews relative to their schoolwork if they're forced to make the tradeoff. I am a small participant in the Interview Prep industry since I purchased Cracking the Coding Interview - but it's no surprise people are willing to pay for interview prep (assuming it's both quality material and the individual needs that particular kind of help) when the ROI is so high
- giantg2 5y ago
  I have no skill so it doesn't make sense for me to try to move from a traditional company to a tech company. Just wanted to share this so other sare aware that one can realize/accept one's limits and that not everyone has to (or even can) go to big tech.
- fnbr 5y ago
  I got a 4x raise moving to big tech. My salary then increased by another 50% in the 4 years since. So you’re completely right.
  - syspec 5y ago
    Humblebrag
    - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
      It’s an honest post. You can take it that way but it might be the kick others’ need to move into higher paying jobs.
    - akvadrako 5y ago
      It doesn't sound like a brag – this is what's normal for software engineers and SREs these days, especially but not only at FAANG.
data4lyfe 5y ago
1. Technical interview prep companies give structured learning and practice to people that aren't good with structure. 2. Algorithm technical interviews provide a structure for companies to compare skill levels of different candidates against each other 3. Neither is the best scenario for either party but in a chaotic world without structure, each one is trying the best they can towards filling a job role by meeting with someone in a span of 45 minutes. Personally as a founder of an interview prep company for data scientist (https://www.interviewquery.com/ https://www.interviewquery.com/), I find that we try to just teach candidates concepts through bite-sized problems and repetition. Some people might hate it, but we're essentially playing the game that the companies are holding up. So you might as well learn to get good at it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
erdos4d 5y ago
I'm curious if there is any actual advantage to this leetcode style of interview. It is nice that it helps people without degrees get a fair shake, but does it actually correlate with success in the job? I have always favored the assignment style of interview since it gives me a chance to show that I can actually build a fully functioning piece of software that we can discuss, as opposed to solving a little brainteaser problem.
- rakejake 5y ago
  My gut feel says there may be a small correlation but not much. I myself credit this leetcode nonsense for being able to land a job in the SW industry despite not having a CS background or any relevant experience at the time. But I found out I had vastly over-estimated my software engineering skills and that proficiency in solving puzzles does not directly translate to building good software. The real advantage in leetcode is that it is well structured and relatively straightforward to scale preparation in. Practice lots of questions from a pre-defined bin of algorithms and data structures and you're good. Assuming the candidate is actually skilled, the real killer in most interviews is if the format of the interview is new or if the interview is some sort of technical discussion and there is impedance mismatch between the interviewer and interviewee. Leetcode has no chance of this happening -> you get the optimal solution or you don't. Ultimately, the problem with leetcode is that it is a very flawed way to scale the interview process that was foisted on us by Google. Interviewing is supposed to be a human process, so any way of "scaling" it is bound to be stupid in one way or the other.
  - jcadam 5y ago
    > But I found out I had vastly over-estimated my software engineering skills and that proficiency in solving puzzles does not directly translate to building good software. From the perspective of earning potential, puzzle solving is a better skill to have as a software engineer than actually engineering software.
    - erdos4d 5y ago
      This is a pretty solid sign that something stinks in here.
0x0000000 5y ago
Something I found interesting after going through a few interview processes is the amount of prep material that the in-house recruiters provide. At both a FAANG and a multi-billion-but-not-FAANG company, I was provided hours worth of prep material for the tech screen, followed up by more hours of prep material for the more in-depth marathon-style interviews. Ten page PDFs with links to hackerrank and tech talks! I get that recruiters are incentivised to get new hires, but the whole "here's this tedious interview process, and here's everything you need to study to be able to pass it" makes me feel like they're optimizing for people who are tolerant of dealing with a lot of bullshit.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  I tried to pass by your comment, but I feel a need to respond. I'm a hiring manager. I've interviewed more than 100 people over the past 6 months. I really want you to be successful in the interview. I would love for a 10 minute conversation where you say "yeah, I've faced the problem you are facing. And here are the next 3 problems you are going to face. And here is how you should prepare for them." Or even "wow, I'm not equipped for this. What I really want to do is X. Is that useful?" And then I referred you to a buddy that is looking to do exactly that. I don't want to surprise you. I don't want to give you an interview question where you get nervous and I have to guess if you actually know how to code stuff. I want to give you an environment where you rock and I can accurately tell you what problems I have and we both decide if this is going to be a good fit for us. Somethings I don't want. I don't want you to fret or prepare for 10 hours. I don't want a take home interview that lasts >2 hours. Or a take home where you were honest, but I'm comparing you against someone who cheated.
  - 0des 5y ago
    "I'm not like those other girls"
    - b20000 5y ago
      haha excellent
    - 5y ago
posharma 5y ago
If you care about making more money put your head down and grind those leetcode problems. The investment is just a few months and the return is quite impressive. Others are either happy where they are or read about how interviews suck. As Bjarne Stroustroup said "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses".
- preordained 5y ago
  Your conclusion (if it can be called one?) is very odd. You mean to say, playing a silly game to job hop and make money is awesome, so you should all git gud? I mean, if that's the be all end all for you, I can't disagree...but I think the issue people have is that this process is a circus that relates far less to the work it purports to be filtering for than it presents to be.
  - posharma 5y ago
    Not disagreeing with you. Just saying that this is what it is. Either we learn to play the game or we don’t. These endless articles about the state of interviews in our industry might provide some solace temporarily but don’t change the fact.
- supramouse 5y ago
  there are a lot of ways to make money
steve76 5y ago
magic_hamster 5y ago
I'm a tech lead in my team. Honestly, I am terrible at whiteboard questions. I've long forgotten a lot of details that I've studied so hard in my CS degree. If I go to interviews right now without adequate preparation I am very likely to bomb pretty hard! But that doesn't mean I'm a bad developer or that I neglect my duties as a tech lead. It means that interviews are testing something pretty far removed from what we're doing at work. It's even worse in some companies that just give you a bunch of CS questions to solve, because a lot of the time it's possible for candidates to just memorize a bunch of interview questions and rely on that, regardless of their actual problem solving skills. There might a better way. When I interview candidates I've started putting less emphasis on O-notation algorithms and how to optimize them, which is pretty much the norm in most tech interviews (make this faster, do this in-place, etc), and started putting more emphasis on the candidate's understanding of IO, specifically when working with databases, congestion, rate limiting, queues, the stuff you actually encounter when working on real projects in my domain. Asking open ended questions and basically building a tiny project together. The experience has been enlightening. You can immediately tell the person's analytical thinking because most of what they learn in "interview prep" isn't directly helpful in this situation. You can see some people frantically trying to match the problem with something they've seen in a video or a book instead of stopping for a moment and giving it some actual thought. At the present I'm pretty certain that asking a person to build something is the best approach to understand their skill level. But this requires more time from both parties.
- YZF 5y ago
  Someone is going to come and make the point that if you want to get a job at "Booble" then you gotta put in the hard work to get it because there's a million other people that want that job ;) It's not black and white. I do think that as a tech lead you need to be able to demonstrate some technical skill in your day to day. You should be a pretty good coder. You should be a pretty good debugger. You don't need to be a competitive programmer which is what some coding problems are modeled after. You do need to know enough of your CS to recognize a pattern where there's theory that matters. You do need to be able to look up the relevant info/papers in that case and be able to understand them. There's also a plethora of other things you need to do as a lead that related to the engineering side of things. design and architecture. testing. CI/CD. requirement management. project management. people skills. Sort of reminds me of the joke where you take your car to the repair person because the engine is making noise. The guy listens to hit and hits a spot very hard with a hammer and the engine is running again. No noise. The bill says $100. So you ask him $100 for hitting a spot with a hammer? He's like $1 for hitting the spot with the hammer, $99 for knowing what spot to hit. Coding some dynamic programming algorithm on the fly in an interview is hitting the spot with a hammer really hard. Knowing what spot to hit is most of the what you care about in a good software engineer.
bharat9848 5y ago
Fully agreed with OP this is rotten. Thank you for writing this
jwmoz 5y ago
I can't stand how this tech test stuff developed. What other industries do this? I applied for a job recently and their first response was a blanket reply with a codility test. Which I ignore and moved on to other opportunities. They contacted after a week asking about it and I had to inform them I would look at other opportunities without a test barrier. Best jobs and places I worked came because of informal conversations during the interview.
- xtracto 5y ago
  This was my case as well. Several years ago I was returning to my home country and while looking for a job I applied to Gameloft, IBM , and other companies, including a small startup. Excepting the one startup, every ody sent me a canned response with a code challenge. The startup replied to me with a human asking me to talk. That's the place where I ended up going , and was the best decision for my career (gameloft closed doors some years later)
langsoul-com 5y ago
Scale is always the problem. Leet code can efficient sort the 1 million+ google applicants. Other methods are far more expensive.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Hatrix 5y ago
me: Hi, I know how to fix the problems I see in your software and increase the performance. I have years of experience with this and successful products. interviewer: um, ok, I'm not interested in that, we will spend the next 20 minutes talking about linked lists and arrays followed by random leet code live coding. Also, be sure to spend a large amount of the limited time talking about various solutions to random questions and come up with the optimal solution. I will make sure there is no time at the end for your questions.
- usrbinbash 5y ago
  > interviewer: -does the leetcode puzzle thing- me: okay thanks for your time, I got about 12 more linkedin messages to go through today.

149 points by otras 5y ago

There's one very significant difference between standardized tests and tech interviews. Standardized tests are designed such that preparing for the test isn't helpful. Current tech interviews aren't like that at all.

planetsprite 5y ago
>Preparing for the test isn't helpful Then in your opinion are all the SAT prep books useless?
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Yes, the SAT prep industry is nearly entirely fraudulent. People will pay you for something they want, regardless of whether you can actually give it to them.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Perhaps to the degree that it presents expensive in person classes as a much superior alternative to using a test prep book for motivated people.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      This is an extensively studied question. The effect of preparation on score is negligible whenever anyone tries to measure it.
  - someguydave 5y ago
    I have noticed that people generally really hate the idea that test prep for the SAT does not really work. (parent was downvoted) I’m not entirely sure why that is.
RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
> Standardized tests are designed such that preparing for the test isn't helpful. Not quite --- "preparing for the test" is also known as "studying". You were probably thinking of IQ tests.
- drc500free 5y ago
  There's also an industry to prepare kids for IQ tests, since gifted placement depends on it, and college admissions depends on gifted placement, and .... so on.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  GP is mistaken for sure. But I think there's a difference between preparing for a specific test, and studying in general. Let's say you have 2 days left to study for the GMAT. You could study the relevant math, reasoning or whatever. That might help. But you'd do far better by working through problems in a Princeton Review GMAT book, and looking at their tips for the questions you got wrong. The tips might be generic test-taking tips (e.g. eliminate obviously wrong answers) or they might be more specific (e.g. relating to specific types of problems found on the GMAT).
  - RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
    True. The point of standard tests though is that it scales. The hope is that the test is able to identify at least those who have studied in general (or even better, geniuses are able to pass without studying). "Get-to-know-each-other" type of interviews are nice, but it's rather inefficient when a job posting receives hundreds of applications.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > You were probably thinking of IQ tests. Quite the opposite. The common IQ tests are not resistant to preparation. But the big standardized tests are.
  - RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
    One is expected to score higher in an ideal standardized test if they prepare for it. One should not be able to score higher in an ideal IQ test if they prepare for it, since IQ tests by definition evaluate an innate ability. Of course, in the real world no IQ test is ideal.
rahimnathwani 5y ago
"Standardized tests are designed such that preparing for the test isn't helpful." LSAT, MCAT, SAT and GMAT are all standardized tests that reward those who prepare specifically for those tests. I used a couple of books to prepare for the GMAT. I'm pretty sure that this preparation: - helped me get a better score than I would have gotten without that specific preparation, and - did not improve my 'aptitude in x, y and z' (the thing the test is designed to measure)
- drc500free 5y ago
  Agree on both points. I crammed a lot of grammar rules to improve my score, which was apparently was the thing I was missing to be a successful business person and totally not a classist barrier erected to exclude people without a private school education. This is the downside of any test that assumes aptitude means mimicking people who have already been successful in the field.
usrbinbash 5y ago
> Standardized tests are designed such that preparing for the test isn't helpful. And how is that supposed to be achieved? When something is standardized, it follows certain parameters. After a while, these parameters are known to the public, and people can prepare for them.

ramesh31 5y ago

This industry dug its own grave with the whole "hazing-as-interview" paradigm. As a senior dev I have zero interest in ever bothering with process again. I'll never leave my current company at this point. The possibility of making 10-20% more money simply isn't worth it.

polio 5y ago
The industry is doing just fine. You're assuming everybody else is as reluctant to get hazed as you are.
- ardit33 5y ago
  No its not. Even Google has to change its hiring practices and move away with the current system, as it is creating a lot of noise. (i.e. hiring people that are good at leetcode, while great engineers are being left out just because they don't have time to practice stupid/pointless problems). The weird thing is that now you even have small dipsh!t start ups that have even harder/longer interview process and questions than some of the large tech cos, which doesn't make sense. It is a form a cargo cult following that it is detrimental to the whole industry. 1. Google is skiping phone screening for many (more experienced folks, as they found it was low value, and filtering out really good candidates. Yet many startups keep doing them. 2. Google is going towards a team hiring strategy, where specialized skills will be more valued, rather than the current 'generic leetcode' process. 3. I just went through an interview process of an old startup/not yet IPO company, and had to go through 10 stages!! 1. Recruiter screening 2. Phone Screening 3-8. A full round with 6 interviews (6 hrs long). 9. Final manager interview/round 10. Call for references, which a previous manager was a must It was insane, like I was interviewing for a CEO and not just another IC Engineer role. At some point, I started refusing companies that had extremely long processes. They almost are never worth it.
  - ramesh31 5y ago
    >Call for references, which a previous manager was a must I've literally never had references contacted. Where are you located?

spike021 5y ago

It's been interesting to watch the sort of "transformation" the industry goes through, even just since I started college back in 2011. For 5-7 years "Cracking the Coding Interview" was all the rage, practically everyone said to review it, do the practice problems, etc. In the past 3-4 years it's become "make sure you practice your Leetcode an hour a day! Even some hards!", and then from what I've seen while interviewing and practicing the past 2 months, there are websites dedicated to providing study plans, additional review, recommended problems to practice to review specific patterns, etc. Youtube channels, even. Those last few are also pretty heavily monetized. Leetcode has some limits in place to nudge people to pay for Premium plans. Some websites require a membership. Youtube videos and blogs usually have a plethora of ads. Of course you don't _need_ to pay anything, but it tends to help more people.

ipaddr 5y ago
We are in an era where people pirate leetcode practice questions to cheat interviews that companies designed in a way that requires you to cheat. If you show up without preparing the company looks down at you for not cheating. Then they hire these people and need to stack rank and fire the bottom because their process makes so many mistakes. A better interview process would involve lottery balls.
- rakejake 5y ago
  Good luck on convincing people about that. When there are more qualified people than slots, the tried, tested and fair method of selection is a lottery. It has its own set of cons though (imagine repeatedly getting shafted in the lottery, which a very small minority is going to face. What are you going to do, throw a statistics book in their face?). More than that, it is the illusion of merit. A lottery is an admission that the level of talent required to be productive at these big companies is vastly overstated and that the algorithmic puzzles are just eyewash. That is way too much truth. OTOH, Passing these interviews gives you that chip on your shoulder that you passed a high hiring bar. Of course, I'm sure you know all the memorizing it took, and how you got lucky that a question you revised was asked at the interview and you feigned ignorance. It will take a critical mass of people who are willing to call out this bullshit and maybe a few really egregious cases that go viral before people start to push-back on this.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Nobody likes being judged in an interview, but on the other hand it has been fascinating to watch how the current style of tech interviews has opened doors for a lot of smart, motivated people who aren’t necessarily born into situations that usher them straight into prestigious tech jobs. Yes, there is an entire industry around interview prep. Yet it’s also possible to do all of your interview prep without ever giving a dollar to anyone. LeetCode basic is free. There are numerous free websites that will walk you through the solutions to LeetCode problems. There are countless YouTube videos helping build interview skills. Tech interviews aren’t necessarily fun, but I actually think it’s great that they’ve allowed us to move past the situations where people were trying to coast in on the reputation of their university or by getting an “internship” from their dad’s friend’s company. Letting people compete on a level playing field of technical interviews, albeit imperfect, is one of the things I’ve come to appreciate about the tech industry.

someelephant 5y ago
I also appreciate that anybody who puts the work in can get a good job in tech. But I don't follow your reasoning that the current tech interview process supports that in some way that another process could not.
- lbotos 5y ago
  Sure, but at the other end of the spectrum you get "know a guy" interviews where interviewers just hire their friends if they are the only person in the hiring process. Where I work (and even other co's my friends work at) even if you wanna hire a friend as a candidate, your friend still has to go through a full interview process. What's the alternative look like?
  - ghaff 5y ago
    As someone in tech but not (professionally) a developer I have to confess that all my (few) jobs since grad school were of a “know a (senior) guy/gal” persuasion. Haven’t had a really serious interview since the 80s. Hav I optimized salary? Likely not but things have worked OK. But it’s very “unfair.”

drc500free 5y ago

The Product interview has also become a fascinating game. You need to be able to apply specific case frameworks that you would never use in real life, at breakneck speeds that you would never work at in real life. Stumbling into one of these without prep is like showing up for a tryout on a football team and finding out that you'll actually be playing Tecmo Super Bowl with a controller you've never held before. And slowly realizing that all the people interviewing you are fantastic video game players who have never been in the weight room, and they spend all day LARPing.

paxys 5y ago
> And slowly realizing that all the people interviewing you are fantastic video game players who have never been in the weight room, and they spend all day LARPing Are these people not actual product managers at the (presumably successful) company that you want to work for? What is the basis of accusing them of being LARPers?
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  A bunch of past threads on this: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/. Google engineers do not so much solve problems as create them and pretend to solve them.
  - nowherebeen 5y ago
    This indirectly summarizes the problem with prep industry. When you optimize for interviews, you are going to get a lot of people that are pros at the interview game.
- drc500free 5y ago
  I guarantee that some of this is un-processed bitterness over my eventual rejection after 3 or 4 rounds of interviewing. :-D This particular FAANG does have a poor track record on products that have any kind of real-world component. I tend to approach products from an issue-spotting, pre-mortem perspective that's focused on mitigating roadblocks. I could tell where I was falling short was that they wanted to hear about how it would scale to billions of users rather than overcoming the 0-to-1, 1-to-10 barriers that I was focused on. The response was always that they could skip those steps because of their massive resources.

RyEgswuCsn 5y ago

To me, the rationale behind interviewing by programming puzzles seems to be: the candidates who pass are either truly smart to be able to solve the problems on the spot without preparing or diligent enough to have prepared for them. As such, puzzle-based interviews are optimised to reject candidates who are not smart enough and have either not bothered to play the interview game or those who don't have what it takes to learn to play the game.

skeeter2020 5y ago
Draw a Venn diagram of your conclusion. the smart people who cannot be bothered to play these games is the biggest segment. They're busy getting shit done.
- bckr 5y ago
  Maybe those people would actually not succeed in Big Tech. There may be a certain amount of "plays the game" necessary to succeed in one of these roles. If your first thought is "well what I would do for these companies is better than what they would want me to do", then that's exactly my point point---They may actually care more about your ability to take orders than about your ability to solve problems independently (even if they say the exact opposite in their culture talking points). Is that optimal for the company over 100 years? I don't know. Is it even possible to know? Just speculation.

ford 5y ago

What few people put to words is that prepping for tech interviews can be the single most significant financial decision of a person's life. Working at BigCo. vs Normal Tech vs Traditional Company can have 1.5x to 2x impact on compensation in a single year - let alone an entire career. When you consider the work you do to earn money/whatever else you value at a job the step increase by passing tech interviews at a big company is almost always worth way more time and/or money than many people put towards it. I think students in particular need to realize the importance of these kinds of interviews relative to their schoolwork if they're forced to make the tradeoff. I am a small participant in the Interview Prep industry since I purchased Cracking the Coding Interview - but it's no surprise people are willing to pay for interview prep (assuming it's both quality material and the individual needs that particular kind of help) when the ROI is so high

giantg2 5y ago
I have no skill so it doesn't make sense for me to try to move from a traditional company to a tech company. Just wanted to share this so other sare aware that one can realize/accept one's limits and that not everyone has to (or even can) go to big tech.
fnbr 5y ago
I got a 4x raise moving to big tech. My salary then increased by another 50% in the 4 years since. So you’re completely right.
- syspec 5y ago
  Humblebrag
  - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
    It’s an honest post. You can take it that way but it might be the kick others’ need to move into higher paying jobs.
  - akvadrako 5y ago
    It doesn't sound like a brag – this is what's normal for software engineers and SREs these days, especially but not only at FAANG.

data4lyfe 5y ago

1. Technical interview prep companies give structured learning and practice to people that aren't good with structure. 2. Algorithm technical interviews provide a structure for companies to compare skill levels of different candidates against each other 3. Neither is the best scenario for either party but in a chaotic world without structure, each one is trying the best they can towards filling a job role by meeting with someone in a span of 45 minutes. Personally as a founder of an interview prep company for data scientist (https://www.interviewquery.com/ https://www.interviewquery.com/), I find that we try to just teach candidates concepts through bite-sized problems and repetition. Some people might hate it, but we're essentially playing the game that the companies are holding up. So you might as well learn to get good at it.

deleted 5y ago
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erdos4d 5y ago

I'm curious if there is any actual advantage to this leetcode style of interview. It is nice that it helps people without degrees get a fair shake, but does it actually correlate with success in the job? I have always favored the assignment style of interview since it gives me a chance to show that I can actually build a fully functioning piece of software that we can discuss, as opposed to solving a little brainteaser problem.

rakejake 5y ago
My gut feel says there may be a small correlation but not much. I myself credit this leetcode nonsense for being able to land a job in the SW industry despite not having a CS background or any relevant experience at the time. But I found out I had vastly over-estimated my software engineering skills and that proficiency in solving puzzles does not directly translate to building good software. The real advantage in leetcode is that it is well structured and relatively straightforward to scale preparation in. Practice lots of questions from a pre-defined bin of algorithms and data structures and you're good. Assuming the candidate is actually skilled, the real killer in most interviews is if the format of the interview is new or if the interview is some sort of technical discussion and there is impedance mismatch between the interviewer and interviewee. Leetcode has no chance of this happening -> you get the optimal solution or you don't. Ultimately, the problem with leetcode is that it is a very flawed way to scale the interview process that was foisted on us by Google. Interviewing is supposed to be a human process, so any way of "scaling" it is bound to be stupid in one way or the other.
- jcadam 5y ago
  > But I found out I had vastly over-estimated my software engineering skills and that proficiency in solving puzzles does not directly translate to building good software. From the perspective of earning potential, puzzle solving is a better skill to have as a software engineer than actually engineering software.
  - erdos4d 5y ago
    This is a pretty solid sign that something stinks in here.

0x0000000 5y ago

Something I found interesting after going through a few interview processes is the amount of prep material that the in-house recruiters provide. At both a FAANG and a multi-billion-but-not-FAANG company, I was provided hours worth of prep material for the tech screen, followed up by more hours of prep material for the more in-depth marathon-style interviews. Ten page PDFs with links to hackerrank and tech talks! I get that recruiters are incentivised to get new hires, but the whole "here's this tedious interview process, and here's everything you need to study to be able to pass it" makes me feel like they're optimizing for people who are tolerant of dealing with a lot of bullshit.

geoduck14 5y ago
I tried to pass by your comment, but I feel a need to respond. I'm a hiring manager. I've interviewed more than 100 people over the past 6 months. I really want you to be successful in the interview. I would love for a 10 minute conversation where you say "yeah, I've faced the problem you are facing. And here are the next 3 problems you are going to face. And here is how you should prepare for them." Or even "wow, I'm not equipped for this. What I really want to do is X. Is that useful?" And then I referred you to a buddy that is looking to do exactly that. I don't want to surprise you. I don't want to give you an interview question where you get nervous and I have to guess if you actually know how to code stuff. I want to give you an environment where you rock and I can accurately tell you what problems I have and we both decide if this is going to be a good fit for us. Somethings I don't want. I don't want you to fret or prepare for 10 hours. I don't want a take home interview that lasts >2 hours. Or a take home where you were honest, but I'm comparing you against someone who cheated.
- 0des 5y ago
  "I'm not like those other girls"
  - b20000 5y ago
    haha excellent
  - 5y ago

posharma 5y ago

If you care about making more money put your head down and grind those leetcode problems. The investment is just a few months and the return is quite impressive. Others are either happy where they are or read about how interviews suck. As Bjarne Stroustroup said "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses".

preordained 5y ago
Your conclusion (if it can be called one?) is very odd. You mean to say, playing a silly game to job hop and make money is awesome, so you should all git gud? I mean, if that's the be all end all for you, I can't disagree...but I think the issue people have is that this process is a circus that relates far less to the work it purports to be filtering for than it presents to be.
- posharma 5y ago
  Not disagreeing with you. Just saying that this is what it is. Either we learn to play the game or we don’t. These endless articles about the state of interviews in our industry might provide some solace temporarily but don’t change the fact.
supramouse 5y ago
there are a lot of ways to make money

steve76 5y ago

magic_hamster 5y ago

I'm a tech lead in my team. Honestly, I am terrible at whiteboard questions. I've long forgotten a lot of details that I've studied so hard in my CS degree. If I go to interviews right now without adequate preparation I am very likely to bomb pretty hard! But that doesn't mean I'm a bad developer or that I neglect my duties as a tech lead. It means that interviews are testing something pretty far removed from what we're doing at work. It's even worse in some companies that just give you a bunch of CS questions to solve, because a lot of the time it's possible for candidates to just memorize a bunch of interview questions and rely on that, regardless of their actual problem solving skills. There might a better way. When I interview candidates I've started putting less emphasis on O-notation algorithms and how to optimize them, which is pretty much the norm in most tech interviews (make this faster, do this in-place, etc), and started putting more emphasis on the candidate's understanding of IO, specifically when working with databases, congestion, rate limiting, queues, the stuff you actually encounter when working on real projects in my domain. Asking open ended questions and basically building a tiny project together. The experience has been enlightening. You can immediately tell the person's analytical thinking because most of what they learn in "interview prep" isn't directly helpful in this situation. You can see some people frantically trying to match the problem with something they've seen in a video or a book instead of stopping for a moment and giving it some actual thought. At the present I'm pretty certain that asking a person to build something is the best approach to understand their skill level. But this requires more time from both parties.

YZF 5y ago
Someone is going to come and make the point that if you want to get a job at "Booble" then you gotta put in the hard work to get it because there's a million other people that want that job ;) It's not black and white. I do think that as a tech lead you need to be able to demonstrate some technical skill in your day to day. You should be a pretty good coder. You should be a pretty good debugger. You don't need to be a competitive programmer which is what some coding problems are modeled after. You do need to know enough of your CS to recognize a pattern where there's theory that matters. You do need to be able to look up the relevant info/papers in that case and be able to understand them. There's also a plethora of other things you need to do as a lead that related to the engineering side of things. design and architecture. testing. CI/CD. requirement management. project management. people skills. Sort of reminds me of the joke where you take your car to the repair person because the engine is making noise. The guy listens to hit and hits a spot very hard with a hammer and the engine is running again. No noise. The bill says $100. So you ask him $100 for hitting a spot with a hammer? He's like $1 for hitting the spot with the hammer, $99 for knowing what spot to hit. Coding some dynamic programming algorithm on the fly in an interview is hitting the spot with a hammer really hard. Knowing what spot to hit is most of the what you care about in a good software engineer.

bharat9848 5y ago

Fully agreed with OP this is rotten. Thank you for writing this

jwmoz 5y ago

I can't stand how this tech test stuff developed. What other industries do this? I applied for a job recently and their first response was a blanket reply with a codility test. Which I ignore and moved on to other opportunities. They contacted after a week asking about it and I had to inform them I would look at other opportunities without a test barrier. Best jobs and places I worked came because of informal conversations during the interview.

xtracto 5y ago
This was my case as well. Several years ago I was returning to my home country and while looking for a job I applied to Gameloft, IBM , and other companies, including a small startup. Excepting the one startup, every ody sent me a canned response with a code challenge. The startup replied to me with a human asking me to talk. That's the place where I ended up going , and was the best decision for my career (gameloft closed doors some years later)

langsoul-com 5y ago

Scale is always the problem. Leet code can efficient sort the 1 million+ google applicants. Other methods are far more expensive.

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Hatrix 5y ago

me: Hi, I know how to fix the problems I see in your software and increase the performance. I have years of experience with this and successful products. interviewer: um, ok, I'm not interested in that, we will spend the next 20 minutes talking about linked lists and arrays followed by random leet code live coding. Also, be sure to spend a large amount of the limited time talking about various solutions to random questions and come up with the optimal solution. I will make sure there is no time at the end for your questions.

usrbinbash 5y ago
> interviewer: -does the leetcode puzzle thing- me: okay thanks for your time, I got about 12 more linkedin messages to go through today.