10 ms·

Maybe it’s not the employees fault, but the management who hired them… or maybe it’s the fact that it takes forever to get anything done at FAANG nowadays. Or

Maybe it’s not the employees fault, but the management who hired them… or maybe it’s the fact that it takes forever to get anything done at FAANG nowadays. Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders.. but a great way of identifying people who can hack a process to secure maximal reward. Look, if I can ‘crack the coding interview’, then I can certainly crack ‘how to do as little work as possible and stack paper to the ceiling while my stock vests’. I wonder when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod.

galdosdi 4y ago
> Look, if I can ‘crack the coding interview’, then I can certainly crack ‘how to do as little work as possible and stack paper to the ceiling while my stock vests’. What's worse, many of the jaded people going through the motions probably started out gung-ho but then got frustrated to see how little impact they were really able to have and eventually became checked out. These kinds of things are self fulfilling prophecies in organizations.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  They see blood in the water for startups and know they don’t have to subsidize employment to keep them from being able to hire.
- llaolleh 4y ago
  Motivation is finite. By the time you get the through red tape to get approvals, permissions, and a million of other things, you have nothing left in the tank to code.
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    God. Every once in a while I think 'I should go back to a FAANG', and then comments like this remind me of how soul-sucking and toxic it is.
    - grepfru_it 4y ago
      All enterprise is, fam. Everything slows down and bureaucracy and politics take over. Watched it happen in real time at the last acquisition and have decided to only focus on startups for the next decade. There's way more speed, passion, and fulfillment..
- bashinator 4y ago
  I can't think of any work to be done for a Meta company that I'd find meaningful in any way. I imagine there are plenty of people who only figured this out for themselves after coming on board.
  - symlinkk 4y ago
    Creating a VR game that your friends and family can play? Adding an API to React that shapes the course of frontend development for millions of people?
    - michaelt 4y ago
      And in this photo, grandson, you can see where your grandpa spent 2 years running into walls at different angles, as part of the daily regression test for players being able to clip outside the world. Of course in the end it turned out you could clip out of the world by summoning your horse in a doorway - but not by running into a wall, no siree not on my watch. Did you know it was the first ever game where the in-game billboards for each player were auctioned dynamically? A complete auction took place in less than the time it took to draw one frame on the screen! I wish I could show you the game itself - such a pity they decommissioned the servers 15 years before you were born.
      - rednerrus 4y ago
        Submitting my 2 weeks after reading this comment.
      - ianbutler 4y ago
        As opposed to other office jobs that are so interesting? “Let me show you the insurance papers I shuffled for 40 years.”
        wombat-man 4y ago
        Yeah, it's legit difficult to find work that is impactful and fulfilling. Making incremental changes on a product that a billion people might actually use isn't the worst thing imo. I worked hard at startups on projects that, while fun, very few people really use. After a while I gotta wonder is it really worth the effort.
- MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  If I'm being honest, I'd probably be happier at a place where my contribution was a small drop in a giant bucket than a place where we were much smaller but my input was being largely ignored.
aeternum 4y ago
Yes, it's pretty clear that humans were overfitting to their interview objective function: comp-sci algo problems. For companies with such strong ML backgrounds, in addition to the sheer amount of content dedicated to discussing and solving tech interview questions hosted on their own platform, one would think they would have noticed earlier.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  > Yes, it's pretty clear that humans were overfitting to their interview objective function: comp-sci algo problems. Worse, it's often over-fitted to memorized specific solutions to esoteric comp-sci algo problems. So you end up with a bunch of, admittedly smart, developers who all have the spare time to memorize an entire suite of algo problems and solutions. Some of those developers are going to have copious amounts of spare time while working at your organization as well.
- borroka 4y ago
  There is a human component to consider: in the case of a change in the interview process, with the new process perceived as easier than the past and current ones, I imagine the bitter protests from the currently employed engineers who would vocally complain that the quality of new hires is much worse than it used to be, and that they have had to pass much more stringent interviews than the new ones, which even a junior SWE employed in an unnamed company would be able to pass.
DmitryOlshansky 4y ago
I got hired by Google in 2016 and I could tell you the interview was a series of interesting tasks all having to do with what I was hired for - working on compilers and related tools. Though after that I was asked for additional interviews on basic algorithmic stuff cause Google thought original interviews to be too narrow in the scope, anyway hardly any esoteric stuff.
z9znz 4y ago
> when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod That would be a surpreme waste of company money, and probably they have engineers working for them who are far better developers than they are.
- _jal 4y ago
  The goal of that would not be to get functional code and a decent price, of course. The goal would be to ensure leadership has an accurate view of what that process is today. Now, that may or many not achieve what the GP thinks it will. But, if you believe the leadership of your org is out-of-touch, it is a natural thing to suggest.
- naravara 4y ago
  At one point Waffle House required all of its senior executives to spend time each year working on the line. (They probably still do I just haven't checked in a few years). They feel this is important for their management team to more viscerally understand the lived experiences of the people working, identify issues in their processes and technology, and generally foster team spirit among their staff.
  - telchior 4y ago
    I think there's a story in the news today about Taco Bell doing the same thing. More relevant to tech -- Automattic, Klaviyo and probably a lot of other companies require people in certain positions to do customer service rotations. Including C-level execs. I haven't heard of a version of that for coding, though.
    - wepple 4y ago
      Door dash gets their employees to do 3 deliveries a year
      - sleepybrett 4y ago
        I'm pretty sure that's more to remind their corporate employees what life outside the tower is like. 'See how much better your job is than being a courier who barely makes enough to survive!'
vecter 4y ago
> Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders.. but a great way of identifying people who can hack a process to secure maximal reward. I see this argument all the time, but I can't find any other place that it comes from other than disappointment from those that didn't or can't pass those interviews. (Disclaimer, outside of college internships I've never interviewed for a FAANG SWE position nor have I ever worked for one). Is it an objectively good measure of being a software engineer? Hard to say honestly. I doubt you'll ever find a truly great measure that you can test for in an interview. When I was interviewing candidates for my company, did I ask those leetcode algorithm questions? Not really. Maybe at most one basic tree traversal question (probably would fall under leetcode "easy" if I had to guess, but honestly the kind of thing a student would learn in AP computer science in high school). Most questions were system design and problem solving with a coding challenge (building something simple, not solving algorithmic puzzles). So by evidence of my own actions, I don't believe that they're the optimal questions for screening engineers. That having been said, I don't understand why people are upset by these interviews. Who cares? If you really think it's suboptimal, then other companies who have "better" interviewing practices should be better at identifying undiscovered talent and hiring them. Better for you if you're hiring in those cases. Let FAANG fail on their own hiring practices. FTR I don't think they're that bad either, they just filter for a bunch of left-brained people who are good at math. Maybe they do make good engineers also. And if results are anything, clearly it's been working for FAANG for the past decade so who's to say that they shouldn't keep doing it? > Look, if I can ‘crack the coding interview’, then I can certainly crack ‘how to do as little work as possible and stack paper to the ceiling while my stock vests’. This is a reach (to put it mildly) and unfairly paints people who are good at algorithms as inherently unmotivated and whose primary goal is to cheat the system without any evidence. Are you saying another talented developer who isn't good at algorithms could not or would not hack the system as such? I don't see any reason to expect either to be the case. Hacking said system does not require you to be able to prove the runtimes of a Van Emde Boas queue, it just requires some common sense that any human being has. > I wonder when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod. This is pure ad hominem and unrelated to whether or not these questions are good screening questions. I certainly hope that Mark or Sundar are not wasting even a millisecond of their time writing code and trying to get a PR out to production. It's one of the absolute worst uses of their time. But while we're on the topic, Mark literally built the first version of Facebook (to be fair, probably in a bad hacky way) and Sundar was a product manager so I certainly don't expect him to write code.
shtopointo 4y ago
> Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders.. but a great way of identifying people who can hack a process to secure maximal reward. If anything, that might be the best way to identify someone that fits in a large corp like Google. Someone that doesn't mind going thru the drudge of studying esoteric CS problems probably will be more attuned to go thru the drudge of working for a large company like Google. I'm thinking most of the time spent at Large Corp. Inc. is doing menial work, rather than hot projects where you learn and get to work on the cutting edge.
- CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the comparison. CS interview problems are interesting, well-constrained math riddles with endless variety. As far as I can tell, they're nearly the opposite of menial drudgery. I don't think they're great for interviewing, on account of how they don't resemble what programmers actually do, but I do think they're a heck of a lot more fun than menial labor, especially when job offers aren't riding on it.
  - mikhael28 4y ago
    You might find them interesting, but I guarantee you many people do not. Many find them... well, something like programming trivia. Some people love going to trivia night! Get some friends, get quizzed on some stuff, feel smart. Lots of people are not interested.
  - ironman1478 4y ago
    The CS interview problems that are asked are a very specific view of CS that not everybody finds interesting or works on. There is a lot more variety to CS and software engineering than string and graph algorithms, which is all I've ever been asked at Google (where is numerical optimization, statistics beyond basic counting, all of graphics, etc). I also never get asked anything with regards to actually engineering software by them, whereas I have been asked that at Apple for example.
  - QuadmasterXLII 4y ago
ThrowawayR2 4y ago
If you have time to faff around at a FAANG, you have time to be cultivating your network to include some very influential people, you have time to be taking advantage of training resources or learning from the experts there that are completely free that most ordinary developers would have to pay thousands to get access to, you have time to work on side projects either for the company or, if you dare, for your own personal benefit, you have time to be hunting around for internal transfers that will boost your career, etc. If you want to rest and vest, hey, more power to you but the smart ones are taking advantage of the gigantic cornucopia of opportunity presented to them by merely getting in the door of an obscenely wealthy FAANG to catapult their careers ahead.
- mr_gibbins 4y ago
  Snap. I, for my sins, am new at a WITCH company (please don't throw rotten fruit at me), and there is an obscene amount of dead time in my calendar and will be for the foreseeable. I'm rinsing their training and development resources and should have the full suite of certs I want within 6 months completely free. Certs that would literally cost thousands to acquire privately. If they want me to do some actual work I'd be delighted but I've worked at multinationals before and I'm not holding my breath. What I won't do is sit around doing nothing.
  - biztos 4y ago
    TIL: "W- Wipro I- Infosys T- TCS C- Cognizant H- HCL A- Accenture India." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707
- borroka 4y ago
  This is fair in theory, and I imagine that some smart, high-agency people take advantage of the situation, but as is often the case, “down time" leads to more down time rather than more time to devote to career advancement, networking, and so on. In fact, one might think that one day, when free of obligations and with plenty of gas in the tank that is currently used for work, one will pick up the barbell, take long bike rides, and build the body one has always dreamed of showing to their partner. But they are much more likely, instead, to spend more time watching the latest horrible Netflix TV series or eating burritos. The right analogy for mental and physical energy is not the tank, but the flywheel.
Aunche 4y ago
>Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders The interview process at FAANGs isn't designed to hire the "best" people. It's designed to hire people who are "good enough" in a consistent manner. Any form of standardized interview can be gamed. More personalized interviews can be better in theory, but they also open the door to nepotism and discrimination. Admittedly, I'm biased because I'm unusually good at Leetcode and a rather lousy in terms of development velocity. With that disclaimer out of the way, I think the last thing that FAANGs need are more "high performing builders". In my experience, a lot of them tend to create a lot of useless passion projects that work their way into being dependencies and end up causing more harm than good. I may be a rest'n'vester, but at least I make sure the work I get done creates positive value for the company.
outworlder 4y ago
> maybe it’s the fact that it takes forever to get anything done at FAANG nowadays. At any large company. Tiny changes that should take an afternoon end up taking 6 months once all the red tape is done and all involved stakeholders have signed off.
koverda 4y ago
managers are employees too
- agluszak 4y ago
  We have a very nice phrase in Polish describing what kind of employees they are, literally it goes like: "there are those who are equal and those who are equaler".
- ironman1478 4y ago
  You're getting downvoted but you're right. Managers generally start out as ICs and bring along with them all their biases.
rajeshp1986 4y ago
+1, why blame employees? blame the management. In my previous job, our manager quickly grew team and hired 3x more people just cos he wanted to manage a larger team and get to hire managers under him so that he gets promoted to Sr. Manager.
FearlessNebula 4y ago
Did Sundar ever write code? Wasn’t he a PM? I wouldn’t be surprised if Mark still writes some code, he’s a hacker at heart
- doitLP 4y ago
  I think parent means has Mark experienced how difficult it is get code to prod these days, not can he still code
MichaelMoser123 4y ago
>Maybe it’s not the employees fault, but the management who hired them… I think the managers are just putting up a straight face, as they need to respond to the changing circumstances. I think it has more to do with the economy and the war of Russia against Ukraine. All of a sudden there is less money to go around, interest rates are rising and it got harder to raise money. And they probably changed their plans, now it is less about 'new features' and more about 'maintenance of existing systems'. But that didn't get into the article, so it's all the fault of the people who will have to look for a new job. Searching for a new job isn't a pleasant experience, if you ask me. (I am not working at google or facebook, but I will probably get to feel the implications as well...)
immigrantheart 4y ago
You just have to use this to push your ideology that leetcode style of interviews don't work, don't you.
iroh2727 4y ago
Yeah at least several years ago I had an explanation for this (though I’m not sure if it still applies). Basically, I think one reason for this weird type of interview is that it was an indirect way to bias towards young hires. Young people have that energy and naïveté to do a lot of the grunt work. And most work at any established company is kind’ve grunt work. Anyways, just a random theory but nowadays it may be backfiring.
dilyevsky 4y ago
Not sure about Mark wouldn’t be surprised if he still hacks php on the side but Pichai joined google as a manager I think from mckinsey of all places… so Im going with “never”

galdosdi 4y ago

> Look, if I can ‘crack the coding interview’, then I can certainly crack ‘how to do as little work as possible and stack paper to the ceiling while my stock vests’. What's worse, many of the jaded people going through the motions probably started out gung-ho but then got frustrated to see how little impact they were really able to have and eventually became checked out. These kinds of things are self fulfilling prophecies in organizations.

birdyrooster 4y ago
They see blood in the water for startups and know they don’t have to subsidize employment to keep them from being able to hire.
llaolleh 4y ago
Motivation is finite. By the time you get the through red tape to get approvals, permissions, and a million of other things, you have nothing left in the tank to code.
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  God. Every once in a while I think 'I should go back to a FAANG', and then comments like this remind me of how soul-sucking and toxic it is.
  - grepfru_it 4y ago
    All enterprise is, fam. Everything slows down and bureaucracy and politics take over. Watched it happen in real time at the last acquisition and have decided to only focus on startups for the next decade. There's way more speed, passion, and fulfillment..
bashinator 4y ago
I can't think of any work to be done for a Meta company that I'd find meaningful in any way. I imagine there are plenty of people who only figured this out for themselves after coming on board.
- symlinkk 4y ago
  Creating a VR game that your friends and family can play? Adding an API to React that shapes the course of frontend development for millions of people?
  - michaelt 4y ago
    And in this photo, grandson, you can see where your grandpa spent 2 years running into walls at different angles, as part of the daily regression test for players being able to clip outside the world. Of course in the end it turned out you could clip out of the world by summoning your horse in a doorway - but not by running into a wall, no siree not on my watch. Did you know it was the first ever game where the in-game billboards for each player were auctioned dynamically? A complete auction took place in less than the time it took to draw one frame on the screen! I wish I could show you the game itself - such a pity they decommissioned the servers 15 years before you were born.
    - rednerrus 4y ago
      Submitting my 2 weeks after reading this comment.
    - ianbutler 4y ago
      As opposed to other office jobs that are so interesting? “Let me show you the insurance papers I shuffled for 40 years.”
      - wombat-man 4y ago
        Yeah, it's legit difficult to find work that is impactful and fulfilling. Making incremental changes on a product that a billion people might actually use isn't the worst thing imo. I worked hard at startups on projects that, while fun, very few people really use. After a while I gotta wonder is it really worth the effort.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
If I'm being honest, I'd probably be happier at a place where my contribution was a small drop in a giant bucket than a place where we were much smaller but my input was being largely ignored.

aeternum 4y ago

Yes, it's pretty clear that humans were overfitting to their interview objective function: comp-sci algo problems. For companies with such strong ML backgrounds, in addition to the sheer amount of content dedicated to discussing and solving tech interview questions hosted on their own platform, one would think they would have noticed earlier.

Ensorceled 4y ago
> Yes, it's pretty clear that humans were overfitting to their interview objective function: comp-sci algo problems. Worse, it's often over-fitted to memorized specific solutions to esoteric comp-sci algo problems. So you end up with a bunch of, admittedly smart, developers who all have the spare time to memorize an entire suite of algo problems and solutions. Some of those developers are going to have copious amounts of spare time while working at your organization as well.
borroka 4y ago
There is a human component to consider: in the case of a change in the interview process, with the new process perceived as easier than the past and current ones, I imagine the bitter protests from the currently employed engineers who would vocally complain that the quality of new hires is much worse than it used to be, and that they have had to pass much more stringent interviews than the new ones, which even a junior SWE employed in an unnamed company would be able to pass.

DmitryOlshansky 4y ago

I got hired by Google in 2016 and I could tell you the interview was a series of interesting tasks all having to do with what I was hired for - working on compilers and related tools. Though after that I was asked for additional interviews on basic algorithmic stuff cause Google thought original interviews to be too narrow in the scope, anyway hardly any esoteric stuff.

z9znz 4y ago

> when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod That would be a surpreme waste of company money, and probably they have engineers working for them who are far better developers than they are.

_jal 4y ago
The goal of that would not be to get functional code and a decent price, of course. The goal would be to ensure leadership has an accurate view of what that process is today. Now, that may or many not achieve what the GP thinks it will. But, if you believe the leadership of your org is out-of-touch, it is a natural thing to suggest.
naravara 4y ago
At one point Waffle House required all of its senior executives to spend time each year working on the line. (They probably still do I just haven't checked in a few years). They feel this is important for their management team to more viscerally understand the lived experiences of the people working, identify issues in their processes and technology, and generally foster team spirit among their staff.
- telchior 4y ago
  I think there's a story in the news today about Taco Bell doing the same thing. More relevant to tech -- Automattic, Klaviyo and probably a lot of other companies require people in certain positions to do customer service rotations. Including C-level execs. I haven't heard of a version of that for coding, though.
  - wepple 4y ago
    Door dash gets their employees to do 3 deliveries a year
    - sleepybrett 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure that's more to remind their corporate employees what life outside the tower is like. 'See how much better your job is than being a courier who barely makes enough to survive!'

vecter 4y ago

> Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders.. but a great way of identifying people who can hack a process to secure maximal reward. I see this argument all the time, but I can't find any other place that it comes from other than disappointment from those that didn't or can't pass those interviews. (Disclaimer, outside of college internships I've never interviewed for a FAANG SWE position nor have I ever worked for one). Is it an objectively good measure of being a software engineer? Hard to say honestly. I doubt you'll ever find a truly great measure that you can test for in an interview. When I was interviewing candidates for my company, did I ask those leetcode algorithm questions? Not really. Maybe at most one basic tree traversal question (probably would fall under leetcode "easy" if I had to guess, but honestly the kind of thing a student would learn in AP computer science in high school). Most questions were system design and problem solving with a coding challenge (building something simple, not solving algorithmic puzzles). So by evidence of my own actions, I don't believe that they're the optimal questions for screening engineers. That having been said, I don't understand why people are upset by these interviews. Who cares? If you really think it's suboptimal, then other companies who have "better" interviewing practices should be better at identifying undiscovered talent and hiring them. Better for you if you're hiring in those cases. Let FAANG fail on their own hiring practices. FTR I don't think they're that bad either, they just filter for a bunch of left-brained people who are good at math. Maybe they do make good engineers also. And if results are anything, clearly it's been working for FAANG for the past decade so who's to say that they shouldn't keep doing it? > Look, if I can ‘crack the coding interview’, then I can certainly crack ‘how to do as little work as possible and stack paper to the ceiling while my stock vests’. This is a reach (to put it mildly) and unfairly paints people who are good at algorithms as inherently unmotivated and whose primary goal is to cheat the system without any evidence. Are you saying another talented developer who isn't good at algorithms could not or would not hack the system as such? I don't see any reason to expect either to be the case. Hacking said system does not require you to be able to prove the runtimes of a Van Emde Boas queue, it just requires some common sense that any human being has. > I wonder when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod. This is pure ad hominem and unrelated to whether or not these questions are good screening questions. I certainly hope that Mark or Sundar are not wasting even a millisecond of their time writing code and trying to get a PR out to production. It's one of the absolute worst uses of their time. But while we're on the topic, Mark literally built the first version of Facebook (to be fair, probably in a bad hacky way) and Sundar was a product manager so I certainly don't expect him to write code.

shtopointo 4y ago

> Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders.. but a great way of identifying people who can hack a process to secure maximal reward. If anything, that might be the best way to identify someone that fits in a large corp like Google. Someone that doesn't mind going thru the drudge of studying esoteric CS problems probably will be more attuned to go thru the drudge of working for a large company like Google. I'm thinking most of the time spent at Large Corp. Inc. is doing menial work, rather than hot projects where you learn and get to work on the cutting edge.

CobrastanJorji 4y ago
I'm not sure I understand the comparison. CS interview problems are interesting, well-constrained math riddles with endless variety. As far as I can tell, they're nearly the opposite of menial drudgery. I don't think they're great for interviewing, on account of how they don't resemble what programmers actually do, but I do think they're a heck of a lot more fun than menial labor, especially when job offers aren't riding on it.
- mikhael28 4y ago
  You might find them interesting, but I guarantee you many people do not. Many find them... well, something like programming trivia. Some people love going to trivia night! Get some friends, get quizzed on some stuff, feel smart. Lots of people are not interested.
- ironman1478 4y ago
  The CS interview problems that are asked are a very specific view of CS that not everybody finds interesting or works on. There is a lot more variety to CS and software engineering than string and graph algorithms, which is all I've ever been asked at Google (where is numerical optimization, statistics beyond basic counting, all of graphics, etc). I also never get asked anything with regards to actually engineering software by them, whereas I have been asked that at Apple for example.
- QuadmasterXLII 4y ago

ThrowawayR2 4y ago

If you have time to faff around at a FAANG, you have time to be cultivating your network to include some very influential people, you have time to be taking advantage of training resources or learning from the experts there that are completely free that most ordinary developers would have to pay thousands to get access to, you have time to work on side projects either for the company or, if you dare, for your own personal benefit, you have time to be hunting around for internal transfers that will boost your career, etc. If you want to rest and vest, hey, more power to you but the smart ones are taking advantage of the gigantic cornucopia of opportunity presented to them by merely getting in the door of an obscenely wealthy FAANG to catapult their careers ahead.

mr_gibbins 4y ago
Snap. I, for my sins, am new at a WITCH company (please don't throw rotten fruit at me), and there is an obscene amount of dead time in my calendar and will be for the foreseeable. I'm rinsing their training and development resources and should have the full suite of certs I want within 6 months completely free. Certs that would literally cost thousands to acquire privately. If they want me to do some actual work I'd be delighted but I've worked at multinationals before and I'm not holding my breath. What I won't do is sit around doing nothing.
- biztos 4y ago
  TIL: "W- Wipro I- Infosys T- TCS C- Cognizant H- HCL A- Accenture India." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707
borroka 4y ago
This is fair in theory, and I imagine that some smart, high-agency people take advantage of the situation, but as is often the case, “down time" leads to more down time rather than more time to devote to career advancement, networking, and so on. In fact, one might think that one day, when free of obligations and with plenty of gas in the tank that is currently used for work, one will pick up the barbell, take long bike rides, and build the body one has always dreamed of showing to their partner. But they are much more likely, instead, to spend more time watching the latest horrible Netflix TV series or eating burritos. The right analogy for mental and physical energy is not the tank, but the flywheel.

Aunche 4y ago

>Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders The interview process at FAANGs isn't designed to hire the "best" people. It's designed to hire people who are "good enough" in a consistent manner. Any form of standardized interview can be gamed. More personalized interviews can be better in theory, but they also open the door to nepotism and discrimination. Admittedly, I'm biased because I'm unusually good at Leetcode and a rather lousy in terms of development velocity. With that disclaimer out of the way, I think the last thing that FAANGs need are more "high performing builders". In my experience, a lot of them tend to create a lot of useless passion projects that work their way into being dependencies and end up causing more harm than good. I may be a rest'n'vester, but at least I make sure the work I get done creates positive value for the company.

outworlder 4y ago

> maybe it’s the fact that it takes forever to get anything done at FAANG nowadays. At any large company. Tiny changes that should take an afternoon end up taking 6 months once all the red tape is done and all involved stakeholders have signed off.

koverda 4y ago

managers are employees too

agluszak 4y ago
We have a very nice phrase in Polish describing what kind of employees they are, literally it goes like: "there are those who are equal and those who are equaler".
ironman1478 4y ago
You're getting downvoted but you're right. Managers generally start out as ICs and bring along with them all their biases.

rajeshp1986 4y ago

+1, why blame employees? blame the management. In my previous job, our manager quickly grew team and hired 3x more people just cos he wanted to manage a larger team and get to hire managers under him so that he gets promoted to Sr. Manager.

FearlessNebula 4y ago

Did Sundar ever write code? Wasn’t he a PM? I wouldn’t be surprised if Mark still writes some code, he’s a hacker at heart

doitLP 4y ago
I think parent means has Mark experienced how difficult it is get code to prod these days, not can he still code

MichaelMoser123 4y ago

>Maybe it’s not the employees fault, but the management who hired them… I think the managers are just putting up a straight face, as they need to respond to the changing circumstances. I think it has more to do with the economy and the war of Russia against Ukraine. All of a sudden there is less money to go around, interest rates are rising and it got harder to raise money. And they probably changed their plans, now it is less about 'new features' and more about 'maintenance of existing systems'. But that didn't get into the article, so it's all the fault of the people who will have to look for a new job. Searching for a new job isn't a pleasant experience, if you ask me. (I am not working at google or facebook, but I will probably get to feel the implications as well...)

immigrantheart 4y ago

You just have to use this to push your ideology that leetcode style of interviews don't work, don't you.

iroh2727 4y ago

Yeah at least several years ago I had an explanation for this (though I’m not sure if it still applies). Basically, I think one reason for this weird type of interview is that it was an indirect way to bias towards young hires. Young people have that energy and naïveté to do a lot of the grunt work. And most work at any established company is kind’ve grunt work. Anyways, just a random theory but nowadays it may be backfiring.

dilyevsky 4y ago

Not sure about Mark wouldn’t be surprised if he still hacks php on the side but Pichai joined google as a manager I think from mckinsey of all places… so Im going with “never”