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> 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 id
by 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.
- junofan 4y ago> 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. Oh, the macro is that these companies are oligopolies. About 15–20 years ago one of them realized that poaching entire teams from the others to enter new LOBs was cheaper than competing. So headcount grew. Outside of strategic hires it doesn’t really matter who they pick up. E.g. LinkedIn isn’t going to go out of biz if they don’t find productive places for their army of level 3.5 software engineers or whatever. LinkedIn doesn’t have any competition.
- vecter 4y agoI might not be connecting the dots, but I don't see how this is related to the GP's gripe that these interview questions aren't good tools for hiring engineers.
- jmalicki 4y ago"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." The GGP is using an argument that if these techniques don't work, then the companies will fail, because that's how capitalism works. The GP is saying that because these companies are oligopolies, they can do a lot of very inefficient things that don't work and distort the market, yet not fail and not be punished for it, thus that's why we should care.
- vecter 4y agoI see, thanks for clarifying that. Makes sense. Relatedly, I still don't understand why people are upset at these companies' hiring practices.
- mikhael28 4y agoAlgorithm-puzzle computer science interviews are hard to prep for. They take a long time to learn. Then, most of the time, when people get hired for engineering roles that use them for interviewing - you find that you spend exactly 0% of your time working on those kinds of problems. Kind of a rug pull. Lots of people are busy. They don't want to spend time prepping for puzzles they will never solve in their job. They feel like they are qualified for the job, and have great work experience in many cases (let's leave jr devs out of this), but feel like they are being asked to jump through completely unnecessary hoops. Meanwhile, someone who does have a lot of time on their hands (young, single, no kids, more energy) preps for the tests, and gets paid more money than someone who is older, who has more responsibilities, and who frankly needs the money more. It feels unfair, in the same way that it feels unfair when rich people get away with crimes poorer people wouldn't. Well, the rich people used the legal system you say - they paid for attorneys. You could do the same thing, if you had the money. Well, you don't have the money. And in the case of this analogy, you don't have the time to prep for random CS problems. You don't have the energy, because after work and family obligations - you just want to sleep. Or work out. Or do anything but write and think about code. To be clear - if you are young, single and have lots of time on your hands - I have no sympathy for you. If you want to work in FAANG, fuck it, grind leetcode. You don't have any responsibilities. But for those older professionals, with work experience and a track record of success - you shouldn't need to prove competence to write software at a FAANG company. It should come from track record, recommendations, open-source work and other artifacts of your career besides a thirty minute whiteboard session. Depending on the day, the time of day, what food you ate, how much water you drank, you might be absolute trash at coding. And it would be a mistake to sum up someones competency in such a small sample size. When they interview lawyers, they don't ask them to perform a mock trial. Surgeons aren't asked to 'get their hands dirty' during an interview. Mechanical engineers don't get asked to whip up a CAD diagram in 30 minutes for a part (or maybe they do, what the hell do I know). Small sample sizes are misleading, large sample sizes (open source work audit, multiple references, perhaps a paid take home project for one of your open source packages) give a much better understanding of a persons skillset than a 30 minute exercise in stress management.