7 ms·

A lot of the commenters in this thread (and elsewhere on HN) flat out refuse to do take-home assignments, live algorithms coding, 4+ hours of onsite rounds, etc

• lolinder 4y ago
  > that pays competetively I think this is the broken assumption—there are a lot of us who simply are willing to accept a sub-FAANG wage in exchange for a work environment/interview process that we feel respects us.
  • Redoubts 4y ago
    A lot of us aren't gonna leave 5x the wage on the table.
    • lolinder 4y ago
      Yup, it's all tradeoffs, and my preferred tradeoffs won't match yours.
      • Redoubts 4y ago
        That's a pretty wild tradeoff though!
        • lolinder 4y ago
          Is it? At my current wage I make enough to pay for all my family's needs and retire at 50. Could I use more money? Probably. But would I be happier with more? The research suggests I wouldn't.
          • Panzer04 4y ago
            Presumably the tradeoff is more along the lines of retiring at 40, if you don't care about the money.
            • lolinder 4y ago
              Fair, but I actually enjoy my work (one of the things I feel like I have gained by avoiding FAANG), so retiring at 40 doesn't have that much appeal.
              • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
                It's true, I could afford to retire now (I am <40), but I expect to keep working until I'm completely unemployable (or physically incapable). It's just more fun than anything I've found in my free time. I do work at FAANG btw so it can't be that bad ;).
          • cipheredStones 4y ago
            Daniel Kahneman, the famous psychologist who authored the paper you're probably thinking of (the one popularized as "no increase in happiness above $75k/yr") actually just released a new paper a few days ago, finding that for the large majority of people, happiness continues to rise with income far past that point. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
            • lolinder 4y ago
              That's a quite an interesting paper! That said, the final results still line up with my intuition, which is that there are diminishing returns, as evidenced by the log(income) relationship that that new study identifies. I already make a 90th percentile income for my area, and I don't feel that investing additional mental and emotional resources in maximizing salary is the best route forward for pursuing happiness. I think that at this point there are other axes to optimize on that provide greater marginal gains to happiness.
            • 4y ago
    • throwaway675309 4y ago
      Uhh.. what? I've never had an interview process with a live coding session and whiteboarding that lasted longer than an hour, and my salary as a senior engineer has annually been anywhere from 150 to 200k. I might be leaving a little bit of money on the table but I highly doubt it's anywhere near 5x. Most FAANG level jobs aren't paying above 300-400k except at the most prestigious.
      • Redoubts 4y ago
        For anyone senior, it absolutely is. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1627276892226322432 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1627276892226322432
      • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
        Level 7+ at FAANG can reach $1m+/yr. Obviously I can't say that you would be able to reach that (most don't), but it's a possibility at least. Part of the difference is that non-FAANG companies often don't have as much of a path to these high levels for ICs so you are forced into management if you want to keep raising your compensation.
      • singron 4y ago
        Was the whole process <= 1 hour, the total amount of live coding was <= 1 hour, or any session of live coding was <= 1 hour? All the interviews at Google are 45 minutes, and when I interviewed only 2 had coding, so there was realistically 70-80 minutes of coding that day. I did maybe 15 minutes in a phone screen on an earlier date. Even if you did only 60 minutes for the whole process, you really aren't that far off from a typical FAANG.
• dev_throw 4y ago
  We don't want to do it but sometimes we do if it means getting to work on interesting things/paid competitively. I've had interviews with heavy LC and ones where I got plain old fizzbuzz and there wasn't much difference in staff competence or how quickly we delivered. If anything, the place with the low bar had more well rounded peers I wanted to spend time with after work.
• Balgair 4y ago
  I'm in non-FAANG tech (biotech, DoD) and no one does take homes or live coding, even for code heavy jobs. Our comp isn't in the 200k+ range, mostly due to location, but it's pretty good all the same (120k+).
• franciscop 4y ago
  I will do live or take-home algorithms (~1h) and such for any company since they are fun and help me practice anyway if I'm in interview mode. I will do take-home assignments (assuming 4~8h of work) or 4h+ onsite only if I am (quite-to-very) interested in the company. This is either the company is famous so I know them well, or there was a good interview process and they passed all of my questions/no red flags. If I'm on the verge of rejecting a company and they ask me for a sudden 4h+ process, sorry but not. I live in Japan so it's been interesting as there's vastly different thinking companies, you have from the most modern flexible silicon-valley-like company (few, but there are) to very traditional ones that might even be confused when you reject them (again few, but some). Last time I interviewed I told a company I wasn't interested in their offer, only to receive an email later telling me they were not interested in hiring me. I could guess HR marking me as a no-hire was a lot better for that interviewer than marking me as rejecting them, but still made me laugh a bit of how much "no, I am breaking up with you" it sounded like.
• roflyear 4y ago
  Are there any other industries that do this? Do cabinet makers ask you to do like a full day of work for free?
  • FeistySkink 4y ago
    I can totally see this: can you whip up a quick breadbox while we stand here and comment on your every move? You've got to use our toolbox, work with unfamiliar materials and no measurements are allowed. You've got one hour. Oh, and we'll keep throwing in new requirements along the way.
    • roflyear 4y ago
      I'm not even trying to touch on the "in person interview" stuff, more of the take home and spend like 8-16hrs on the project type stuff. Which is just crazy. That's more like "build me this table to get the job" type of thing.
    • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
      That would be reasonable if you were hiring an employee, since they would have to work in your workshop with your tools. Of course many carpenters work as contractors so that's why it seems a bit silly.
  • CSMastermind 4y ago
    Of course. My buddy just got a job at a high-end cocktail bar as a bartender. Part of the interview process was asking him to mix a drink. Gordon Ramsay has talked about how he'll interview chefs by asking them to make scrambled eggs. Actors, even famous ones, generally have to 'read' for roles in order to land them. Musicians interview for seats in symphonies by playing music. MBAs have to do case studies to land jobs at high end consulting firms. Hell I applied to Taco Bell as a kid and they made me take a short math test to prove I knew how to make change. I could give similar examples for dozens of other jobs. The cases where you don't need to demonstrate some skill in order to get the job generally fall into a few categories: - There's some outside certifying body like the Bar, CPA, PE, various tradesmen unions, or all the licenses like a CDL. - The jobs are undifferentiated so the workers are fungible (no special skills required). - Job skill is immediately apparent (less than two weeks to know for certain if someone can do the job or not). - The cost of a bad hire is low so you're willing to eat the cost and just cut the workers how don't work out.
• activitypea 4y ago
  I won't do anything that requires more time from me than it does for them, simple as that. If they think it's worth it to waste 10-20 man hours for a day on sites, that's concerning but not disqualifying.
• rnk 4y ago
  I refuse them. If I'm looking for a job I don't have half a day for some pointless thing. Interview me in the standard way, a few hour long interview, one at least with coding. When I interviewed at Microsoft and Google a few years ago, take home assignments were not part of the deal. Last 10 years no take home. Today it's coding something in a vc meeting, maybe in a web browser or coding env. Maybe beginners do some coding.
• ipaddr 4y ago
  Most people on hacker news and most people in tech do not work for faangs. These salaries of $250,000 or $200,000 or even $150,000 seem unreachable. But these faang salaries have *. You signup for a new Amazon job. You are a senior developer you expect to make $400,000 with the stocks/salary. Your base outside of California is 139,000 or 129,000. After year 1 only 5% vests.. after year two 15%.. the average employment length is 1.5 years. So you end up with $140,000/150,000 for working 16 hour days. If you manage to stay 10 years you could retire..(you have to because at this point you hate life) but they don't want people staying at the same level so you need to get a promotion when the 4 year vest up or you will be at your base. Getting one takes the right project and is hard and requires a breakthrough project. Most people 95% of developers never worked at a faang and those who have, on average worked for 1.5 years. Very few are still employed or seeking faang employment. Faangs make popular entry level position but very difficult to keep for life but if you can survive many years you usually leave the field or create your own startup because of burnout. Faang adjacent companies can be the worst of all worlds same issues worse pay/upside.
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    I would guess <50% of commenters here are even professional devs.
• CSMastermind 4y ago
  > A lot of the commenters in this thread (and elsewhere on HN) flat out refuse to do take-home assignments, live algorithms coding, 4+ hours of onsite rounds, etc. Well, I personally have always refused to do take-home interviews but happily will do live coding and systems design interviews. For me it's about respect and power imbalance. A company asking me to do work without them putting in equal effort sets a tone for a culture I personally don't ever want to be a part of. Like I find take-home interviews disrespectful. Time-bounded interviews with an interviewer also there (aka FAANG style onsites with 4 hours of interviews) is far and away my preferred process, especially if I can do them all at once. One problem I've seen in a remote friendly world is companies wanting to spread the interviews out over multiple days.
• Redoubts 4y ago
  > So where are all you interviewing that pays competitively without this "traditional" interview loop? You see people on HN balk at 500k+ engineering jobs even existing, so I think that's your answer.
• davedx 4y ago
  Personally, either regular tech companies in Europe who tend to be more relaxed with hiring ... but also don't pay the same astronomical salaries FAANG adjacent companies pay. Or startups. :)
• crabbone 4y ago
  Where I'm from FAANG pays the average for the market salary. They might be more attractive as a bullet point on the resume or because of various other perks (both related to the job directly or not at all). In the world outside HN I very rarely encountered people who'd turn away from any kind of hiring process. Maybe one in fifty candidates?.. I don't have the numbers, but I think I only met such people twice in my life. I bailed from interviews for different reasons, but I think that homework is a legit way to test someone's skills, so I wouldn't mind that. The reasons I cut the hiring process short in my job hunts were most commonly: 1. Employer is an MS Windows shop. Sometimes it's hard to figure this out from the job posting. 2. Employer requires employees to use company-provided tools s.a. code editor, or antivirus etc. In other words, an over-reaching IT. 3. Crazy / not very smart / borderline criminal employer. Examples include a guy who had "scrum cards" deck on his desk and essentially showed me to the door when I asked if they used this stuff for real. Another one who couldn't get my homework to run, asked for a Docker image, couldn't run that either, asked for a VM image, couldn't run that either... ---- There's one litmus test I have when interviewing that turned out to be surprisingly precise, and I don't know why. I ask potential employer if they ever use git-merge. If the answer is "no", the company turns out to be intelligent people who are nice to work with, and if the answer is anything else, it turns out to be dysfunctional in more ways than just infra. They will have toxic culture, under-the-carpet skirmishes where each department undermines another department, while at the same time trying to do as little work as possible. As you can imagine, unfortunately, I had to take jobs where the employer answered "yes" or "sometimes" etc. That's how I know :(
  • rsaarsoo 4y ago
    I'm confused... What's wrong with merge? For all I know, I once joined a company where the policy was to only do squash-merges. I left from there at the brink of mental breakdown.
    • strus 4y ago
      All companies I worked in for the last 10 years used squash-merges exclusively, combined with trunk-based development and small commits. I don't see anything wrong with that, it's nice to have a history where every other commit is not a merge commit.
• scarface74 4y ago
  Despite the HN bubble, most of the 2.7 million developers working in the US in banks, insurance companies or other “enterprise developers” will never see a total compensation amount (inflation adjusted) above around $170K in most of major cities in their life. These developers may go their entire careers without ever reversing a binary tree on a whiteboard while juggling two bowling balls on a unicycle.