5 ms·

I don't know, I've walked into these interviews with zero preparation and succeeded. And I've failed FAANG-ish interviews where no amount of leetcode grinding

by codr7 3y ago

I don't know, I've walked into these interviews with zero preparation and succeeded. And I've failed FAANG-ish interviews where no amount of leetcode grinding would have helped me. In my opinion, it's getting rather silly. They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive processes. None of them even cared about my Github repository that's full of code I write for fun. Software developer hiring is definitely ripe for revolution/innovation.

liuliu 3y ago
When you are hiring in volume, you are hiring for additive value, not for transformative value (nor multiplicative value). For additive value, conformance is essential. Most of the semi-successful companies don't need to be "the innovation machine".
- snakewatching 3y ago
  I will agree with this. Leetcode style interviews identify the "rule-followers", "not-going to rock the boat" type of engineers. That's what FAANGs need, not innovators and leaders.
lionkor 3y ago
All jobs I applied for that I interviewed for looked at my GitHub specifically, and my past projects, and that was their main topic of discussion in the interview, apart from usual coding questions and such. Im not victim blaming by saying you may just be applying to the wrong places, am I
- majormajor 3y ago
  I would love to talk about my github projects with an interviewer - hell, I'd also love to talk more about my past systems than their hypothetical ones - but like the parent post, I've found it pretty rare. Past projects maybe 15% of the time at medium-to-large companies (500+ person), and so far am batting 0.000 for "asked about personal projects", including at FAANG interviews.
  - liuliu 3y ago
    The logic is twisted and strange, the justification sums up to this: talking past projects like talking to a PhD student about his research paper, it is all they does and doesn't put them in enough "foreign situation" to see their novel problem-solving abilities. OTOH, when you are hiring for leaders (directors and above), past experiences and behavior questions are all you talking about.
    - majormajor 3y ago
      That makes a certain about of sense but I think you can usually get a feel for project-by-project dissimilarities in someone's background and figure out if they've been doing the "1 year of experience for 10 years" or the "continually tackling new challenges and learning from them" path.
- PheonixPharts 3y ago
  Unfortunately this also means you have to be open to a potential 50% cut in TC as well. Personally, I find enjoying the 8+ hours I spend at work each day more important than raw TC, so have made the tradeoff (and still have a reasonably high TC) which works for me. That said, I would love a more laid back research programming job in academia, but that requires an additional 50% cut from where I am now. It's still understandably frustrating that knowing how to write software seems largely irrelevant to getting a job at a FAANG.
CamperBob2 3y ago
What kills me is that the developers they are hiring based on their encyclopedic knowledge of language minutiae and mad leetcode skillz are exactly the ones who will be first in line for replacement with ML-based solutions. The fitness function used by these companies is so broken it's not even funny. The ability to get things done and ship product doesn't even seem to be on their radar. They are optimizing for dead weight, which is how they end up with these periodic 1000+-person layoffs.
kerblang 3y ago
I tend to put it this way: If you are entrepreneurially/leadership- minded and can develop a talent for identifying talent, you can be 10x, even 100x more valuable than any engineer because you become a force multiplier who recognizes real talent and empowers it - and the best part is that everyone else is dragging their knuckles on the ground and obsessed with pretentious gate-keeping. The opportunity level is wide-open.
- majormajor 3y ago
  If you want to make money off of being better at hiring than Google et al you need two things: 1) the product idea for something to build that you can sell profitably 2) the hiring skill Neither of those are trivial to develop. I do tend the think the second isn't that hard to develop for specific situations (FAANG interviews are really aimed at hiring people who they could swap around to large different sorts of teams or roles and get along with, and be productive with, a huge swath of the company, though IME in practice that doesn't happen terribly often these days). But if you're doing it for someone else's company, your upside is capped by the upside of the company you're working for. And your reward is too - you're not going to command 10x the pay from a CEO you report to who doesn't themselves understand the difficulty of the hiring you're doing compared to "just copy Google" (or why they wouldn't have good results with the latter).
- borroka 3y ago
  A talent for identifying talent needs to be supported with numbers and effect sizes. The relative absence of numbers from the conversation is what allows many directors of football/soccer (those who recommend the purchase or sell of players) to boast about their stature as talent scouts. Indeed, it is not surprising that directors of soccer focus on successes and tend to gloss over the many blunders made. Which makes it difficult, as in many other fields, to distinguish the role of luck and ability in successes and failures. Almost always, in my experience, those with the most money and at least an average "eye" succeed in doing the best that can be done: everything else is a game of chance. A more sophisticated and technically oriented person would say that the most that can be done is to increase the odds of success, but then we are all left to the whims of fate: the young soccer player who many thought would be a sure bet will turn out to be one among many, and the average player at age 16 will have the growth spurt in the next two years that will make his body more conducive to stellar success (but was the growth spurt predictable?). What I can say is that there have been several attempts to create a special agency for the identification and management of talent in the technology industry, but none has turned out to be more than a higher-level contracting firm.
onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
> In my opinion, it's getting rather silly. It's luck of the draw. That's really how it's always been. If you get bad interviewers, you're in for a bad time. If you get asked questions you know, you're in for a good time. It's possible your odds of getting bad interviewers has increased. But I doubt the increase is that substantial. It's interesting to me how much stock these companies put into hiring, and then let countless terrible interviewers continue to interview. You'd think they'd recognize high quality interviewers and get them doing more than 1 interview per week, and not let people interview until passing a pretty high bar in the quality of their interview. Instead, they pretty much let anyone interview (as long as they've been at the company for N months and gone to some training).
- Tyr42 3y ago
  They also don't give any feedback on your interviews other than an eventual "they were hired" or not. So if you are a mediocre interviewer you will never know.
- michaelt 3y ago
  > You'd think they'd recognize high quality interviewers and get them doing more than 1 interview per week, and not let people interview until passing a pretty high bar in the quality of their interview. I think you substantially over-estimate the eagerness of software developers to take on unrewarding admin work.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    > I think you substantially over-estimate the eagerness of software developers to take on unrewarding admin work. Why do you assume it can only be un-rewarding? If hiring is so important, maybe it's worth paying the best people extra to get it done correctly. If it's not that important, it'd be nice if they'd stop pretending like it is.
    - michaelt 3y ago
      > Why do you assume it can only be un-rewarding? It’s an important day for them, so you owe them your full attention. Can’t be browsing the web or replying to emails. After a decade of interviewing, there is no excitement in watching the thousandth interviewee make the thousandth attempt to count the set bits in an integer. Hiring is important, it's just very very very boring.
mihaitodor 3y ago
I have a public disclaimer in my LinkedIn profile intro saying that I refuse to do any algorithmic live coding. They’re top employers and whatnot, but one doesn’t need to torture themselves with Leetcode to get a good job in this industry
- dpe82 3y ago
  Interesting; how has that worked for you?
  - mihaitodor 3y ago
    It felt quite empowering, actually. I ended up having to point it out to some recruiters who kept pestering me even though I already knew what their employer’s interview process is like. It also helped me avoid wasting time to hop on the first intro call with HR to get details about the next steps. Also, I got a few people reaching out specifically because they resonated with it, which was great!
- dekhn 3y ago
  Interesting. So if I asked you to open up coderpad.io and write a python function to reverse a string, you'd just absolutely refuse? What would you do otherwise to show me that you're a programmer?
  - mihaitodor 3y ago
    I’d refuse, but If the conversation goes in that direction, then I’d probably end the conversation right there, since it’s pretty clear that’s not the kind of role I want to interview for. I managed to accumulate a bit of online presence over the years and I expect my future employer to a) look me up prior to the interview and b) have a direct interest in my Open Source work.
    - dekhn 3y ago
      Sure, I'd look you up and scan your github pages. I've dealt with people who set up fake githubs (copying from various places on the web to make it look like they did real work). Can't help you if you only want to interview people who are interested in your open source work... that sounds very limiting.
kulikalov 3y ago
Not a recruiter, but I imagine there are at least 3 reasons for your repo to be ignored or deprioritized in favor of typical interview: - not everyone contributes to OSS - it’s easy to fake - it’s hard to assess within a short period of time This it seems to be hard to standardize and streamline candidates validation based on their oss repos. Also, afaik the goal of interview is to assess candidates thinking patterns, it’s hard to do quickly based on an arbitrary piece of code.
- codr7 3y ago
  Sure, it would take some more effort to dig into than checking boxes. But it would also provide more valuable feedback.
  - tdudzik 3y ago
    How would you compare candidates that have some code in GitHub and those that don't ?
    - cinntaile 3y ago
      You can assess the ones that don't have code on GitHub in a different way, but there is no reason to ignore a possibly valuable datapoint.
      - tdudzik 3y ago
        But faang companies try to objectively compare all candidates. Also they have so many resumes that it doesn't seem feasible to review code on GitHub.
        codr7 3y ago
        5 hours x 1/2 people checking boxes is energy that could be put to better use.
TheBigSalad 3y ago
"They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive processes." I don't see myself ever applying to any of these whacky interview companies. I like money and all, but idk. It's such a turn off. Maybe if I truly felt they were actually measuring company value.
- ar_lan 3y ago
  Where do you find other valuable companies to interview at? Genuine question, I've been entrenched in the Silicon Valley bubble for well over a decade that I don't even know how/where to find meaningful (remote) companies.
  - TheBigSalad 3y ago
    Mostly friends or targeting well known companies. I've used recruiters, all sorts of things. I can't speak to the current climate as I haven't looked in years.
ulfw 3y ago
The Product Manager interviews are even worse. Google was the shittiest experience I had, all the way to the silly hiring Committee. Three months of my life I'll never get back.
- passwordoops 3y ago
  Ooh do provide more detail! In general I've found PM interviews at hardware companies much more useful (?) than software.
em500 3y ago
FAANGs can get literally over a million job applications per year. Any procedure that filters that down to roughly the number of people that they plan to hire (a few 10k) is also going to filter out some excellent candidates, no way around it.
- codr7 3y ago
  But it's still a very time consuming and expensive process. Typically 5h of interviews with 1/2 people from my experience. Spending that energy more wisely would result in more valuable feedback and better hires. But it takes actual effort to try and understand rather than simply checking boxes.
  - Ihateyouall2345 3y ago
    [dead]
- RandallBrown 3y ago
  And yet, they still cold email me every 6 months or so.
ar_lan 3y ago
GitHub is not the best metric, though. 1. Many (most) engineers are not in positions to be able to meaningfully contribute to OSS (e.g. all the code I write for work is proprietary). 2. It can easily be faked. 3. Personal projects can sometimes be interesting, but often don't showcase usefulness (unless front-end). 4. Many high quality engineers don't like to spend their free time doing more of their job. Some repos, of course, are more impactful though. And I would probably say that if you are someone who loves to write code 16 hours a day, more power to you, you deserve to be hired! But many quality engineers would get missed if that is the desired bar (which is fine - other companies will just scoop them up). (edit: OSS engineers extra upset by what I'm saying, but there is a lot more to this world than just what shows up in your GitHub feed)
- codr7 3y ago
  The fact that a candidate loves problem solving / coding so much that they'd do it for fun is a pretty strong signal. Like I said, it would take more effort from the interviewers to dig into. But it would also provide more valuable feedback and result in better hires.
superfrank 3y ago
I agree that there's a lot that the current hiring process get wrong. I'm not really defending it, but want to clarify a few things. > They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive processes. In my experience this is by design. The cost of a false positive (hiring someone they shouldn't) is far more expensive than a false negative (passing on a good candidate). Since FAANGs usually have a healthy pipeline of candidates and many who fail will eventually reapply they're okay with passing on possibly qualified candidates. > None of them even cared about my Github repository that's full of code I write for fun. As an EM at a mid to large tech company who has hired plenty of engineers I think ignoring people's Github is the right call and I don't even bother looking at candidate's Github unless it's for something like an intern role. Ignoring the fact that I don't know where the code on Github came from (did someone else write it? Is this just following a tutorial?), the code you write and the skills you use when you're writing code at home alone on a passion project is VERY different than the skills you need to be successful in a large, slow moving, bureaucratic corporation.
- blitzar 3y ago
  > The cost of a false positive (hiring someone they shouldn't) is far more expensive than a false negative (passing on a good candidate) The cost of a false positive is 0 - they always hire the non optimum candidate there is a massive margin of error. We all like to pretend that without our unique special skills the entire company would dissapear overnight, but it is a fantasy.
nomel 3y ago
> None of them even cared about my Github repository that's full of code I write for fun. Context: I've interviewed around 200 people for our current org, and have "settled" on an interview that's used for a certain position. I don't think I'm necessarily good at interviews, and I'm not sure I'm "doing it right". I give the number to show that my sample size is reasonable. We're solving practical problems, with code. Our interview sessions are 45 minutes for each person (which is the fundamental limitation). I don't look at GitHub projects, or really ask about previous work. I used to, but I very quickly found that the vast majority of people lie on their resumes. Generally, the more senior, the more lies. Most people put bullet points of "achieved x" which end up really being "kinda helped those people who were achieving x". For GitHub, in most cases, it was obvious the person was not the author of the Github repo they gave me. They could answer questions about the code, but couldn't go into any depth about it. I found that going over previous work, or Github repos, ended up taking a huge chunk of the 45 minutes, that put each person on a different standard, somewhat of their own crafting, leaving no time to find out if they were actually able to write a for loop or not, which I've had Phd candidates, with "15 years of experience", fail to do. For feedback of the candidate, I need a tangible justification, and clear demonstration of why I say yes/maybe/no. There are no "gut feelings" allowed from the panel; you need reasons. So, I give the candidate a simple, practical, work relevant, problem to solve during the interview. No compilation, no running code, no worries about perfect syntax, and no esoteric knowledge/libraries required. They're free to use whatever language they want. It's an interview where they have to demonstrate their thought process, how they question/navigate the requirements, and ability to see consequences (which I think is 90% of programming). Maybe a few percent have finished within 10 minutes. For these people, we had fun talking about their other work, and they showed great knowledge, as expected. But, as desired, that wasn't required to do first. The interview itself proved that they would already. I would love feedback about this approach, even though it seems to be working well for our orgs needs. Ideally, I would take the Jim Keller approach, and have a nerd out session, but, I have a feeling people are more properly filtered before they would get to him.
- codr7 3y ago
  Wouldn't that be an excellent filter? If the candidate is lying, just move on to the next.
dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
>Software developer hiring is definitely ripe for revolution/innovation. That's like saying that janitor jobs ripe are for revolution/innovation. You would think I'm joking, but most companies really do not care, despite what they say.

by codr7 3y ago

liuliu 3y ago

When you are hiring in volume, you are hiring for additive value, not for transformative value (nor multiplicative value). For additive value, conformance is essential. Most of the semi-successful companies don't need to be "the innovation machine".

snakewatching 3y ago
I will agree with this. Leetcode style interviews identify the "rule-followers", "not-going to rock the boat" type of engineers. That's what FAANGs need, not innovators and leaders.

lionkor 3y ago

All jobs I applied for that I interviewed for looked at my GitHub specifically, and my past projects, and that was their main topic of discussion in the interview, apart from usual coding questions and such. Im not victim blaming by saying you may just be applying to the wrong places, am I

majormajor 3y ago
I would love to talk about my github projects with an interviewer - hell, I'd also love to talk more about my past systems than their hypothetical ones - but like the parent post, I've found it pretty rare. Past projects maybe 15% of the time at medium-to-large companies (500+ person), and so far am batting 0.000 for "asked about personal projects", including at FAANG interviews.
- liuliu 3y ago
  The logic is twisted and strange, the justification sums up to this: talking past projects like talking to a PhD student about his research paper, it is all they does and doesn't put them in enough "foreign situation" to see their novel problem-solving abilities. OTOH, when you are hiring for leaders (directors and above), past experiences and behavior questions are all you talking about.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    That makes a certain about of sense but I think you can usually get a feel for project-by-project dissimilarities in someone's background and figure out if they've been doing the "1 year of experience for 10 years" or the "continually tackling new challenges and learning from them" path.
PheonixPharts 3y ago
Unfortunately this also means you have to be open to a potential 50% cut in TC as well. Personally, I find enjoying the 8+ hours I spend at work each day more important than raw TC, so have made the tradeoff (and still have a reasonably high TC) which works for me. That said, I would love a more laid back research programming job in academia, but that requires an additional 50% cut from where I am now. It's still understandably frustrating that knowing how to write software seems largely irrelevant to getting a job at a FAANG.

CamperBob2 3y ago

What kills me is that the developers they are hiring based on their encyclopedic knowledge of language minutiae and mad leetcode skillz are exactly the ones who will be first in line for replacement with ML-based solutions. The fitness function used by these companies is so broken it's not even funny. The ability to get things done and ship product doesn't even seem to be on their radar. They are optimizing for dead weight, which is how they end up with these periodic 1000+-person layoffs.

kerblang 3y ago

I tend to put it this way: If you are entrepreneurially/leadership- minded and can develop a talent for identifying talent, you can be 10x, even 100x more valuable than any engineer because you become a force multiplier who recognizes real talent and empowers it - and the best part is that everyone else is dragging their knuckles on the ground and obsessed with pretentious gate-keeping. The opportunity level is wide-open.

majormajor 3y ago
If you want to make money off of being better at hiring than Google et al you need two things: 1) the product idea for something to build that you can sell profitably 2) the hiring skill Neither of those are trivial to develop. I do tend the think the second isn't that hard to develop for specific situations (FAANG interviews are really aimed at hiring people who they could swap around to large different sorts of teams or roles and get along with, and be productive with, a huge swath of the company, though IME in practice that doesn't happen terribly often these days). But if you're doing it for someone else's company, your upside is capped by the upside of the company you're working for. And your reward is too - you're not going to command 10x the pay from a CEO you report to who doesn't themselves understand the difficulty of the hiring you're doing compared to "just copy Google" (or why they wouldn't have good results with the latter).
borroka 3y ago
A talent for identifying talent needs to be supported with numbers and effect sizes. The relative absence of numbers from the conversation is what allows many directors of football/soccer (those who recommend the purchase or sell of players) to boast about their stature as talent scouts. Indeed, it is not surprising that directors of soccer focus on successes and tend to gloss over the many blunders made. Which makes it difficult, as in many other fields, to distinguish the role of luck and ability in successes and failures. Almost always, in my experience, those with the most money and at least an average "eye" succeed in doing the best that can be done: everything else is a game of chance. A more sophisticated and technically oriented person would say that the most that can be done is to increase the odds of success, but then we are all left to the whims of fate: the young soccer player who many thought would be a sure bet will turn out to be one among many, and the average player at age 16 will have the growth spurt in the next two years that will make his body more conducive to stellar success (but was the growth spurt predictable?). What I can say is that there have been several attempts to create a special agency for the identification and management of talent in the technology industry, but none has turned out to be more than a higher-level contracting firm.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago

> In my opinion, it's getting rather silly. It's luck of the draw. That's really how it's always been. If you get bad interviewers, you're in for a bad time. If you get asked questions you know, you're in for a good time. It's possible your odds of getting bad interviewers has increased. But I doubt the increase is that substantial. It's interesting to me how much stock these companies put into hiring, and then let countless terrible interviewers continue to interview. You'd think they'd recognize high quality interviewers and get them doing more than 1 interview per week, and not let people interview until passing a pretty high bar in the quality of their interview. Instead, they pretty much let anyone interview (as long as they've been at the company for N months and gone to some training).

Tyr42 3y ago
They also don't give any feedback on your interviews other than an eventual "they were hired" or not. So if you are a mediocre interviewer you will never know.
michaelt 3y ago
> You'd think they'd recognize high quality interviewers and get them doing more than 1 interview per week, and not let people interview until passing a pretty high bar in the quality of their interview. I think you substantially over-estimate the eagerness of software developers to take on unrewarding admin work.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  > I think you substantially over-estimate the eagerness of software developers to take on unrewarding admin work. Why do you assume it can only be un-rewarding? If hiring is so important, maybe it's worth paying the best people extra to get it done correctly. If it's not that important, it'd be nice if they'd stop pretending like it is.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    > Why do you assume it can only be un-rewarding? It’s an important day for them, so you owe them your full attention. Can’t be browsing the web or replying to emails. After a decade of interviewing, there is no excitement in watching the thousandth interviewee make the thousandth attempt to count the set bits in an integer. Hiring is important, it's just very very very boring.

mihaitodor 3y ago

I have a public disclaimer in my LinkedIn profile intro saying that I refuse to do any algorithmic live coding. They’re top employers and whatnot, but one doesn’t need to torture themselves with Leetcode to get a good job in this industry

dpe82 3y ago
Interesting; how has that worked for you?
- mihaitodor 3y ago
  It felt quite empowering, actually. I ended up having to point it out to some recruiters who kept pestering me even though I already knew what their employer’s interview process is like. It also helped me avoid wasting time to hop on the first intro call with HR to get details about the next steps. Also, I got a few people reaching out specifically because they resonated with it, which was great!
dekhn 3y ago
Interesting. So if I asked you to open up coderpad.io and write a python function to reverse a string, you'd just absolutely refuse? What would you do otherwise to show me that you're a programmer?
- mihaitodor 3y ago
  I’d refuse, but If the conversation goes in that direction, then I’d probably end the conversation right there, since it’s pretty clear that’s not the kind of role I want to interview for. I managed to accumulate a bit of online presence over the years and I expect my future employer to a) look me up prior to the interview and b) have a direct interest in my Open Source work.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    Sure, I'd look you up and scan your github pages. I've dealt with people who set up fake githubs (copying from various places on the web to make it look like they did real work). Can't help you if you only want to interview people who are interested in your open source work... that sounds very limiting.

kulikalov 3y ago

Not a recruiter, but I imagine there are at least 3 reasons for your repo to be ignored or deprioritized in favor of typical interview: - not everyone contributes to OSS - it’s easy to fake - it’s hard to assess within a short period of time This it seems to be hard to standardize and streamline candidates validation based on their oss repos. Also, afaik the goal of interview is to assess candidates thinking patterns, it’s hard to do quickly based on an arbitrary piece of code.

codr7 3y ago
Sure, it would take some more effort to dig into than checking boxes. But it would also provide more valuable feedback.
- tdudzik 3y ago
  How would you compare candidates that have some code in GitHub and those that don't ?
  - cinntaile 3y ago
    You can assess the ones that don't have code on GitHub in a different way, but there is no reason to ignore a possibly valuable datapoint.
    - tdudzik 3y ago
      But faang companies try to objectively compare all candidates. Also they have so many resumes that it doesn't seem feasible to review code on GitHub.
      - codr7 3y ago
        5 hours x 1/2 people checking boxes is energy that could be put to better use.

TheBigSalad 3y ago

"They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive processes." I don't see myself ever applying to any of these whacky interview companies. I like money and all, but idk. It's such a turn off. Maybe if I truly felt they were actually measuring company value.

ar_lan 3y ago
Where do you find other valuable companies to interview at? Genuine question, I've been entrenched in the Silicon Valley bubble for well over a decade that I don't even know how/where to find meaningful (remote) companies.
- TheBigSalad 3y ago
  Mostly friends or targeting well known companies. I've used recruiters, all sorts of things. I can't speak to the current climate as I haven't looked in years.

ulfw 3y ago

The Product Manager interviews are even worse. Google was the shittiest experience I had, all the way to the silly hiring Committee. Three months of my life I'll never get back.

passwordoops 3y ago
Ooh do provide more detail! In general I've found PM interviews at hardware companies much more useful (?) than software.

em500 3y ago

FAANGs can get literally over a million job applications per year. Any procedure that filters that down to roughly the number of people that they plan to hire (a few 10k) is also going to filter out some excellent candidates, no way around it.

codr7 3y ago
But it's still a very time consuming and expensive process. Typically 5h of interviews with 1/2 people from my experience. Spending that energy more wisely would result in more valuable feedback and better hires. But it takes actual effort to try and understand rather than simply checking boxes.
- Ihateyouall2345 3y ago
  [dead]
RandallBrown 3y ago
And yet, they still cold email me every 6 months or so.

ar_lan 3y ago

GitHub is not the best metric, though. 1. Many (most) engineers are not in positions to be able to meaningfully contribute to OSS (e.g. all the code I write for work is proprietary). 2. It can easily be faked. 3. Personal projects can sometimes be interesting, but often don't showcase usefulness (unless front-end). 4. Many high quality engineers don't like to spend their free time doing more of their job. Some repos, of course, are more impactful though. And I would probably say that if you are someone who loves to write code 16 hours a day, more power to you, you deserve to be hired! But many quality engineers would get missed if that is the desired bar (which is fine - other companies will just scoop them up). (edit: OSS engineers extra upset by what I'm saying, but there is a lot more to this world than just what shows up in your GitHub feed)

codr7 3y ago
The fact that a candidate loves problem solving / coding so much that they'd do it for fun is a pretty strong signal. Like I said, it would take more effort from the interviewers to dig into. But it would also provide more valuable feedback and result in better hires.

superfrank 3y ago

I agree that there's a lot that the current hiring process get wrong. I'm not really defending it, but want to clarify a few things. > They're scaring off and filtering out excellent candidates with these excessive processes. In my experience this is by design. The cost of a false positive (hiring someone they shouldn't) is far more expensive than a false negative (passing on a good candidate). Since FAANGs usually have a healthy pipeline of candidates and many who fail will eventually reapply they're okay with passing on possibly qualified candidates. > None of them even cared about my Github repository that's full of code I write for fun. As an EM at a mid to large tech company who has hired plenty of engineers I think ignoring people's Github is the right call and I don't even bother looking at candidate's Github unless it's for something like an intern role. Ignoring the fact that I don't know where the code on Github came from (did someone else write it? Is this just following a tutorial?), the code you write and the skills you use when you're writing code at home alone on a passion project is VERY different than the skills you need to be successful in a large, slow moving, bureaucratic corporation.

blitzar 3y ago
> The cost of a false positive (hiring someone they shouldn't) is far more expensive than a false negative (passing on a good candidate) The cost of a false positive is 0 - they always hire the non optimum candidate there is a massive margin of error. We all like to pretend that without our unique special skills the entire company would dissapear overnight, but it is a fantasy.

nomel 3y ago

> None of them even cared about my Github repository that's full of code I write for fun. Context: I've interviewed around 200 people for our current org, and have "settled" on an interview that's used for a certain position. I don't think I'm necessarily good at interviews, and I'm not sure I'm "doing it right". I give the number to show that my sample size is reasonable. We're solving practical problems, with code. Our interview sessions are 45 minutes for each person (which is the fundamental limitation). I don't look at GitHub projects, or really ask about previous work. I used to, but I very quickly found that the vast majority of people lie on their resumes. Generally, the more senior, the more lies. Most people put bullet points of "achieved x" which end up really being "kinda helped those people who were achieving x". For GitHub, in most cases, it was obvious the person was not the author of the Github repo they gave me. They could answer questions about the code, but couldn't go into any depth about it. I found that going over previous work, or Github repos, ended up taking a huge chunk of the 45 minutes, that put each person on a different standard, somewhat of their own crafting, leaving no time to find out if they were actually able to write a for loop or not, which I've had Phd candidates, with "15 years of experience", fail to do. For feedback of the candidate, I need a tangible justification, and clear demonstration of why I say yes/maybe/no. There are no "gut feelings" allowed from the panel; you need reasons. So, I give the candidate a simple, practical, work relevant, problem to solve during the interview. No compilation, no running code, no worries about perfect syntax, and no esoteric knowledge/libraries required. They're free to use whatever language they want. It's an interview where they have to demonstrate their thought process, how they question/navigate the requirements, and ability to see consequences (which I think is 90% of programming). Maybe a few percent have finished within 10 minutes. For these people, we had fun talking about their other work, and they showed great knowledge, as expected. But, as desired, that wasn't required to do first. The interview itself proved that they would already. I would love feedback about this approach, even though it seems to be working well for our orgs needs. Ideally, I would take the Jim Keller approach, and have a nerd out session, but, I have a feeling people are more properly filtered before they would get to him.

codr7 3y ago
Wouldn't that be an excellent filter? If the candidate is lying, just move on to the next.

dennis_jeeves1 3y ago

>Software developer hiring is definitely ripe for revolution/innovation. That's like saying that janitor jobs ripe are for revolution/innovation. You would think I'm joking, but most companies really do not care, despite what they say.