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I've seen plenty of HN threads where good alternative processes were described. I'm not going to be exhaustive here: writing a program over a few hours that is

by ken47 3y ago

I've seen plenty of HN threads where good alternative processes were described. I'm not going to be exhaustive here: writing a program over a few hours that is reflective of the kind of work that the company actually does, coming up with and debating the architecture of a system, mock code reviews, etc. You might say these don't scale as well as standardized testing of university classical algorithms knowledge. The general response to that would be that if you're optimizing for scale, then you're not optimizing for quality, so stop the hype around Google only hiring "the best." It's telling that as Google has begun to regularly lay off engineers, they have also begun to deemphasize classical algorithms in their interview process.

deleted 3y ago
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okdood64 3y ago
> they have also begun to deemphasize classical algorithms in their interview process Can you elaborate?
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
To your point, while I haven't interviewed with Google, don't they actually do a number of the things you're talking about (e.g. ask about system design or ask you to look at some existing code)? I'm guessing every interviewer isn't asking you some variation of "find a loop in a linked list".
trympet 3y ago
At big tech companies, "writing a program over a few hours that is reflective of the kind of work that the company actually does" is not really a good, representative performance measure. Often times, you will be solving problems across multiple domains, outside of your area of expertise. You have to take on the role of PM, data scientist, SWE, researcher, etc. Internal restructuring of the company may even take you from working on backend web apis to distributed databases. It is expected that you re-acclimatize and learn quickly. Giving you a take-home test to write some CRUD app isn't necessarily sampling those same attributes. p.s.: also not a fan of classical algorithm style interviews. Clearly, they also have a bias.
- ken47 3y ago
  > Internal restructuring of the company may even take you from working on backend web apis to distributed databases This is a stretch. It's unlikely that an interview process would test such disparate skills directly, and a competent company will avoid moving an engineer into a role that requires a drastically different skillset without separate verification that they can handle the new role.
- stormbeard 3y ago
  > Internal restructuring of the company may even take you from working on backend web apis to distributed databases. This isn’t true. I’ve worked in multiple FAANG companies’ infrastructure orgs, including distributed kv stores, as a SWE. Anybody joining those kinds of teams are either specialists, very junior, or already had some kind of experience in the domain before joining. Recruiters that say stuff like “we want strong generalists… blah blah” are not the people who are sourcing candidates for these deep systems roles. It looks a lot like the ML roles.

by ken47 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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okdood64 3y ago

> they have also begun to deemphasize classical algorithms in their interview process Can you elaborate?

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

To your point, while I haven't interviewed with Google, don't they actually do a number of the things you're talking about (e.g. ask about system design or ask you to look at some existing code)? I'm guessing every interviewer isn't asking you some variation of "find a loop in a linked list".

trympet 3y ago

At big tech companies, "writing a program over a few hours that is reflective of the kind of work that the company actually does" is not really a good, representative performance measure. Often times, you will be solving problems across multiple domains, outside of your area of expertise. You have to take on the role of PM, data scientist, SWE, researcher, etc. Internal restructuring of the company may even take you from working on backend web apis to distributed databases. It is expected that you re-acclimatize and learn quickly. Giving you a take-home test to write some CRUD app isn't necessarily sampling those same attributes. p.s.: also not a fan of classical algorithm style interviews. Clearly, they also have a bias.

ken47 3y ago
> Internal restructuring of the company may even take you from working on backend web apis to distributed databases This is a stretch. It's unlikely that an interview process would test such disparate skills directly, and a competent company will avoid moving an engineer into a role that requires a drastically different skillset without separate verification that they can handle the new role.
stormbeard 3y ago
> Internal restructuring of the company may even take you from working on backend web apis to distributed databases. This isn’t true. I’ve worked in multiple FAANG companies’ infrastructure orgs, including distributed kv stores, as a SWE. Anybody joining those kinds of teams are either specialists, very junior, or already had some kind of experience in the domain before joining. Recruiters that say stuff like “we want strong generalists… blah blah” are not the people who are sourcing candidates for these deep systems roles. It looks a lot like the ML roles.