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A small anecdote. A partner of a friend quit their job earlier this year. They then took 4-6 weeks to prepare for each interview with Big Tech companies (4-6

A small anecdote. A partner of a friend quit their job earlier this year. They then took 4-6 weeks to prepare for each interview with Big Tech companies (4-6 weeks for Meta, 4-6 weeks for Stripe, etc.). Along the way, they also took random interviews just to practice and build muscle memory. They would grind leetcode several hours a day after researching which questions were likely to be encountered at each Big Tech. This paid off and they accepted an offer for L6/staff at a MAANG. Talked to them this week (haven't even started the new role) and they've already forgotten the details of most of what was practiced. They said that the hardest part was studying for the system design portion because they did not have experience with system design...but now made staff eng. at a MAANG. IRL, this individual is a good but not exceptional engineer having worked with them on a small project. Wild; absolutely wild and I feel like explains a lot of the boom and bust hiring cycles. When I watch some of the system design interview prep videos, it's just a script. You'll go into the call and all you need to do is largely follow the script. It doesn't matter if you've actually designed similar or more complex systems; the point of the system design interview is apparently "do you know the script"? Watch these two back to back at 2x speed and marvel at how much of this is executed like a script: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_qu1F9BXow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_qu1F9BXow - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K-eupuDVEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K-eupuDVEc

paxys 2y ago
Sounds like the system worked exactly as intended then. A seemingly smart person got a good job. What's the problem with this story exactly?
- pmg101 2y ago
  A moderately smart person was selected for a good job perhaps over many many better possible hires simply because that person had the leisure to learn the game. Inefficient. But nice for that individual, naturally.
  - FartyMcFarter 2y ago
    But is there a good way to find the "better possible hires" which doesn't have other significant disadvantages? If you have a convincing method of doing that, many companies would be interested in your ideas.
    - Apocryphon 2y ago
      Starfighter doesn’t seem to have gotten anywhere https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37985450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37985450
    - pydry 2y ago
      Yes, ask give interview tasks which are realistic depictions of the actual job tasks. No, the hiring managers that are into cargoogle culting are not actually that interested in how to do interviewing properly. Not unless, say, google does it and they can copy it. For them the important thing is that leetcode is a safe, defensible choice because "everyone else does it that way".
      - FartyMcFarter 2y ago
        > Yes, ask give interview tasks which are realistic depictions of the actual job tasks. I think this is exactly what a lot of companies try to do when interviewing. Depending on how much time they want candidates and interviewers to spend on the task, this ranges from leetcode-style problems to bigger coding challenges (possibly with some debugging or collaboration involved). What would you suggest concretely?
        pydry 2y ago
        A lot of companies do do it this way but the ones that set leetcode problems are deliberately avoiding setting realistic interview tasks. If you think leetcode is representative of real life programming you're probably a college student.
      - SatvikBeri 2y ago
- cess11 2y ago
  Apparently they expect people to work for free for more than a month to learn material they then won't use. In my mind that's a rather nasty practice. Not that I'm complaining. I'm happy to pick up people that are good at computers but wouldn't be able to pass that hurdle, and probably wouldn't hire anyone that has.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    It's very mild compared to postgraduate education. Or getting a degree in general. That's years!
    - cess11 2y ago
      Sure. Why is it a worthwhile comparison?
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      If you're getting a PhD solely for a job in marginally related part of industry, that's on you. The experience is useful if you're doing it for right reasons, instead of as a proxy ritual to boost your CV. There are more efficient ways to do the latter.
  - unoti 2y ago
    > Not that I'm complaining. I'm happy to pick up people that are good at computers but wouldn't be able to pass that hurdle, and probably wouldn't hire anyone that has. You're looking for people who feel like they can't be bothered to learn some of the science and fundamentals of their craft? And you'd actively oppose hiring people who have the determination to go the extra mile? You'd actually discriminate against people who know how to use basic data structures and algorithms, and have that enriched landscape of knowledge to apply to problems that might come up? Fortunately for you, there are lots of these people available to hire who felt like they are too good to put in the work. I'm not saying that the data structures and algorithms knowledge is needed to do most software engineering jobs on a daily basis. But for lots of jobs, hiring people with a demonstrated willingness to dive in deep and learn things that aren't necessarily easy or fun actually can be a very good thing, because a lot of engineering problems require a similarly difficult dive into some aspect of specialized domain knowledge.
- dmvdoug 2y ago
  It’s like the bar exam for lawyers. It bears absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the actual job and the work you will be doing. It’s a pointless ritual. And the point of the above story is that the person performed the ritual and then promptly forgot all the words once they succeeded. It illustrates the pointlessness.
  - ForHackernews 2y ago
    It's not a pointless ritual. It tests for determination, grit, and willingness to grind on difficult, frustrating and ultimately value-free tasks. All crucial skills in the modern technology or legal workplace.
    - dmvdoug 2y ago
      I was a lawyer. I passed the bar exam (first try, no less). I practiced. The bar exam does none of what you claimed for it. Now, I offered it here as an analogy, but I am not a software developer. It just sounded akin to what I do know from my own experience and from talking to literally hundreds of other lawyers, law school professors, judges and their clerks. So maybe it’s not a good analogy to software development. I don’t know.
    - tshaddox 2y ago
      And by that argument, difficult big tech system design interviews are interchangeable with bar examinations.
      - raydev 2y ago
        I actually think we should keep the system design interviews because they are closer to what I've actually experienced and researched in service of my work. The leetcodes feel completely unrelated.
    - pessimizer 2y ago
      > It's not a pointless ritual. It tests for determination, grit, and willingness to grind on difficult, frustrating and ultimately value-free tasks. This is what people say whenever one criticizes the methodology of any test. They say that the real test was actually the friends we made along the way. The real test was the degree to which you are willing to humiliate yourself, or to accomplish things you don't understand the purpose of, or to accomplish things that you do understand the purpose of but disagree with logically or morally. We filter for the worst, most damaged, and most desperate people.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  "Seemingly smart person getting a good job" is a criteria for filling headcount during a boom, but regresses the industry's maturity by placing inexperienced people into critical roles. The problem with this story is that people need to work with and rely on this person for responsibilities they're not yet qualified to meet. In some cases, a "smart person" will be able to grow into the role, but the road there is long and messy, which becomes a frustration for colleagues, supervisors, clients, users etc. Because of the prolonged boom we just went through, the industry -- especially at FAANG's -- is now saturated with smart, naive people trying to fake it until they make it, leading to a gross decline in quality and consistency compared to where we have been and might otherwise be.
- sanderjd 2y ago
  It took forever. Literally tens of thousands of dollars of opportunity cost, with a lot of risk of having nothing to show for it. The bummer is that you're right, it actually is worth even this much investment, because these companies do pay extremely well. But it's still horrendously inefficient, because the companies are getting a very small improvement to their signal to noise ratio, at this great cost (which, notably, they don't bear).
  - lupire 2y ago
    Yeah that's how education works. Someone working at billion dollar VC funded outfit should understand the cause of making smart but speculative bets.
    - sanderjd 2y ago
      Yes, and they should also be able to understand when the system that creates those smart but speculative bets is creating deadweight loss, and identify that as a problem. BTW, I have personally made this bet in the past (though I didn't put 3 to 4 months into it...) and it was indeed an excellent bet to make. But benefitting from a system does not preclude identifying problems with it.
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  although its a different paradigm that I’m used to, I agree with this general concept if you provide utility to the market, you shouldn’t need credentials or a corporate ladder to climb to prove it, it should be immediate compensation no matter how disparate so despite how coveted tech compensation packages are at this tier of company, a seemingly smart person getting a good job after doing a contrived aptitude test does meet that criteria. other people outside the field (and within) have difficulty passing it and don't have the cognitive ability to study for it, or the financial stability to prioritize studying for it I also agree that a less contrived aptitude test would be better
- raydev 2y ago
  They passed over all the people who didn't study hard enough on random word problems, and then practice those types of problems sufficiently such they could hammer out a solution in under 20 minutes. Multiple aspects of the "leetcode interview" require practice outside of work experience for many people, despite them being great problem solvers.
keiferski 2y ago
If the interview is testing for the ability to learn new difficult things quickly, then it would seem to be successful.
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  Is "cramming" the same as "learning"? Is knowing the chemical reaction between an acid and baking soda the same as being a world class patissier? Many of these exercises are like "demonstrate that you can make this dough rise" but not actually considering "can you make an artful and delicious pastry"; the two are totally different. The most surprising thing when asked about their experience was that most of the details have already been lost before even starting the role.
  - keiferski 2y ago
    Depends on the situation and job of course, but cramming isn't necessarily always a negative thing. Sometimes you may only need to learn a technology/skill/etc. to accomplish something quickly, but then not need it again. But yeah in general I agree with you – I just don't think it's necessarily always so clearly a waste of time.
  - eitally 2y ago
    At some inflection point, though, cramming becomes learning. This is in a different place for each individual, but it's true regardless. Nobody hires anybody other than artists based on whether they can "create an artful and _____ ____". People are hired based on either what the have done, can claim to be able to do, or whom they know.
  - agentultra 2y ago
    You can only get so far as a pastry chef knowing the recipes. Understanding the chemistry does take your craft to a higher level. I’m never really surprised that there are so many security vulnerabilities out there. Tons of software is completely half-assed: slow, error-prone and inefficient. The market supports it because VCs keep pumping out companies that throw spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. And it has had an influence on the kinds of skills we optimize for at the hiring level. The problem I see isn’t that we’re trying to hire better developers. It’s that the tests we use are misaligned. Getting into a MAANG with all these hazing rituals and then you get stuck resizing the corners on buttons or editing XML configuration for some ancient system is a waste of time. But so is hiring programmers that only understand frameworks.
mekoka 2y ago
> IRL, this individual is a good but not exceptional engineer having worked with them on a small project. Have you worked with them since they went through this regiment? Doing a DS&A coding problem regiment + system design will change you as an engineer. You might be surprised how good they've become. Also they say they've forgotten. But if they were able to get that position, they probably could do medium level leetcode problems. So, I'd doubt they've forgotten all of it. I'm pretty sure they'd still be able to solve easy level problems, which most people can't solve off the cuff. They also probably still know the complexity of a bunch of essential backend operations (search, sort, array and hash lookups, tree & graph traversals, etc).
- swatcoder 2y ago
  No home study grind on puzzle problems is a substitute for years of practical experience, which is what most teams actually hope for in their higher-level engineers. The point is not that the friend didn't pick up some implicit knowledge or become a sharper engineer than they were before grinding, it's that by exploiting the screening strategy, they got placed into a job they're not truly qualified for. Are they bright enough to fake it until they make it? Maybe, but that's not going to be the case for many of the countless placements that were made like this, and hints at why both product and software quality is in bad shape these days.
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    Yeah, in some ways I like "system design" type questions, because at least it's pretty creative and more like what I do at work than writing some little algorithm with a custom data structure. But on the other hand, it's also not a very strong signal for my years of experience working on and designing portions of systems. I've never actually done "design a system from scratch", because every system that is big and complex evolved from some smaller and less complex system. So the kinds of questions that come up in these system design interviews are best answered in real life with "I dunno, I'd pick something simple and refactor it later if it becomes a bottleneck". "What kind of database would you choose for this?" "Whatever we're already using in production for other things." "How would you model this data?" "As simply as possible, so that we can get it out fast and start learning things." But these are not interesting answers in these interviews. I have usually found myself saying "well, in real life, I would advocate for simplicity and iteration, but for the purposes of this interview, I'm happy to discuss potential trade-offs in technology selection, architecture, and data modeling". But I think it's easier to study up on the "right" answers to the architecture and modeling questions, without spending a lot of time learning how to start simple and when to evolve toward complexity, etc.
loeg 2y ago
I took a similar approach -- took 6 weeks off doing interview prep, then concurrently applied to three FAANG employers. Got offers from all three, the worst of which was a 36% raise over my former non-FAANG job.
_DeadFred_ 2y ago
Back when I had a job hiring people we created problems we could walk people through and see what they figured out on the fly/what they knew but didn't know they knew. That was what I was taught whiteboard problems were, not this lame leet code. But I grew up with both parents in 1980s/90s Santa Cruz tech. The current scene adopted the practice but made it exclusive when it was intended to be inclusive (because there wasn't a huge talent pool back then so they were looking for people they could grow into developers). One of my hires was a physicist who didn't know any of the jargon and had a look of terror when she first started on our whiteboard problems. Once we led her to a comfortable spot and she got into it she started talking about tools she made to help with her physics work with zero dev knowledge (she was shocked when we called her tools software, she was like, but it wasn't REAL software, we were like hate to break it to you, but that was not only real software you wrote, but crazy impressive). The white board problems were a tool to highlight potential. I get that these big companies just want drop in widgets not people and that is what they are searching for, I just think it's funny they are using something that was created for the exact opposite purpose. Part of me is kind of glad I'm too old to be one of the cool kids and have no hope to land a job that does these sorts of code challenges.
- momojo 2y ago
  I'm from the Bay but I've never heard "Santa Cruz Tech" before. Its always been a sleepy beach/uni town to me. Have any interesting anecdotes?
  - Loudergood 2y ago
    Assuming it's reference to Santa Cruz Operations.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    Not to share here. I was at boring places my parents had the interesting experiences but those aren't my stories to share. It had lots of small industry specific solutions, lots of hardware/software tied together solutions (so a large 'tech' community where 'tech' was the title for hardware technicians that hand built/designed/produced the hardware devices/circuit boards/etc). I'm surprised you never heard of the Santa Cruz software scene. Some examples: Victor Technologies (specifically Victor 9000 Computer) Texas Instruments had a fab/facility there. Digital Research had a presence (CP/M, PDP) Seagate SCO Borland EMU Systems (hardware music samplers) (lots of cool musicians used to visit their facilities) (current) Antares (Auto tune/music tools) (current) Plugin Alliance (music tools) (current?) Plantronics But mainly it was smaller obscure companies. For example Parallel Computers working on parallel computing early on. IDX working on radio tags in the 80s. Triton doing sonar imaging with SGI boxes. It was very much it's own sub-scene with people who picked it for lifestyle so a bit different mindset (more hippie, schedules around the tides so people could surf, everyone going to the Wednesday night sailing races together). I was just a kid but it seemed cool. And it was open and friendly (I always had summer jobs as a kid starting from duplicating floppies for CP/M or PDP software as a 10 year old). Plus just a cool vibe. I remember next door to where my mom worked going and talking to Lorenzo Ponza (inventor of the pitching machine) when I got bored of playing Trek or Rogue on the VAX at her office (she was a workaholic always working weekends and dragging me along) or skating the ramp (for the stoner tech(nician) crowd) in the parking lot.
tayo42 2y ago
Your absolutely right about the "system design" interview but people act like it's an amazing type of interview. People generally don't even want you to go deep on anything, but you're can't stay to shallow. It's just bsing, yes your absolutely right, it feels like memorizing a script and saying the right words at the right time
- icedchai 2y ago
  Interviewers would be better off focusing on data fundamentals: data modeling, validation, schema design, indexing, sharding/distribution strategies. When you screw this stuff up, it can be very, very hard to fix. The "problems" cascade and build up. Garbage in, garbage out. I've seen databases, in production, with no primary keys or indexes. It is absolutely bonkers.
  - CharlieDigital 2y ago
    The thing with the system design script is that it seems so Rube Goldberg. Why not just ask the important bits?
charlie0 2y ago
The problem is not everyone has the chance to work on super-scale systems. So what are you going to do? Weed out anyone with the potential to become great at that just because they've never had the chance to try? Demonstrating the ability to learn, even if it's just scripted, should be good enough. Granted, they might get passed over by someone with actual experience, but the lack of real experience shouldn't be a deal breaker. It's fine as long as the employer has realistic expectations of the employee.
asdfman123 2y ago
> It doesn't matter if you've actually designed similar or more complex systems You know you've designed more complex systems. The interview has no way of knowing if that's true, or you're an actor following the "I've designed complex systems" script. And acting talent is arguably more common among the population than programming talent.
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  I think there are ways to tell by simply asking deep questions about the system someone claims to have built, critiquing the design decisions, diving into why this technology over that technology. When I've hired or been a part of a hiring process, I always place emphasis on a candidate's past projects and ask deep technical questions around those. I also always review their GitHub repos if one is provided in the profile and I will ask them deep questions about their repos, why they chose this tech or that, interesting pieces of code, design tradeoffs they made, etc.
  - lkjdsklf 2y ago
    That type of interview allows all kinds of unconscious bias to creep in which is why a lot of tech companies moved away from it
crazygringo 2y ago
If you talk to hiring at some of these companies, it is intentionally designed to be this way so that it is fairly meritocratic. In other words, anybody, regardless of what university they went to or what courses they took out what advantages or disadvantages they had, can learn this stuff in a couple of months if they have what it takes for the role. And because the skills are so standardized, the process is pretty differently objective. It's not expected that they'll actually use the specific skills in the job. But it shows they can learn skills of that type and then perform them at a high level in a stressful interview situation. Which is a great signal for whether they can learn the skills needed for the specific project they wind up on and perform in a high stakes deadline scenario. I'm not defending the system, but I am saying there's a clear logic behind it.
- bb88 2y ago
  The thing I think is funny in all this is that hiring a new manager is fraught with a high amount of risk (more so than an engineer), but they don't have nearly the level of hurdles to get over. Does the company interview past employees of the manager? Did the manager applicant have alcohol, drug issues, or weird sexual things he did to his direct reports or others? Or, instead, would you enjoy his presence on a golf outing? I know one manager who had issues with all three got hired at Google. So. Think of the poor HR person that will have to clean up that mess.
- derangedHorse 2y ago
  The idea of it being positioned as meritocratic is hilarious to me. As if having a process outside of the leetcode question bank will lead to any more bias. I'm generally of the belief that an interview process should be standardized in an attempt to reduce bias, but I disagree that it needs to be something people can study for to the extent that leetcode questions can be studied. I've interviewed people with leetcode questions where my co-interviewers made the candidate's confidence in presenting the correct answer the tipping point for hiring (with women mostly being targeted in this category). Bias can happen in any process, and with "culture" frequently being a consideration it's hard to tell what should be justified. Meritocracy in the tech industry is mostly a joke outside the overachieving outliers.
collingreen 2y ago
Did you also post this in another comment recently (yesterday?)
aleksiy123 2y ago
I think you missed the part where you describe their current experience. If he was even considered for L6 staff, then his on resume credentials already justified him at L5 Senior or L6 Staff. The interview performance is what pushed him over the edge into L6. It seems like you think they don't deserve a staff level position?
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  > If he was even considered for L6 staff, then his on resume credentials already justified him at L5 Senior or L6 Staff. I don't want to put anyone down here, but working experience with this individual says "probably not".
deleted 2y ago
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whstl 2y ago
Systems Design is IMO the most useless part of those interviews. Interviewers are just trying to find someone who would design a system the same way they did. They used a queue? They want you to add one. They used serverless? Better say the word "Lambda" somewhere. They hate serverless? Ooops better stick to regular servers. In the end yeah, it's about following a script, but also reading the room.
raydev 2y ago
> They said that the hardest part was studying for the system design portion because they did not have experience with system design Your friend is not alone, and I don't understand what separates us. Even when I was early career, system design was my favorite. My biggest issue is performance anxiety when there's a concrete problem to solve that I've never seen before, so coding sessions are absolute hell. Inability to focus, forgetting approaches I've known forever, etc. Ask me to do system design though, and it's generally freeform, I can talk about different approaches, deep dive on the fly, and draw a nice diagram or many nice diagrams, and interviewers love me and think I'm smart. I've had interviewers who were suspicious after my bad coding performance try to nail me on esoteric implementation details but because I have actual, hard-earned experience I can pretty much explain any approach in my niche and then tell you all the tradeoffs. I can also quickly code up examples, etc. Never had a bad feedback on this portion. Something about the complete detachment of the coding problem from real life is such a huge mental block and I am continuing to fight it 15 years into my career, after dozens of similar interviews.

paxys 2y ago

Sounds like the system worked exactly as intended then. A seemingly smart person got a good job. What's the problem with this story exactly?

pmg101 2y ago
A moderately smart person was selected for a good job perhaps over many many better possible hires simply because that person had the leisure to learn the game. Inefficient. But nice for that individual, naturally.
- FartyMcFarter 2y ago
  But is there a good way to find the "better possible hires" which doesn't have other significant disadvantages? If you have a convincing method of doing that, many companies would be interested in your ideas.
  - Apocryphon 2y ago
    Starfighter doesn’t seem to have gotten anywhere https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37985450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37985450
  - pydry 2y ago
    Yes, ask give interview tasks which are realistic depictions of the actual job tasks. No, the hiring managers that are into cargoogle culting are not actually that interested in how to do interviewing properly. Not unless, say, google does it and they can copy it. For them the important thing is that leetcode is a safe, defensible choice because "everyone else does it that way".
    - FartyMcFarter 2y ago
      > Yes, ask give interview tasks which are realistic depictions of the actual job tasks. I think this is exactly what a lot of companies try to do when interviewing. Depending on how much time they want candidates and interviewers to spend on the task, this ranges from leetcode-style problems to bigger coding challenges (possibly with some debugging or collaboration involved). What would you suggest concretely?
      - pydry 2y ago
        A lot of companies do do it this way but the ones that set leetcode problems are deliberately avoiding setting realistic interview tasks. If you think leetcode is representative of real life programming you're probably a college student.
    - SatvikBeri 2y ago
cess11 2y ago
Apparently they expect people to work for free for more than a month to learn material they then won't use. In my mind that's a rather nasty practice. Not that I'm complaining. I'm happy to pick up people that are good at computers but wouldn't be able to pass that hurdle, and probably wouldn't hire anyone that has.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  It's very mild compared to postgraduate education. Or getting a degree in general. That's years!
  - cess11 2y ago
    Sure. Why is it a worthwhile comparison?
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    If you're getting a PhD solely for a job in marginally related part of industry, that's on you. The experience is useful if you're doing it for right reasons, instead of as a proxy ritual to boost your CV. There are more efficient ways to do the latter.
- unoti 2y ago
  > Not that I'm complaining. I'm happy to pick up people that are good at computers but wouldn't be able to pass that hurdle, and probably wouldn't hire anyone that has. You're looking for people who feel like they can't be bothered to learn some of the science and fundamentals of their craft? And you'd actively oppose hiring people who have the determination to go the extra mile? You'd actually discriminate against people who know how to use basic data structures and algorithms, and have that enriched landscape of knowledge to apply to problems that might come up? Fortunately for you, there are lots of these people available to hire who felt like they are too good to put in the work. I'm not saying that the data structures and algorithms knowledge is needed to do most software engineering jobs on a daily basis. But for lots of jobs, hiring people with a demonstrated willingness to dive in deep and learn things that aren't necessarily easy or fun actually can be a very good thing, because a lot of engineering problems require a similarly difficult dive into some aspect of specialized domain knowledge.
dmvdoug 2y ago
It’s like the bar exam for lawyers. It bears absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the actual job and the work you will be doing. It’s a pointless ritual. And the point of the above story is that the person performed the ritual and then promptly forgot all the words once they succeeded. It illustrates the pointlessness.
- ForHackernews 2y ago
  It's not a pointless ritual. It tests for determination, grit, and willingness to grind on difficult, frustrating and ultimately value-free tasks. All crucial skills in the modern technology or legal workplace.
  - dmvdoug 2y ago
    I was a lawyer. I passed the bar exam (first try, no less). I practiced. The bar exam does none of what you claimed for it. Now, I offered it here as an analogy, but I am not a software developer. It just sounded akin to what I do know from my own experience and from talking to literally hundreds of other lawyers, law school professors, judges and their clerks. So maybe it’s not a good analogy to software development. I don’t know.
  - tshaddox 2y ago
    And by that argument, difficult big tech system design interviews are interchangeable with bar examinations.
    - raydev 2y ago
      I actually think we should keep the system design interviews because they are closer to what I've actually experienced and researched in service of my work. The leetcodes feel completely unrelated.
  - pessimizer 2y ago
    > It's not a pointless ritual. It tests for determination, grit, and willingness to grind on difficult, frustrating and ultimately value-free tasks. This is what people say whenever one criticizes the methodology of any test. They say that the real test was actually the friends we made along the way. The real test was the degree to which you are willing to humiliate yourself, or to accomplish things you don't understand the purpose of, or to accomplish things that you do understand the purpose of but disagree with logically or morally. We filter for the worst, most damaged, and most desperate people.
swatcoder 2y ago
"Seemingly smart person getting a good job" is a criteria for filling headcount during a boom, but regresses the industry's maturity by placing inexperienced people into critical roles. The problem with this story is that people need to work with and rely on this person for responsibilities they're not yet qualified to meet. In some cases, a "smart person" will be able to grow into the role, but the road there is long and messy, which becomes a frustration for colleagues, supervisors, clients, users etc. Because of the prolonged boom we just went through, the industry -- especially at FAANG's -- is now saturated with smart, naive people trying to fake it until they make it, leading to a gross decline in quality and consistency compared to where we have been and might otherwise be.
sanderjd 2y ago
It took forever. Literally tens of thousands of dollars of opportunity cost, with a lot of risk of having nothing to show for it. The bummer is that you're right, it actually is worth even this much investment, because these companies do pay extremely well. But it's still horrendously inefficient, because the companies are getting a very small improvement to their signal to noise ratio, at this great cost (which, notably, they don't bear).
- lupire 2y ago
  Yeah that's how education works. Someone working at billion dollar VC funded outfit should understand the cause of making smart but speculative bets.
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    Yes, and they should also be able to understand when the system that creates those smart but speculative bets is creating deadweight loss, and identify that as a problem. BTW, I have personally made this bet in the past (though I didn't put 3 to 4 months into it...) and it was indeed an excellent bet to make. But benefitting from a system does not preclude identifying problems with it.
yieldcrv 2y ago
although its a different paradigm that I’m used to, I agree with this general concept if you provide utility to the market, you shouldn’t need credentials or a corporate ladder to climb to prove it, it should be immediate compensation no matter how disparate so despite how coveted tech compensation packages are at this tier of company, a seemingly smart person getting a good job after doing a contrived aptitude test does meet that criteria. other people outside the field (and within) have difficulty passing it and don't have the cognitive ability to study for it, or the financial stability to prioritize studying for it I also agree that a less contrived aptitude test would be better
raydev 2y ago
They passed over all the people who didn't study hard enough on random word problems, and then practice those types of problems sufficiently such they could hammer out a solution in under 20 minutes. Multiple aspects of the "leetcode interview" require practice outside of work experience for many people, despite them being great problem solvers.

keiferski 2y ago

If the interview is testing for the ability to learn new difficult things quickly, then it would seem to be successful.

CharlieDigital 2y ago
Is "cramming" the same as "learning"? Is knowing the chemical reaction between an acid and baking soda the same as being a world class patissier? Many of these exercises are like "demonstrate that you can make this dough rise" but not actually considering "can you make an artful and delicious pastry"; the two are totally different. The most surprising thing when asked about their experience was that most of the details have already been lost before even starting the role.
- keiferski 2y ago
  Depends on the situation and job of course, but cramming isn't necessarily always a negative thing. Sometimes you may only need to learn a technology/skill/etc. to accomplish something quickly, but then not need it again. But yeah in general I agree with you – I just don't think it's necessarily always so clearly a waste of time.
- eitally 2y ago
  At some inflection point, though, cramming becomes learning. This is in a different place for each individual, but it's true regardless. Nobody hires anybody other than artists based on whether they can "create an artful and _____ ____". People are hired based on either what the have done, can claim to be able to do, or whom they know.
- agentultra 2y ago
  You can only get so far as a pastry chef knowing the recipes. Understanding the chemistry does take your craft to a higher level. I’m never really surprised that there are so many security vulnerabilities out there. Tons of software is completely half-assed: slow, error-prone and inefficient. The market supports it because VCs keep pumping out companies that throw spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. And it has had an influence on the kinds of skills we optimize for at the hiring level. The problem I see isn’t that we’re trying to hire better developers. It’s that the tests we use are misaligned. Getting into a MAANG with all these hazing rituals and then you get stuck resizing the corners on buttons or editing XML configuration for some ancient system is a waste of time. But so is hiring programmers that only understand frameworks.

mekoka 2y ago

> IRL, this individual is a good but not exceptional engineer having worked with them on a small project. Have you worked with them since they went through this regiment? Doing a DS&A coding problem regiment + system design will change you as an engineer. You might be surprised how good they've become. Also they say they've forgotten. But if they were able to get that position, they probably could do medium level leetcode problems. So, I'd doubt they've forgotten all of it. I'm pretty sure they'd still be able to solve easy level problems, which most people can't solve off the cuff. They also probably still know the complexity of a bunch of essential backend operations (search, sort, array and hash lookups, tree & graph traversals, etc).

swatcoder 2y ago
No home study grind on puzzle problems is a substitute for years of practical experience, which is what most teams actually hope for in their higher-level engineers. The point is not that the friend didn't pick up some implicit knowledge or become a sharper engineer than they were before grinding, it's that by exploiting the screening strategy, they got placed into a job they're not truly qualified for. Are they bright enough to fake it until they make it? Maybe, but that's not going to be the case for many of the countless placements that were made like this, and hints at why both product and software quality is in bad shape these days.
- sanderjd 2y ago
  Yeah, in some ways I like "system design" type questions, because at least it's pretty creative and more like what I do at work than writing some little algorithm with a custom data structure. But on the other hand, it's also not a very strong signal for my years of experience working on and designing portions of systems. I've never actually done "design a system from scratch", because every system that is big and complex evolved from some smaller and less complex system. So the kinds of questions that come up in these system design interviews are best answered in real life with "I dunno, I'd pick something simple and refactor it later if it becomes a bottleneck". "What kind of database would you choose for this?" "Whatever we're already using in production for other things." "How would you model this data?" "As simply as possible, so that we can get it out fast and start learning things." But these are not interesting answers in these interviews. I have usually found myself saying "well, in real life, I would advocate for simplicity and iteration, but for the purposes of this interview, I'm happy to discuss potential trade-offs in technology selection, architecture, and data modeling". But I think it's easier to study up on the "right" answers to the architecture and modeling questions, without spending a lot of time learning how to start simple and when to evolve toward complexity, etc.

loeg 2y ago

I took a similar approach -- took 6 weeks off doing interview prep, then concurrently applied to three FAANG employers. Got offers from all three, the worst of which was a 36% raise over my former non-FAANG job.

_DeadFred_ 2y ago

Back when I had a job hiring people we created problems we could walk people through and see what they figured out on the fly/what they knew but didn't know they knew. That was what I was taught whiteboard problems were, not this lame leet code. But I grew up with both parents in 1980s/90s Santa Cruz tech. The current scene adopted the practice but made it exclusive when it was intended to be inclusive (because there wasn't a huge talent pool back then so they were looking for people they could grow into developers). One of my hires was a physicist who didn't know any of the jargon and had a look of terror when she first started on our whiteboard problems. Once we led her to a comfortable spot and she got into it she started talking about tools she made to help with her physics work with zero dev knowledge (she was shocked when we called her tools software, she was like, but it wasn't REAL software, we were like hate to break it to you, but that was not only real software you wrote, but crazy impressive). The white board problems were a tool to highlight potential. I get that these big companies just want drop in widgets not people and that is what they are searching for, I just think it's funny they are using something that was created for the exact opposite purpose. Part of me is kind of glad I'm too old to be one of the cool kids and have no hope to land a job that does these sorts of code challenges.

momojo 2y ago
I'm from the Bay but I've never heard "Santa Cruz Tech" before. Its always been a sleepy beach/uni town to me. Have any interesting anecdotes?
- Loudergood 2y ago
  Assuming it's reference to Santa Cruz Operations.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  Not to share here. I was at boring places my parents had the interesting experiences but those aren't my stories to share. It had lots of small industry specific solutions, lots of hardware/software tied together solutions (so a large 'tech' community where 'tech' was the title for hardware technicians that hand built/designed/produced the hardware devices/circuit boards/etc). I'm surprised you never heard of the Santa Cruz software scene. Some examples: Victor Technologies (specifically Victor 9000 Computer) Texas Instruments had a fab/facility there. Digital Research had a presence (CP/M, PDP) Seagate SCO Borland EMU Systems (hardware music samplers) (lots of cool musicians used to visit their facilities) (current) Antares (Auto tune/music tools) (current) Plugin Alliance (music tools) (current?) Plantronics But mainly it was smaller obscure companies. For example Parallel Computers working on parallel computing early on. IDX working on radio tags in the 80s. Triton doing sonar imaging with SGI boxes. It was very much it's own sub-scene with people who picked it for lifestyle so a bit different mindset (more hippie, schedules around the tides so people could surf, everyone going to the Wednesday night sailing races together). I was just a kid but it seemed cool. And it was open and friendly (I always had summer jobs as a kid starting from duplicating floppies for CP/M or PDP software as a 10 year old). Plus just a cool vibe. I remember next door to where my mom worked going and talking to Lorenzo Ponza (inventor of the pitching machine) when I got bored of playing Trek or Rogue on the VAX at her office (she was a workaholic always working weekends and dragging me along) or skating the ramp (for the stoner tech(nician) crowd) in the parking lot.

tayo42 2y ago

Your absolutely right about the "system design" interview but people act like it's an amazing type of interview. People generally don't even want you to go deep on anything, but you're can't stay to shallow. It's just bsing, yes your absolutely right, it feels like memorizing a script and saying the right words at the right time

icedchai 2y ago
Interviewers would be better off focusing on data fundamentals: data modeling, validation, schema design, indexing, sharding/distribution strategies. When you screw this stuff up, it can be very, very hard to fix. The "problems" cascade and build up. Garbage in, garbage out. I've seen databases, in production, with no primary keys or indexes. It is absolutely bonkers.
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  The thing with the system design script is that it seems so Rube Goldberg. Why not just ask the important bits?

charlie0 2y ago

The problem is not everyone has the chance to work on super-scale systems. So what are you going to do? Weed out anyone with the potential to become great at that just because they've never had the chance to try? Demonstrating the ability to learn, even if it's just scripted, should be good enough. Granted, they might get passed over by someone with actual experience, but the lack of real experience shouldn't be a deal breaker. It's fine as long as the employer has realistic expectations of the employee.

asdfman123 2y ago

> It doesn't matter if you've actually designed similar or more complex systems You know you've designed more complex systems. The interview has no way of knowing if that's true, or you're an actor following the "I've designed complex systems" script. And acting talent is arguably more common among the population than programming talent.

CharlieDigital 2y ago
I think there are ways to tell by simply asking deep questions about the system someone claims to have built, critiquing the design decisions, diving into why this technology over that technology. When I've hired or been a part of a hiring process, I always place emphasis on a candidate's past projects and ask deep technical questions around those. I also always review their GitHub repos if one is provided in the profile and I will ask them deep questions about their repos, why they chose this tech or that, interesting pieces of code, design tradeoffs they made, etc.
- lkjdsklf 2y ago
  That type of interview allows all kinds of unconscious bias to creep in which is why a lot of tech companies moved away from it

crazygringo 2y ago

If you talk to hiring at some of these companies, it is intentionally designed to be this way so that it is fairly meritocratic. In other words, anybody, regardless of what university they went to or what courses they took out what advantages or disadvantages they had, can learn this stuff in a couple of months if they have what it takes for the role. And because the skills are so standardized, the process is pretty differently objective. It's not expected that they'll actually use the specific skills in the job. But it shows they can learn skills of that type and then perform them at a high level in a stressful interview situation. Which is a great signal for whether they can learn the skills needed for the specific project they wind up on and perform in a high stakes deadline scenario. I'm not defending the system, but I am saying there's a clear logic behind it.

bb88 2y ago
The thing I think is funny in all this is that hiring a new manager is fraught with a high amount of risk (more so than an engineer), but they don't have nearly the level of hurdles to get over. Does the company interview past employees of the manager? Did the manager applicant have alcohol, drug issues, or weird sexual things he did to his direct reports or others? Or, instead, would you enjoy his presence on a golf outing? I know one manager who had issues with all three got hired at Google. So. Think of the poor HR person that will have to clean up that mess.
derangedHorse 2y ago
The idea of it being positioned as meritocratic is hilarious to me. As if having a process outside of the leetcode question bank will lead to any more bias. I'm generally of the belief that an interview process should be standardized in an attempt to reduce bias, but I disagree that it needs to be something people can study for to the extent that leetcode questions can be studied. I've interviewed people with leetcode questions where my co-interviewers made the candidate's confidence in presenting the correct answer the tipping point for hiring (with women mostly being targeted in this category). Bias can happen in any process, and with "culture" frequently being a consideration it's hard to tell what should be justified. Meritocracy in the tech industry is mostly a joke outside the overachieving outliers.

collingreen 2y ago

Did you also post this in another comment recently (yesterday?)

aleksiy123 2y ago

I think you missed the part where you describe their current experience. If he was even considered for L6 staff, then his on resume credentials already justified him at L5 Senior or L6 Staff. The interview performance is what pushed him over the edge into L6. It seems like you think they don't deserve a staff level position?

CharlieDigital 2y ago
> If he was even considered for L6 staff, then his on resume credentials already justified him at L5 Senior or L6 Staff. I don't want to put anyone down here, but working experience with this individual says "probably not".

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whstl 2y ago

Systems Design is IMO the most useless part of those interviews. Interviewers are just trying to find someone who would design a system the same way they did. They used a queue? They want you to add one. They used serverless? Better say the word "Lambda" somewhere. They hate serverless? Ooops better stick to regular servers. In the end yeah, it's about following a script, but also reading the room.

raydev 2y ago

> They said that the hardest part was studying for the system design portion because they did not have experience with system design Your friend is not alone, and I don't understand what separates us. Even when I was early career, system design was my favorite. My biggest issue is performance anxiety when there's a concrete problem to solve that I've never seen before, so coding sessions are absolute hell. Inability to focus, forgetting approaches I've known forever, etc. Ask me to do system design though, and it's generally freeform, I can talk about different approaches, deep dive on the fly, and draw a nice diagram or many nice diagrams, and interviewers love me and think I'm smart. I've had interviewers who were suspicious after my bad coding performance try to nail me on esoteric implementation details but because I have actual, hard-earned experience I can pretty much explain any approach in my niche and then tell you all the tradeoffs. I can also quickly code up examples, etc. Never had a bad feedback on this portion. Something about the complete detachment of the coding problem from real life is such a huge mental block and I am continuing to fight it 15 years into my career, after dozens of similar interviews.