What is the engineering hiring bar?
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What is the engineering hiring bar?
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Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?
#2The article could be a_lot_ more concise. Here’s what I got out of it as the takeaway:
> And that helps us understand why Recursive Cactus spends so much time practicing. He’s training himself partially because his current company isn’t developing his skills.
Exactly. Recursive Calculus wants a better job, (a lot) higher pay, a better environment. So he spends time prepping for this.
And companies who can offer all of this, and get a lot of interest already, they are selective, minimising false positives in the hiring process. They expect working code in the coding challenge, a good attitude and some other skills like demonstrating decent systems design. Recursive Calculus also preps so much as his interview process to his current place was different and he _really_ wants to nail these interviews, get a bunch of offers and get into a bidding war before saying bye to his current workplace he’d love to leave for something better.
There wasn’t really any actionable thing in this article that I found, or applicable advice. The end.
Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?
#3The section in that article about 'Defining “Intelligence”' is similar to a previous discussion on HN about whether a FAANG interview is just "an IQ test which is disguised as a relevant skills test for legal reasons". [1] This article does a good job of supporting that claim. Theoretically, both IQ tests & FAANG interviews test for whatever "innate intelligence", but in practice, both of them can be gamed by grinding brainteasers & leetcode respectively.
Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?
#4this is fine, so long as you're looking to get hired by a megacorp (fine,faang.) but for most people theres a point of diminishing returns. Do you want to spend six months to a year out of your life drilling for a $10k raise working for a company that works you like a rented mule anyhow, or do you settle with your present quality of life and conclude 70k is enough to do whatever you wanted to reasonably do anyway.
Then theres the variable of google et. al. and their random eleven-round interviews. Are you patient enough to sit through questions like "how many kegs of beer on a schoolbus" and "how to build a datacenter on the moon" from some grinning techbro only to be told youre re-invited to another round of interviews?
Finally, age. You can cram and cram but if youre over 50 your chances of building that moon datacenter are better than getting hired.
Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?
#5I don't have a study to back it up, just my empirical observations over the past 12 years, but I'm kind of convinced that hiring engineers almost randomly (let's say they can speak clearly and write a fizzbuzz) would have almost the same outcome as designing and implementing these complicated and convoluted hiring processes.
I have yet to work with the mythical "really really bad engineer that completely screw up your project and does it in such a stealthy way that you don't even fire them before it's too late".
Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?
#6Holy cow, is Recursive Cactus me? Lol I can totally relate. And I believe a lot of people on cscareerquestions subreddit and people at Leetcode forum can relate. 100%? Accurate.
Also, just to give a context of the hiring bar these days. The FAANG companies coding question is no longer on Easy even on phone interview. Expect at minimum 2 Medium difficulty questions in a phone interview that need to be able to be solved in optimal space time complexity in under 45 mins (or more precisely, under 20 mins each because if the first question is not solvable under 20 mins then they will skip that and you already failed).
So for those FAANG engineers that were able to get in early, whether by acquihire, by diversity hire, by luck, by normal hire. Stay there as long as you can especially in today’s times. Because once you quit you’ll experience a rude awakening for getting right back in, unless those companies waive you in because you’ve been in before.
And yea, I’m talking for both fresh graduates as well. There are instances where a fresh graduate get 4 out of 5 hard leetcode questions in an onsite. Yea, its that crazy.
I'm strictly speaking from personal experience and by reading subreddit cscareerquestions and Leetcode forum on people's experiences.
So at this point, a lot of people (including me) already solved hundreds of Leetcode questions, and still got rejected. So this is now a luck of the draw game, apply to those companies every year (because once you get rejected then you are not allowed to apply within a year), one day you will get your lucky strike.
One way to maximize your luck if you really want to get in, assuming that you are not lucky, not part of diversity hire, not part of acquihire: - internship - contract work
Damn I have to EDIT so many times lol. But due to this Leetcode style training that a lot of us are going through, we literally have less time to learn anything else, for example, learning new libraries, new frameworks. I personally think learning new frameworks or libraries are kinda dumb because it is easy to pick up on the job anyway, but nevertheless when you want to look for a job you need these on your resume. Say you only know REST but now companies want gRPC and Protobuf then you gotta learn those on the side. Assuming that you are a normal working person with hobbies, families, responsibilities, activities on the side you need to pick your choices carefully.
So this has an interesting result. The more you prepare for FAANG and doing Leetcode style questions, the less time you prepare for mid-tier companies and the lesser the chance you will get a better offer from them. So you have to go ALL IN one way, can't go half ass one way or the other.
Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?
#7The section in that article about 'Defining “Intelligence”' is similar to a previous discussion on HN about whether a FAANG interview is just "an IQ test which is disguised as a relevant skills test for legal reasons". [1] This article does a good job of supporting that claim. Theoretically, both IQ tests & FAANG interviews test for whatever "innate intelligence", but in practice, both of them can be gamed by grindin…
The tech interview process is just so badly messed up. Even if the process were a reasonable proxy for IQ (it's not), or correlated somewhat with use of actual required technical skills (it doesn't), it still almost entirely ignores the EQ (emotional intelligence) and CQ (cultural intelligence) factors which comprise the other 2 legs of the "good hire" stool.
Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?
#8this is fine, so long as you're looking to get hired by a megacorp (fine,faang.) but for most people theres a point of diminishing returns. Do you want to spend six months to a year out of your life drilling for a $10k raise working for a company that works you like a rented mule anyhow, or do you settle with your present quality of life and conclude 70k is enough to do whatever you wanted to reasonably do anyway. Th…
> Are you patient enough to sit through questions like "how many kegs of beer on a schoolbus" and "how to build a datacenter on the moon" from some grinning techbro only to be told youre re-invited to another round of interviews?
I systematically end all interviews when they've reached this point. As soon as the smart-ass finishes their stupid question I just say "I think we're done here". I can stomach take homes, even whiteboarding, but don't ask me how many tennis balls would fit in the Empire State Building.
Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?
#9this is fine, so long as you're looking to get hired by a megacorp (fine,faang.) but for most people theres a point of diminishing returns. Do you want to spend six months to a year out of your life drilling for a $10k raise working for a company that works you like a rented mule anyhow, or do you settle with your present quality of life and conclude 70k is enough to do whatever you wanted to reasonably do anyway. Th…
> "how many kegs of beer on a schoolbus" and "how to build a datacenter on the moon"
I interviewed at Google and Facebook in 2015 and never got any questions like that. I don't think they've had those type of brainteasers for over a decade.
Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?
#10I don't have a study to back it up, just my empirical observations over the past 12 years, but I'm kind of convinced that hiring engineers almost randomly (let's say they can speak clearly and write a fizzbuzz) would have almost the same outcome as designing and implementing these complicated and convoluted hiring processes. I have yet to work with the mythical "really really bad engineer that completely screw up you…
I do think it really depends on the complexity of what you need to build.
The skill level needed to not screw up large complex problems is exponentially higher than for simple small problems.
Companies and products vastly differ in this regard.