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What is the engineering hiring bar?

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#11

Post by twomoretime »

gregdoesit wrote: post #2

The 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 o…

>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.

I develop software full time and have some 10 years of experience depending on how you count it, and I'm absolutely terrible at leetcode style problems and find whiteboard questions difficult for non programming reasons.

I know it wasn't the point of the article, but there's a deeper problem here that most FAANG programming questions aren't actually testing work related code skills.

At my company we give two very basic tests, takehome. Both can be completed in 15 minutes if you're rushing. Far more useful of a tool than any of leetcode style questions.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#12

Post by stuxnet79 »

gregdoesit wrote: post #2

The 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 o…

Perhaps there wasn't any actionable advice, but it's a sad indictment of the current state of tech hiring. Based on the article you can assume that Recursive Cactus is already in Big-Tech ("well known tech company") so "(a lot) higher pay" is a moot point and quite frankly it's unlikely that the daily tasks involved in the next job will bear a strong resemblance to the kind of synthetic tasks or problems you are asked about in an interview setting.

The article did raise more questions than answers, but that was by design. A lot of the assumptions that go into most tech interview processes don't withstand scrutiny. Interviewing is a hard problem to solve, but we shouldn't be satisfied with the status quo.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#13

Post by sudeepj »

christiansakai wrote: post #6

Holy 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 solve…

Yeah. Some of the problems are way to unfair considering 45 min budget. I can see two parallels in the way interviewing has evolved into:

1. Getting selected for special forces (like Navy Seal). Some companies also have "Bar Raiser" (I think its Amazon & Uber).

2. Casting for porn: You need to perform right now while a person/people watch you. Also you need to sustain it for 45 min. In 1st round its with a woman. In 2nd it might be a dude and in 3rd it might be with multiple people. We want to check if you can fk with variety of people.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#14

Post by jasondclinton »

nimbius wrote: post #4

this 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…

I agree with a few things you said but you're also wrong about a few things.

FAANG compensation is much higher than you think. $200k/year (including stock) in the Bay Area for new grads is common. Yes, the prep for these interviews is insane but what has effectively happened (and this is supported by the article) is that companies have offloaded the selection work to the interviewee: they will only be able to pass if they are willing to do the ridiculous prep work. And yes, the interview questions have nothing to do with the job; that's not the point. Sadly, the process is often selecting for intelligent, compliant worker bees and not, what I would prefer, more creatively-inclined people. I agree with you: depending on what team you end up on, you could be asked to clock-in, crank out code, and clock-out without much creativity or input into anything.

BTW, Google doesn't use brain teasers since 15+ years ago. But, there is the occasional interviewer who asks questions about trivia that only they know about. This is supposed to be banned but there's no consequences for interviewers who do this. Hiring committees (who make the decision) usually throw out these questions when they see them in the list of interview feedback that they are using to make a decision.

Re: age. I worked on a team at FAANG that has tried very hard to hire folks with industry experience and we haven't found any resistance from interviewers to that. However, when talking to potential interviewees, we have found that very few are willing to subject themselves to the interviewing process for the reasons that you've outlined above. I don't blame them.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#15

Post by Ididntdothis »

I had a conversation with a fellow engineer and we pretty much concluded that our current company would not hire us with our current resumes if we had to go through the interviewing process. And we are generally viewed as some of the higher performers. I bet the same is true for a lot of other companies.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#16

Post by ng12 »

I can usually spot the candidates who are leetcode junkies. This is why I direct our interviews to be as pragmatic as possible. Most of our question bank comes from actual code one of our devs had to implement.

I'm fairly confident that if you've studied hard enough to solve these problems easier the studying just paid off by making you a better developer.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#17

Post by [deleted] »

kevinventullo wrote: post #9
nimbius wrote: post #4

this 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.

[deleted]

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#18

Post by twomoretime »

chrisweekly wrote: post #7
sxp wrote: post #3

The 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.

>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)

I wouldn't be so quick to presume that FAANG IQs aren't above average.

>the EQ (emotional intelligence) and CQ (cultural intelligence) factors which comprise the other 2 legs of the "good hire" stool

EQ may be difficult to measure but the spoken part of the interview should generally take care of 'CQ', if that's a thing.

IMO the only surefire way to hire is to bring people on temporarily and evaluate their performance in 1-3 months. I don't know why this isn't popular.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#19

Post by convolvatron »

dudul wrote: post #5

I 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…

that seems ... impossible. almost every single project I have worked on always ended up not really what we had hoped for.

maybe you've generally worked at larger places and I've generally worked at smaller?

3 reasons I can think of why projects fall short -

hubris: you were never really going to be able to do that in the time and resource limits anyways

bad actor: maybe we should really fire Joey, but hiring is hard, and stuff is kinda getting done..if we can just keep it together another quarter

general structural dysfunction: we have a bad culture. no one can really depend on any one else, and its kind of not clear what we're doing anyways.

(1) is a given, but usually isn't the whole story. (3) almost mandates the appearance of (2). but (2) kind of depends on having at least some kind of twisted competence, otherwise they wouldn't be able to do that much damage. so are you in a (3) dominant situation...or do you live in the place beyond the mists where we get what we need to done and have a great time doing it?

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#20

Post by jasondclinton »

christiansakai wrote: post #6

Holy 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 solve…

I was agreeing with you until you used the phrase "diversity hire" in your comment. I think that you could have made the same point without inferring that the hiring bar has been lowered for employees in underrepresented groups. That's a pretty terrible thing to say to anyone who is in one of those groups.
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