What is the engineering hiring bar? • Hacker News Board

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#31

Post by pc86 » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

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…

> There wasn’t really any actionable thing in this article that I found, or applicable advice. The end.

This could honestly be a single-line summary for every blog post I've read on interviewing.io.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#32

Post by leggomylibro » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

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.

In my experience interviewing candidates for a FAANG, people say that they weight "CQ" heavily behind closed doors, but it is mostly used as a way to enforce various -isms under the guise of "probably would[n't] be a good cultural fit". It's how they screen out people who might have or develop a family life, among other things.

But that's just my anecdotal experience.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#33

Post by dudul » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

convolvatron wrote: post #19

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,…

I think you may have both misunderstood my comment and made my point.

1) if that's the case, how could spending time and resources in complicated interviewing processes help with that?

2) if you don't f*ck with candidates and have them jump through stupid rounds of interview, hiring may not be that hard.

3) Bad culture comes from the top, not from the code monkey.

Sure projects fail, sure they end up being not very satisfactory, but it's not because your complicated interviewing process didn't prevent you from hiring bad people.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#34

Post by fenwick67 » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 6:14 PM UTC

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.

IMO the grueling FAANG interviews actually optimize for how much people want to work at the company. If you're sitting through 10 interviews and grinding on LeetCode problems every night then really all you are proving is how badly you want the job. It's effectively a hazing ritual.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#35

Post by omar_a1 » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

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…

>So for those FAANG engineers that were able to get in early, whether by acquihire, by diversity hire, by luck, by normal hire

Can we please stop assuming that being a minority or woman is some kind of hiring free pass? It's often quite the opposite.

But more to your point, I've been cynically wondering if the untenably high bar set for technical interviews serves as an industry-wide means of lowering turnover.

Also very confused about what constitutes a pass or failure, with the opaquely-defined expectations. I'd love to be able to prepare for my technicals, but usually end up wildly misleading information from recruiters about what the technical entails. (Why are you testing me on Java!? I never claimed to have any experience with Java. I was told this would be a behavioral interview!)

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#36

Post by dominotw » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

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.

> 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.

all of them have "behavioral round" which is similarly hacked as white board rounds. Check leetcode discuss.

Describe the time you had a conflict with your team == Invert a binary tree.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#37

Post by PascLeRasc » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

christiansakai wrote: post #28

Ididntdothis wrote: post #15

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.

I suck at writing resumes, to the point that recruiters and even hiring managers at companies that I applied to give me a pity and even talk on how to improve my resume DURING INITIAL PHONE CALL lmao.

That probably means you're underselling yourself. Have you tried taking their advice?

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#38

Post by southphillyman » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

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…

Aren't sites like leetcode partially to blame for this? Years ago asking a candidate to push all zeros to the end of an array , in place, probably eliminated 75% of the pool. Now anyone who adequately prepares can probably solve that optimally in 10 minutes. I remember when asking for optimal solution to isPalindrome was a "bar raiser". I was recently told that I am expected to solve 2 medium-hard questions with clean code and good variable names and test cases in 30 minutes for phone screen. The recruiter emphasized that speed was a factor. The bar will keep increasing as people optimize for the test.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#39

Post by dominotw » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

ng12 wrote: post #16

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.

> I can usually spot the candidates who are leetcode junkies.

what are some of the tells ?

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#40

Post by dvirsky » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

twomoretime wrote: post #11

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…

The big companies don't care if some great candidates can't do these kinds of problems, there are many others who can. They care about not hiring bad candidates, period.

Anyway, I've done both types and for me the false positive rate for take-home assignments is far greater. I've seen people ace home assignments and later turn out to be mediocre engineers. Maybe they were cheating. Maybe not.

But I've never seen anyone really ace an on-site coding question and not being great (I'm sure there are some, this is just my own experience).