What is the engineering hiring bar?

I can tell you how I spot: 1. Doing it in Python. "Can I do this with Python instead of X? because Python is really fast to write and I don't need to worry about small helper functions"

2. Know various approaches more than ordinary people. "Ah we can solve this in various approaches. We can sort this one, and the problem will be log N, or we can use Heap and make it log K. We can use stack but does it get counted as space in the space complexity? Oh I can use deque here but let me just use Python list because Python list is very versatile, it can be anything, it can be array, can be queue, can be stack"

3. Know the solution right away even the non obvious ones. One example is the problem of next permutation. Given a number 1, 3, 2, 4, 5. Find the next permutation in O(n) time and O(1) space. This solution is easy but if you have never done it before there is no way you can come up with a solution complete with code. Another problem, given preorder and inorder list, construct the binary tree. There are many non obvious problems like this.

The solution: dump (popular) algorithms!

All whiteboard problems should be fairly novel and 'not possible to practice' or else you are testing their preparation, not their ability.

(Admittedly, preparation is a measure of something, and 'conquering all algorithms' is a measure of something.)

But neither are the measure you're looking for.

And 'General IQ' is not only it either.

The ability to decipher problems, understand requirements, grasp tradeoffs, translate that into reasonably clean code, keep possibly complex systems in your head, work with others and maintain a positive disposition.

Finally, the elephant in the room is 'perceived confidence'. It took me 30 years at least to be able to understand how well a problem was communicated, and how good the solution actually is.

Someone who is confident, who 'looks the part', who can communicate the issue clearly ... may still have a mediocre problem.

The weird, lacking in self-awareness, a shy-but-blunt nerd who may be totally unsure of themselves, sweaty palms ... may possibly have just as great as a solution.

We are hard-wired to see 'patterns' and our intuition misguides is significantly on this issue.

It's a lot of hard work to try to ignore 'the bad parts' of one's own intuition while keeping the 'good parts'.

One of the solutions to this literally is data. Instead of 'feeling' how they did, a checklist of things might help us structure in our minds how truly well something was accomplished.

And of course, we can't ignore the fact that communicating matters, it just matters differently in different contexts.

At every company I have worked at, policies were in place to extend greater opportunity to URM and women candidates. Most large companies are setting diversity targets well in excess of the share of women and URM workers in software development other engineering roles at the company. This necessitates discrimination to achieve this over representation. For example, Dropbox announced a goal of 33% women in engineering roles when I was there in 2019. My currently employer has a goal of 30% women in engineering.

This typically doesn't result in easier interviews. Rather it was implemented by giving recruiters incentives (larger bonuses, or penalties for failure to meet a certain %) to hire diverse candidates. At my current company, over 50% of engineering candidates phone screened last year were women (and were given phone screens at a rate twice as high as men). In other words, framing diversity hiring as "giving a free pass" isn't quite accurate. Rather the companies increase their diversity by adjusting the rate at which diverse and non-diverse candidates are let into the interview process.

> a sad indictment of the current state of tech hiring

I've only ever worked as a programmer, so I'm genuinely curious - how does interviewing work for every other job that's out there?

I remember one time I was hiring for a JavaScript developer. The most important technical competency was a brief working knowledge of the DOM. The actual position required modifications to pages for A/B tests and jQuery was either too slow or broke in production when other developers used it for their test code.

Of everybody that passed through HR to me I sent out a notice that there would be a minor code assessment and they could not use jQuery. 6 or 7 people instantly dropped out. There were 22 people left that I actually talked to which only three could pass the code assessment.

The assessment was never designed to be challenging. Candidates were using their home computers had access to any reference material. There was no hurry. They could look things up. I also told them if they got stuck just ask me and I would point them in the right direction without any penalty, but only 2 candidates tried that.

The assessment was an hour long phone call. At the start of the call I would send out a static HTML page for the candidates to open in their browser and for them to write an answer in whatever tool they wanted but it had to execute in the console of a browser on that page. Tasks were things like take this item out of the page and reinsert at some other location or change the color of a particular paragraph to red. Stupid simple stuff that you would expect any UI developer to do easily. After all these were beginner skills and this was a senior level position.

I did ask to see the code they wrote only to make sure they completed the tasks. I would drop their code in my browser console and run. I never looked at code style or sloppiness. It’s a job interview where people are rushed and nervous. Their code is allowed to be sloppy.

Only 3 candidates were able to pass this code filter. The people that did pass either did well enough to pass or extremely excellent. The people that failed, maybe 19 of 22 people, all failed epically.

That experience really shocked me. I did everything I could think of to make this relaxing and take the edge off because there is always pressure during a job interview. No matter how much of a lifeline I threw out almost nobody would bite. They would sit there silent on the call or they would attempt to stall like that would somehow make code magically appear. Sometimes I would remind candidates they could ask me questions because I cannot evaluate a blank answer. Other times I would try nudge them to get started or guide them into progress, which only seemed to hurt more than help.

Very bizarre experience.