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What is the engineering hiring bar?

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#81

Post by dudul »

praptak wrote: post #50
dudul wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, e…

Does this actually happen? I thought these "get out of the blender" and "why are manholes round" puzzles were the waterfall of hiring. They were written about because they were so bad, everybody agreed they are horrible and they weren't that popular to begin with.

The last time I really looked for a job was maybe 4 or 5 years ago. I interviewed at ~5 or 6 companies and I got a variation of this 2 or 3 times. So let's say 1/3rd of the interviews.

They do happen yes, I don't know if it's common or if I'm just not very lucky :)

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#82

Post by manfredo »

jasondclinton wrote: post #20
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.

I won't dispute whether you think it's a terrible thing to say, but preferential treatment towards demographics categorized as "diverse" is something I've both witnessed and taken part in during my time so far in tech. At least in the San Francisco Bay Area, many tech companies are setting targets of >30% women in engineering roles despite the fact that they make up 20-25% of the tech workforce. Achieving these numbers necessitates discrimination.

Note that you're putting words in the other poster's mouth when you write that "the hiring bar has been lowered". Not all forms of discrimination involve lowering the hiring bar. From my experience, the bulk of discrimination occurs before hiring event starts - recruiters extend phone interviews to diverse candidates at higher rates. The hiring bar is the same for diverse and non-diverse, it's just that diverse candidates are more likely to get a chance to attempt to pass that hiring bar.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#83

Post by Ididntdothis »

introvert0 wrote: post #78
Ididntdothis wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you follow that logic then a lot of people on this site are just pretenders. I don’t think it’s helpful to discuss the meaning of “engineer” in this context.

I am not sure about that, I want my doctor to be a licensed m.d. in all contexts. Same with the firefighters, I don't want a firefighter to be considered as such only on some "contexts".

In the US there are no software engineer certifications. So everybody with that title is a fake engineer and companies should not hand out that title.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#84

Post by whiskyant »

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…

I've definitely worked with engineers that are 10x slower or have extremely poor engineering practices: copy-pasting chunks of code, 8+ nested ifs, all code in one giant function, use of global variables throughout, clueless how memory management works/tons of cyclic retains, etc.

I've seen plenty of purported "senior" engineers with 7+ yoe that code worse than new grads.

Now that I'm in FAANG with a high hiring bar, these type of engineers are completely absent. I'm sure that's not a coincidence.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#85

Post by dominotw »

southphillyman wrote: post #64
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.

People will just game this as well. If you already know the answer to a question coming in because you leetcode all day you could easily ask a lot of clarifying questions, identify edge cases, and give brunt force/alternative approaches before solving the question. A smart person will use that opportunity to highlight their communication skills and get an even higher grade on the interview

exactly. pretending to have not seen the question before is one of the "skills" that ppl practise on leetcode forums.

https://www.teamblind.com/post/Should-you-tell-your-intervie...

only ppl GP is catching is ppl who havent' practiced that skill. Leetcode junkies are simply outsmarting him.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#86

Post by introvert0 »

ardit33 wrote: post #57
introvert0 wrote: post #43

Apologies in advance for being harsh, but are you a member in order of your state association of engineers, did you pass the FE exam?, was your school accredited to grant engineering diplomas? If the answer is not, please do not call yourself engineer

That’s not how software engineering works.... I am glad we don’t have to have “certifications” by some bureaucratic local agency to work.

You do realize you make a disservice to those who studied and worked hard to obtain a proper engineering degree, right?

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#87

Post by [deleted] »

dvirsky wrote: post #40
twomoretime wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 anyo…

[deleted]

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#88

Post by omar_a1 »

manfredo wrote: post #75
omar_a1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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…

If we could quantify the net effects of sexism and racism in hiring and attrition, we could compare whether the incentives mentioned offset the sexism and racism equivalently. But, since we don't have a means of doing so, it's a futile discussion on this site. Also worth pointing out that just hiring a diverse candidate is pretty meaningless if they get bullied or harassed to the point of being forced out in a short order.

But that's beside the point (or, beside the tangent to the point). The context of "diversity hire" above parallels being diverse and getting hired to an acquihire or getting lucky. That's very different than what you outlined above.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#89

Post by christiansakai »

akoumis wrote: post #61
christiansakai wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is my anecdata, and take it as what it is. I've seen it myself a few times. Take it as what it is, downvote it all you want. A freedom of speech for everyone.

"I've seen it myself" - So you've sat on FAANG hiring panels that made decisions specifically based on candidates' underrepresented demographics? Or you're just inferring based on people you met while employed at a FAANG? Or...?

So basically I know a few people who can't even solve an Easy Leetcode questions. They got in as SWE L3/L4, E3/E4 and I also know one L5.

Can you help me in explaining why? I don't have the intention of looking down on people. I'm just gathering data. If I can find a reasonable explanation then I want to take a look at it, and learn from it, and see where did I do wrong, so I can improve and pass the interviews next time.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#90

Post by christiansakai »

omar_a1 wrote: post #45
christiansakai wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is my anecdata, and take it as what it is. I've seen it myself a few times. Take it as what it is, downvote it all you want. A freedom of speech for everyone.

After reading this comment, I get the sneaking suspicion that your definition of "diversity hire" means hiring any minority or female candidates, period.

That is correct. Please see my other comments. I don't have the intention to look down on people.
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