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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.
Welp.
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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...?
Usually discrimination doesn't take place in the hiring panels. Rather it's done by the people given incentives to discriminate, usually recruiters. Recruiters can infer candidates' race and gender with census data on names, and advance diverse candidates to phone screens more often than non-diverse candidates.
I can also detail the company's "opportunistic hiring" plans if you want to hear more.
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…
Maybe expectations are different for senior engineers, but from my experience in applying/getting into FAANG last year, I was only asked easy/medium algorithm questions. I felt the algorithm questions were more of a technical bar/weeder, far more emphasis was placed on the behavioral, practical, and architecture questions. I did around a month of casual prep for the algorithm questions, about an hour after work.
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 probably did about 80 leetcode puzzles, let's just assume that is 1 hour per puzzle. So 80 hours of leetcode puzzles.
In addition, 10 hours were spent reviewing my networking trivia (focused on layer 2/3/4 and HTTP).
The PE recruiter at the company also provided a study guide packet. I elected to sink about 10-20 hours into studying the Linux troubleshooting and finding some common questions off of Glassdoor to understand the type of things they will be asking.
Finally I tried to review some system design stuff (but as a juniour in this industry didn't really know how) Just followed some study guides from the system-design-primer on Github. Probably 5 hours dedicated to this.
Let's just round it to about 100 hours of prep in about a month and a half. While juggling a full time job as a devops engineer.
Afterwards I was rejected :)
Ultimately I wasn't surprised I was rejected. I was under the impression that I needed to pass all 7 of the interviews in order to get an offer (2 phone screens, 5 on site.) I know for sure I failed the system design interview question HARD. Like irredeemably hard. Regardless of my performances in my other interviews, I know I definitely did a good job in my network and OS interviews but it doesn't matter.
I do wish that companies would provide a feedback system. I would love to know where they thought I was weak so that I can improve upon that later. But there is nothing beyond "we decided to pursue other candidates."
Here's the crazy thing, though. It isn't even a question in my mind that I should try again if another FAANG recruiter reaches out to me. I will sink another 200 hours if necessary to pass their interviews because of what it represents to achieve getting hired at such a firm. There's prestige, salary, and quality of life that just can't be matched by any other tech companies.
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> I can usually spot the candidates who are leetcode junkies. what are some of the tells ?
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…
Kind of like that math teacher accusing me of cheating because I did well on the exam.
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…
It seems like a lot of these discussions end up being something along the lines of "the standards are bad because they exclude me, therefore there shouldn't be any standards at all" (just with a lot more words).
A) they're only tangentially related to the work, meaning they include bad hires and exclude good hires
B) they put a huge workload on employees who must practice tens or hundreds of hours of underwater basket weaving, time which would be better spent doing almost anything else
C) they systemically exclude anyone who can't play the dumb game due to a lack of time, including but not limited to older people and poorer people
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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 numbe…
How is this different from any other targeted recruiting? FAANG recruits students from CMU while not even visiting my alma mater. Recruiters extend phone interviews to referrals at 100% rate no matter how bad they suck, etc. Diversity recruiting != diversity hiring, and the numbers bare that out. Unless you argue that recruiters should have zero targeted pipelines I'm not sure how it's unique for diversity initiatives
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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…
No offense, but it looks like you are guessing and penalizing people for using python or solving a problem you gave them too fast. Kind of like that math teacher accusing me of cheating because I did well on the exam.
But to actually answer your question. Say the role is in JavaScript, say a Frontend role and the candidates want to answer it in Python instead of JavaScript. Then it is possible that the candidate is a Leetcode junkies.
Why I know? Because I do this myself. And definitely no points subtracted from knowing and using Python.
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That is correct. Please see my other comments. I don't have the intention to look down on people.
...So you're confirming that if you hire the most qualified candidate, and they happen to be a minority, you consider it a "diversity hire"? Welp.