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What is the engineering hiring bar?

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Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#101

Post by clarry »

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

This is still my favorite anecdote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17106291

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#102

Post by christiansakai »

manfredo wrote: post #92
akoumis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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...?

I've sat at company hiring panels, and have taken part in discriminatory policies first hand. At career fairs, Dropbox recruiters had us mark candidate resumes with a star for diverse candidates, two starts for "double diverse" candidates (female + URM), and "ND" for Asian male candidates. It turns out "ND" stands for "negative diversity". Literally the first thing we did was bucket candidates by the desirability of…

I would like to hear more, but maybe HN doesn't want to. If you don't care about the risk of downvoting and this being on HN, please write so. But if not, it is ok.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#103

Post by dmoy »

My hiring bar (for coding) has gotten easier the more I interview (as the interviewer). I don't ask any kind of super tricky algo questions, because the signal you get from those tends to be closer to "is the candidate familiar with this specific area of algorithms" than anything else. I don't ask any questions that take a really good candidate more than 20-30 minutes to solve, because then I can't scale the question down. You can always scale a question up.

I used to ask questions that were fairly close to what you find on leetcode now, but the signal isn't great anymore. It used to be good at identifying candidates who can quickly figure out the right tools to solve a given problem, but now it ends up identifying candidates who spent a lot of time on leetcode.

Now I mostly ask questions that involve

* transforming some data using a less than stellar API (using a REALLY simple transformation)

* holding a bit of state to accomplish the above transformation

* throwing a few edge case wrenches at the candidate

And the last part is technically baked into the question - a candidate who can fully grok the state could determine all of the edge cases on their own. But even if they don't I'll explain them and see how the candidate handles. 'cus in the real world we have unit tests, and I don't expect TC to really figure out all the edge cases in 30 minutes. A couple of them, sure. And they better be able to handle them once pointed out.

Candidate forgets that a java collection can have null because you can't have a List of primitives? That literally doesn't go into my feedback at all (and depending on how recently I've written java, I might have forgotten myself). Candidate writes a function that doesn't compile because there's no return statement? I'll point it out, maybe make a note, but don't really hold it against them because we write code in IDEs. Candidate spends 10 minutes trying to figure out how to force a single variable to do the job of three different variables, despite increasingly desperate hints to just store more local data? Yea that might go poorly in feedback.

But yes, I expect a candidate to be able to write 10 lines of code to answer a data transformation in 30-45 minutes. And yes, when either they figure out or I point out a couple of edge cases, I expect that 10 lines to not morph into a congealed mass of horror that cause their original solution to break.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#104

Post by charlesu »

christiansakai wrote: post #89
akoumis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I knew a lot of people at FAANG that were L4/L5 that couldn't solve Leetcode easies. Leetcode isn't part of the job, just the interviews.

Getting an offer is not just a matter of solving a programming problem. It's about how you communicate. And, of course, if you're a brilliant jerk ability doesn't matter: you're not getting hired.

If you're not getting past the interviews despite being a strong programmer, you may want to really think deeply about how you're communicating with your interviewer. Remember, the vast majority of people who are getting offers aren't women or minorities so that's probably not what's blocking you.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#105

Post by manfredo »

omar_a1 wrote: post #88
manfredo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Whether one thinks that discrimination in hiring is justified to offset suspected discrimination in other areas is besides the point. The point is, there exists discrimination in hiring that results in women and URM candidates getting offers that would not have been obtained were it not for diversity status. The opportunities of people categorized as diverse in tech company interviewing is substantially different from those not categorized as diverse. Maybe I'm biased towards the SF bay area, but there's a palpable mismatch between how common and prevalent these practices are and the offense people take when they're acknowledged.

I'm not sure why you think what I'm saying is different. At my company, white and asian male new grads are only given a chance to interview if they're CS (or math, EE, or other tech majors) grads from top universities like Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, etc. Candidates from boot camps, less well known universities, or non-tech majors are only extended the chance to interview if they're diverse. Does that mean that a diverse candidate from a boot camp who gets hired is unskilled? No, probably not. Does it mean that a diverse candidate from a boot camp would not have been hired if they weren't diverse? Yes, because non-diverse candidates from boot camps don't get interviewed at all.

Maybe I'm biased toward the SF Bay Area, but the mismatch between the prevalence of these policies and the discomfort with acknowledgement of their existence is concerning.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#106

Post by commandlinefan »

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.

I kind of wish we did... but it's silly to scold somebody for not having passed a test that doesn't exist.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#107

Post by [deleted] »

manfredo wrote: post #105
omar_a1 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Whether one thinks that discrimination in hiring is justified to offset suspected discrimination in other areas is besides the point. The point is, there exists discrimination in hiring that results in women and URM candidates getting offers that would not have been obtained were it not for diversity status. The opportunities of people categorized as diverse in tech company interviewing is substantially different fro…

[deleted]

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#108

Post by kevstev »

jrbancel wrote: post #49
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…

> Expect at minimum 2 Medium difficulty questions in a phone interview that need to be able to be solved in optimal space time complexity in under 45 mins I see this being repeated on Leetcode and Blind, but it is not my experience at all. In 2019, I got Senior level (L5/E5) offers from everywhere I applied, including Facebook and Google. I never solved more than a single medium problem in 45m-1h. I was asked a hard…

What is considered a medium problem? Is this in terms of equivalence of problem levels found on leetcode and such? I have yet to do the grind. My current job is great and pays FAANG level- I hope to not have to engage in this crap.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#109

Post by Ididntdothis »

commandlinefan wrote: post #106
ardit33 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I kind of wish we did... but it's silly to scold somebody for not having passed a test that doesn't exist.

I wouldn’t mind either...

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#110

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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…

The actionable thing is the graph about two thirds of the way down - passthrough rate vs performance.

That's the whole point of the article. Two possible conclusions:

One is that companies are cargo-culting hiring, and have absolutely no idea what they're doing. Clearly whatever the process is supposed to do, it's not hiring the "best people" by any realistic metric.

The other is that the process is working as intended, but the actual goals are not stated. This might be true if the aim is to hiring difficult and stressful for candidates to discourage job hopping. (Other interpretations are also possible. [1])

If a company wants the "best people" it needs to follow up hiring with performance tracking, and identify and reward the people and hiring practices which increase performance. [2]

If companies want hiring to continue as a social/political game which stresses and discourages developers, the system is working for them, and they don't need to change it.

Startups need to decide what kind of company they want to be. [3]

[1] IMO there may be a strong element of corporate narcissism in the process. It's not about hiring good people, it's about allowing the CEO and senior management to feel that their company is better than those other companies which hire these people. In reality "these people" may be a bit more than averagely competent, but with a few standouts most won't be insanely great or A players or 10X or whatever the goal is supposed to be.

[2] Which assumes it's possible to measure performance, which is a whole other issue.

[3] I'd bet almost anything that in reality there's a lot of "Oh, you were working with X at Y? Awesome!" affecting hiring choices in SV.

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