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What is the engineering hiring bar?

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Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#161

Post by ryandrake »

fourmyle wrote: post #140
faanginginthere wrote: post #117

After 9 years at the same company, I left my job at the beginning of January 2020 to dedicate myself to leetcoding and interview practicing in the hope of getting hired at a FAANG, more specifically Google. I really started dedicating all my time to interviewing January 1st. It is now March 31st and I am now abandoning the idea of getting hired at a FAANG, or any larger-sized startup and will target early startups wi…

You are a fine engineer and there are many people that are working at FANG that are worse than you. Just keep grinding and don't give up. You have built a solid foundation the past few months. All of these companies let you interview again. Just keep practicing, albeit at a slower pace, and try again next year. You will eventually break through. I succumbed to depression after getting rejected after a lot of work my…

Definitely hang in there and keep practicing. I've worked at two FAANG companies, and for both of them I was rejected many times before finally passing. There seems to be quite a bit of random chance at play. They all allow re-applying, and some recruiters will tell you the minimum interval between applications, so just set your calendar and re-apply again and again.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#162

Post by jgwil2 »

strken wrote: post #97
commandlinefan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The standards (e.g. algorithmic questions) are bad because 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…

I think of "the bar" as being basically our industry's equivalent to a law degree: it's just a way to show that you have some foundational knowledge in the subject, even if it bears little resemblance to day-to-day work. All of the flaws you enumerated could also apply to law school, but at least "the bar" is reasonably accessible and doesn't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#163

Post by Diederich »

Scea91 wrote: post #156

So I got contacted by Facebook London about 2 weeks ago. The job description sounded quite interesting, but when the recruiter described the interview process and actually sent me a deck with resources for preparation for coding interview he lost me. The reason is that I am absolutely satisfied with my current job and decided that I don't want to bother at this time with preparation for an interview. Maybe I would pa…

Over the past 27 years, I've worked for 8 different organizations, including two FAANGs, and I've never technically prepared for any interview. This is not some kind of indirect boasting about how smart I am. Far from it. I feel positively dumb compared to my peers.

I rarely fully nail the most difficult algorithmic interviews, and I don't think that's the point. I think I get most of my 'points' by taking a very direct, easy going and open approach to things. The phrases "I don't know" and "I'm not sure" will get practically worn out at the end of my interviews.

I don't think it's what one knows as much as it is about how one approaches and thinks about problems.

Second item: do the interviews anyway, even if you don't necessarily intend on leaving.

I'll tell recruiters that I'm pretty happy where I'm at, and that it would take some kind of enormous comp package to entice me to move. But we'll still do the whole process, and I'll often end up turning down a pretty solid offer.

For many/most companies, turning down an offer 'locks' you out for a year or so; no big deal.

I really enjoy interviewing at the top tier companies, because, in the end, I always learn a great deal.

Like most things, interviewing is something you can get good at with practice. What's nice is that you have the opportunity to get several hours of face to face time with really smart people at no out of pocket cost, except for a day of PTO from your current job if you live local.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#164

Post by omar_a1 »

manfredo wrote: post #155
omar_a1 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, the notion that racial slurs are "the price of admission" is something you seem to have brought up - not me > Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech. I'm still having trouble believing anyone who isn't a frothing racist can pass off "many" getting called racial slurs on the job as just business as usual. Or, "a small price to pay." Whereas what I was saying is…

> I'm still having trouble believing anyone who isn't a frothing racist can pass off "many" getting called racial slurs on the job as just business as usual. I don't think it's business as usual, and looking back on my comments I never wrote this. Again, the first one of us bring this up was you when you justified discrimination in hiring as a means to offset discrimination elsewhere. What I wrote was, > But is the p…

How many times do I have to re-quote your own words to yourself? Did you not say the following?

> Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.

Because that's a breath-takingly racist assertion. And I did not say that. I suggest re-reading your post so that you understand that you wrote those words.

> First of all, it is a common practice at least as far as what I've experienced.

Funny, because I've literally never experienced or even heard of this practice at a single place I've worked at. So I guess that makes it a very uncommon practice?

> Studies in university STEM faculty recruiting found a 2:1 bias in favor of women

I'm referring to tech hiring in the private sector. Your citation is about tenure-track academic hiring in STEM, which encompasses a broad range of fields including ones that aren't male-dominated and is a very different can of worms than SV tech. But go ahead and continue to minimize the very real, disparate impact that discrimination in tech has, while insisting that trying to rectify that problem is, in fact, the real bias in hiring.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#165

Post by nojvek »

thaniri wrote: post #95

I applied to a new grad production engineering job at Facebook recently. 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…

> There's prestige, salary, and quality of life that just can't be matched by any other tech companies.

Not sure about prestige and quality of life. Salary, yes!. I happily quit my Microsoft for a slightly lower pay and way better quality of life.

Right now AAMFGN are hiring tons of engineers. So their quality really varies and different teams have different bars. You can't say they worked at Google so they must be good. We are humans and we have our biases. Like it or not, hiring is biased (mostly towards white/asian males from prestigious universities). To counteract, there's also diversity hires (with various degrees of definition what it exactly is).

For some people, money is much higher priority, for others it's not. Just be sure what you really want from life. Remember, it's not a race.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#166

Post by ryandrake »

whiskyant wrote: post #84
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,…

I agree, this was the biggest striking difference I saw between the engineering workforces at FAANG companies vs "everywhere else". You'll encounter a similar percentage of geniuses and top performers at both types of companies. You'll see plenty of regular 1X to 2X engineers, too. But somehow the FAANGs have, for the most part, figured out how to filter out the programmers who literally cannot program, whereas many other companies have not. You'll never see The Brilliant Paula Bean [1] at FAANG, but you will encounter them once in a while pretty much everywhere else.

1: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#167

Post by president »

I have always thought maybe there should be a path for people who are terrible at coding interviews but are confident in their abilities? Perhaps maybe a pass on the interview but then you work provisionally for little to no pay at first until after a discretionary period where they can decide whether they want to keep you or not.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#168

Post by manfredo »

omar_a1 wrote: post #164
manfredo wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm still having trouble believing anyone who isn't a frothing racist can pass off "many" getting called racial slurs on the job as just business as usual. I don't think it's business as usual, and looking back on my comments I never wrote this. Again, the first one of us bring this up was you when you justified discrimination in hiring as a means to offset discrimination elsewhere. What I wrote was, > But is the p…

How many times do I have to re-quote your own words to yourself? Did you not say the following? > Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech. Because that's a breath-takingly racist assertion. And I did not say that. I suggest re-reading your post so that you understand that you wrote those words. > First of all, it is a common practice at least as far as what I've experi…

> Because that's a breath-takingly racist assertion. And I did not say that. I suggest re-reading your post so that you understand that you wrote those words.

Let's reread the sentence in context:

> But is the perspective of a white or asian man pursuing a coding boot-camp to try and break into tech going to have the same opinion on policies that greatly reduce or eliminate his chances of getting an interview as compared to if he was a woman or URM? Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.

Say you have two people in a coding boot camp. One is a woman, the other a white or asian man. They get the same scores and are just as capable. At my current and previous employers, only the former would get a chance to interview.

If the latter looked at this situation, and concluded that they would have better career opportunities if they were a woman - even if it meant additional discrimination in other forms, like being subject to slurs - then they're "breath-takingly racist"?

I'm also confused as to why you're calling me racist for pointing out the fact that many white and asian men feel like the tech industry's treatment towards them on the basis of race and gender is a net negative. Again, these are the opinions of people other than myself. The fact that you're exclusively quoted this sentence without the preceding one suggests that you either forgot this fact, or are deliberately attempting to conceal it.

> I'm referring to tech hiring in the private sector.

Good thing I cited a source studying hiring the private sector as well.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#169

Post by christiansakai »

UncleMeat wrote: post #145
christiansakai wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh nice, I've been waiting for someone like you to reply. Thanks for replying, I need a perspective from you as well. Why do you think it happens this way? I have some other anecdatas that I gathered from the forums but I am not gonna spew it here because it could be offensive/racist or whatever. But what I think the more reasonable answer is, because interviewers are humans, and a lot of it are based on luck. Maybe…

Googler here. I've probably done 150 interviews. I've never once adjusted my question based on where the candidate was coming from. The idea that people would ease up if they saw FAANG on a resume or a 10+ year career is just not a thing I've ever seen. There are a few truths in modern tech interviewing: 1. There is a large amount of randomness. Between the question that an interviewer chooses to ask and whether the…

You answered some of my questions in some other HN posts. I remember you.

Thanks for the replies.

Btw I am curious of this one thing. Say a FAANG has X years of experience in a FAANG company and then quit. When he/she reapplies to the company, is there any sort of stuff that makes he/she preferred over other candidates? Why I'm asking this question is this. I imagine that a FAANG engineer who has more than X years of experience, say x = 10, he/she must have better things to do rather than just memorizing 1000 Leetcode problems. Therefore if being judged strictly by using Leetcode style questions, I imagine he/she would not do well.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#170

Post by no_flags »

dominotw wrote: post #53
chrisseaton wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people should dis-regard what FAANG do. The hiring bar there is so astronomically high that they're only hiring people at the very top of their field. I wouldn't try to take any lessons from FAANG and apply them to the rest of the industry.

I've gotten same interview that GP described from mid tiered tech shops in salt lake city.

I think some places think "we're just as good as FAANG so we should have the same bar."
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