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What is the engineering hiring bar?

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#261

Post by scarface74 »

runawaybottle wrote: post #55
dominotw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>so "(a lot) higher pay" is a moot point no its not. I know ppl who quit MS and reapply later to get placed into a higher tier after they interviewed there again. Jumping jobs into a higher tier is easier way to get a raise than grinding at the same job.

Just adding I had to do this at a large non-faang corp. Just curious how common this is, it seems like the only work around to strict HR caps on raises.

Very common.

It’s called salary compression or even worse salary inversion.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#262

Post by scarface74 »

DeathArrow wrote: post #251
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. To asses the quality of life you have to take into account : payment, time spent on the job and for the job, the amount of work, the prices in the area you live and work, the stress level, the interactions in the company and probably more. I've done these calculations and for myself, job hunting for FAANG isn't wort…

At 45, I’m still an active developer and these days just your regular old “Enterprise Architect”. Married, dual income living in the too big house in the burbs of a major metropolitan city. We make “enough” that making more wouldn’t change our lifestyle.

Grinding algorithms to work for a FAANG doesn’t interest me. I’m actively disinterested.

Even though I started as a hobby developer in the 80s doing assembly and spent the first decade of my career writing assembly, now I’m much more interested in solving business and process problems than I am in the computer science side of software development.

So, next move will probably be more in the Solutions Architect/Professional Services/Enterprise Architect/Consulting route for a few years. I’ll have to do a little “grinding architecture”, and I may end up at one of the major cloud providers but that isn’t a goal in and of itself.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#263

Post by rcxdude »

commandlinefan wrote: post #77
stuxnet79 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps there wasn't any actionable advice, but it's a sad indictment of the current state of tech hiring. Based on the article you can assume that Recursive Cactus is already in Big-Tech ("well known tech company") so "(a lot) higher pay" is a moot point and quite frankly it's unlikely that the daily tasks involved in the next job will bear a strong resemblance to the kind of synthetic tasks or problems you are aske…

> 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?

Trial shifts are a lot more common in service industry jobs, and I think construction as well.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#264

Post by pmiller2 »

pmiller2 wrote: post #217
christiansakai wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FYI, a Python list is a very bad stack.

Whoops. Correction: a Python list is a very bad queue.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#265

Post by belorn »

southphillyman wrote: post #98
manfredo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>From my experience, the bulk of discrimination occurs before hiring event starts - recruiters extend phone interviews to diverse candidates at higher rates. 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 hir…

The major difference is that both CMU and your alma is seen to welcome both women and men (and people of different colors, cultural backgrounds, religion, social economical status and so on).

Targeted recruiting from single sex schools or religious universities would be different, but there aren't many such universities in the first place.

However, targeted recruiting for high prestige university tend to create discrimination for social economical status, which discriminate against people who were not lucky enough to be born by rich parents.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#266

Post by DeathArrow »

jasondclinton wrote: post #14
nimbius wrote: post #4

this is fine, so long as you're looking to get hired by a megacorp (fine,faang.) but for most people theres a point of diminishing returns. Do you want to spend six months to a year out of your life drilling for a $10k raise working for a company that works you like a rented mule anyhow, or do you settle with your present quality of life and conclude 70k is enough to do whatever you wanted to reasonably do anyway. Th…

I agree with a few things you said but you're also wrong about a few things. FAANG compensation is much higher than you think. $200k/year (including stock) in the Bay Area for new grads is common. Yes, the prep for these interviews is insane but what has effectively happened (and this is supported by the article) is that companies have offloaded the selection work to the interviewee: they will only be able to pass if…

Probably FAANG pay those levels in Bay Area due to the insane cost of living. Other companies hiring in that area might pay similar levels.

How about other US states or other countries? I don't live in US, and where I live they pay about the average salary, maybe a tiny bit more.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#267

Post by blub »

christiansakai wrote: post #23
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.

Ironically, I think I develop this ability as well through solving hundreds of Leetcode questions myself. At some point I actually have to step back and think, act not to solve it too quickly otherwise the interviewer will spot me as Leetcode junkies.

This is beautiful. As selection pressure increases, the candidates evolve to mimic all the criteria of the selector.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#268

Post by DeathArrow »

dudul wrote: post #225
mapmap wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was their response after you said "I think we're done here?"

Usually they don't really understand what I mean, and I just elaborate by explaining that I have no interest in working for a company that uses this type of brainteaser to decide who to hire. One time the guy got half angry, started defending his process and just walked me out. Another time they tried to move on to the next interviewer and I just said I wasn't interested anymore, it would be a waste of time. Obviousl…

Guys asking stupid questions want to believe they are clever. Saying you aren't interested might make them feel offended.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#269

Post by charlesu »

fg6hr wrote: post #192
charlesu wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worked at FAANG. There are diversity programs because most engineers are white and Asian men with professional networks composed almost entirely of white and Asian men. Referrals are a big source of talent, so you can imagine what that does to our hiring pipeline. But there are no diversity hires. Everyone who's hired has to pass the bar.

That's not entirely true because the bar isn't deterministic. For example, diverse candidates are given two attempts to pass a phone screen.

Candidates from well represented backgrounds are also given two attempts. It depends. In general, most candidates aren't given two attempts irrespective of background.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#270

Post by swat535 »

jgwil2 wrote: post #162
strken wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes well except you forgot that lawyers pass the bar once and don’t have to redo randomized exams over and over in under 45 minutes. My lawyer friends are making 160$/h and their interview efforts were an hour discussion with a few lunch meetings.
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