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What is the engineering hiring bar?

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#281

Post by devdas »

twomoretime wrote: post #44
jasondclinton wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But it undeniably has, and I've had multiple older women in management express to me that they felt their position was less respected because of the company's overt push to hire women. Sure, in theory we're correcting the injustices brought about by inequality, but what we're really doing is presuming that minorities need extra help and white men do not, without considering that all people have struggles and, frankly…

The presumption here is that white and Asian men get extra help by default, and the rest are penalised. This has enough evidence in favour that I would call it a theory and not a hypothesis.

Making this view more public would help.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#282

Post by christiansakai »

dominotw wrote: post #278
_nckn wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is worth it. I did Leetcode in JS, then in Go, then in Python. In Python you just need to focus on the actual algorithms than the actual minuteae details such as "let me create a function to copy this array". As long as you are aware of limitations such as Python int has no restriction like Java (int32, int64) etc, because some problems require you to look into that restrictions. Python string concatenatio…

thank you. what you said makes sense. job market seems to be down anyways. So might as well give this a shot.

also in Python you can literally not use a computer and just write down your algorithm in a piece of paper. makes it more fun to kill time during queueing in line, commuting etc lol.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#283

Post by throwaway49494 »

meestaahjoshee wrote: post #203
throwaway49494 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I decided that I wanted a job at Google, so I did the only reasonable and started grinding Leetcodes, probably at the same level as Recursive Cactus. I even took two days a week off for a couple of months to just do leetcodes. ~10 hours every weekend was Leetcodes. I read the whole CLRS (and made sure that I understood 80% at least). I wrote a thesis. I studied maths. I dug deep into databases and distributed systems…

you sound like a great engineer and mind, there's no reason to think you couldn't pass these bars. try again - there's randomness and variance to the interview process. most FAANG engineers did not get in on their first tries and without even more prep a second time around most likely. and even then you might just be unlucky and get a bad interviewer who won't hire you for any arbitrary reason.

Thanks for the kind words. Unfortunately I'm not sure the stress is worth it. Also, it's not like I'm getting bombarded by FAANG recruiters anymore (where did they all go?), and I'm not going to submit my CV to a "black hole"...

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#284

Post by fg6hr »

faanginginthere wrote: post #250
fg6hr wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a good chance that you're more qualified than all your interviewers except the 3rd one, who looks like a tenured "staff" engineer or manager. This is the reason you don't leave your job before you've landed a better one.

> This is the reason you don't leave your job before you've landed a better one. I don't agree with this. I actually don't regret any second having left my job before having a new one and would do it again in a heartbeat. After so many years at the same company I needed a radical change to change careers and had been meaning to find another job for a while but just never had the energy to do so and was just becoming…

In that case you just slack off hard and do interviewing almost full time.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#285

Post by fg6hr »

mav3rick wrote: post #209
fg6hr wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Many non "diverse" hires are also given two attempts.

Let's put it straight: most diverse candidates are given 2 attempts; while most regular candidates are given 1 attempt.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#286

Post by pmiller2 »

christiansakai wrote: post #273
pmiller2 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, but for the purpose of algorithm interview it doesn't matter.

It does if your interviewer knows that popping from the head of a list is O(n) and they feel like being picky about it.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#287

Post by dahart »

randomdude402 wrote: post #280
redis_mlc wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've written a fair amount of vanilla JS over the past 20 years and know what you're talking about. But in the circle of people that I've talked to, everybody else uses frameworks, and I doubt they could make surgical changes in the browser console. So you're excluding most of today's working front-end developers, and appealing to "edge cases." I guess you could pre-screen candidates by asking, "Are you familiar with…

It seems insane to me that most working front end developers don't know how to manipulate a DOM with javascript. Not saying this is or isn't true, but it seems insane.

Doesn't something seeming insane automatically make you question and check your own assumptions and information first? Isn't the most likely explanation for your premise either that it's not true, or that your expecations don't match reality?

Is it true that most front-end devs don't know how to manipulate a DOM with JS? I don't know, but it's not exactly true; Jquery is still javascript. Do you do front end dev professionally, and use strictly the pure javascript DOM API with no frameworks? There's a reason most people who do front end dev for a living don't do that: because it's time-consuming and there are easier options. Also because there better options than fiddling with the DOM at all, like React.

Is it insane that most programmers wouldn't be able to code something up in X86 assembly during an interview? (Not to mention that most wouldn't be interested.) To me that seems like a similarly unrealistic expectation.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#288

Post by megous »

dahart wrote: post #287
randomdude402 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems insane to me that most working front end developers don't know how to manipulate a DOM with javascript. Not saying this is or isn't true, but it seems insane.

Doesn't something seeming insane automatically make you question and check your own assumptions and information first? Isn't the most likely explanation for your premise either that it's not true, or that your expecations don't match reality? Is it true that most front-end devs don't know how to manipulate a DOM with JS? I don't know, but it's not exactly true; Jquery is still javascript. Do you do front end dev prof…

I'd assume that a developer should at least have a mental model of what DOM is and what it consists of, and that it can be queried and transformed by calling functions on JS objects that represent DOM nodes.

If the dev doesn't remember the names of actual functions (which is no fault, since that comes only with using them regularly), this would at least allow them to figure out what to search for on the Internet and how to use the results.

Is that a far fetched assumption? It's not really comparable to wanting a webdev to write some assembly code.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#289

Post by mav3rick »

fg6hr wrote: post #285
mav3rick wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many non "diverse" hires are also given two attempts.

Let's put it straight: most diverse candidates are given 2 attempts; while most regular candidates are given 1 attempt.

This is far from the truth.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#290

Post by randomdude402 »

dahart wrote: post #287
randomdude402 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems insane to me that most working front end developers don't know how to manipulate a DOM with javascript. Not saying this is or isn't true, but it seems insane.

Doesn't something seeming insane automatically make you question and check your own assumptions and information first? Isn't the most likely explanation for your premise either that it's not true, or that your expecations don't match reality? Is it true that most front-end devs don't know how to manipulate a DOM with JS? I don't know, but it's not exactly true; Jquery is still javascript. Do you do front end dev prof…

I generally don't do front end development professionally.

I do know how to manipulate the DOM without frameworks. Learned it over a weekend.

If I were interviewing for front end, I wouldn't recall the syntax immediately, but I would know what to google or be able to have enough of a conversation with the interviewer to show them I have the basic understanding of what is happening.

I do backend. A similar situation might be something like using curl to make individual http requests.

Yeah, we don't do that in real life and I forget some of the parameters and flags available, but if I acted like I had no idea how to use curl, I hope an interviewer would be very disappointed with that.

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