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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#641

Post by cptaj »

Waterluvian wrote: post #625
XorNot wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I'm pretty sure FAANG hiring is just a random walk. Every now again someone happens to have looked at all the questions they ask recently for that particular interview cycle (or avoid the trap ones like that) and that person gets hired (and then put on the ad targeting team or whatever).

It may be a random walk but I think the goal is to convince whoever gets hired that they’re special and talented and elite members of their discipline.

You think they're doing this to make you feel... good?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#642

Post by ghaff »

crispyambulance wrote: post #628
XorNot wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I'm pretty sure FAANG hiring is just a random walk. Every now again someone happens to have looked at all the questions they ask recently for that particular interview cycle (or avoid the trap ones like that) and that person gets hired (and then put on the ad targeting team or whatever).

The experiences that people describe here just confirm something that many of us has learned a long time ago: NOBODY HAS "FIGURED OUT" HIRING ! Not Google, not Apple, no one. Sure, some places (and individual interviewers) are better at it than others. But at the end of the day, hiring is a deeply subjective process with lots of error and uncertainty built into it's nature. The subjectivity is intrinsic. Places like…

Or you hire people you know. Which isn't perfect, has it's own set of problems, and doesn't scale. But I can't really complain given it's how I've gotten every job (just a few) after grad school and my interviews have been mostly perfunctory.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#643

Post by woofie11 »

crispyambulance wrote: post #628
XorNot wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I'm pretty sure FAANG hiring is just a random walk. Every now again someone happens to have looked at all the questions they ask recently for that particular interview cycle (or avoid the trap ones like that) and that person gets hired (and then put on the ad targeting team or whatever).

The experiences that people describe here just confirm something that many of us has learned a long time ago: NOBODY HAS "FIGURED OUT" HIRING ! Not Google, not Apple, no one. Sure, some places (and individual interviewers) are better at it than others. But at the end of the day, hiring is a deeply subjective process with lots of error and uncertainty built into it's nature. The subjectivity is intrinsic. Places like…

Pretend there's a Programming Quotient (PQ) which is like IQ.

Let's say Google would like candidates with PQ>130 with 95% confidence. Google has an error with std. div. of 15 points in measurement of PQ in jobs interviews. Google then needs to set the hiring bar at 160 PQ in order to get those candidates. This:

- screens most qualified candidates out; but

- most candidates who do screen in are qualified

Statistics would suggest this leaves you with 95% qualified candidates. A more precise Bayesian analysis will show you don't end up with 95% qualified employees, but the basic idea works -- it's still a majority. You set an impossibly high bar, so that candidates hired need to be qualified AND lucky. You discount unlucky candidates, but you don't hire (many) unqualified ones.

The problem, of course, is that all Googlers are convinced they all have a PQ>160, and are superior to everyone else. That's where you get the obnoxious Google incompetent arrogance.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#644

Post by gowld »

dilyevsky wrote: post #211
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.kalibrr.com/sites/default/files/featured_images/... Every year, Google receives over one million resumes and applications. Only 4,000-6000 applicants will actually be hired — that's less than a 1% hiring rate. Given those odds it's not worth it.

These numbers are misleading af. Most of those applications are just spam, not really relevant and never get read by any human. I’ve done ~150 interviews for backend roles at google and based on my experience 4 years ago if you make it to onsite you have 5-10% of getting an offer

> if you make it to onsite

So those numbers are accurate and not misleading.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#645

Post by TheHypnotist »

buro9 wrote: post #593

Ah Amazon... 14 interviews, an additional 5 hour technical test, spanning a total of 3+ months. Only to be informed at the end that I was too technical for the role they had in mind but they were offering me a Senior Principal SDE role instead. By the time we got to the end of the process I'd already concluded that the hiring process was a reflection of their internal decision making and that this was not a company (…

As i mentioned in another post, don't forget to work in those LP's otherwise you get 0 Bezos points and your experience is worthless.

Edit: Meant LP's. Leadership Principles.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#646

Post by cmrdporcupine »

silisili wrote: post #119

My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances. My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again. I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm…

FWIW I've been at Google for a decade and I have done interview training twice and each time opted not to do interviews, because I think the interview process is terrible.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#647

Post by the_only_law »

throwaway9191aa wrote: post #601
lordnacho wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At this point I'm pretty sure FAANG hiring is just a random walk. Every now again someone happens to have looked at all the questions they ask recently for that particular interview cycle (or avoid the trap ones like that) and that person gets hired (and then put on the ad targeting team or whatever). This might actually be part of the retention strategy. If everyone who works at FAANG knows that they're somewhat l…

I'll just +1 this as a datapoint. I am not looking externally until I'm sure I'm done at AWS. I've done 80+ interviews here, and I'm consistently amazed by what drives people to say "The candidate wasn't up to the coding bar". As far as I can tell, you are almost never up to the coding bar. I think we interview so many people just to remind ourselves that if we leave, we aren't getting back in. Just to head off the "…

I remember seeing a comment about Amazon once claiming in order to be seriously considered for a role, you have to be better than 50% of the existing team you’d be coming onto.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#648

Post by shanev »

DAOs are fixing this in the crypto world. You contribute to the protocol and get paid by the DAO. Everything is transparent and open. If you do this enough and earn the respect of the dev team it could even turn into a full-time role.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#649

Post by 2001lodyssee »

Rapzid wrote: post #42
2001lodyssee wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my long and storied career, well long at least, every single truly heinous, project-killin', crazy person actually interviewed pretty well. Honestly, I don't have a good solution to the problem.

Fire fast. Use that 90 day try out period. Contract-to-hire. In the past I would never have been interested in a contract-to-hire. These days though if the company and role is right, and this an option to short-cut a ridiculous interview process, I might spring for it.

> Fire fast. Use that 90 day try out period. Contract-to-hire.

I've see that work before, but it was some time ago. The company also had a very large test department with separate management and kept to a strongly enforced waterfall-esque design routine.

Of course, it used to be a lot harder to ship out version 1.01 of the software.

I just assume it was a different world as this was in the days of US manufacturing, very limited set of software tools, high importance placed on domain knowledge as opposed to toolset, longer average stays at employer, lower wages for programmers. Probably not applicable to modern times.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#650

Post by skeeter2020 »

deepGem wrote: post #626
keyb0ardninja wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Makes a lot of sense, you could solve all these questions without knowing specific algorithms as long as you are good at problem solving - which is, I assume, the intent of the process. You could solve all these questions as long as you are good at problem solving, *given enough time*. However, with tight time constraints and perfomance pressure, the only way you could solve all these questions is memorizing and pr…

It's funny you put it this way. I actually did a couple of hard level Leetcode problems and I thought they would help me immensely in my day to day life in addition to helping me get better at interviews. No such avail. In fact, unless these algorithms and problem solving methodologies are baked into your memory there's no way you are white boarding a Leetcode hard level problem in an interview. What I was impressed…

>> which basically boiled down to 'how do I abstract retrying a 429 - rate limit exceeded

They're probably looking for some sort of variable refilling leaky bucket implementation, which is funny because I believe this is exactly what they do internally. It was probably the task the interview had in front of them in their day-to-day and wanted you to do it for them!

This is a fair design question for a senior role (which this sounds like) that promotes disccussion, but expecting a specific solution is really only testing "does this person match my preconceived ideal for what a is?" which is really dangerous and has very little value.

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