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A confession of a FAANG hiring manager

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Re: A confession of a FAANG hiring manager

#41

Post by alanwreath »

alanwreath wrote: post #40
Gortal278 wrote: post #34

I ramped up to do a bunch of interviews last year after some covid layoffs and, I'd rather the format stayed in its current form. It isn't great, but I can study one style of interviews and apply that across the board to all the companies I interview for. The system interviews are easy, it's just talking about side projects or work I do for a living anyway. After ramping up and successfully landed a role last year I…

Opposite for me - I have always gotten an offer when given a take home. Every. Single. Time.

Now…talking while I code and explaining. I don’t ever do well there.

Re: A confession of a FAANG hiring manager

#42

Post by popularonion »

wildrhythms wrote: post #37
splittingTimes wrote: post #36

We ask candidates to prepare a 20min presentation about one or two interesting projects they worked on. The whole dev team (8 people) is present and we all discuss it in a friendly, genuinely interested manner on eye-level, trying to understand what the candidate has build by asking design choices or more details on certain aspects, how error paths were handled, which trade off considered, how was the collaboration i…

Personally, as an engineer at a highly desirable company, I would hate this process, and I imagine your candidates hate it too. And if your point of view during hiring comes from a place of looking for candidates trying to 'bullshit their way through' (your words), I wouldn't feel comfortable working there.

You would hate talking about your job for 45 minutes? Honestly trying to understand what your outrage is about.

Re: A confession of a FAANG hiring manager

#43

Post by Conclusionist »

I finished my onsites with a FAANG company. Recruiter comes back to me and says every interviewer gave you the green light but the hiring committee wants another interview with these specific questions asked.

By this point I had already spent 8 hours with them. Told them to beat it and stop wasting my time.

It's ridiculous how disrespectful these companies are to our time.

Re: A confession of a FAANG hiring manager

#44

Post by splittingTimes »

wildrhythms wrote: post #37
splittingTimes wrote: post #36

We ask candidates to prepare a 20min presentation about one or two interesting projects they worked on. The whole dev team (8 people) is present and we all discuss it in a friendly, genuinely interested manner on eye-level, trying to understand what the candidate has build by asking design choices or more details on certain aspects, how error paths were handled, which trade off considered, how was the collaboration i…

Personally, as an engineer at a highly desirable company, I would hate this process, and I imagine your candidates hate it too. And if your point of view during hiring comes from a place of looking for candidates trying to 'bullshit their way through' (your words), I wouldn't feel comfortable working there.

"bullshitting" was indeed a bad choice of words on my part and it's not how we see our candidates nor it's reflective of our rational why we choose this interview style. It was a mere reference to another post further above.

We try to make the candidates as comfortable as can be in a stressful interview scenario by having them talk us through some of their previous work. If that does not do it, i do not know what is. If you feel comfortable to code while others watch, good on you. I personally am not that kind of person.

We try to be mindful of their time by having a single interview with minimal mandatory preparation time and same day feedback.

We want to give them a chance to see how we as a team interact.

Re: A confession of a FAANG hiring manager

#45

Post by nokya »

What I find utterly sad when I read this is that the rest of the world, no let me rephrase it: the actual world, both intuitively knows this process is wrong and operates recruitment differently.

Engineers of the world don't work at FAANG companies, just a very small subset of them. Engineers who want to work there are like teenagers who were told they must study at an ivy league if they want to something with their life. It's a small club, it is not selective at all, it is just not a club that a lot of people would care to join.

What I find more interesting to observe in this post is the recruiter himself. How he was led to believe an awful community was "better" until he realized he had to escape from it, and now he is teaching something that almost every engineer in the world already knows.

So, yes, I'll upvote this one but probably not for the reason I'm expected to :)

Re: A confession of a FAANG hiring manager

#46

Post by thunkshift1 »

nlowell wrote: post #17

Interviewing is one of the unsolved problems in computer science. I think take-home assignments have their own tradeoffs such as time investment by the engineer or the (I'm assuming) increased chance of cheating. You also still run into the question of what a standard take-home assignment should look like, and how to prevent take-homes from becoming a game in the exact same way leetcode has become a game.

What is ‘cheating’ in a take home assignment? Its an open book exam

Re: A confession of a FAANG hiring manager

#47

Post by jhugg »

thunkshift1 wrote: post #46
nlowell wrote: post #17

Interviewing is one of the unsolved problems in computer science. I think take-home assignments have their own tradeoffs such as time investment by the engineer or the (I'm assuming) increased chance of cheating. You also still run into the question of what a standard take-home assignment should look like, and how to prevent take-homes from becoming a game in the exact same way leetcode has become a game.

What is ‘cheating’ in a take home assignment? Its an open book exam

Someone helps you? Or does it for you? Or you copy a solution from online?

Re: A confession of a FAANG hiring manager

#48

Post by nlowell »

jhugg wrote: post #47
thunkshift1 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is ‘cheating’ in a take home assignment? Its an open book exam

Someone helps you? Or does it for you? Or you copy a solution from online?

Yeah, you pay someone to take the assignment for you. Which, by the way, there's already a market out there where people are paying others to interview in their place (deceiving the company). I think video interviews are less cheatable than unsupervised assignments but still cheatable since bad actors can hire people to impersonate them. Anyways, whether or not these would be genuine significant risks in your hiring pipeline is pretty company-dependent.

Re: A confession of a FAANG hiring manager

#49

Post by nlowell »

thunkshift1 wrote: post #46
nlowell wrote: post #17

Interviewing is one of the unsolved problems in computer science. I think take-home assignments have their own tradeoffs such as time investment by the engineer or the (I'm assuming) increased chance of cheating. You also still run into the question of what a standard take-home assignment should look like, and how to prevent take-homes from becoming a game in the exact same way leetcode has become a game.

What is ‘cheating’ in a take home assignment? Its an open book exam

Paying someone to take the assignment for you and secure you the job. People are out there doing this already, though I wouldn't recommend it :)

Re: A confession of a FAANG hiring manager

#50

Post by phendrenad2 »

Sometimes I think that FAANGs real power comes from their nontechnical hires. They pay top dollar for their CxOs, market strategists, domain experts, etc. With this kind of firepower, they can get along with any engineers. They just need to fill seats. The high salaries for software engineers are just to shackle their engineers with golden handcuffs so they'll stick around long-term, and not spread any secondhand strategic vision to competitors.
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