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Misidentifying talent

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Re: Misidentifying talent

#11

Post by kevinmchugh »

greatpostman wrote: post #7
ryanSrich wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense. How many creative and truly innovative thinking people do you know that will spend hours studying for and partaking in such a ridiculous interview process? It’s easily one of the top turn offs for me when it comes to FAANG companies. Not because it’s difficult, but because it’s utterly boring, and useless. It seems these companies are far more interested in hiring very intelligent and analytical type…

Here’s what’s funny, amazon and Microsoft are less about leetcode. Google has very hard questions but they are somewhat novel. Facebook has very tough questions but they are basically straight from the book, people getting hired there just need to memorize. Smaller growth stock companies like coinbase or DoorDash tend towards the Facebook style of interviews. If you look at stock prices, there’s a near direct correla…

My takeaway has been that the fastest growing (especially consumer-oriented) tech companies put up the highest bars to hiring, simply because they'll still get enough candidates to end up with enough people. IBM can't be as picky as Roblox.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#12

Post by iakh »

mattwad wrote: post #9

I'm on a pretty small team, we don't have enough people or time to do a robust interview process, but we started contracting devs for a week before hiring them, and it has been a much better experience than any interview I could have done in 1-2 hours. Plus, they get paid and we get a little bit of work done even if things don't work out.

Wouldn't this self select for the unemployed? Unless they took a week off and then gave notice after the "contract" period.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#13

Post by trhway »

ardit33 wrote: post #3

The sad point is that in the current state, you get two leetcode style questions for round interview, and that's it. Good luck with that; There is 0 interest in companies to improve the quality of the interview process. 0. They'd rather increase the funnel, instead improving the rate of good talent detection. There is enough new fodder to go through every year, that improving quality of detecting good engineers, is n…

> you get two leetcode style questions for round interview, and that's it. Good luck with that;

that is really good luck. Where else can you get a relaxed "i feel like taking the afternoon off (my personal take back then when i was windsurfing - the wind has picked up very good, and thus i'm gone)" $500K+/year just for memorizing a bit of stuff? We have it best in the history of humanity. Yet still the whining. Until one has a disability preventing mastering leetcode, the failure to do so clearly indicates something like attitude issues and/or lazyness and/or lack of focus/discipline. Hard to argue about usefulness of such a filter.

>There is enough new fodder to go through every year,

some say that AMZN in some markets has practically exhausted the candidates pool, so lets see whether it would cause any changes

Re: Misidentifying talent

#15

Post by ewuhic »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #11
greatpostman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s what’s funny, amazon and Microsoft are less about leetcode. Google has very hard questions but they are somewhat novel. Facebook has very tough questions but they are basically straight from the book, people getting hired there just need to memorize. Smaller growth stock companies like coinbase or DoorDash tend towards the Facebook style of interviews. If you look at stock prices, there’s a near direct correla…

My takeaway has been that the fastest growing (especially consumer-oriented) tech companies put up the highest bars to hiring, simply because they'll still get enough candidates to end up with enough people. IBM can't be as picky as Roblox.

Does that mean one would find themselves in an environment surrounded by bright innovative minds should they go for IBM?

Re: Misidentifying talent

#16

Post by MattGaiser »

ewuhic wrote: post #15
kevinmchugh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My takeaway has been that the fastest growing (especially consumer-oriented) tech companies put up the highest bars to hiring, simply because they'll still get enough candidates to end up with enough people. IBM can't be as picky as Roblox.

Does that mean one would find themselves in an environment surrounded by bright innovative minds should they go for IBM?

IBM might actually find some. I doubt they could keep them.

I have met a bunch of great ex-IBM people. But they measured their stays in months.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#17

Post by MattGaiser »

greatpostman wrote: post #5

Funniest thing is that the companies with the most extreme leetcode interviews, Facebook, roblox, etc also fell the hardest in the most recent sell off. There’s even a quote by kieth rabois, one one the top VCs, that FB hired and built their culture around optimization, which has failed. They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.

Are developers really counted on for innovation anyway? We seem like implementation units.

Someone else makes decisions and creates tickets for devs to work on.

Re: Misidentifying talent

#18

Post by oreally »

Well hiring for software engineers should involve fields outside their own while de-emphasizing leetcode. For example, there are psychometric studies comparing personality and job success.

Some of JP's lectures talk on this point quite a bit.

Workplace Performance, Politics & Faulty Myers-Briggs: https://youtu.be/GXHj7eZ23gk

IQ and The Job Market: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0

Re: Misidentifying talent

#19

Post by rileymat2 »

iakh wrote: post #12
mattwad wrote: post #9

I'm on a pretty small team, we don't have enough people or time to do a robust interview process, but we started contracting devs for a week before hiring them, and it has been a much better experience than any interview I could have done in 1-2 hours. Plus, they get paid and we get a little bit of work done even if things don't work out.

Wouldn't this self select for the unemployed? Unless they took a week off and then gave notice after the "contract" period.

Perhaps this is a good thing?

To be cynical perhaps an unemployed person has less negotiating power, so you can get higher quality diamonds in the rough cheaper.

The classic fear is the person is unemployed for a flaw in that person, but perhaps this trial alleviates that somewhat?

Re: Misidentifying talent

#20

Post by kevinmchugh »

ewuhic wrote: post #15
kevinmchugh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My takeaway has been that the fastest growing (especially consumer-oriented) tech companies put up the highest bars to hiring, simply because they'll still get enough candidates to end up with enough people. IBM can't be as picky as Roblox.

Does that mean one would find themselves in an environment surrounded by bright innovative minds should they go for IBM?

I am not endorsing the innovation idea here. I'm just saying that a well known company that's expected to see a big jump in value in the short term will have too many applicants to reasonably sort through. They can put up arbitrary bars, and arbitrarily high ones, and still manage to hire. Coinbase could disqualify everyone born on Mondays and Tuesdays without seriously impacting their ability to hire, probably
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