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We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#21

Post by chillacy »

WYepQ4dNnG wrote: post #6

I think people put too much effort and time in this whole interview business. My suggestion, based on my experience, is to spend a reasonable time like a month, brushing up on most common data structures and algo. Then just take your chances. Rinse and repeat.

> based on my experience

I will throw out counter-experience that I did not succeed at technical interviews until I treated it like a fulltime job. In the past I just brushed up and failed Google's interview a handful of times before I decided enough was enough.

My takeaway ultimately is that how much time and effort one chooses to put in is entirely personal based on how much they want one of these jobs + what their gaps are in algorithms and data structures. Some people are going to need more effort than others.

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#22

Post by vmception »

> If you’ve hired engineers from some of the companies in this post, have they performed better than others?

It should be: have you hired engineers from interview.io

This author is sadly blinded by the echo chamber of their own creation

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#23

Post by vdnkh »

nevermindiguess wrote: post #19

I would never want the best developers. Imagine the giant pain in the back of these primadonna always thinking they can get paid more in their next job. And how you should give them this or that, or how you should change your development stack, language, processes, chair color, etc. I only need very few geniuses and a lot of normal ones. 80/20, remember?!

Why do you think the best engineers are hard to work with?

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#24

Post by leeny »

horsawlarway wrote: post #17
leeny wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. We didn't publish a histogram showing how many users we have from each company, so I guess you'll have to trust me on this one. Dropbox has waaaay fewer engineers on interviewing.io per capita than some of the other companies... many of whom didn't make the top ten list. In our experience, they're quite good at retaining talent.

Doesn't this exact comment undercut your results fairly heavily? You're admitting that it's much more likely dropbox is a statistical anomaly because of fewer data points, rather than a robust data set.

it's possible. we did see statistical significance when comparing dropbox to others despite the relatively smaller sample size. but yes, that is possible.

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#25

Post by pas »

robbywashere_ wrote: post #15

The fallacy to these findings and conclusions is that you're measuring processes of your own brand and flavor; the biases are so deep you likely don't recognize them. 'technical', 'problem solving', 'communication' these are all of your own construction, setting, presentation and scoring. Look at the failings of the IQ test for example. I'm curious if people just really need to learn the talk and the walk of a silico…

> Look at the failings of the IQ test for example.

can you elaborate on that please?

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#27

Post by 1270018080 »

nevermindiguess wrote: post #19

I would never want the best developers. Imagine the giant pain in the back of these primadonna always thinking they can get paid more in their next job. And how you should give them this or that, or how you should change your development stack, language, processes, chair color, etc. I only need very few geniuses and a lot of normal ones. 80/20, remember?!

Your definition of best engineer doesn't sound like they're the best engineer.

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#28

Post by seabriez »

"best performers work" With a title like that you really just cannot take this study seriously lol. Not to say it's not interesting but that is one crazy claim, at best title should be "most effective interviewees." Also, I work in FANG but signed up for this website and can't even participate, so how you chose all these candidates is also questionable.

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#29

Post by spupe »

Many others have commented on possible biases here. That's true, but I also find this a really interesting observation based on a huge dataset. Once you can correlate it to actual job performance - performance reviews, whether you were fired or not, maybe even salary -, it might be one of the best ways to see if technical interviews actually measure anything significant.
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