I wonder about when you don’t need “the best”. Everyone needs solid role players too…
Nobody ever talks about getting good, but not “the best”.
We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
41–50 of 234 posts
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#42Oof, non-zeroed charts are very deceptive in enlarging differences that might be within the error margins.
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#43> There’s also the issue of selection bias. Maybe we’re just getting people who really feel like they need practice and aren’t an indicative slice of engineers at that company. Or that your interview preparation platform prepares candidates better for Dropbox's interview process than it does for Microsoft's. Or that the people who were confident in their interview skills for Facebook decided not to use your platform.…
Or that less qualified people do not apply for Dropbox. It's a % acceptance rate almost - Harvard is good for having a low acceptance rate, not high.
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#44I'm glad to see this getting roasted in the comments, as it's a really good example of how companies put out self-serving pseudo-statistical nonsense in an effort to promote themselves.
There's no effort to quantify what "technical" or "communication" skills are - these are left to the interpretation of a the interviewer. It makes no effort to show where these engineers are going, what the interview process they're completing looks like, what impact demographics had on this, etc.
I find this stuff repugnant. It perpetuates the myth that there's something really special about Silicon Valley engineers, while making only lazy and perfunctory efforts to examine any alternative explanations than "this is where the rockstar ninja coders work." Shameful.
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#45"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.
The logic being "They work at Google/Dropbox/etc... therefore they are the best performers" really irks me.
The author confuses successful products with high performing tech and high performing engineers. I’ve met many brilliant indie engineers that build highly performant code that almost no one knows about yet it provides these people with a steady stream of income and they would never work at faang or unicorns.
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#46> There’s also the issue of selection bias. Maybe we’re just getting people who really feel like they need practice and aren’t an indicative slice of engineers at that company. Or that your interview preparation platform prepares candidates better for Dropbox's interview process than it does for Microsoft's. Or that the people who were confident in their interview skills for Facebook decided not to use your platform.…
Author here. The data is mostly drawn from how people who work at these companies do in mock interviews rather than how our users do in real interviews with these companies.
The implication in your blog post doesn't make that clear-
> At interviewing.io, we’ve hosted over 100K technical interviews, split between mock interviews and real ones.
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#47I 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.
> people put too much effort
> spend a reasonable time like a month
Spending a month on interview training is exactly what I would consider unreasonable effort.
Here's a scenario – I have worked at big tech company A for a decade writing backend code. Big tech company B has many openings for senior backend coders, and is desperate to fill them. B's recruiters are hounding me every day to consider a switch. The job looks interesting, and the salary and benefits are great.
Should be a perfect fit, you say? Except if I interview with B today I'll get rejected at the very first coding stage. The barrier to entry they have created for themselves is me taking time away from my current job to solve programming puzzles, solving them perfectly in an interview setting, then throwing away all of that knowledge. They are never going to make me go through this effort unless I am truly unhappy at my current role.
This is the exact reason companies are finding it so hard to hire engineers, and why they have to pay them so much to switch.
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#48I 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.
This is a lot easier to say when you're established in the industry and you have a "feel" for interviewing. When you're breaking in, you have to learn all the computer science shibboleths and industry jargon before people will take you seriously as a candidate.
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#49> There’s also the issue of selection bias. Maybe we’re just getting people who really feel like they need practice and aren’t an indicative slice of engineers at that company. Or that your interview preparation platform prepares candidates better for Dropbox's interview process than it does for Microsoft's. Or that the people who were confident in their interview skills for Facebook decided not to use your platform.…
Author here. The data is mostly drawn from how people who work at these companies do in mock interviews rather than how our users do in real interviews with these companies.
There's still the selection bias of who volunteers to do these mock interviews. Probably its the people who want practice interviewing and at dropbox those are the top performers who want to "move up" to a Google, while at Google it's the people who aren't cutting it and know they are going to have to find another job soon.
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#50I cannot take any of this seriously.
- First of all, it assumes that `interviewing.io` is some sort of certification standard (which I'm willing to bet is the actual point of publicizing these 'studies' in the first place. It's 'fact' manufacturing)
- Then there's selection bias about engineers actually using one platform vs the other
- Touting the data set size in order to give the 'study' some credibility is a red flag for me. You can analyze millions of the same technical interview and deduce all sorts of conclusions.
- The use of 'best performers' is deceitful. It means 'best performers in the interview context'. But using it in the context of where do they work, it implies something like 'the best performing engineers are at company X'. Which is bullshit. More like 'best trained engineers to pass these interviews work at company X'.
Garbage. I'm flagging this as it's nothing more than self-serving marketing.