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

blog.interviewing.io

51–60 of 234 posts

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

#51

I'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 c…

At least they left in the "Unemployed" category.

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

#54
I honestly don't care which company retains the best performers. Is none of my business. Maybe if you are an investor in these companies, might be a useful signal to know such trivia. But from a candidate standpoint, this page is super useful - https://interviewing.io/recordings

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

#55
post #20

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.

I think interview practice with real interviewers and expert feedback is an excellent investment.

My strategy is simple: I do interview practice by simply interviewing with companies that I am not really interested in joining. That allows me to practice not only the technical interview but also all other steps involved.

Last time I interviewed, I did 7 of these interviews, targeting: startups, pre-ipo, mid public companies, 2 of the FAANG I would never work for ...

I did that while prepping for interviewing at the companies I was really interested in working for. And eventually it all worked out and got a few offers, of which two from FAANG of which one from one of the two FAANG I really wanted to join.

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

#57
post #47

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.

> 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 lo…

Have you ever ran interviews? I have, and there's an incredibly wide range of candidates, all of whom with fantastic pedigrees, but some of whom are completely incapable of demonstrating their problem-solving ability. Likewise, some candidates have poor pedigrees, but make it clear to me that they can think, communicate, and code.

I'm not saying that some of my rejections can't do that. But I can't measure what I didn't observe.

I also get mountains of emails from recruiters about how deeply impressed they are with my skills, and how I should go work for their firms. I know that they are completely full of shit, because from looking at my LinkedIn, they have no idea whether or not I have any of those skills.

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

#58

"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.

I was thinking the best performers may very well be at one of those companies, but there's a pretty good chance that they never did any kind of coding interview. Maybe they were hired through a merger or acquisition or perhaps their reputation or portfolio is more than enough.

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

#60

This is super interesting! Worth noting that another possible title is "... where the best performers were trying to leave during the study timeframe". Really interesting to see dropbox so high - would be curious to see some other data to corroborate that they (at least used to) employ the best engineers. From my time interviewing, I've seen clusters of very good candidates often be more reflective of which top compa…

> hired a lot of people from Uber; right now we're getting Amazon and Facebook/Meta.

good luck with that

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