Honestly the only thing I see out of this is that Dropbox is a huge paying customer of this service.
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We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
71–80 of 234 posts
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
Simple but really time consuming. Experienced engineers with responsibilities outside of work don't have time for that nonsense. It's hard enough to do ONE interview, let alone do tons of fake interviews in preparation. No other industry is like this - once you've proven yourself as an experienced professional/exec, if you want to swap to another company, you just have a chat.
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#73Oof, non-zeroed charts are very deceptive in enlarging differences that might be within the error margins.
I was curious what one of these would look like as a "regular" chart. Here's what it looks like: https://imgur.com/a/BkzEoGV
Thanks for that. Still looks significant, but much less striking.
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#74Why does Dropbox software ship an amateurish Electron app then?
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe add error bars to give it a little more color?
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 did…
You and the person you reply to are both right. Having been on both sides of the aisle, after working for almost 2 decades, this really makes me not look forward to switching jobs anymore. Interviewing for a job really is the worst part of working as a software engineer.
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#77Dropbox was known as a hard place to interview since 2014, the tech companies that had the hardest technical interviews are Quora, Palantir and Dropbox(honorable mention fog creek)(this was from a few years back so things may have changed). Just because the company makes it extremely difficult to get in does not mean the company is generally all around awesome or pays great or employs the greatest engineers. It optimizes for people who generally come straight out of an elite CS program with those learned concepts fresh in their mind, and for people who grind out on leetcode or who are great at interviewing. Of the three companies I mentioned above I would not work for any of them now.
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#78I 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.
the process is incredibly inefficient and disrespectful. people have already paid for university degrees and getting a degree is no joke, certainly not at a european university. graduating without programming skills is impossible. what companies should do is ask you to walk them through a piece of code of your choice and discuss that and/or hire you for a month as a contractor and pay you a fair market rate.
> graduating without programming skills is impossible
I’ve encountered many who graduated from bachelor and even PhD programs without programming skills (even from European universities), so your statement is false.
It also seems pretty weird to assume that a degree or certificate is foolproof for demonstrating programming skills. That seems like a lack of critical thinking skills.
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#79If Dropbox engineers are so good across the board, why are they interviewing at all? Surely the desire to move away from this kind of technical nirvana would be almost zero?
Dropbox was famously leading the SWE comp charts[1]. In particular, they focused on equity grants both pre- and post-IPO.
Well, live by the equity sword, die by the equity sword: SP500 is up 16 percent in the past year, DBX is down 10 percent. Even over the long term, DBX is down 15 percent since their IPO 5 years ago, while SP500 is up 77 percent. It's the kind of performance that results in layoffs[2], which will probably hit your most expensive / experienced engineers first. Glassdoor ratings suggest remote work did not go well when combined with the layoff.
[1]: https://medium.com/@paysa/thinking-inside-the-box-spotlight-... [2]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dropbox-layoffs/dropbox-t...
Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work
#80Many 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.
Every big corp has that data. Remember Google ditching brainteaser questions due to the lack of correlation between the interview and job performance.