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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

#181

Post by b20000 »

emerged wrote: post #142
rootusrootus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It perpetuates the myth that there's something really special about Silicon Valley engineers Does this myth still have much traction? If anything, my general regard for engineers in the bay area has steadily declined in the last few years. There are so many really worthless folks who have only figured out how look like they have a clue, but go any deeper and they flail. I know I'm painting with a broad brush, and t…

I know a ton of engineers. Of them all, those working FAANG are profoundly less skilled than the others. It’s impossible to miss its so obvious. Maybe my social network is an outlier, but I really really doubt it.

why is this downvoted?

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

#182

Post by CobrastanJorji »

b20000 wrote: post #151
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to argue against myself, I do think that if enough interviewers interview a candidate, you will get an aggregate score that will give you a pretty good sense of how well that candidate is likely to do on other interviews, and I have found that candidates that do well on these interviews tend to make good employees, although that's based only on the fact that everybody I work with has passed one of these intervie…

I've been in interview rounds where if ONE interviewer doesn't like how you did on the stupid coding test, you're out. So what you are saying is pretty much BS.

I don't think I follow you. Your company has a hiring process where it rejects all candidates who fail any interviews. How does the existence of such a system invalidate anything I said?

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

#183

Post by gcheong »

overrun11 wrote: post #167
gcheong wrote: post #92

Does this happen in any other field? If I was a doctor and wanted to work at some other company, would I need to study the MCAT every year in order to pass a screening interview based on one possible question? What's the equivalent in other fields? Closest I can think of is an acting audition but even then they give you the script beforehand. I'm beginning to think that the industry somehow settled on this approach n…

Software engineering is the only field I know of where someone with zero pedigree or education can make as much as a doctor. If you can pass a grueling technical interview then you can get a high paying job (200-500k+) no matter who you are or what your background is. The tradeoff is that you have to go through the same grueling process every time you change jobs. I think the tradeoff is well worth it and would not l…

I don’t need a 200k+ job at a FAANG, but it doesn’t seem to matter as FAANGS are perceived as having the best hiring practices (because they wouldn’t be so successful otherwise, right?) so the entire industry just blindly follows suit.

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

#184

Post by kieselguhr_kid »

b20000 wrote: post #181
emerged wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a ton of engineers. Of them all, those working FAANG are profoundly less skilled than the others. It’s impossible to miss its so obvious. Maybe my social network is an outlier, but I really really doubt it.

why is this downvoted?

Fragile FAANG-ers

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

#185

Post by vonseel »

babyshake wrote: post #127
subsubzero wrote: post #77

Dropbox 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 optim…

Are you suggesting that these jobs don't mainly consist of quickly banging out dynamic programming and DFS/BFS traversal algorithms as quickly as possible while a stranger stares at you? From interview experience, I assume this is what engineers mostly do at these companies all day.

My brother is an MD and I showed him some Leetcode prep material since I am studying for interviews. Specifically, a problem from Grokking the Coding Interview.

His response - “It would be helpful if they then showed how that is used in real world code“. I had to tell him I don’t think these kinds of scenarios come up often in real-world use cases, haha. They are essentially coding puzzles to filter for people who are good at solving coding puzzles, which may or may not directly translate to being good at writing application code.

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

#186

Post by overrun11 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #170
overrun11 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It perpetuates the myth that there's something really special about Silicon Valley engineers Why are you sure it's a myth? My prior would be to believe that engineers at the most exclusive companies with the highest hiring bars that pay 3-5 times more than average would be better programmers. The article is just one data point confirming what intuitively should be true. If Silicon Valley engineers are no better tha…

There are capable people who don't want to live where 1000sqft home costs $1M. Never mind all of the other problems with the region. Selection bias doesn't prove anything about the people you aren't selecting for.

Dropbox is fully remote. All of these companies have offices around the country. I don't see how selection bias plays in here

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

#187

Post by kieselguhr_kid »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #176
kieselguhr_kid wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't necessarily say anything other than "where you work now has some predictive value for how well you'll be perceived by interviewers" in which case these aren't "top performers", they're "people with jobs" and it's just regurgitating a truism about how it's easier to get a job if you have a job. I'm not buying this as a moral outrage question, I'm wondering if this is adding anything meaningful for us to loo…

Except that interviewing.io interviews are specifically designed to be anonymous. This is even stated on their website. The interviewers do not see a resume or job history. As a candidate who's done a couple of interviews through them, the interviewers never asked anything about my background either. I don't recall even uploading a resume.

Yeah, but there's in-group jargon and technical approaches that FAANG and FAANG-adjacent engineers will pick up on. Just because you're anonymous doesn't mean you aren't unconsciously signaling your background to your interviewer.

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

#188

Post by kieselguhr_kid »

overrun11 wrote: post #169
kieselguhr_kid wrote: post #44

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…

> It perpetuates the myth that there's something really special about Silicon Valley engineers Why are you sure it's a myth? My prior would be to believe that engineers at the most exclusive companies with the highest hiring bars that pay 3-5 times more than average would be better programmers. The article is just one data point confirming what intuitively should be true. If Silicon Valley engineers are no better tha…

I've lived in Silicon Valley and I've lived outside of it. I'm sure it's a myth. The higher rate of pay is not an indication of higher skill.

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

#189

Post by 3minus1 »

This just sounds like Dropbox, Google have a similar interview to interviewing.io. So if you're able to clear the Dropbox interview bar, you'll do well on their test. It doesn't really say anything about general work performance, only performance on a specific interview.

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

#190

Post by junon »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #155
junon wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> senior engineers at FAANG This means absolutely nothing. It's a well known fact that SV titles hold next to no weight.

> " It's a well known fact that SV titles hold next to no weight. " Except at FAANG; the rewards are so great that the competition is fierce. Whether they gained their levels through engineering ability or savvy politicking, you can be sure they are adept in at least one of the two.

This reads like satire.
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