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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

#201

Post by xtracto »

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

In my [disillusioned] experience, this holds true: Silicon Valley engineers are very good for building throwaway MVPs that they won't have to maintain more than 3 years.

I've been very disillusioned by the quality of the software written by Silicon Valley companies, but in hindsight it makes sense: "Run fast break things" development culture resonates with the "raise VC money every 18 months" business culture, and then look for an exit in 5 years tops. There is no incentive in Dev or Business to really develop good software.

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

#202

Post by tlb »

kieselguhr_kid wrote: post #99
ummonk wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's no effort to quantify what "technical" or "communication" skills are - these are left to the interpretation of a the interviewer." And yet, these scores are measuring something and averaged across tens of thousands of technical interviews, you have enough statistical power to average out the particularities of each interviewer. I'm sorry you find the results repugnant, but the results are what they are. And…

It's not the results I find repugnant, it's the assumption that the results have any real world validity. The _something_ they're measuring is as likely to be demographic biases as it is technical or communication skills.

Are you claiming they have no validity at all? Like if you built 2 teams: one team with candidates that all got 0% on the test and another team with candidates that all got 100%, you'd expect no difference at all in their real-world performance on a difficult problem?

If you're claiming something weaker than that, can you state it more precisely?

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

#203

Post by xtracto »

leeny wrote: post #8
jstx1 wrote: post #3

> 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 data and charts in the article look pretty nice!

One of the things I learned from my years in research/academia is that Design Of Experiments in itself is a pretty complicated task. Most experiments/studies are invalidated due to a huge amount of confounding factors and correlations that are not factored in for the experiments.

A cursory visit to r/science comments would show a lot of people who do science for a living providing valid criticism to published peer reviewed scientific studies due to wrong Design of Experiments procedures.

Having lived all this first hand makes me EXTREMELY resistant to take seriously the data, analysis and conclusions of the linked article.

Other than that, the effort is appreciated and I like the ideas behind interviewing.io.

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

#204

Post by overrun11 »

b20000 wrote: post #178
overrun11 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You end up with a far less merit based hiring pipeline. I work at a top tech company and don't have any degree at all. The current process gives people like me a chance, yours wouldn't.

the current process rewards people who memorize and grind leetcode answers, rather than those with an actual education and skills, which is a problem. so no, the current process is not merit based but rather measures to what extent you are willing to exhaust yourself to get a job.

I did maybe 5-10 hours of preparation for my current job's interview and most of my colleagues didn't grind either. I'm skeptical of this idea that the only people who work at FAANG are Leetcode machines that have sacrificed their lives to grind questions.

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

#205

Post by b20000 »

overrun11 wrote: post #197
b20000 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how so? you are rewarding students for working hard to get their degree? the current process basically tells them: we don’t care you worked crazy hard, it’s back to square 1. they might just as well gone straight into an internship after high school… also: this is not just the case for scandinavian universities but also the case for universities in most of western europe especially if they are non-private.

I believe you that this is the level of talent at western European universities but what about all the other universities outside of Western Europe that aren't like this. Should companies exempt you from a grueling interview process only if you are from one of these schools?

sure, why not? companies collect info about what school you graduated from and your grades anyway already. they can associate that data with who they fired to decide if they want to hire out of that school.

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

#206

Post by b20000 »

overrun11 wrote: post #204
b20000 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the current process rewards people who memorize and grind leetcode answers, rather than those with an actual education and skills, which is a problem. so no, the current process is not merit based but rather measures to what extent you are willing to exhaust yourself to get a job.

I did maybe 5-10 hours of preparation for my current job's interview and most of my colleagues didn't grind either. I'm skeptical of this idea that the only people who work at FAANG are Leetcode machines that have sacrificed their lives to grind questions.

then maybe you are an outlier and were asked the exact questions you prepared for. most people here mentioned 2-3 months of grinding and that is what i also experienced firsthand.

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

#208

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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…

> "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?"

If you were a doctor, you would have gone through 4-5 years of supervised residency after medical school (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine)) to guarantee some minimum level of competency before becoming a practitioner. Pay is notoriously poor and the hours are extremely long.

Programmers have it exceedingly good and the only reason for that is that software is still in its growth phase. I doubt we'll all be still riding the gravy train in another 25-50 years.

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

#209

Post by dgunay »

driverdan wrote: post #157
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…

Welders typically have to demonstrate their welding skills. That's the only one I can think of though.

At least a welder actually welds stuff during their day-to-day. Still looking for a job that needs people who can implement efficient graph traversals though.

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

#210

Post by WYepQ4dNnG »

hiq wrote: post #159
paxys wrote: post #47

Earlier 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…

If B is desperate, they'll just increase salary and benefits until enough people able to pass the interview start applying. Adjectives like "desperate" don't reflect what actually happens: they priced the cost of possibly not hiring soon, of using a different hiring method and of changing the benefits, and they computed (badly?) the optimum to be where they are. If they become more desperate, things could change, but…

> increase salary and benefits until enough people able to pass

More often than not, BigCo don't need A players, but average devs to keep the wheels spinning and that's where the struggle with hiring is.

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