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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

#131

Post by junon »

leeny wrote: post #88
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…

Author here. Yes, the skills are left to the interpretation of the interviewer, but most of our interviewers are senior engineers at FAANG. We've done quite a bit of work internally to make sure your interviewers are well calibrated, and we have a living calibration score for each one (calibration is based on how the interviewees they interview end up doing in real interviews). The interviews in question are a mix of…

> senior engineers at FAANG

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

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

#132

Post by smrtinsert »

rch wrote: post #2

Looks like Dropbox has trouble retaining tech talent?

I remember seeing a job description that was something like

  must be self starter, enjoy high energy postive environment!  enjoy coding in RoR etc
To me this reads like legacy Rails codebase people are too scared to touch that's always causing fires. No thanks.

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

#133

Post by potatolicious »

leeny wrote: post #88
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…

Author here. Yes, the skills are left to the interpretation of the interviewer, but most of our interviewers are senior engineers at FAANG. We've done quite a bit of work internally to make sure your interviewers are well calibrated, and we have a living calibration score for each one (calibration is based on how the interviewees they interview end up doing in real interviews). The interviews in question are a mix of…

> "but most of our interviewers are senior engineers at FAANG"

Wait, so the result is that "interviewers from FAANG companies rate highly interviewees from FAANG (and FAANG-adjacent) companies"?

Or maybe more causally: "those who have already passed FAANG-style interviews are more likely to pass interviews conducted by FAANG people"?

I appreciate the mission here - but if the idea here is to give people a fair shot even if they don't have the pedigree of FAANG, building FAANG interview styles into the system seems counter to your stated goals. If anything these results are concerning - you can interpret the findings in (at least) two ways:

- these companies hire or produce superior engineers, the results you got are indicative of a broader higher caliber of engineer in those companies.

- the interviewing exercise is optimizing for "people who can pass/have already passed FAANG-style interviews", which rolls in all of the myriad biases of FAANG hiring and perpetuates them.

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

#134

Post by CobrastanJorji »

smrtinsert wrote: post #125
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG interviewer here. I've conducted many hundreds of interviews for multiple FAANG companies. The totality of my training in how to interview is about 4 hours (when I combine the training of each company). I have zero confidence in the usefulness of calibrating my answers and expect that neither I nor anyone else who does this would reliably score the same person with the same score most of the time, outside of a…

Props to the honesty

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 interviews and they've mostly been pretty good employees. I suspect a lot of people who fail these interviews would also make pretty good employees, but I'll never know.

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

#135

Post by commandlinefan »

WYepQ4dNnG wrote: post #6

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.

They all mostly ask the same sets of questions, too. If you get turned down by one interviewer, just keep track of what questions they asked, go look up the answers to those questions and you'll most likely be asked the same question by the next interviewer.

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

#137

Post by pgroves »

paxys wrote: post #59

What this really tells me is that the best engineerineers at Dropbox are looking to quit.

And the implication is the 'quality' of engineers at the companies is actually reversed - the top performers at Dropbox are struggling and leaving while the under performers at FANG are struggling and leaving.

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

#138

Post by commandlinefan »

visarga wrote: post #115
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…

> I'm beginning to think that the industry somehow settled on this approach not so much as a skills verification process but, by making the process so onerous on the candidate, talent retention is a lot easier. There are plenty of applicants who just can't do the job, and the cost of restarting the search all over again is high. It's important for a team to vet their new hires.

> applicants who just can't do the job

While that definitely matches my observations, the current interview grind:

a) filters out people who can do the job too

and

b) somehow also manages not to filter out people who can't, either.

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

#139

Post by ex_amazon_sde »

b20000 wrote: post #35
WYepQ4dNnG wrote: post #6

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.

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 interviewed a lot of people and quite a few could not implement fizzbuzz.

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

#140

Post by nosefrog »

As an ex-Dropboxer, Dropbox asks legitimately tough questions. I only got in because I got asked the exact set of questions that I could figure out the answer for, once I joined and went through interview training I realized I would have failed about half of the questions that Dropboxers ask.

I'm also not sure how it is at other companies (at Google but haven't gone through interview training yet), but Dropbox's rubrics are also pretty strict. Doing "well" on a question requires getting through multiple parts normally with close to zero bugs that you don't catch yourself.

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