Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What is the engineering hiring bar?

blog.interviewing.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 298 posts

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#201

Post by meestaahjoshee »

Apocryphon wrote: post #182
jgwil2 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of "the bar" as being basically our industry's equivalent to a law degree: it's just a way to show that you have some foundational knowledge in the subject, even if it bears little resemblance to day-to-day work. All of the flaws you enumerated could also apply to law school, but at least "the bar" is reasonably accessible and doesn't cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The annoying thing is that with the bar exam, there is a clearly defined test with criteria. Whereas what you have in the software industry is a vaguely-defined set of expectations that vary widely. There's no standard.

ctci and leetcode seem to be the unofficial standard tbh

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#202

Post by manfredo »

omar_a1 wrote: post #200
manfredo wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every post of yours is just doubling down on insistently glossing over the realities of racial biases in hiring by painting any attempt to hire diverse candidates as the real racism. If this is your takeaway, then I don't think you've been getting the message that I've been trying to convey this whole time. There are benefits and drawbacks of being diverse in tech. You correctly highlight that diverse workers are o…

> You correctly highlight that diverse workers are often subject to more bullying and harassment. On the other hand, many tech companies do discriminate in hiring and that results in greater opportunities being extended to diverse candidates as compared to non-diverse candidates. Both of these are "real racism" (and sexism). Which one is more impactful than the other? That's a subjective question, and people with dif…

> Hint: if it were the latter, women and minorities would be over-represented rather than underrepresented in tech.

They often are. At Dropbox women made up over 23% of tech roles in 2018 while recruiters estimated that the Bay Area average is 19.2%. That's an overrepresentation of ~20%. At my current employer, last year 50% of engineering hires were women - 2.5x the industry wide representation (though that was an anomaly - it usually averages ~30%).

> And, no, comparing racial slurs on the job to diverse hiring is not apples-to-apples, it's apples-to-clan-hooded-racist. There is no way you can be making that comparison in good faith. But do continue tell me how racist slurs and diverse hiring committees are basically the same thing...

At this point you seem to be offended by the notion that one can even try to compare the impact of racial or gendered slurs or harassment with denying White and Asian men employment opportunities on the basis of their race and gender. There's really nothing to say except that people will compare these two things regardless of your objections, and some of them reach the conclusion that the former outweighs the latter.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#203

Post by meestaahjoshee »

throwaway49494 wrote: post #58
nimbius wrote: post #4

this is fine, so long as you're looking to get hired by a megacorp (fine,faang.) but for most people theres a point of diminishing returns. Do you want to spend six months to a year out of your life drilling for a $10k raise working for a company that works you like a rented mule anyhow, or do you settle with your present quality of life and conclude 70k is enough to do whatever you wanted to reasonably do anyway. Th…

I decided that I wanted a job at Google, so I did the only reasonable and started grinding Leetcodes, probably at the same level as Recursive Cactus. I even took two days a week off for a couple of months to just do leetcodes. ~10 hours every weekend was Leetcodes. I read the whole CLRS (and made sure that I understood 80% at least). I wrote a thesis. I studied maths. I dug deep into databases and distributed systems…

you sound like a great engineer and mind, there's no reason to think you couldn't pass these bars.

try again - there's randomness and variance to the interview process.

most FAANG engineers did not get in on their first tries and without even more prep a second time around most likely.

and even then you might just be unlucky and get a bad interviewer who won't hire you for any arbitrary reason.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#204

Post by meestaahjoshee »

dmoy wrote: post #103

My hiring bar (for coding) has gotten easier the more I interview (as the interviewer). I don't ask any kind of super tricky algo questions, because the signal you get from those tends to be closer to "is the candidate familiar with this specific area of algorithms" than anything else. I don't ask any questions that take a really good candidate more than 20-30 minutes to solve, because then I can't scale the question…

id love to interview with you

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#205

Post by omar_a1 »

manfredo wrote: post #202
omar_a1 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You correctly highlight that diverse workers are often subject to more bullying and harassment. On the other hand, many tech companies do discriminate in hiring and that results in greater opportunities being extended to diverse candidates as compared to non-diverse candidates. Both of these are "real racism" (and sexism). Which one is more impactful than the other? That's a subjective question, and people with dif…

> Hint: if it were the latter, women and minorities would be over-represented rather than underrepresented in tech. They often are. At Dropbox women made up over 23% of tech roles in 2018 while recruiters estimated that the Bay Area average is 19.2%. That's an overrepresentation of ~20%. At my current employer, last year 50% of engineering hires were women - 2.5x the industry wide representation (though that was an a…

Overrepresentation of the population. Do I really need to explain how 23% compares to 50%?

And I'm offended because it's wildly offensive. You've repeatedly insisted racial slurs aren't so bad, and diverse hiring practices are somehow worse. And seem to think some amount of explanation on your part will make it seem like it's a reasonable stance instead of a deeply and reprehensibly racist one. Instead it just makes you look like a verbose clan leader.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#206

Post by mav3rick »

twomoretime wrote: post #180
mav3rick wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is your test proven to be better than the others ? Can't the FAANGs be more selective ?

We can't reasonably priced which is superior for selection, but in our opinion the process is much saner and less resource intensive on our part. I wonder if the modern interview process at large orgs is built on a false sense of security. They are possibly overly selecting and perhaps successfully choosing above average candidates but missing exceptional cases who fail to conform to their rigid criteria.

In the numbers game they are okay with false negatives.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#207

Post by mapmap »

dudul wrote: post #8
nimbius wrote: post #4

this is fine, so long as you're looking to get hired by a megacorp (fine,faang.) but for most people theres a point of diminishing returns. Do you want to spend six months to a year out of your life drilling for a $10k raise working for a company that works you like a rented mule anyhow, or do you settle with your present quality of life and conclude 70k is enough to do whatever you wanted to reasonably do anyway. Th…

> Are you patient enough to sit through questions like "how many kegs of beer on a schoolbus" and "how to build a datacenter on the moon" from some grinning techbro only to be told youre re-invited to another round of interviews? I systematically end all interviews when they've reached this point. As soon as the smart-ass finishes their stupid question I just say "I think we're done here". I can stomach take homes, e…

What was their response after you said "I think we're done here?"

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#208

Post by mav3rick »

southphillyman wrote: post #98
manfredo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't dispute whether you think it's a terrible thing to say, but preferential treatment towards demographics categorized as "diverse" is something I've both witnessed and taken part in during my time so far in tech. At least in the San Francisco Bay Area, many tech companies are setting targets of >30% women in engineering roles despite the fact that they make up 20-25% of the tech workforce. Achieving these numbe…

>From my experience, the bulk of discrimination occurs before hiring event starts - recruiters extend phone interviews to diverse candidates at higher rates. How is this different from any other targeted recruiting? FAANG recruits students from CMU while not even visiting my alma mater. Recruiters extend phone interviews to referrals at 100% rate no matter how bad they suck, etc. Diversity recruiting != diversity hir…

You can't really blame the companies. CMU has a great track record why wouldn't they go there.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#209

Post by mav3rick »

fg6hr wrote: post #192
charlesu wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worked at FAANG. There are diversity programs because most engineers are white and Asian men with professional networks composed almost entirely of white and Asian men. Referrals are a big source of talent, so you can imagine what that does to our hiring pipeline. But there are no diversity hires. Everyone who's hired has to pass the bar.

That's not entirely true because the bar isn't deterministic. For example, diverse candidates are given two attempts to pass a phone screen.

Many non "diverse" hires are also given two attempts.

Re: What is the engineering hiring bar?

#210

Post by fourmyle »

commandlinefan wrote: post #77
stuxnet79 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps there wasn't any actionable advice, but it's a sad indictment of the current state of tech hiring. Based on the article you can assume that Recursive Cactus is already in Big-Tech ("well known tech company") so "(a lot) higher pay" is a moot point and quite frankly it's unlikely that the daily tasks involved in the next job will bear a strong resemblance to the kind of synthetic tasks or problems you are aske…

> a sad indictment of the current state of tech hiring I've only ever worked as a programmer, so I'm genuinely curious - how does interviewing work for every other job that's out there?

Biggest difference is references actually matter.
Post reply on HN