The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

Their interview process does not test intelligence. It may require some intelligence to pass (meeting Gayle’s stupid criteria that “some people are not intelligent enough to pass”), but having a high IQ is not sufficient, nor necessary.

I’ve seen in your other comments that you’ve let them convince you that you are too stupid to hire you. You need to disabuse yourself of that notion because their interview process does not test intelligence, it’s just a heavy algorithms/ds process that allows thousands of mediocre engineers every year into Google’s payroll and rejects an order of magnitude more highly competent engineers that did not have the time and/or motivation to prep leetcode bullshit.

> lot of startups that forego the whiteboard problem with just a conversational interview or take home problem are putting significant less emphasis on raw intelligence.

sigh. I don’t really want to try to spell this out anymore, but a take-home assignment provides you significantly more material to examine someone’s intelligence. The reason Google doesn’t bother is because it takes more time to administer and poor saps are willing to throw themselves at the machine to see if they can slip through. If Google didn’t receive 100x the job applications they required, they would certainly fix their fucked process super quickly.

whoosh. Re-read what I said to understand how I didn’t compare anyone to Trump. You never ask someone who is responsible for creating a whole process/team/product for honestly critical info about it. Unless they are willfully malicious (which I doubt Gayle is), they are certainly convinced they’ve been doing the right thing (otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it).

> working outside of a google-like company is like dealing with people at a community college...

Sorry, but whoever you talked to took you for a ride. Most Google engineers are writing glue code and glorified ETL processes. I used to work there, I left because it got way to big an deteriorated quickly and now work at a startup with several employees I personally know took 50% pay cuts by turning town Google offers.

> The google interview process is absolutely stellar at creating teams of raw intellectual power

Not from what I saw from 2012 going forward. It was filled with mediocre devs that wrote lots of bad code, including ones that would slip in quadratic runtime behavior. The only thing Google had going for it is that early on it did attract some brilliant people that believed in the mission and created the stellar infrastructure supporting the masses today.

Nobody convinced me. There is a reality here I have to face and more importantly YOU have to face. A lot of people can pass that interview, I can't. The conclusion is unescapable. There are tons of engineers who HAVE practiced leetcode problems who Can't get in. The practice process is not a huge deal, three months of leetcode grind for half a million in TC is worth it, yet this isn't enough to pass for many, many people. No doubt there are tons of people like you who think they are good but can't pass so they blame the google interview process.

>Gayle Lackman is lying though.

Highly, highly unlikely. You have to look at the incentive to lie. For Gayle Lackman, to lie is acting against her incentives. She is no longer employed by FAANG but now promotes her website and book for cracking the interview.

If she says that there are engineers who can never get into google no matter how much they study then her book is useless to a lot of people. Why would she resort to a lie that will decrease sales of her book? She won't. She is not lying, she says something that may decrease sales of her book because she believes it's the truth. You may not agree with what she says but it is highly, highly unlikely that she is lying.

>sigh. I don’t really want to try to spell this out anymore, but a take-home assignment provides you significantly more material to examine someone’s intelligence.

A take home assignment is a highly inaccurate test if raw intelligence is the factor that needs to be measured. First off each interviewee will now have access to unlimited resources and almost an unlimited amount of time. The thing that can't be measured is what resource was used and how much time was used to complete the assignment? Some interviewees used no resources and less time and invented the solution out of thin air, others looked up a way to architect a solution and spent a huge amount of time getting it working. This variability cannot be measured and therefore is a bad measurement.

Even if knowledge and skill is the thing being tested for here, the take home test hides this. Someone may already have the knowledge required to do the take-home test others may not. If both people don't have the knowledge to pass the assignment than you are simply testing their internet search skills.

Do you have any reasonable way to convince me and everyone reading your responses that your opinions are more valid than other people who offer contrary opinions?

Why would someone take a 50% pay cut and turn down a google offer? There has to be a bigger reason than the one you mentioned.

>whoosh. Re-read what I said to understand how I didn’t compare anyone to Trump.

I assumed your analogy was used to state that people at google are incompetent and that those who are incompetent can't recognize their own incompetence. The later part may be true in the context of google but I disagreed with the former. Your reply indicates to me that you in fact don't think much of google engineers and that your comparison of incompetence is apt.

As far as I know Gayle didn't work to create the interview process, she was just part of the board and now she actively works to help people pass it. Saying that there exists many people who can't pass the google interview will harm sales of her book. I believe it is against her incentive to say it and that she only said it because she believe it's the truth. There is no active lying going on here.

I recently interviewed with a hot VC funded start-up, the interviewer was the most dry and passive aggressive person I have ever met, I decided about 5 minutes into the 'get to know you, tell me about your work history' section of the conversation that I would not like working for this person. I had never wanted to end an interview early before this experience. When they sent me a leetcode link (to a problem I had solved in preparation for a series of interviews I was doing) and asked me to solve the problem I just sat there wondering how long before they would ask me to leave if I typed nothing. About 5 minutes later they asked me to leave, and that was the first time during the entire interview that the interviewer cracked a smile. I think that company will fail.

Am I the a-hole for playing that sort of game?

Edit: I also interviewed with a medical startup during which the interviewer, while telling me it took me a while to get to the solution and critiquing my implementation, admitted (I think by mistake) that they had spent some time researching the solution prior to the interview. I asked them how long it took them to solve, he did not answer that question.