"It's proven that there is a big correlation between performing good during an coding interview and performing good during your day-to-day job"*
*citation needed
*citation needed
If there would be an easier way then these companies would definitely use it. A candidate usually has 5-7 interviews (if he is not failing the phone screen), which is 5-7 engineers spending at least 1 hour for the interview + 1 hour for the feedback. I am having 2-5 interviews per week, which means I spend between 4 and 10 hours per week just on hiring. If we could reduce this number we would definitely do it, as it's costing a loooot of money.
To be fair: there is some innovation and traction in those areas, s.t. some candidate s do a coding project at home and then present their solution (to reduce the number of interviews).
My boss asked HR about this and they said if we want to ask coding questions we need to first give the coding interview and score the results - but not use that to decide to hire or not. Then after two years look at their performance and compare to how they did on the interview.
That's true, I recently had an interview and the interviewer was on the phone all the time totally uninterested, barring the first 5 minutes. How do you account for that?
Everybody knows (and as stated in the article) the system can be gamed (by memorizing Leetcode solutions) and I choose not to. If you don't believe me have a look here:
https://www.1point3acres.com/bbs/thread-191077-1-1.html (translate it to English)
(there are a ton of interview experiences and detailed questions and strategies on this site)
There are people who are freaking memorizing behavioral questions!! Surely, the FAANG companies are aware of this?
This what I see happening these days: 1. You have an interview candidate solving questions without memorization
2. You have an interview candidate solving questions with memorization
How are you distinguishing between the two and how do you prevent bias? Bias in all forms, not just the stereotype: white guy hiring another white guy.
The idea that Google has internal research indicating this wouldn't be surprising to me.
The problem with internal research on these matters is the nearly total lack of negative examples. Depending on the quality of the pre-on-site screening the quality of candidates at that point might be so high that random selection might be just as good.
I think the biggest issue with the current approach among faang interviews is that a lot of really good people get filtered out (false negative) - but faang get so many applications that they are ok with this.
Scare quotes used because knowing how to define success is an even more hairy question that we (industry, humans) dont have a good grasp on either. So any criteria you use might be wrong or a subset of the right (where "wrong" means you would change your conclusion if you saw the bigger picture, which none of us can.)
As a candidate I would give you 3 at most. But that would require me to be in the near vicinity.
5-7 interviews? That is more than many people need to form a marriage...
8-15 years ago fb/google had 20+ interviews - and reduced the number based on research that after 4 they can predict it really good.
They mention 4 in the article, but that actually means 4 on-site. Before that a candidate usually has to pass a simple recruiter phone screen and a simple coding phone screen.