Comment by andrewla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewla | Hacker News Reader

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The technical interviewing scheme is not great, but I haven't seen another system that works.

> I cannot help but think that these big tech companies (FAANG, et. al) are missing out on diversifying and increasing their engineering expertise by passing over developers like you.

I think this is certainly true.

> I often think what would Google/Facebook would be like if they hired in some experienced engineers that may not be able to whiteboard a BFS tree or can tell you Djikstra's algorithm, but have proven business track records of getting projects done, on budget, and on time.

Well... how do we find these people? By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it? By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates?

Practically speaking, FAANG companies do hire such individuals, they just do it through acqui-hires. If a person works at a company that is good enough to be worth acquiring, then we have a good signal that they are effective employees even absent a direct evaluation of their technical abilities.

> Practically speaking, FAANG companies do hire such individuals, they just do it through acqui-hires.

there's a huge pool of employees that are in companies which aren't potential acquisition targets.

> Well... how do we find these people? By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it?

internal references? if you've got a couple of internal folks who are doing good work, and they all worked with and vouch for old bob, maybe that's better than anything you're going to find out from <8 hours of whiteboard scribblings?

> By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates?

even the faintest whiff of implication that FAANG interviews might not be subjective is hilarious.

I've had internal referrals at a few FAANG myself, I have one of the "unique" (no degree, some high school, ops/coding since 12 so about 15 years on/off) backgrounds and the people who referred me would be on the team that I'd be joining and all seemed incredibly excited to get me on board. I work on FOSS projects with them already.

At each place it was people from other teams completely unrelated to that team who interviewed (or would interview) me and eventually turned into a decision panel where everything about me would be considered by these people who really knew nothing of my character/skills aside from the resume and white boarding.

Between that and the amount of times I heard "Stanford" tossed around in a way that put down other schools (while not having a degree at all myself) I decided to give up on ever working at any of these places without being an acquihire. It just seems like a far fetched pipe-dream and I'd never check the required boxes that they expect for someone to sit in the same building with them. And honestly, none of that sat well with me.

It was an interesting time and I got to finally experience SV and realized it's likely not a place for someone like me.

One of my recent FAANG interviews was ENTIRELY whiteboarding. It kind of shocked me.

It's weird that it's that skill, and only that skill, that gets evaluated. I did another interview at a different one where there was at least a design interview (though I flubbed it and wound up being incoherent).

It really feels like they aren't even trying to evaluate anything other than whiteboard coding. Accepting that it's not a great signal and yet fully investing in it.

It's such a weird skill and it's so easy to perform badly; I'd be kind of shocked if the test/retest validity wasn't very low.

Also... I mentioned that working on teams with other women was important to me... but every technical onsite I've had has been given by a man. They've pitched teams led by women, and my HR/recruiting contacts have been nearly all women. But for the interview itself? All men.

Trust me, companies would love to have at least one woman on every interview slate, and not just for women candidates. The problem is that the ratio of women engineers at the FAANG companies is such that this would put an incredibly unfair burden on women engineers. They would have to spend all of their time interviewing, or at the very least a disproportionate amount of time.

>I'd be kind of shocked if the test/retest validity wasn't very low.

It's absolutely very low, and they're okay with that. One of the things recruiters at these companies will tell you if you get rejected is some variant of, "Don't worry, you can always try next year." These companies fully understand that they're rejecting good engineers. They don't care, because, historically, the number of engineers applying has been so high that they could reject 75% of the good engineers and still have enough to fill their headcount.

We'll see how that attitude towards interviewing changes when high Bay Area/Seattle housing prices make it more difficult for them to recruit.

I work for Google, opinions are my own.

First of all it sounds like your interview experience was unpleasant so if this was at Google I apologize.

Secondly, I can totally relate to feeling like I don't belong having also come from a nontraditional background (No college degree).

> At each place it was people from other teams completely unrelated to that team who interviewed (or would interview) me and eventually turned into a decision panel where everything about me would be considered by these people who really knew nothing of my character/skills aside from the resume and white boarding.

This sounds similar to what we do at Google; people who know you actually aren't allowed to interview you because they will be biased. We try to make the interview as objective as possible. Note that information from anyone who knows you or referred you will be shown to the hiring committee though so it's not as though that feedback is not used.

> Between that and the amount of times I heard "Stanford" tossed around in a way that put down other schools (while not having a degree at all myself) I decided to give up on ever working at any of these places without being an acquihire. It just seems like a far fetched pipe-dream and I'd never check the required boxes that they expect for someone to sit in the same building with them. And honestly, none of that sat well with me.

I understand why you feel this way but that's definitely not true! I don't think you necessarily should want to work in FAANG but I strongly think you should believe you are capable.

> internal references? if you've got a couple of internal folks who are doing good work, and they all worked with and vouch for old bob, maybe that's better than anything you're going to find out from <8 hours of whiteboard scribblings?

At big companies this is hard to scale because you have to protect against nepotism at the top layer. This forces policies protecting against the bad outcome.

At small companies this does happen.

Provided references are at the core the worst way to judge if someone can do the job and the laziest way. If you want to rely on references you have to get them yourself through background check or the risk of gamification is huge.

Get a sense of the projects they have worked on if those skills relate to the position. Make a decision based on that.

Random coding tests, whiteboarding, buzzword dropping are only helpful to a point.

Good points - provided references are shit, simply because they can be gamed. If you work for me and I dislike you but don't have the courage to pull out the fire hammer, I can give you a great reference. If I really like you because you're extremely good (and make me look good), I can give you a horrible reference and hold onto you.

However, OP was talking about internal references. This would be a situation where I work at Company A, but I know you and trust your work. Therefore, I refer you to Company A, big up you a little and suggest that they pursue hiring you.

The difference is that if you suck, it reflects poorly on me (and quite likely kills my dreams of upward mobility). Normal provides references don't have the same motive to be truthful!

What? Is this just conjecture? If you give a bad reference to an employee you are directly putting you and the company in harm's way in terms of litigation. Usually, you just don't give a reference other than confirming tenure existence and duration if you won't go into positive detail.

That's a textbook answer, but in actual practice, the probability of litigation is extremely low.

Many acqui hires get interviewed again. Most acqui hires are a business deal for the company's business.

This is correct.

Does any other company than Google interview acqui-hires?

I’ve never heard of any other company doing this, but I haven’t been looking especially carefully.

Every company I've worked for interviews acquihires.

From FAANG, to start ups, to established traditional engineering companies.

How is it an acquihire if the company is interviewing all the talent they acquired anyway?

Not all of it, but some of the force does to ensure that they meet the bar of the hiring company and also to get calibrated in the eng ladder.

- You are getting paid to interview

- If they decline, you usually get a very generous severence package

- While sometimes technical, there is usually significantly evidence of your abilities from the acquired company's records.

- In my experience it's usually a cultural test more than any other.

- Interviewing is part of the evaluation. If the hiring company thinks everyone is grossly incompetent they can reevaluate the acquisition or call it off entirely.

Which of the FAANG specifically have you experienced acquihire technical interviews at?

Just curious, because again, I’ve only ever heard this from friends that got bought by Google. I’m not saying others don’t, just haven’t heard of it from folks getting acquired at other places.

> Well... how do we find these people? By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it? By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates?

While not perfect I wonder if a person's projects are a good signal for this. There certainly are those who have developed a significant open source project but who get rejected by the FAANG companies, the author of Homebrew being a recent infamous example.

In Howell's own words from https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...:

> I wrote a simple package manager. Anyone could write one. And in fact mine is pretty bad. It doesn't do dependency management properly. It doesn’t handle edge case behavior well. It isn’t well tested.

From later in his same post...

But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.

> I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things

Having worked with people who are dicks but make really good things...I wouldn't want him on my team either. There are plenty of people who make really good things and aren't dicks.

Gotta agree. People sometimes underestimate the power of actually getting along with others!

One unfortunate side effect of being at a FAANG company is that most of your best work is probably proprietary and you will never have the chance to show it to anyone outside the company, nor will you have much free time for personal projects.

As an interviewer, I can definitely say that GitHub has become a bigger part of helping to evaluate people.

> As an interviewer, I can definitely say that GitHub has become a bigger part of helping to evaluate people.

Many people can’t work on open source, either due to a lack of time or corporate policy.

> There certainly are those who have developed a significant open source project but who get rejected by the FAANG companies, the author of Homebrew being a recent infamous example.

It’s always possible that Google felt he wasn’t what they needed. And keep in mind that Howell ended up being hired by Apple and working there for a while.

Every time the interview story of the guy behind Homebrew gets brought up, there’s the reminder that he interviewed for a software engineering position while he would’ve been better suited for a product manager position — he also mentions this as such.

The author of Homebrew was rejected for software engineering at Google, which was perfectly reasonable given what he has said about his own skills. He has demonstrated very good product management aptitude on the other hand; it would be far more concerning if he were rejected from a PM role.

> he has demonstrated very good product management aptitude on the other hand

Not to diminish his accomplishment... he could be a good candidate for PM but his tool is more of a dev-tool (so I suppose this is a niche-ish?)

>By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it? By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates?

I mean... Yes?

This system, backed by "trusted recommenders" is exactly what academia uses, and they seem perfectly capable of discovering Higgs Bosons and whatnot.

"intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates"

This is inherently biased and proven to be the worst way to hire people.

They physics communinity does not seem to have the issue of being able to judge merit from resumes. When you see a physics PhD with a list of academic references, chances are that the person knows what they are doing; with computer science it’s somehow likely that the person might not know their way around the command line or when using an array might be a bad idea…

Ironic example, as the guy who theorized the Higgs Boson originally doesn't think he'd be productive enough for today's environment. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...

>The technical interviewing scheme is not great, but I haven't seen another system that works.

I would argue that pair programming or take home projects do a far better job than the standard Whiteboard Algo interviews. In fact I don't think it's even close but SV engineers have been captured by this Whiteboard Interview Stockholm Syndrome/Hazing and continue to perpetuate the insane idea that there is no better way.

Many people on HN also complain about "I don't have time for pair programming, take home". They don't like interviews. People just expect to be paid top dollar on their word.

> People just expect to be paid top dollar on their word.

And their education, previous employment, etc.

No one makes a neuro-surgeon perform a surgery before hiring them.

> No one makes a neuro-surgeon perform a surgery before hiring them.

True, but I also know that a neurosurgeon graduated from an accredited school, did an internship at an accredited hospital, and then passed a standardized licensing exam.

If we had that for engineers we wouldn't need to test their skills either.

When I was doing hiring, I would see resumes of people with 10+ years of experience who couldn't write a simple loop in their favorite language. If you've been coding for 10 years, you should be able to write a simple loop. That's the problem we're solving for here.

> If we had that for engineers we wouldn't need to test their skills either.

I think we will, eventually. Other fields of engineering already do, of course. Software is new and not that many people have been killed by bad software (unlike bad buildings), but I think we'll get there.

> If you've been coding for 10 years, you should be able to write a simple loop. That's the problem we're solving for here.

That's the problem some interviews solve for. FAANG interviews take it to another level.

When everybody can solve a simple loop, a base bar, then the bar has to be raised.

The bar is being raised all the time as much as it is painful and hard for me to see/experience this :(.

> If we had that for engineers we wouldn't need to test their skills either.

We have that for "real" engineers. Doesn't stop many of them from being atrocious at their job. Doesn't stop doctors either, for that matter.

An engineer that did 4 years of college at an accredited engineering school isn't enough?

What you are asking for, is a surgeon to retake the boards every time they change hospitals. Or a licensed professional engineer to retake the PE exam everytime they change jobs.

The algorithms asked in interviews are rarely implemented in a job. All they prove is how much you studied and the author of the article proves that.

What our industry is missing, IMHO is required certification and training. Doctors and nurses have yearly training and related exams to keep their certification. That's why a hospital can hire staff based on a license...Not becsuse the items you mentioned. But our industry would never go that route, which is a longer rant.

Also if peope who can't write for loops are passing your phone screen... You might want to update your phone screen.

> Or a licensed professional engineer to retake the PE exam everytime they change jobs.

Yes, just as you retake your driving exams every five years, you should retake your engineering exams (unless you are an accredited engineering instructor, in which case the license becomes permanent) every ten years.

> just as you retake your driving exams every five years

Uhh... I haven't taken a driving test in 17 years (and two states ago, to boot).

> True, but I also know that a neurosurgeon graduated from an accredited school, did an internship at an accredited hospital, and then passed a standardized licensing exam.

...and meets ongoing continuing education requirements.

> If we had that for engineers we wouldn't need to test their skills either.

We do have that for professional engineers.

We don't have it for people working in software whose job titles have become (but largely weren't for similar roles a few decades ago) "engineer".

> ...and meets ongoing continuing education requirements.

Which are a joke. Attending conferences and weekend workshops take care of this.

> Which are a joke

Sure, professional licensing provides fairly weak guarantees, but it's more than exist in software, hence FizzBuzz.

> When I was doing hiring, I would see resumes of people with 10+ years of experience who couldn't write a simple loop in their favorite language. If you've been coding for 10 years, you should be able to write a simple loop. That's the problem we're solving for here.

While I agree with this, the FAANG interviews take it too far. Simple fizzbuzz is enough to weed out these completely incompetent engineers. If they pass that, accomplishments and experience are going to be a much better indicator of engineering ability imo.

> And their education, previous employment, etc.

Unfortunately, this seems to be poorly correlated with whether people can actually code.

Actually it seems like motor skills are a part of neuro-surgeon evaluation - https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i5976

There is also an experimental virtual surgery simulator for objective evaluation - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26153114

> Many people on HN also complain about "I don't have time for pair programming

How does one not have time for pair programming? It's the exact same time commitment, from both the interviewer and interviewee, as a whiteboarding session. It's just a different format for the interview.

This is probably the only part I'll give you as far as your comments on this thread, but even this is inane and you're projecting. First of all, the problems with take home tests are the time commitment, which I can understand with the caveat that you do a lengthy pair programming exercise in person. I haven't heard that many complaints about pair programming, but I'm sure I exist so I'll give you that.

I don't think it's the case that people don't like interviews. I think you're making a strawman. I'm not going to go and say that you're part of the cycle of SV engineer being hazed, reproducing it and exhibiting a sunken cost fallacy/bias towards the way you've done it, but it's possible. I don't think this is the ideal way to interview.

What's more, I've been seeing actual improvement on the state of the art in this area. Platforms like Karat et al (not sure if Karat is the best in this area but I did have a good experience with a company that used them and interviewed me well) are actually incentivized to minimize false positives and negatives rather than just one. You might be surprised at how much better a good technical interviewer can be than an average strong engineer.

Please provide a rebuttal on the comments individually if you care to disagree. This comment was just alluding that any technique is ever good enough for HN. People just want word of mouth and their resumes to be enough. That doesn't work when resumes lie.

> I would argue that pair programming

Google allows you to write code on a Chromebook instead of a whiteboard (don't know if it's for everyone or some people). Is that pair programming? Or do you mean actually working with your preferred IDE/text editor, terminal, browser to look stuff up?

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