The dystopian world of software engineering interviews | Hacker News Reader

The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

jarednelsen.dev

1,027 pointsasangha811 comments

When my classmates were preparing interview coding questions, I was working on a mini TCP implementation and a toy kernel.

AWS rejected me since I failed to write prefect code to traverse a tree in level order. Google did not even give me an interview since I told the campus recruiter I have not prepared for the coding questions.

Then I ended up with an internship at CoreOS and created etcd. I am glad that they did not hire me back then.

Today, I am sure I still cannot pass the coding interview at "Giant Search and Advertising Company", but they run a lot of my code in production :P.

Hah! Reminds me of https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768.

Cynical answer though — Google does not want people like you. They don't want to hire entrepreneurs or inventors. They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.

This is absolutely true. I work at Giant Search and Advertising Company, and joining was a huge mistake. I thought I would be working interesting technical problems with a high degree of autonomy — instead the work is extremely boring, and you get ahead by playing political games rather than by innovating. I’m one of the rare few here who managed to get through the interview without really preparing.

Before joining, I had endless enthusiasm for computer science and programming. Now I feel so unenthusiastic that I question my future in this industry.

I don’t think there’s any intention to it at all.

Unless one takes extraordinary steps to examine what brings truly brings value, most people interview for clones of themselves. Or worse: their idealized self-image.

Google started off with very mathy people, and highly competitive people, and interviewing this way has always worked for them, so why change?

Some people have done internal studies showing how wildly counterproductive their interview process is, and yet it does not change.

I suspect psychological factors are the main reason why this process persists.

> Cynical answer though

Honestly I don't think it's that cynical - it just makes sense. There are the people who can and will do that stuff - and do it happily - and they would presumably be the easiest to hire as junior devs. Google views it as a stepping stone towards their next product launch, and the programmers see it as a stepping stone to a more enjoyable job.

And then the inventors and entrepreneurs create their own projects, and typically both produce and earn more than they would've at the company.

It kind of works out in everyone's best interest (although I'm sure the Google hiring managers sometimes regret missing out on the guy who invented New Cool Thing, and the guy that invented New Cool Thing is probably still a bit miffed that he couldn't land or get through an interview for a job he/she was clearly qualified for).

> They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.

I think the reason is a bit different.

Google is a search engine. It's a company whose success was due to one (or several) but very good algorithm.

That explains everything: why they are so obsessed with algorithms, why they hire so much olympics winners, why they don't care about anything else.

Their code is pretty bad most of the time, they've took beautiful Webkit and turned it into Blink mess. They are all about algorithms, they don't care about code.

And that's a pity that people are copying Google's methodology without understanding why Google is doing so. If you are developing an OS, you'd be better copying Microsoft, which had much of a different approach, nearly without any algorithm questions.

>> They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.

Somehow I doubt that. Can anyone who actually works at google comment on what it's like? Do people come to you with specific requirement and expect you to crank out code like the interview problems?

I've never worked somewhere where the software folks were actually just coding machines.

Right. Coding tests are designed to find people who are happy in a job where their only responsibility is: "Here's your coding assignment. Go do it." Technology companies are overfull of engineers who want more responsibility than that. They don't need any more.

And it reminds me of this one too: https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383

Brian Acton, rejected by Facebook in 2009. Then in 2014 FB acquired his company for $19B...

Agree, they want smart workers (well you have to be smart at some degree to do software). And they don't care if they will miss some genius, they just let other companies help the selection process, and if you turn out to be gold, they will pay a big money to get you.

It is actually pretty well known that the second way into FAANGs is through acquisition.

You could have saved a lot of space just saying button pressers. This is most large companies and why I am burnt out on writing software professionally.

The reasoning for this is the commoditization of software hiring. The idea is to target the median of the bell curve, to lower risks and costs associated with hiring. This targets the greatest quantity of developers in a moment, but it also means the people who play it safe, follow popular trends, and don’t take any risks on product improvements.

To think about it another way the idea is to create mediocre software with mediocre developers because the software is thought to cost less than finding, hiring, and retaining top quality people.

Makes perfect sense. Thats when you know you need to short the stock in the LONG RUN. Because all they know is taking orders from someone and running it. This is the same with all companies. If Mark Zuckerberg steps down from Facebook, you can pretty much know, it's going to go down.

False; Google wants everyone like them to keep them away from the competition.

Edit: it's unfair to single Google out. It's unfortunately the correct game theory and impossible to regulate.

Reading posts like that make the process seem stupid, but it has utility for the interviewers. All of this silliness is creating an artificial talent shortage which drives up salaries at FANG companies.

It’s far from universal, but the incentives between managers, workers, and shareholders never really align that well.

Wow. I don't have as prolific a tale as that, but I'm in the looking stage right now and the idea of cramming for a test I haven't taken in 12 years annoys the hell out of me.

I've done some pretty interesting things in biotech in my career, things that required learning about motion control, digital imaging, signal processing, and biology... but if I want a job as a web dev I apparently need to memorize how to implement every sorting algorithm... on a whiteboard... in ten minutes. The fact that I know which to use when is irrelevant. Bleh.

This is part of the reason why I've only consulted into big companies, and only briefly. It's not just that I am not that sort of person, it's that I don't like being around that sort of person.

Software engineering is also another field where there's no effective upper limit on difficulty. In other words, no matter how good you are you (should) always feel that you're barely capable of understanding what you're supposed to be doing, let alone doing it.

That's right from "make a single static web page" to "submit binary fix to close-source compiler" or whatever the high end of your particular field is (Win a technical argument with the C++ standards committee? Shave 0.001% off the load time of the google homepage? Discover a new way to monetise users?).

Hi EpicEng,

just out of curiosity to learn more about your project: Where could I contact you?

Cheers!

Having worked at cutting edge biotech,startups and FAANG I wholeheartedly defend the interview process, and believe you would too if you ever switched over for a while

If learning is the naive approach to getting good grades then programming fun projects is the naive approach to passing technical interviews.

"If tests truly were tests of learning, things wouldn't be so bad. Getting good grades and learning would converge, just a little late. The problem is that nearly all tests given to students are terribly hackable. Most people who've gotten good grades know this, and know it so well they've ceased even to question it. You'll see when you realize how naive it sounds to act otherwise."

http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html

I love these anecdotes, thank you!

The greatest programmer I've had the privilege of working closely with could easily pass most technical screens, but he's an odd fellow, and I don't think could handle the stress and anxiety of these crazy interviews. Lots of diamonds in the rough out there, but I suppose large companies understand that and just consider it acceptable loss.

That's what every bitter HN comment on the topic forgets. If Larry Page could sit down and talk to each candidate, I'm sure he'd be able to properly assess these kinds of corner cases. The challenge isn't being able to do that at an individual level; it's being able to do it in a way that's somewhat consistent and scalable across tens of thousands of interviewers and millions of candidates. Any large system is going to have false positives and negatives, and hiring is broken to begin with at most companies (assessing whether someone will be a good employee for the next few years based on a few short meetings is really hard)

One thing to note about coding interviews, they're very simular to somone looking over your shoulder while you're working.

Nobody can perform well like that.. One great colleague who I wish I was in the interview for, simple started thinking out loud.

Everything he was thinking, he said out loud, and of course, the team loved it. Because thats all it's about.

If its not over a video chat/submission, comment your code your thoughts, remember, they want to know you chain of though, not your knowledge of a framework/algorithm (unless its very specific)

> Today, I am sure I still cannot pass the coding interview

If you know how to figure out the problem, forget the technical side and explain how you would go and figure it out.

Problem solve. Don't worry.

So I had an interview that was like that, but I wasn’t given enough information. I was asked to implement the “inverse square law in code” ... and I explained to the interviewer who was two years out of college (I looked up all of the interviewers on linkedin, so I had a good idea of their experience and areas of expertise) that my first step as someone who hadn’t been in an academic environment or exposed to this kind of requirement for over a decade would be to research the requirement and asked if I could consult a Wikipedia article. “No, you can’t consult outside sources.” “Ok, can you explain to me the inverse square law?” “No, you should know this.”

I didn’t know that. Also, I didn’t have enough information to ask good questions, because I was pretty sure that this was an incomplete specification and I needed to ask informed questions to reach a particular implementation.

As a result, the company’s evaluation was that I didn’t know how to code.

I did that for an interview for what is now my employer. It was via Skype with a shared code editor. The interviewer asked me to implement a data structure that I had not used (directly—I'm sure plenty of libraries I use utilize it) since college, and I said as much. I told him I was quickly looking it up on Wikipedia, skimmed the article (mumbling to myself, I'm sure), and then proceeded to implement it. My candor and ability to quickly synthesize information on the fly must have reflected well on me, because I ended up getting an offer.

This wasn't at a big name tech company, though. From the sounds of it, most of those places don't give interviewers nearly as much leeway as mine had.

Exactly ! See - https://leetcode.com/discuss/career/509258/Social-anxiety-in...

But the issue is that they're not just judging you by the approach, they are also judging you by your results.

Some people, especially those with social anxiety (not some fancy psychological term, just someone who feels uncomfortable when someone is watching over their shoulder), can only achieve results if they are not judged during the journey.

> AWS rejected me since I failed to write prefect code to traverse a tree in level order.

I hate to break it to you, but Amazon doesn't reject a candidate because he bombed his coding challenge. I know people who received a job offer from Amazon for a developer position although they somewhat bombed their hard skills component. If you were rejected after passing the coding challenge and phone screening interview then odds are you actually bombed their personality and/or soft skills aspect of their interview process.

[Thinking to themselves:] "Is this serf really the right kind of drone, the type who will fit neatly--much like an unthinking cog--into our organizational machinery?"

Maybe he accidentally let it slip that he thought the South should have won and Robert E. Lee had some good ideas.

I hope the message that people take away from this anecdote is that "even the best people don't always pass an interview at AWS first time". But if someone is interested in the benefits AWS has to offer, try again. I interviewed three times before getting hired there, and I am the happiest I have ever been. I work with great people, on high-stakes, challenging problems that match my strengths, and we work 40 hour weeks, including time for beer. I have enough time outside work to learn new things (this year some basic FPGA programming). And skiing is 90 minutes away.

You've got to admire this well lubricated machine, they are getting the milk and didn't have to pay for the cow.

They are happy. You are happy.

People are jumping higher and higher hoops with a smile.

Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Hopefully as a wiser person you have your contingency ready for when the machine come to collect its blood tribute.

Getting good signal-to-noise ratio from ANY interview, forget the big cos, is really difficult. I've seen great programmers passed over because they were _not_ given a chance to whiteboard and show their technical skill. At the end of the day, there is a bit of randomness to the process of sizing anyone up in an hour, and people will make bad calls.

That said, I'm skeptical about your particular story. As a process rule, AWS doesn't provide interview feedback, so I'm pretty sure you don't _actually_ know why you were rejected, you can only guess. Perhaps if you were rejected in phone screen(s) it can be obvious, but if you made it to an on-site, I can guarantee (based on experience being in the room during hiring decisions at AWS) that they don't almost someone because of one bad whiteboarding result; there are multiple people collecting and reporting on results and only one person, the bar raiser, has veto power, and I've never seen it used for something as banal as not writing perfect code.

I also don't know what happened in your interview, but consider it's also possible that you completely bombed it: failed to ask questions, failed to communicate properly, or made more mistakes than you even realize.

It's certainly great that you went on to do great things, but maybe at the time you interviewed you weren't yet doing those great things...

I'm sure that "Giant Search and Advertising Company" would never hire me. But they did buy patents with my name on them.

I spent my time learning instead of drilling too and don’t regret it. My bank balance does though :(

I want to work for myself however in the long run and I think the skills are more important for that

> but they run a lot of my code in production :P.

We run your code in production too! Thanks!

> Can you regurgitate the answer to this already solved problem?

No, but I can write a storage solution that works even when your dummy engineers are actively melting down servers.

Ah, the difference between "computer science" and "software engineering".

To quote Hamming: """In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it."""

It follows that regurgitating answers to already solved problems is good engineering :)

So everyone got what they wanted?

You did the project you wanted.

AWS and Google got the code they wanted.

Your friends for the jobs they wanted.

> AWS and Google got the code they wanted.

Depends, if he was still working in Big Tech Co, they could have potentially not open sourced it, they could have used his secret sauce to get better system performance compared to competitors.

Google does not want bright, creative people anymore. Google only wants drones now. It's a shift that coincided with its change from a technology company to an advertising company.

Google had the equivalent of etcd a long, long time ago.

True, but its a very technically sound product. Authoring it as an intern cannot be anything but a sign of prodigious skill.

As an amusing anecdote, I didn't drill for internship interviews either and I ended up at a successful startup by sheer luck. I did well there, but I never achieved the level of technical brilliance that OP did.

I feel like there were far more opportunities like this 8 years ago when I was doing that, though.

Was it general and polished enough to get traction though? What’s its name?

Two questions.

How long do you think it would’ve taken you to prepare and ace these kinds of coding interview questions? (I bet less than 100 hours.)

But I’m more interested in the following: what interview process do you think would have correctly (and reliably) evaluated someone with your profile?

A company that cannot come up with a better more interesting process isn’t somewhere I want to work.

How about making the questions broad enough for every candidate to have some input and evaluate them on what they choose to focus on? Something like, “How would you design an ATM?”

There should never be a right answer to an interview question, just a candidate that solves problems in a way that fills a gap in your company.

Personally I appreciate the questions that are

1) open ended design questions 2) here's some broken code, fix everything 3) probe depth of understanding of tools/language

I always feel the Algo whiteboard questions feel like a "did you take the same DS class I did" round.

Also after the Redhat and then IBM acquisition I wonder if you came out in a better position in the end anyway.

> When my classmates preparing interview coding questions, I was working on a mini TCP implementation and a toy kernel.

There are plenty of people who do both. They work on their projects, and when needed, they prepare for coding interviews.

Two things.

The google interview process was not made to filter you out. It was made to guarantee that they will not make a mistake on hiring you. People with the capability to do those interview problems have a high chance of being good programmers. There are many people like you who can't do those problems but are still very good programmers. Google doesn't need to hire you, the whole interview process is optimized for preventing a bad hire rather than finding people like you who are good hires but can't interview.

Second, traversing a tree in level order is a trivial problem from the interview question perspective. It is more than likely that this question will NOT be given by the interviewer because it is too easy. The interview questions FAANG tends to give are a bit more novel. In fact the method in which you use to solve this problem and the problem itself is often just taught directly in school depending on the class you're in, meaning you don't need to practice interview questions to solve it because it's a basic topic.

The solution is called tree traversal using BFS. If you didn't know this, despite working on and creating things like etcd you will appear stupid because the question is just too basic. When I interview I am 100% expecting questions way harder than this... even on phone interviews. Additionally when I'm the interviewer this type of question is the lowest bar, I will fail someone who can't answer this question.

This is not to comment on your abilities. Rather it is to give you a dose of truth. I truly believe that there are many people like you who can program an entire kernel but can't even solve fibonacci recursively on a white board. Despite this I can't stop judging you based off of the white board question nor do I know how to confirm that you can write a kernel despite lack of ability to solve very very basic programming questions.

Thanks for educating me about BFS.

I am major in computer science, and published paper in top conference. Tree traversal is trivial for me. So I guess I have decent CS background and knowledge?

Writing bug free and perfect code is not equal to simply solve the problem. If you have prepared coding interviews (especially for new grad and internship), you should understand it is less about knowledge but more about practicing and memorization for that specific purpose. The time spent on it is almost a waste in the future.

If the interview is knowledge based or problem solving oriented, I am all for it. Sadly, it is not today in many places. And that is exactly why website like Leetcode exists.

> 'I can't stop judging you based off of the white board question nor do I know how to confirm that you can write a kernel despite lack of ability to solve very very basic programming questions.'

You phrased this as two parts, but in reality these two things are intricately linked. It's because you don't know how to judge person on their true ability--i.e. that you lack this skill--that you resort to useless trivialities like this whiteboard bullshit.

Combine survivorship bias (you were subjected to it and made it, so that validates the process) with heavy hive mind group think (We're All Real Smart People, Much Smarter Than Them Masses(TM))--both of which are always in abundance in intelligence-owned front 'companies' like Google, and of course you end up in your present mindset: arrogantly and naively selecting for people exactly like yourself; people who think just enough into things to think you possess a clue, while in reality, being totally oblivious to larger thoughts and concepts.

There are many in this world who just can't stop judging you based on your shortcomings and limitations. For example: your owners.

Lol that’s amazing, you should write an article on this

A few months ago I interviewed with Major CDN Company for a front-end dev position. They sent me a take-home React/NextJS project stub with dependencies and such already defined, and instructions to finish building out the full app. "Perfect!", I thought. No stage pressure, plenty of opportunities for going an extra mile. They encouraged me to get creative and I did; it met all the requirements and then some. I proudly submitted it.

A few days later I got an email saying, "Sorry, we're going to pass. The feedback from the person who reviewed it said that, 'It crashed with res.flat() is not defined when we tried to run it'".

"That's weird", I thought. I assumed they were running it in a different browser that lacked Array.flat(). Annoying, but maybe browser compatibility was part of the test (it hadn't been stated as such). So I did some digging just to be sure; I asked what version of NodeJS they were using. Version 10. Turns out that version of Node is somewhat old and doesn't have flat(). Huh. Dug some more.

.flat() wasn't even called in my code.

The stack trace went down into NextJS itself. They had given me a project with a particular dependency declared and then run it in an environment which was incompatible with that dependency, and then immediately punted it without any further debugging. I tried to engage my contact via email, presenting the proof that it wasn't my fault. I got an icy "Thanks for your feedback, we'll forward it to our hiring team", followed by silence.

It's hilarious, but I think you dodged a bullet. Imagine for a minute actually working there.

I remember once interviewing for a startup my friend was working at because I wanted to work with said friend. It was mainly a PHP/Laravel job, but I didn't care. I had a high opinion of said friend and stacks are just tools to me -- you can do good work in just about anything.

Go in for the in-person interview which goes extremely well, but talking to their two most senior engineers it seemed like they had just recently learned what OOP is and "drunk the Kool Aid". I found this extremely odd given that this was well into the 2010s already.

They gave me a take-home exercise which was basically to implement some feature with Laravel using established best practices. I turn in something that's clean, documented, with tests, using the documented best practices (like literally from the Laravel docs), and extremely performant (would scale to a high volume of requests). Functional style though, broken out into 1-3 line functions that only do one thing -- similar to what you'd expect from a Rubyist.

Rejected and they told my friend that I don't know how to code. My friend knew better and got a new job himself a month later and I went on to much better things.

Haha, this mirrors my experience - once I was asked to write some embedded hardware driver, which required to run it under the RTOS in emulator, which they failed to run. They failed to run a simple qemu! I even provided them a shellscript to copy and run the required stuff. Surprisingly, I was hired nevertheless, because code "made sense", but still. I can imagine it's ubiquitous nowadays. Too many incompetent people decide on how to choose among competent people.

My company does a takehome project, but are completely understanding if dependencies don't work on different systems.

Basically, if the code looks right and you can show it working on your system, we're pretty understanding. The goal of a takehome isn't perfection - it's to demonstrate underlying abilities.

I failed a hiring code assignment because I didn’t provide a unit test. They didn’t ask for unit tests. I did provide various data samples to provide various end-to-end tests with documentation.

Now I abandon any interview that requires a code assignment. I have better things to do than mind reading or dicking around with subjective code style nonsense. If they are taking this seriously they will provide their grading criteria along with the assignment text.

unlucky! The buddha said we are promised two certain things in life: suffering and death. Everything else is a bonus.

They definitely did you a favor.

You have demonstrated solid debugging skills and stated your case. That's usually harder to find than someone who can churn out code based on simple and well-defined specs. Because that's the easy part.

I think the situation was unwinnable. You've exposed their incompetence. Rightly or wrongly, most people can't stand being criticized. If there's a solution to that one it's a diplomatic one, not a technical one.

Be similarly wary to point out bugs in code reviewer's code. Unless you have a healthy professional atmosphere and multiple reviewers, your best course is to manipulate the reviewer into "coming up" with the idea for the bugfix from your ticket.

Grr! That's how you should be interviewed, but then they fscked it up at the end. How frustrating.

That's hilarious

Are you still looking for a FE role in the CDN industry?

Nice work, I learned just from your post.

In my personal experience, having interviewed dozens of candidates (data science), I believe that asking "easy" and "simple" questions is the most effective way to probe the problem-solving skills of a candidate. Fun and interesting solutions to easy questions are hallmarks of great individuals.

The question would go like this:

Suppose I have a column-oriented file and I want to print out a column in a reverse-sorted order. How could I go about it?

This question is among the most effective ever. First it filters out the FizzBuzz failures right away, let's you see immediately how people think (does the candidate want to code it up or understands that they could do: cut | sort| head)? It lets you explore the various aspects of sorting numerical, alphabetical, different locales, in numerical you can have generic numerical sort etc. Then what if the file is really large, now a much better approach could be to split sort then merge sort back into one file.

everyone with real work experience has a story about sorting.

but then you can move on, let's do it in your favorite programming language, then explore of what if the data is "infinite" long, a stream ... and so on

it is a topic that can produce very interesting solutions, nobody is stressed out, and people that "fail" do understand why.

Edit: I will also say I feel that I can learn more about a person based on how they respond to easy questions. Are they cocky, are they showing off, are they rattled etc.

I feel the need to nitpick your example.

> does the candidate want to code it up or understands that they could do: cut | sort| head

Piping together commands is undoubtedly programming, just in ancient shell script. So in a sense you're really testing for bash expertise. Which is maybe really relevant to you but I wouldn't say you're really "avoiding" coding by knowing to use those commands together, you just decided to code it with obscure shell commands. I might fail your test by choosing to write that sort of thing in python, because I could write it much more reliably in 10 minutes than deal with all the incredibly weird things that can happen in bash. I mean the final product in bash might be slightly more elegant, but your terminal history is probably littered with "man cut" and various attempts at it.

But for your example, my answer might be: if you're querying this file once, you may be querying it again, it's probably just way simpler to load the thing into sqlite instead of trying to imitate sql with some janky unix commands.

> everyone with real work experience has a story about sorting.

I am 34 and an experienced coder and I literally have no stories about sorting, and I've never once wanted to sort a CSV file on the terminal.

A column orientated file? What format? Excel? CSV? What is cut, sort or head? Are you only accepting Linux candidates then, a tiny percentage of users?

This sort of utter nonsense question, heavily loaded to your "standard" experience, which is anything but, is even worse than the questions cited in the article.

All you're doing is filtering for people who are in your tribe, who followed the same path as you and think like you, use the same tools as you and the same OS as you.

Pretend all you want, but you're filtering not by "experience" but by trying to find people in your tribe, which is naturally heavily weighted.

Around 1990 I had to do some interviewing and I used this kind of intentionally underspecified simple problem to weed people out. (It seemed radical at the time.) Did they realize the problem was underspecified? Did they try to elicit the underlying “why”? Did they collaborate with me to complete the spec? Were they able to restate the spec coherently? Could they articulate a workable implementation in some technology domain? Basic stuff. Interesting thing is that there were people who really didn't do very well, who we hired anyway, who went on to be reasonably productive and reliable developers. In retrospect I concluded the cognitive and social basis of their ability was incomprehensibly different from mine. But I'd still do those questions today.

As someone who has had bad data science interviews before getting my current data science job, the process is highly variable. I've had interviews where the interviewer is looking for a specific right answer, with the answer being a binary you-know-it-or-you-don't thing that can't be talked through or worked out in a dialogue with the interviewer.

An example was a whiteboard problem requiring the BETWEEN syntax for SQL window functions, which is very uncommon. After I asked for a hint, the interviewer replied "You don't know the BETWEEN syntax for window functions? Everyone knows that."

Why would you do cut|sort|head? You should instead just ask the k-sorted merge question about external sorting.

As a FAANG data scientist, I've never once wanted to use cut|sort|head nor have I wanted to work with CSV's. Everything is already sharded and encoded as a schema-enforced binary encoding like protobuf or thrift. The file is so large its better to favor Apache Beam or equivalent to parallelize the aggregations of particular fields over very large amounts of data. But, hopefully you just use some SQL-like interface such as BigQuery that when pointed to sharded files, can easily do aggregations for you with SQL-like language (which, kicks of distributed computing jobs under the hood and is not truly relational). Unless you're streaming data, then that's another question.

Testing unix commands is narrow minded IMO. If you want to test divide and conquer plus streaming, then just ask a flavor of that Leetcode question.

the responses to this are breathtaking. I think I would decline to hire the majority of HN users because of their arrogance.

My partner is learning about data science now so I asked them if I could try this question on them in the context of a data science interview, first thing in the morning and without coffe. They looked at me and said "being asked data science interview questions by your spouse right after waking up is the worst thing in the world but I dunno I would load it into pandas and put it in a data frame". And like honestly that's not how I would do it (I would do awk | sort | head because I always forget the cut column options) but the whole point is that the answer prompts further discussion. Now I know to ask about python and pandas (the thing the candidate uses and knows), and not, I dunno, scala and cascading/scalding or whatever (the thing that I know or use). Good questions investigate what the candidate knows. Bad questions investigate whether or not the candidate knows the things you already know.

People on this site are way too concerned with "being correct".

How do you sort an infinite stream?

lol but this is literally a leetcode style problem so what's your point?

https://leetcode.com/problems/merge-k-sorted-lists/

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/external-sorting/

and it's literally called "merge sorted files" (page 175 of elements of programming interviews).

In addition to all of the very dystopian examples given in this post, there are other non-technical, super-dystopian things that have been popping up as "trends" in the tech industry.

Ever heard of top-grading? It's the most oppressive interview technique of all time. A series of grueling multi-person interviews. A retrospective of all work experiences since high school. You also have to get multiple prior employers as references. Apparently top-grading is used to weed out "liars". Imagine what kind of place optimizes to find liars; maybe one with a problem with a lot lying? I've heard Twitter uses this technique (or did last year when my friend interviewed with them).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topgrading

My experience as both a 50+ hiring manager and as a candidate tells me that we are collectively living in an illusion of whacked up expectations.

Yes, it's super hard to hire good people, but most of the time it's because "good enough" isn't good enough anymore, and while we may think our company is a 9 and we deserve 9s, we are probably more of a 4 based on what people are actually working on.

Yes, interviews suck, but that's because we all want to get paid the big bucks so we can afford the prohibitively expensive COL and actually do better economically than our middle-class parents. My background and resume legitimately qualifies me as a 9 on the high end, but really I'm probably just a 4.

Cascading causal relationships thus expand both upwards into the capital markets and downwards into your grocery stores.

If we can all take a chill pill employers+employees and stop 49er'ing around so hard, then I think most everyone can be happily employed.

I don't see us getting there on our own though, since that next door neighbor ain't gonna stop and I'm sure as hell not getting left behind /s.

I hope we can find a bit more maturity in our industry, but I'm not holding my breath.

Yet, the people who pass the grueling gauntlet will still be dumped on a fringe feature team with a first- or second-time engineering manager within 2 years of your age, and a PM that's fresh out of college (or worse, just finished MBA) who is spending 100% of their time learning how to use Jira instead of how to build product.

Not sure if they were using this exact method, but I did interview at a place that had a long, grueling process (series of interviews, coding challenge, etc). They also asked for every employer back to high school, as well as contact info for supervisor for all of those jobs, which of course was ridiculous. I did enjoy seeing them taken aback when I provided that information and, despite being in my early 30s, having 20+ jobs listed that included things like "fruit picker," "janitor" and "waiter at gay bar". I blew away the algorithmic coding challenge, mostly because it was a take-home test (I have flubbed some white-boarding ones pretty badly).

The company was almost entirely men, many with quite obvious and malignant ego issues. Their method for making technical decisions was to get all ~20 of them into a conference room and argue about how things should be done, with the loudest, most forceful arguments tending to win. The entire time I worked there, the socially dominant clique was primarily concerned with moving their stack into Kubernetes, despite having almost no traffic that I could discern. I wouldn't say I was impressed overall, people who didn't fit the mold had little chance of making career progress, and I personally felt I had more experience and could code circles around the majority of them.

Also other trends that, thankfully in my experience, have not yet made their way to tech. I suspect it is only a matter of time, though...

A lot of non-technical positions I have seen and heard about (including non entry-level positions) require a video of the candidate to describe themselves and why they would be a good fit for the position. That just sounds awful to me.

Great way to weed out older developers, since there's a good chance that some of the companies they've worked for have gone out of business or been acquired, and some of their references have died.

A few words on top grading. We are use a top grading like process, and are pretty flexible on the references part of it. It is just a long conversation. I think it is a structured and simple way to talk about a person and where they have been. Yes, it is comprehensive, but it works well. We hire almost all candidates that have made it to the top grading stage of our hiring process. We don’t use it to find liars and don’t think of it like that. What it really is good at is finding patterns of behavior in someone’s life and work history. It’s not full of campy dumb mental problem questions. You just talk about yourself and your work history and how you relate to previous colleagues and managers. And it’s done consistently to make it a little more comparable from one person to the next. The reference checks are one of the most useful and valuable parts of the whole process (we are flexible here, we are a small company). I can see how this process could get morphed into something less friendly, but at the end of the day it’s a huge time investment for us and the candidate so we don’t embark upon it lightly. I haven’t found a better interviewing technique that takes the pain out of it for the employee and the employer. Our team all appreciated the process and we take their feedback seriously. We don’t follow all of the steps in top grading religiously, but the interviewing process is really good. We also read a lot of other books on building a hiring process and settled on top grading as the most consistent and logical. The few people we didn’t hire threw up major red flags in their interview process in terms of how they would fit in at the company and the work we do. How else should a company hire people? For a small business we try to de-risk the hiring process as much as possible because mishiring is /extremely/ painful. We have grown from 3-20 people organically. Each hire we made was and is very important to our growth and stability.

Edit: just wanted to say I am a partner/founder at my company and we deeply give a shit about what we do and who we work with. Our turnover across 7 years is very, very low. We strive for a good work life harmony with everyone that works with us. You have to have some process to fit people into a company and that means you gotta talk to people and get to know them. The goal is to eliminate interviewer bias as much as humanly possible after the technical screening. So it goes. Not everyone can be pleased and I would defend our hiring practices as very reasonable and humanistic in an otherwise crazy tech interviewing system at the FAANGs of the world.

Personally I'd call off the interview and let them know they need to rethink their hiring practices. If that's how they interview the company probably is horrible to work for anyways.

So many people suggest me to lie. So many do. When you don't (anxious, imposter, doubtful or else), recruiter hasn't shiny eyes so you fail.

It's a recipee for fake.

Twitter uses what they call top grading, but really isn't, it's just a 1 hour reverse chronological set of questions through the most relevant/recent of your work history, asking the same set of defined questions for each role you had. Really just a structured way to understand your history in a consistent way. It basically the same as asking someone about their work history, but in a structured way.

  It is absolutely definitely not the actual top grading of multi hours of interviews , phoning references etc.

Comedian Daniel Tosh had a bit about people that claimed to be smart, it's just that they were just bad at taking tests. He said, "oh, so you struggle with the part where we find out what you actually know?"

I hear a lot of complaints about the "typical" software engineering hiring process, and it usually comes from the people that don't do well within the current system. Could the process be improved? Almost certainly, I don't think that anyone thinks that this is an absolutely perfect way to hire people. But it is an undeniable fact that some people pass this interview process; software companies do fill positions with this process.

So that kind of makes me think that many of the complaints are from people that wouldn't cut it at a high-pressure tech company and would be better off coding internal software for a non-tech corporation. I'm sure that the hiring process at Kroger (the grocery store) is much lower pressure than Google's. Google might not need you to code some efficient algorithm to search a b-tree every day, but they pay top dollar and can rightly expect that their software engineers can come up with efficient and creative solutions to hard problems without dragging the rest of their team down.

People are completing 500+ problems on leetcode before heading into interviews at google. Don't believe me? Go read the teamblind forums. People might spend six months studying, after which they pass a bunch of interviews and get good comp. Getting just one offer from a FAANG company often doesnt pay well enough, you need multiple competing ones.

If you think this has anything to do with incompetent people complaining, then you arent reading into the situation.

I will add that one can pass these interviews without extensive preparation, but it makes it alot harder when those around you are willing to spend ridiculous amounts of time studying.

Tosh's joke ignores that people can struggle with recall and on-the-spot test taking stress, while performing quite well at whatever the test is assessing. When studies have been done on interviewing, nothing has shown that inducing stress is ever helpful, unless the interview is for a job that requires on-the-spot stress, such as interviewing to become a police officer.

To me, here is the actual problem that I see cropping up. FAANG companies have enough volume of applications per position that they can afford to have a system that will strongly prefer false negatives over false positives, so they are willing to err on the side of, "We'll just hire people who can pass our realtime CS-grad battery and sadly say goodbye to equally good candidates who cannot." Ok, FAANG companies can do that as long as they are eyes-open about the situation. Where things screw up is that companies that are not FAANG companies do not understand that, and end up aping the FAANG interview techniques when they do not have the same applicant volume. This starves them of talent, and also leads to good applicants getting rejected by non-FAANG companies.

The ability to acquire and apply technical knowledge, and ability to demonstrate random technical knowledge under time pressure, in a foreign environment, while other people are watching and judging you, are orthogonal skills and many engineers are great at the former and terrible at the latter.

There's also a ton of opinion and taste involved in software engineering, which can bias the interviewer's view of someone's technical ability. Not to mention all the unconscious biases against people who don't "fit the description" of a typical software engineer demographically.

The Googles of the world limit their own potential by rejecting many talented people who couldn't make it through their hiring filter for reasons that have nothing to do with their actual ability to build software. Then they express angst over how difficult it is to fill positions. It's a self-inflicted problem, and a hard one to solve. It's probably impossible to design a theoretically perfectly fair hiring process without also solving all causes of inequality in society generally. But it can be made better and more fair than it is, and many companies and applicants aren't satisfied with the existing hiring processes, so they are making efforts to change the situation, as they should.

> Google might not need you to code some efficient algorithm to search a b-tree every day, but they pay top dollar and can rightly expect that their software engineers can come up with efficient and creative solutions to hard problems without dragging the rest of their team down.

This is a non-sequitur. Being able to write good software has nothing to do with reading cracking the coding interview and practicing leetcode for an interview in an environment that bears no resemblance to how work is actually done.

But hey, that's fine—they just leave good talent for others to hire.

> But it is an undeniable fact that some people pass this interview process; software companies do fill positions with this process.

This argument is devoid of logic.

We could have an interview process where everyone runs a 100 meter dash and the fastest get hired. Some people would pass this interview process and get hired.

It's obvious that running fast is not a great predictor of success at software development. It's not obvious that passing l33tcode interview questions is a bad predictor of success; but it's not obvious that it's a good one, either.

You haven't made an argument for either case, here. Personally, I don't think it tests for much that Raven's Progressive Matrices wouldn't cover; but that's illegal, because it's too obvious.

I'm bad at taking tests. I'm also bad at playing guitar when someone is looking or even when recording myself (and pretty good when playing without anyone looking). I get anxious and self-conscious and that gets in the way of good public performance. This does not translate to public speaking - I'm pretty good at that, and I'm not afraid of audiences of just about any size - my largest so far was ~1K people.

I somehow managed to get a masters degree from the top engineering school in my country (with honors), and get hired at MS and Google, and a handful of other places, but that was in spite of my interview performance, not because of it. I've also failed a lot of interviews. I literally look and sound like an idiot when adrenalin kicks in, which for me it does at the most inopportune moments.

I very strongly suspect that there are _a lot_ of people who suffer from this. You can recognize them when they on the one hand have an illustrious resume and on the other suck pretty bad on simple coding problems. Those things are supposed to be mutually exclusive, and they usually are, except when the person's blood is full of adrenalin and they end up on the wrong end of fight-or-flight response.

If I spent 7 years as a SWE on high profile teams at Google it's pretty clear I know how to code, even if my interview performance on your Leetcode problem is not excellent. My C++ and systems design will likely be way better than all of your existing engineers, in a non-interview context, just because I've done a ton of both in an environment which expects excellence in both, and won't let you commit code if it sucks. 5 years after leaving I have not worked anywhere where this wasn't the case.

This is not the same, BTW, as "high pressure" usually encountered in the work environment. I can deal with that just fine. And I can code whatever algorithm you like in that environment, no problem. So I doubt a high pressure interview is terribly predictive of performance under "normal" levels of stress, too.

Unless your job is coding novel algorithm implementations under strict deadlines without a computer, how does answering this question in a job interview prove or disprove your efficacy in the actual position? It only proves you're good at interviewing, which, if you think about it, is not a desirable skill in your new hire 6-12 months down the road.

Just remember that Herbert Hoover was a terrible test taker. His colleagues vouched for his brilliance because they read his previous work and thought he was a genius. It turned out he was the type to spend a lot of time revising his answers until they were perfect, so under any sort of timed test he would fail, including his entrance exam into Stanford.

I'm only sharing that factoid because I find it interesting. Maybe Herbert was a terrible engineer by today's standards. He almost certainly wouldn't be president today for completely different reasons, but would he be have been accepted into Stanford? Would he even make it as an engineer? I don't know--certainly not if we put as much weight as we do on tests.

I’m a senior engineer with 20 years experience, I just delivered kubernetes into production at a Fortune 500 company. We wrote our own provisioner in go and our own controllers and built a system to manage add-ons. I know pretty much everything about running a cluster and have knowledge of most of the popular tools you’d install on a cluster.

I applied for a job at a Silicon Valley company to work on their kubernetes team. They talked to me for five minutes about anything related to my current job and spent 2 hours asking me to solve algo questions from cracking the coding interview. The experience was so bad that I basically am refusing to do any more interviews that require coding.

The hiring process at Google has a different function at a start up. Google needs to weed out hundreds, thousands of applicants and the good jobs people tend to want to stay in. Google needs to filter more than it needs to hire. I don't know why people see being rejected for a job at Google as a testament to their worth as a programmer.

People who see their worth as a programmer in creating good valuable software and are willing to sacrifice a lot for it tend to make startups. People who want to mark their skills as a programmer in receiving a large number of skills and working their way up to the top of the tree tend to join a large corp.

I don't get this comparative, 'my job is tougher' mindset. Resting your families' livelihood on the back of your startup programming skills is as pressure filled as being the backbone of a highly strung project in the heights of a large corp.

When the startup wins, the large corp licenses it. When the large corp wins, it opens an API to the smaller devs. Too much sour grapes around lately.

High pressure coding is a completely different skill that most engineers aren’t going for.

Unless you’re hiring for a detective that has to write code to stop crimes in progress why are companies so focused on testing coding under pressure.

In regards to the Tosh quote, how many people at FAANG companies are using most of these tested skills in their day-to-day jobs, ever? This isn't about testing useful domain knowledge (except for the handful of people working on core algorithmic problems).

To a point these questions are an intelligence test but I see them mostly as a form of gatekeeping, seeing how many hoops people will jump through to land a job there. Most decent coders COULD pick up the knowledge to pass but not all of them want to, need to or are willing to grind through the test prep stuff just for the chance. And filtering for THAT has value because people won't grind through the process are less likely to hack it being smaller cogs in these behomoths.

I think the biggest value of the leetcode process is to rub off competent programmers who need to feel like their code is meaningful. Obviously many people produce meaningful code at FAANG corps, but working at a huge company means your code has a decent chance of never see the light of day or get chopped after 2 years, or be thrown out in some new broad initiative...

It is an effective filter for finding people who don't need external motivation to keep plugging on ahead. It is an important distinction because those types will likely flame out or start to wilt after a few projects of coding into the void.

It's worse than that, those "algorithmic" interviews are testing IQ, more-so than knowledge. The hard knowledge that is tested is pretty much only the syntax of the programming language candidate decides to solve the interview question with.

I put "algorithmic" in question marks, because those aren't even that hard as problems in programming contests or questions from uni comp sci coursework. For a phone screen with an online doc, it can be even something concrete, maybe implement a simple feature of a text editor (does not have to be as complex as the online doc the interview is in - it's important that the subject matter is easy to understand).

For an onsite interview, it would be something not likely to have been practiced in advance (questions leaked to websites get banned). Still, it would be something that reasonably fits in RAM, so there's no need to use a database or any networking technology (we can discuss those, too, just not necessarily request to use it in code - similarly, it may be taken for granted that the input data will be valid and there's no need to code defensively, the interview duration time is kinda fixed).

But as a policy we don't tell the candidates what their mistakes were, so those who failed may never know what they were up to. Goes without saying, we get to interview software engineers from different backgrounds - physics PhD s, or high-school IMO medalists, too.

I think there's truth to what you're saying, but I also think it screens out a lot of false negatives (which is kind of its intent since they'd rather that than false positives).

For me personally the process gives me a lot of anxiety/fear to the point where I won't do them even when I know I want to. I suspect a lot of the negative sentiment around interviews or talk about their 'ineffectiveness' is just this fear being poorly interpreted.

I think the technical interview process is also just a separate skill to master that has some overlap with programming, but is mostly getting good at leetcode style problems. It reminds me of things like the SAT for college.

There's a lot of failure necessary most of the time to succeed that I think scares people away because they do one and fail and then think they're not good or smart enough. I think I did ten different phone screens and three or four on sites before getting hired by a famous company. Some of those I totally bombed and others went really well - there's a randomness to it depending on the question you get and the specific interviewer.

I wish this wasn't the case and things were better because it'd be really fun to work on interesting projects with different people at different companies, but the barrier to changing is so tedious it's often better to stay put at a local maximum.

I suck at those interviews but here's a few real life job situations I've been in:

- sitting at my desk with the board of directors on speakerphone. They asked questions, I wrote SQL to find answers, while they tried to come up with a way to stop the company going bankrupt. Small company, I was basically the one guy who knew how the database linked together.

- sitting across the hall from a room full of support people while they went completely insane trying to answer the phones, and I tried to stay cool and calm while peer-coding with two others trying to get the system back up and running.

- having literal truckloads of garbage sitting in a queue while I debugged software that linked number plate recognition systems to a weighbridge and boom gate.

- being "that guy" who kept pushing for an early performance test. Eventually we did one. It went spectacularly badly. Some people wanted to blame me, because I was the one responsible (for the test).

In other words, being able to cope with "completely unexpected interview questions" and being able to cope with "code I wrote has gone wrong" are different skills.

This assumes "the part where we find out what you actually know" is actually fit for purpose.

> There is a cottage industry springing up around passing interviews

This, a million times.

I was told to practice solving dynamic programming problems to prepare for the interview[1]. Looking around the web I found out that people spending months solving thousands of dynamic programming problems, just for getting a job. This strongly reminds me of the rote learning I had to do in order to get into university, which includes thousands and thousands of integration, derivatives, series, lense placements etc... A nightmare I thought that ended decades ago.[2]

Now dp is all nice and cool, but I think most jobs don't involve solving dp problems on a daily basis. Just like most mechanics don't need to solve Lagrangian mechanics problems or civil engineer with continuous girder (the interview for those those two don't have those either)[3].

There must be a better way to measure problem solving ability of a candidate, isn't there? Something thay requires more dedication from the company instead of blindly followingbthe practices of Google.

[1] The position is EM at a offshore branch of a medium sized non IT company, way below the likes of Google.

[2] Typical Asian problem.

[3] I started as a mechanics, and then doing some civil engineering job, building bridge and such.

I mean, there has been a not-so-cottage industry around getting into college for decades now.

I suppose we could agree that college admissions are as broken as tech interviewing though...

Just speculation but I think a big part of this is that it is often quite difficult to lay off staff.

The issue isn't that you assess employees poorly...it is very hard to be right based on knowing someone for a couple of hours...but that it is so hard to get rid of someone if you are wrong. Would you marry someone after meeting for as long as the interview? That is the decision for a lot of companies.

I think that is why you see places like Denmark and Sweden, that make it easy to fire employees, do well and places like Japan and France do relatively poorly (the latter is particularly odd, they had a big lead in engineering...tech is miles behind)...ofc, it is hard to fire people in California...so not every example fits.

> 23 interviews and I didn’t get a single offer

That's… an unusually consistent signal. Suggests to me that either this person is getting into the wrong interviews (eg junior interviewing for senior role—though they say that's not the case), or more likely there's some hidden variable, like a bad reference, bad BO, really noticeable "culture" misfit, or other "red flag".

Regardless, the general points are spot on; it's a mess, for both sides. And even if the game weren't improved, I wish we all gave and got more honest feedback (however illegal that would be).

Wishing you luck in this numbers game!

I think OP should use interviewing.io and take the feedback seriously. It's likely to be helpful if they want to actually pass those interviews. But there are other ways for a non-traditional candidate to make it.

You could be right. But given the highly random and variable nature of interviewing, the author could be the 1 in 100 competent engineer who does get rejected 23 times in a row.

Exactly. I mean, hiring strategies like this absolutely do have a bunch of false negatives: people who just didn't get lucky about what problem was asked, or had a brain fart at the wrong time. It happens.

But not at this kind of frequency it doesn't. If I got my quick back of the envelope statistics right (exactly the kind of skill that occasionally crops up in these jobs and on this interviews!), this would mean at 95% confidence the employers were incorrectly rejecting 88% of qualified candidates!

It's funny that the other day I was reading about the door policies of some top-tier Berlin nightclubs and it seems that the underlying processes are similar. The bouncers there do a "door interview" designed to not only filter likely bottom of the barrel (too drunk/high, tourists) but you also need to know arbitrary and often unwritten codes (e.g. the name of the event, line-up, dress code, physical appearance) which is a proxy for showing you've put in some amount of effort and "know the rules". It doesn't seem to help much to possess the real values they desire (actually not causing problems once inside, actually enjoying the music, actually contributing to the party's atmosphere) because they simply can't screen those quickly enough.

In both cases this seems to be the market solution to the problem of having limited capacity, high demand, necessarily short interviewing/screening processes, high cost for admitting sub-par candidates but low reward for admitting good candidates. And in both cases it seems most dislike the process for being ripe for arbitrariness and routinely turning away good candidates and "there ought to be a better way" but the process seems to have evolved naturally and doesn't seem to go away despite there apparently being no major barrier for using a better process should it exist.

Just a random though.

I’ve been to that club. The internet descriptions are overblown. When I got all up in my head and attempted to follow all of the advice, I got turned away. I felt like I was wearing a costume and trying to be someone I wasn’t, and that was probably obvious to them.

When I went back years later and just went as myself, my wife and I were immediately welcomed in without much questioning. For those wondering, this is not a club where being with a woman is necessarily advantageous, but I will certainly admit that it likely had an impact.

The biggest things I saw them looking to screen out, beyond drunk - high - obnoxious, were youth and naïveté. They seem to largely be aiming at people who know exactly what they’re getting into, and are relaxed about it + not overly attached to the outcome.

Just so you know exactly what I had on, and how much it flies in the face of some of the advice... on Friday: White t-shirt, jeans, baseball cap. Saturday: Grey Everlane pocket t-shirt, backwards baseball cap, Patagonia 5” running shorts, Off-white Adidas Marathon sneakers. I did learn to dress like you’re going to dance for hours in Friday night, and jeans got hot and shirt came off real quick, so I adjusted on Saturday.

Wife went more classic and wore black jean shorts, black tee with a ripped collar, black baseball cap, black adidas.

I'm in my late 50s and after 10+ years at same company I found myself on the job market. 1998 was the last time I had any real interviews - after that point it was all networking with no real tech interviews. After much cursing at the advent of white boarding and code tests, I finally just caved and bought a leetcode subscription and starting working problems I hadn't seen since the late 80s in college. Long story short, After 8 interviews I landed a great job with Big Company. At the end of the day, it's a game. You can play it or complain about it, but it is what it is. Has leetcode made me a better programmer? NO. What has helped though is stackoverflow and github.

It showed that you were able and ambitious enough to learn (re-learn) a somewhat complex skill in a reasonably short time. This seems like a very desirable property to me, and a good substitute for having strong talent or recent experience of algorithm design and implementation.

Well, if you pass that interview, you then get to help Giant Search and Advertising Company make the world an even more dystopian place...

I honestly don't know why anyone gives FAANG recruiters the time of day anymore. I have yet to meet anyone who feels good about the prospect of working for them, anyone who works there who's super proud of their mission, and the competitors who are looking to hire at that level of talent pay roughly similar wages from what I've seen.

My advice for this poor kid is to look around at startups and do more networking. FAANG jobs aren't anything to aspire to anymore.

A couple of reasons:

- Comp: Total comp for a new hire with 3+ yrs dev experience is probably 300k -> 400k at a FAANG on average (with possibility to be higher). If you want to live and raise a family in your own house in the bay area (2.5 Million for a reasonable house), this matters.

- Access: Few places have the kind of scale and resources of these companies, that can make them fun places to work. You also get to learn a lot from really good coworkers (and go to talks, explore different things, etc.)

- Work/Life: FAANGs are generally pretty good for work/life balance (though this can vary by team and manager). They're generally pleasant places to work as an engineer.

> I have yet to meet anyone who feels good about the prospect of working for them, anyone who works there who's super proud of their mission

I worked at the N in FAANG. It was the best large company work environment I ever worked in. The people I worked with were top notch, I looked forward to going into to work.

Our mission was to deliver entertainment around the world. I believed in that mission. I think entertainment is an important part of people on this planet relaxing, which leads to them being happier and all the outcomes that come from that.

I'll admit Netflix is different than most of the rest in that it isn't driven by ad revenue and increased consumerism, so maybe that made it easier to love the mission.

But yeah, I definitely enjoyed working there. Even without the crazy paycheck (although that admittedly helped a lot).

I looked into moving to the bay area and FAANG were the only companies paying sufficiently high wages for me to break even after the difference in my mortgage payments. I don't want to work for FAANG, so I didn't move.

I assume he is interviewing with the other top companies too (e.g. "payment processing company" would be something like Stripe or Square probably).

I don't know what kind of selective bargaining power you guys have, but i would kill just to get my foot in the door of a FAANG.

I've been doing initial phone screens (small companies) this week (two just today, actually), and with all of them when the recruiter (internal or external) gets to the "we'd like to send you a coding challenge" I interject with: "Let's do a code exchange. I'll point you at some of my GH projects, and you send me some of your code".

So far they've accepted ("I'll forward it to the hiring manager"), and it's far too soon to see if this works... but I'm hoping.

The next step I'll be trying is "I'd like you to pay me for my time. If you're not comfortable with that yet, let's talk about what's involved in getting there."

One approach I really like is a company that will vet you and decide you have promise, then decide to hire you on the spot for some small amount of contract work. "Ok, you seem great, let's commit to 40 hours of work from you on whatever schedule you want, and we'll see how that goes." This lets you squeeze that in on evenings and weekends if you want and not quit your current job. Costs them very little and is way more productive than a standard interview loop.

Airtable requests a coding challenge and pays for your time. I was very impressed.

I interviewed with a start-up mid-acquisition by Indeed and they paid me for my take-home project. Quality move but the rest of their behaviour was utterly reprehensible. I was mad/upset at the time but I'm now grateful.

Also, I had the time available to spend ~8-10 hours on a take-home project (paid or otherwise); most of the time the best candidates already have jobs and will rightfully tell you to pound sand.

In my opinion this should be the only way things are done. And it does work it just depends on if the company gets OSS

Curious how they respond, but I like this angle.

It's good to see people complaining about interview processes from Google&co as it's a good idea to always try to improve the current situation. However, I feel there needs to be some context here. While the interviews at FAANG seem not ideal, they are HUGELY better than most other tech interviews I've had experience with. In most other interviews you get to have a chat with some HR person that has no idea what the word "variable" means. You answer a set of standard questions and they barely know how to map your answers to the expected list of answers they have. Then they score you based on that.

Let's not lose that perspective in discussions like these.

Sincere question: What are you all doing accepting these multi-hour, multi-day take away free consulting gigs?

Say NO to this bullshit. Establish a deadline and clear guidelines and expectations:

1. I will not be doing any take away work at all.

2. You will explain how my GitHub repo, resumé, previous experience is insufficient to qualify me for the job in 100 words or more.

3. You will sign an NDA for whatever solution I created to whatever problem you task me with. You do not own my solution’s IP and may not share it outside of the people involved in my hiring process without my consent. 4. In the case where I fail the test you will explain in 100 words or more why my solution was unacceptable. 5. In the case my solution doesn’t compile/run you will allow me 3 attempts/1hour to provide you a solution and/or give me a Dockerfile representing the env where my solution will be tested.

Have you ever established these guidelines and expectations with a potential employer and subsequently been hired by that employer?

Definitely a solid way to avoid bad interviewing experiences.

Any interviewing experiences, really, but bad ones too.

Unless you are a critically important hire / executive level, asking a company to sign an NDA for an interview would be the kiss of death for the vast majority of candidates. To get an NDA signed, I would have to get company lawyers and my upper management involved, which is not something I would do unless we desperately needed your skillset and had zero other options.

I give candidates the option to do a take-home or in-person assessment. For the take-home I communicate that they own everything they produce, and I create an EC2 server for them to use for the interview so that whether or not someone owns a server is not a barrier to entry.

I would definitely decline to continue to interview a candidate if I received this list of demands. The tone is unbelievably entitled and screams "difficult to work with". The suggestion that I would sign an NDA on behalf of my company is absolutely absurd. I would never sign something on behalf of my company without consulting our legal counsel, and I would never continue an interview if I had to involve my legal counsel to determine whether or not a person can code.

Some people need to find a job at some point. It's nice to have principles, but it's nicer to earn money.

I have tried a milder version of this and as anyone can guess - it did not work. The supply is too much and demand not so, the organizations will always pass. Only if you can get the demand-supply to work in your favour will this work.

> It sounds to me that now companies are more afraid of hiring bad candidates than they are excited about the opportunity to hire a great candidate.

People have come right out and said they’d rather miss out on a good hire than get a bad one. There’s no “sounds”. It is.

Rather than more and more convoluted interview processes maybe we should work on better weed out techniques? I mean, what’s the overall cost really of picking the best person you saw in two weeks, getting back to the process of building new functionality (and your new hire training materials) and just kicking the dense ones with a little reflection on what we’re the objective warning signs this was going to happen?

I really think the thing is that people want to believe that training for their team is arduous, and so the cost of every person is huge. I’ve known more than a few people who philosophized about how much they learn about their craft by teaching. And it always seems like the people who create the biggest messes are the ones who can’t explain themselves.

Which we have known forever. In fact during the dot com era it was quite common to hire the most articulate people you interviewed. At least of they were wrong about something you’d know it right away, instead of them obfuscating their bad ideas.

If all you care about is money, go bust your butt on leetcode and ace a FAANG interview. If you care about a work-life balance, and having a big impact on a small team, work for a medium-small startup and negotiate a flexible schedule.

Personally I get a huge kick out of making massive improvements to a small business's tech and infrastructure. The lack of bureaucracy is a freedom that is often taken for granted. If you have the vision and drive, you can improve the business's processes and product offerings by leaps and bounds...something I would argue is not readily available at a big company. Smaller companies are also much more willing and able to negotiate with you to help balance your life. A 4-day work week for example.

Again speaking anecdotally, I don't need that much money. I certainly don't need FAANG-level compensation. If I'm going to work somewhere, it's going to be because I want to be with those people, working on those problems, and having a big impact. Not because of the fat paycheck.

> I'm going to work somewhere, it's going to be because I want to be with those people, working on those problems, and having a big impact.

There are teams in FAANG that are like that. And I'm going to say mine, as we're a new team building a top level public service for a very large cloud company. It does mean sometimes there's lots of work though.

The thing is once you get in you will probably work half the hours for twice the pay. I agree about the freedom to do big changes part though.

Preach! Also knowing everyone in the company and having some sort of personal relationship and impact in their lives.

There are plenty of small teams within FAANG that offer big impact, and which have good WLB.

I recently flagged myself as "back on the market" on sites like StackOverflow and LinkedIn.

What a nightmare process this whole thing is.

I end up with a slammed inbox, constant cold-calls from head hunters that are all dead ends, and in between all of the noise are some real opportunities where I get moved from the tech screen to the final round quickly due to my seniority.

It's like most jobs except there is a strange dichotomy between the technical screens, and the on-prem final rounds, which become more of a culture-fit type interview.

I feel like I am up against the Bob's from Office Space a lot of the time.

If anyone needs a 30+ year software engineer currently working with .Net Core 3.1 on Azure Linux and Angular 9, please hit me up.

I was given a 2-hour coding challenge once to build a language server for a programming editor. It had to implement 3 functions:

1. show help text (type/doc string) for a word

2. go to definition

3. find all references

My first thought was "this is an absurd request for a two hour coding challenge". My second thought was "boy I hit the jackpot, a few years ago on a whim I built my own language server for Go in sublime text and could probably crank out a new one pretty quick"

Sadly despite my best attempt they rejected me. They never did give me an explanation. (fwiw: https://github.com/calebdoxsey/languageserver-challenge)

I wish I could say it was a fluke, but I've been rejected by lots of companies due to the coding challenge. One day I'd really love to see what the passing code for these challenges looked like. Maybe I could learn where I dropped the ball.

FWIW. This is an absolutely awful coding challenge for an interview especially in a 2-hour setting. The challenge requires building off of implementation details for a few very specific technologies. Interviews are supposed to test for general problem solving capabilities within some domain of competence. Unless the job was specifically to work on a go language server, and that was your aforementioned domain of competence, I see no rationale for using this programming challenge to determine employment.

What does it mean for the industry when there's one of these articles on the front page every other week?

That most people have a hard time viewing the world from different lenses.

The article presents a picture of a guy “studying up” for a career and his adventures in interviewing. As someone who’s interviewed hundreds of candidates I noticed red flags right away. For instance, if someone asks you to design a micro service - you don’t say “I can’t”. No FAANGco interviewer wants you to fail. In fact, they want to help you. The best worst answer would have been “I’m not really familiar with micro services but I’ll give it a shot. Could you explain a bit more about them?” This shows the candidate doesn’t falter at a challenge, is willing to dive deep, and is committed to the task.

The lens shift comes into play when 50% of the candidates can’t complete fizz buzz, another 25% simply lied in there resume about any relating experience, and the other 24% don’t have any real understanding about algorithms.

There are software developers and then there are great software developers. It’s generally initiative and algorithms that separate the two.

The HR folks do not care, it's not their metric to bother about.

Cynically: it means that there are a bunch of jobs that people want and that are hard to get, and the people who didn't get them don't like the process that rejected them.

There's no world in which there is an elite (e.g. FAANG) tier of employers who reject most applicants and one in which no one complains about their hiring.

That doesn't say anything about whether the hiring process is good or bad, obviously. But that is what it says about the industry.

People misjudge where their high compensation package comes from.

Something that strikes me in reading articles like this, is the distopian part often seems to be thinking about this:

    p(job_capable | not_interview_capable)

That is, it's crazy that an interview could miss so many people qualified for the job.

However, I wonder if oftentimes companies are aiming for..

    p(job_capable | interview_capable)

If p(job_capable | interview_capable) is high, and p(interview_capable) is pretty good also, then the company will probably get what it's looking for.

This means that the author is right to recognize the test is doing a bad job of measuring their job readiness. A reasonable instrument in this case doesn't have to measure everyone's job fitness (whether there are nasty side effects is another big issue).

A simple way of saying this - companies are optimizing for filtering out bad candidates, at the expense of sometimes filtering out good candidates.

Because the cost of hiring the wrong person is a LOT higher than missing out on the right one.

This will probably be lost in the pile of comments, and I'm sure some people will interpret it as humble bragging. But I genuinely do not get the angst and anger over the tech screen, from the perspective of an applicant. So I want to explain why I like them.

My background: I've never taken any kind of CS or programming class in my life. Mediocre grades in college. My first exposure to programming was at age 24, as I fell into it with an IT tech position. Went from there to a series of jobs at several startups. Before applying to a FAANG, I went through Elements of Programming Interviews and solved all the problems in it, which at around 10 hours/week took maybe 6 months of prep. I then sent in two applications, one to FB and one to GOOG, immediately got phone screens, passed, and then two weeks later went through the on-sites. Every one of the questions was either lifted from the coding prep book or trivial.

End result? Offers from both, joined as an L4, at a total comp higher than I had ever dreamed of, and significantly higher than friends in medicine who have easily spent over a hundred times as much time preparing and studying as I have.

So I'm kind of left flummoxed. Am I just incredibly lucky? There are huge issues in the hiring process, but if you want a job at FAANG, as far as I can tell it's incredibly easy to game the system. Set aside some time each week (easy, if you don't have kids), study for a couple months, and then apply. There's literally no other field than ours that is so open to motivated people without paper qualifications and that simultaneously offers so much in terms of lifestyle and compensation. Whether it hires the best candidates is another question entirely, but that's an issue for the company, not for the applicant.

But, when I give an interview to an applicant and use my go-to question, which I initially feared would provide no useful hiring signal for being too easy (and which, yes, I've tested on all my coworkers, who solve without any difficulty), I find that only maybe a third of applicants complete it at LH or higher.

To be clear, I'm calling this out as a blind spot I have--there's clearly a massive gap in perspective here--but hopefully it'll provide a useful data point for why tech screens aren't universally hated and why they manage to persist.

Your experience is incredibly close to my own. I'd love to know if you also feel the same about a few other issues:

- I used to have a massive impostor syndrome due to not having a CS degree. Joining FAANG alleviated perhaps 80% of it. (Just to be clear, that's not the reason why I joined FAANG; I just wanted to try a large corp after years in tiny startups.) It feels good, but I'm mourning it a little, because I believe it was a driving factor to how intensely I was trying to better myself.

- I enjoyed solving all these problems. There's beauty in finding the most optimal solution to each of them. Binary heaps are plain beautiful, and suffix trees and arrays still blow my mind years later. I wonder if people here dislike this stuff because they were forced to learn it in college for a piece of paper, while we learned it on our own volition for a big jump in compensation. Maybe I'm just projecting because I hated school and college; many HNers seem to have enjoyed their studies, which is awesome.

What's LH?

The potential red flag in this account was Jared interrupting the interviewer who was asking a question that mentioned microservices to say that he had no experience in microservices.

Why did he interrupt the interviewer? And why interject that he had no experience in microservices? So what? You can still tackle a question that mentions microservices...

It's not like one's programming skills are useless for questions that merely mention an architecture you haven't officially worked with before. It's very strange to me that he interrupted that way, for that reason, and it makes me wonder if he acted similarly in other interviews. If his attitude is that he shouldn't have to answer questions about architectures and technologies not specified in his resume, that wouldn't go well.

Also, there's a lot of hype and looseness around the term "microservices" these days. You might have worked with what some people call microservices without knowing it. All the more reason not to cut off the question.

The evolution of the software engineering interview is a consequence of people gaming the metric. As the author points out, once the cat got out of the bag, the problems became increasingly challenging.

The real consequence is for wages. By making interviews a ceremonious practice where even engineers with years of experience need to spend a month Leetcoding, you severely restrict the talent pool. It discourages poaching. Engineers only care to subject themselves so many times, and since they already have a job, they're not too motivated to find another (compared to industry outsiders who aren't already earning software engineering-level salaries).

Fortunately, many places don't put you through the hazing that is the typical FANG interview. You can make 85-90% of a FANG salary, at a company that asks Leetcode easy's. That's what I've chose for myself. Not because I'm an incompetent engineer, but because mastering leetcode isn't a priority for me.

> You can make 85-90% of a FANG salary

IME, it's more like a >50% pay cut. Plenty of reasons not to do FAANG, but when calculating trade-offs it's important to have an accurate view of the costs of each decision.

> You can make 85-90% of a FANG salary, at a company that asks Leetcode easy's

Depends on which FANG. And G/F with their refreshers means the gap will widen significantly year over year

A month is 8% of a year, so it seems like a worthwhile tradeoff to spend a month learning to interview instead of being paid 10-15% less.

This is a topic I wrote about recently[0]. The fundamental problem is that these big companies are so afraid of hiring a bad candidate (a false positive) that they are willing to put up with a ton of smart people who fail their interviews (a false negative).

And the worst part of this is, from the inside, it really looks like the process is working. After all, there are some really smart people who get hired, and saying the hiring process is bad feels like you're saying your coworkers aren't smart. But the truth is, these companies are hitting smart people. They're just hitting a non-uniform dust of all three smart people out there.

I think this is an opportunity for smaller companies to hire people who wouldn't make it into the big companies, and innovate in a way the big companies can't!

[0] https://hiringfor.tech/2020/02/10/false-positives-and-false-...

A bit late, but...

Does it work? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps you get some fantastic candidates (true positives), and perhaps you get people that are very god at gaming the system (false positives).

The process, as it is, is kinda like trying to select potential mathematicians on the basis of how well they solve HS AP Math problems. It is fully possible to rote learn every kind of integral and derivative under the sun, if you just solve enough - without actually understanding the underlying principles. It becomes a pattern recognition problem.

There are tons of anecdotes from seemingly false positives, when it comes to tech hiring. The web is filled with "I was very lucky, because they re-used problems I had just solved".

BTW, when I say false positives, I don't mean incompetent programmers / engineers - I just refer to those that do not master the subjects they're being tested on, but average candidates (on the subject) that luck out on getting asked the right question.

I still think Goodhart's law stands true for this trend.

People game the system, because they want to earn more money. Companies make the system more rigorous and robust against gaming. People still find ways to game the system, and it essentially becomes a race to the bottom. Along the way you start losing out on terrific candidates, because they refuse to partake in the increasing demands. So you end up with a mixture of very talented engineers, and very able test-takers.

This horror story would be enough to quit the entire FAANG game:

"At one particular ‘top’ tech company the process is that when a candidate goes through an interview he or she has a packet compiled about their interview performance. The packet then goes to a committee whose job it is to impartially review the packet to make a hiring decision. At one point a particular committee got so critical that they rejected every packet for several months. When HR caught wind of this they decided to set up a test. They sent the committee a new round of packets and once again the committee rejected them all. HR then called them all into a meeting and explained that they packets they had just reviewed were in fact the hiring committee member’s own packets from when they interviewed for that company. They had unknowingly rejected themselves! How could anyone pass that bar?"

It is my observation that you generally don't need to know how certain algorithms are implemented. You need to know of them, what they do and their strengths and weaknesses compared to other algorithms. That is, just enough knowledge to make the choice on which way to go. The actual implementation part can be Googled when the time comes.

If I was ever an interviewer, I would not ask candidates to implement algorithms, but rather to explain why you would use a certain one. Or give them a situation and some choices and ask them to choose one and justify their choice. (e.g. For this task, would you do it in python or C? Would you use a linked list or an array to solve this problem?)

> “Yes. Can you write an algorithm to find the Kth highest value in a binary tree?”

I got this exact question on a phone screen with "Giant Search and Advertising Company." I got stuck on a stupid detail and botched the implementation. Once I hung up the phone I took a deep breath and fixed the algorithm in about 15 minutes. That still isn't very good since I was only given 15 minutes total at the end of the interview to implement it in the first place so I assume that is the time-span they expect to get an answer from a senior engineer.

Fair enough, I didn't study for the interview, I don't have a lot of binary tree experience. I realized that if I couldn't get through that phone screen cleanly/easily then I probably wouldn't make it passed 4 or 5 whiteboard problems either (which are likely to be significantly more difficult). Fair play to any company that wants to screen candidates using that approach because I am not the kind of guy they are looking for and that is just fine. Everyone I spoke to was polite, professional and sounded competent. I do wish they would stop calling me and letting me know that I did well enough to be eligible to retry.

I have no doubt that I would contribute at an above-average level within any of those FAANG orgs but I appreciate their process and the reasons behind it. I have had no problem finding high-paying employment and distinguishing myself within any team I have worked on for my entire career. I generally get promoted quickly and asked to lead teams. As far as I can tell there is no dystopia, just people looking for different things.

How snarky do people get on these interviews? If anyone asked me to find the kth-greatest element in a tree I'd write down a loop that increments std:set::crbegin k-many times and then dereferences and returns it. This is literally how anybody at Giant Search and Advertising Company would do it, and almost nobody at that company has ever written a tree, they just use the one in libc++, from Jeff Dean on down.

If it makes you feel better I’ve failed google’s interview several times before passing, after just grinding questions. It’s in some ways silly but not so silly that I’m willing to forgo a job which pays so much out of principle if I can help it.

It’s an easy question if you just do an inorder traversal and stop at the kth element, but of course that’s not optimal. To get log(n) efficiency you need to augment the tree with subtree counts.

Not exactly a comment for the piece, but for overall comments going around.

I am really shocked with people's understanding of situations. Like one great example of a different interview process which totally seems like working for the interviewer and his/her interviewees is bashed for not being good for their tastes without even getting the rationale. Or expecting people to spend 6 months on preparation for interviews considered normal or totally acceptable.

Either HN crowd are totally out of loop of life, or their self importance is out of bounds that they can't see anything else which is deemed below.

Is life something that you could spend so easily? What kind of affirmation people get from jumping hoops that would never even matter in the big picture?

The newer interview procedures that are described here really made my jaw drop. I am not the most down to earth guy without the last bit ego, but I believe I improved over the years. Still if I would encounter any of these , I would go jerkiest of egocentrics ever and tell them go do themselves.

> expecting people to spend 6 months on preparation for interviews considered normal or totally acceptable

You're expected to be able to solve a certain set of problems. Whether you don't prepare at all, spend 6 months, or spend 6 years is up to you. Oh, and everything you need to prep is available in cheap books and websites.

That's immensely superior to being required to spend 5 years and thousands of dollars in college to get the degree that nobody will hire you without, like some industries do.

Unfortunately, it doesn't matter - since all tests test for something, and all these things are highly correlated, grueling job interviews are entirely justified.

As much as it pains to say me, HR is entirely justified in their approach of asking people to fill out a form, importing the list into excel, sorting on the GPA column, and calling the top N candidates on the list.

Push for change. Show others the alternative. I have worked with teammates to change hiring culture and gotten some fantastic feedback. Change will happen if you push for it.

Here're my points:

1. Supply candidate with a challenge that I built myself, tested with a co worker

2. Test should have many small goals and bugs: Get more data points on what they achieved, don't make it binary!

3. Challenge should include real bugs from when you built it. e.g. typos, wrong attribute names like 'innerHtml' instead of 'innerHTML', forgetting an import, etc.

4. Make results runnable / viewable (for front end work)

5. Explicitly tell candidate that Google is not just allowed, but expected

6. Allow candidate to ask questions so you're not dehumanizing them (but don't always give a straight answer)

7. Follow up with questions like "what do you think could be improved?"

8. If candidate spends more than 10 minutes on any of the challenges, allow them to skip it

Get as many data points as possible from an interview. Make it as close to real life as possible.

Everyone knows it's broken, but interview cycle still continues to bring in talent, even if there are false negatives. People still brave the grueling gauntlet. People still show up for interviews. Smart people still get hired. The system works, just in a terribly shitty way.

To HR, the engineer hiring process is voodoo magic and we best not touch it.

It only works because there's always another body standing outside the door waiting their turn to be abused by the process. It'll end real quick if they run out of interviewees.

A small agile company could hire undervalued people who don't do well in traditional interviews and clean up, if they didn't cargo cult programming interviews.

See these make a bit of sense for huge companies that have to filter millions of potential candidates. They don't make sense for your ten person bootstrapped company that wants to hire a junior full stack dev.

> At one particular ‘top’ tech company the process is that when a candidate goes through an interview he or she has a packet compiled about their interview performance. The packet then goes to a committee whose job it is to impartially review the packet to make a hiring decision. At one point a particular committee got so critical that they rejected every packet for several months. When HR caught wind of this they decided to set up a test. They sent the committee a new round of packets and once again the committee rejected them all. HR then called them all into a meeting and explained that they packets they had just reviewed were in fact the hiring committee member’s own packets from when they interviewed for that company. They had unknowingly rejected themselves! How could anyone pass that bar?

I am not sure anyone mentioned it before, but in many occupations you are required to take standardized tests which you are required to renew each X years. This way if you hold the credentials than you don't have to actually demonstrate your technical skills when applying for jobs, since your certificate proves them.

And guess what?! Your diploma is actually such a certificate, at least something that's close enough. Still our industry largely ignores that for some reason.

To get to the point I wouldn't mind to renew my credentials with supplemental diplomas every X years on standardized tests facilitated by educational institutions to avoid the stupidity of the industry's current trends.

The word 'dress' doesn't appear once in this thread and that's a sign of the disgusting state of affairs all in itself

It used to be people took care in small gestures like wearing a pressed shirt but now all the auspices have gone awry in favour of this laughable meritocracy

No wonder tests of this nature have been devised by people who haven't ever buttoned a collar and it's everyone's fault for not taking the moral high ground

When's the last time you walked into a formal interview that actually was formal?

Casual guys in a jizzing contest over O(logn) implementations of tree traversal is the reason every start-up fails after 18 months

What? I interviewed at my current location wearing a cargo short and a tshirt. It’s a trillion dollar company and we’re not failing any time soon.

Coding interviews aside, no dress requirement is one of the biggest plus and allow people to focus on the thing that matters. I have no idea where you come from that software engineering is helped by dressing up pressed shirts.

I have just realized that I have no idea how interviewing is done in other areas - for instance, mechanical engineering.

GREAT question. For one thing you’re not getting any job in mechanical engineering without a degree and an EIT, so that narrows the possibilities. Companies recruit at universities and this is the main pipeline into the industry. Connections are very important, so doing internships in summers during university gets your foot in the door. After you practice for ten years you get your PE and set up your practice either within a large company or independently. It is very likely that an ME can do their entire career without ever being subjected to the trick questions of some kid with six months of industry experience, like we pretend is normal for software developers.

I find this post accurate. Please also keep in mind that interviewing is as much about deciding if the company is right for you as it is if you are right for the company. When I take a bit too long to solve the coding challenge and the interviewer puts on an attitude I just assume that this is what it would be like working with this person, no thanks.

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.

The FAANG's of the world are doing us a big disservice. They filter out the best of the best programmers in the world, and then shackle them with 300K+ golden handcuffs to work on meaningless tasks on already developed products.

I was talking with a recruiter many years back about when Yahoo had a massive layoff. The following year, he was suddenly awash with jobs to fill with new startups that were created by these Yahoo employees that were in comfy jobs for life.

If one of the FAANG companies laid off their workers, we would have a huge tech boom as these brilliant people suddenly would be forced to either get another job, or create something new, and that percentage of people that would create something new would rock the world. We would have new innovations across the board in IT and other fields that they would apply their talents to.

Instead, they are building plumbing in a system that really is just in maintenance mode. Remember, 99% of the functionality of these systems that exist today was already in existence 5 years go for them. This swarm of high priced talent is basically just moving the needle about 1-2% per year to just stay ahead of any other potential competitor.

The trouble is that these companies are so successful, that they can burn the cash trapping talent, and still pull in billions per year. This grind for small returns is just a small line item compared to the flood of cash they all rake in.

Hiring and interviewing are incredibly broken, I totally agree... And the algorithm puzzles are basically silly and don't tell you any relevant things, like how pleasant would this person be to work with, how conscientious are they, etc.

But.

Usually interviewers are asking these questions to see how you think, not because they expect you to get it exactly right. And so verbalizing your thought process is how you prove yourself. And if you have trouble verbalizing your thought process, I sympathize, but being able to explain to others what you're trying to do and why you want to do it that way is a really big part of the job. And there are going to be a lot of times on the job where you DO need to tackle something wildly outside your skill set, and people need to see that you can at least start iterating towards the right thing. You don't have to be right, you just have to convince them you'd get there in a reasonable amount of time.

Also, if a small amount of pressure causes you to forget your entire CS education, that's kind of relevant to being able to do your job? I'm not trying to pile on to people that have anxiety issues, but being able to do things under pressure is a skill. If we're up against a deadline and you entirely freeze up and can't do anything, that would be a bit of a problem wouldn't it?

It's incredibly hard, and would take years for anyone to come up with any algorithm from first principle. Which means that any test of algorithm is a test of knowledge, rather than "how you think" or "being able to reason about subtle behavior in system" etc. You looks good if you already have the knowledge, and you will look like a clown otherwise. That is okay if you also realize that the breadth of CS fundamentals are incredibly broad and everyone only knows a subset of it (ask as many simple things as you can).

My deadlines are measured in months, weeks and in the minimum, days. There is practically no cases where it is in hours, and absolutely no case where it would be 30 minutes. I (We?) have trained myself to work and deal with deadlines/pressures of those standard time frame, which means that if I have only a day to deadline left, my technical mind shut down and it is now thinking about the business to see what should be best done next.

I believe people would feel more pressure at the risk of failing an interview than the risk of their company's product having a downtime

Its so funny, but I was with a good friend of mine who I've worked with on private projects, and we were just talking about this.

We spent a good lot of the night interviewing eachother in our own respective questions and judging eachother.

I'm a bit more senior that I like to admit, and I loved his questions. His approach was more simple questions, then go and follow up on them. This was evident when he mentioned 1 hour was not enough time for him.

I have quick fire nonsense questions that are just an entrance fee, What is SOLID, how can you prepare a unit test. Then important things (IMO) Patterns, identifying refactoring needs.

As for the questions themeself they're actually not that important and both of us tonight realised..

The questions you ask should reflect the work you EXPECT(if a senior/mid) the person to be able to do.

If you're hiring a JUNIOR I will say... The most important thing is to make sure they actually have an interest. I have been burnt hard on this.

Forget about language specifics also.. They can be learned, and as for Patterns, I am taking a step back on them because a lot of people use them without knowing it.

Our world comes from experience.. If you're willing and able to teach, hire like that, if you need some core team member quickly, hire for that.

It was easily the best chat I had with him in a long time and I hate interviewing!

I don't even have the coding level that the writer has, but I felt myself so expelled from the industry that I quit looking for jobs. I just gave up and started working independently. Financially now I'm really broke but I think I'm better with myself. Maybe I'm not the "super-programmer-hacker" but at least I don't have to participate feeding the sadistic pleasure and sense of power that recruiters have on us.

> The second was to write a recursive permutation generator using dynamic programming which is no easy task. I got totally stumped in the moment by that one. At the end of the interview I asked the interviewer “This problem seems a little steep for a phone interview. Do you often write recursive algorithms at Payment Processing Company?” He replied “No, we don’t use recursion.” “How about permutations? When have you used those?” He answered “Our algorithms have no need for permutations. Most of the engineers here work on user interfaces and infrastructure.”

This is absolutely hilarious, and has happened to me a bunch of times interviewing at large corps. Although I wish I had the balls to do what Jared does here, which is ask the interviewer if they ever even _used_ dynamic programming on the job.

Like, I get that some jobs are algorithms intensive. I've worked in such jobs myself. On the job, I had a lot of resources to help me - access to textbooks like CLRS and Wikipedia, so that building an algorithm and coming up with it's big O was mostly straightforward. But we've never had the CEO come and say "I need a O(n) algorithm stat for this problem _text dump of hard DP problem_".

Yes it sucks but so what? It's worth it. FANG will give anyone an interview if you have an internal reference. I am an undergrad English major in my 30s and just got in.

Gaming the system is easy. You just have to put in the work. Do every question in EPI and then do a few hundred leetcode questions until you're ready. It will take between 100-500 hours depending on where you're at when you start. Good luck!

How can you think clearly when someone is watching and judging you?

The ideal scenario would be - give a problem, leave the room, and come back after 15 minutes - give the candidate some breathing room.. to make mistakes, to try out few methods, to collect their thoughts.

This concept of 'We want you to think aloud, We want to see your approach', doesn't match reality.

In reality, the only time that happens is when both parties are trying to figure out a solution collaboratively. Not when one party already knows the answer and is 'testing' the other party.

An author's first draft, or a speaker's demo, has a million corrections before it gets to print/stage. Can RR Martin write freely if the NYTimes reviewed his every draft version ? Can Steve Jobs go on stage and give a demo if he has not already rehearsed the entire saga ?

It's like judging a person at their vulnerable stage. Unless they are a saint who can completely block out the existence of another human being sitting a few feet away, it's hard to concentrate.

You're more worried about how your thought process looks than you are about solving the problem at hand.

Is it possible to create a meaningful coding test that only takes 45 minutes? I would love some examples for front end tests if any one has any.

Not "front end" (I assume you mean stuff like React) but many of these are candidates for coding tests in interviews: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Programming_Tasks

Though some would take longer than 45 minutes.

archived version from feb 2019 since cloudflare dns seems to be broken atm: https://web.archive.org/web/20190219135427/http://rosettacod...

Fizzbuzz?

I'm pretty sure the only meaningful coding test is if you can program at all. After that everything becomes artificial in an interview setting.

When I was young and free the FAANGs were my ultimate dream. I even saw the interview process as a cool pissing contest. However living in the US wasn't for me, so always had to regrettably pass on interviews... but now as time passed and we've seen the FAANGs go from good guy to Bond villain, I'm forever glad I never hauled my family across the world to be part of the cool gang.

Talking to friends who now work for the FAANGs, I've heard stories of having to spend 40+ hours (re-reading Sedgewick and practicing programming questions etc) to just prepare for the first round.

Fuck that...

FAANG interviews might be dystopian, but if you look outside the Silicon Valley bubble, you can find interviews that are far more enjoyable than spending days in front of whiteboards just to move onto the next round. The most common pattern of past interviews for me has been beer/coffee/coke and a 30 minute chat about the company's future goals and see if I fit might in. That should be how it's done.

I've designed an interview test before and I am ironically now doing a very similar interview test to what I designed for the company I used to work at. It worked extremely well for where I used it and I am absolutely thrilled to work on it now for this company. The key element here is indeed relevancy to the job you apply for and not looking for a perfect answer.

For anyone doing programming tests, I would like to give some advice, too, based on the tests I did and got through successfully:

- Always give it a try - Always explain what you do and what you are trying to do - Don't worry about sending in an incomplete test when you don't manage to do it - Be verbose about what you are trying to do to solve it - Don't be afraid to ask questions

My first great programming job was at a place where I got a hard mathematical problem to solve, and I didn't manage to solve it at the moment, so I asked if I could take it home. I didn't manage to solve it at home but sent in the broken code that I had either way.

I got the job.

Why? Because the broken code I sent in showed that I understood recursion (it was for a Common Lisp job, that code was in Clojure) and the other people, even if they did manage to solve it, used more common languages and iterative solutions. He wanted someone who got the spirit of what they were working with, so that got me in. I asked my boss later how to solve that question, and he didn't manage either.

When I did the interviewing myself, the situation was similar. One candidate sent in a huge resume that looked impressive, but didn't send in the test. Immediate fail. Two others had a hard time with the test, but they showed that they cared about making it work, and that was enough for us to accept them: the core thing we wanted to see was that they could learn and cared enough to learn about what they needed.

One of those became main programmer and leader of many others later on, and made the company hugely successful.

I mean looking at the author's resume, it looks like he is mainly focused on machine learning domain, where the hiring is tight. Yes, in ML top 5% candidates are sought after like there is no tomorrow, but there is barely anything left for the left 95% of candidates.

So here is my advice. For your first job, and as a newbie, be accommodating. When I was out-of-college, I thought Java is no fun and is only for old people, I am functional and cool. And the job scene is just a hammer right on my head. So brush up my Java knowledge like in 2 weeks, and putting Java everywhere on my resume. Get a job pretty quickly.

Now I have experience, and don't have to bundle myself as Java programmer anymore. But that is only after I have grown from that early experience.

So again, be accommodating, get a job first and everything else can be figured out more easily.

There's literally no reason not to name these companies who rejected you, you don't owe them anything!

Whenever I've interviewed people I've always made sure to them feel comfortable, so any anxiety does not get in their way.

Then, we talk and I look for all the qualities they /do/ have.

Sadly, lots of interviewers get a kick out of finding out what the interviewee does not know, so they can feel superior.

Coding challenges should be: -1. take-home -2. concise -3. relevant to the job -4. take no more than 4 hours

One example of such a decent test that I came across involved having to read a file, parsing it and turning its contents into some basic HTML. During the interview we talked about things like "what if the file were really big", e.g. let the candidate reflect on the limitations of their implementation. This was enough to suss out where somebody is, professionally. And nobody had to have a bad day.

All this discussion is spot on. The problem is all these startups now think they are FAANG companies also. You're not Google dude and you're probabaly passing on great hires and making the hiring process harder on everyone.

We recently did a bunch of hiring. Our coding excersize was practical and involved working through some existing code that had a bug and extending it. They had to be able to state the problem back to us clearly. It was take home solutions submitted to git. It was simple to weed through candidates looking at the code for 30 secs. We looked for things like clean code and well thought out solutions. We didn't do the silly BigO optimization stuff that every company is obsessed with. We've been very happy with our hires.

> companies are more afraid of hiring bad candidates than they are excited about the opportunity to hire a great candidate

Pretty much - they're willing to reject 100 good candidates in order to avoid hiring one bad one by mistake.

It's also a feedback system/arms race (like college admissions, conference paper submissions, etc..) The lower the acceptance rate, the more places you have to apply. This raises the number of applicants for each position, which in turn lowers the acceptance rate even further. This continues until you reach the maximum number of applications that each candidate can produce. Needless to say, the quality of evaluation is inversely proportional to the number of candidates, so acceptance becomes arbitrary and random.

I have a poor opinion of the Google style job interview to the point where despite having worked at Google for 8 years and trained in the interview process twice I just won't give interviews... I don't like the idea of giving an interview that I wouldn't pass myself.

BUT...

Having recently been through an interview with a well-known open source software company where the third interview ended with a "No" based on what seemed like purely subjective factors with no skill-based or evidence based reasoning at all... I do now have a lot more sympathy for our process @ Google which at least requires a panel of people with calibrated scores, multiple interviews with copious note taking and documentation, etc.

It really is hard to find a middle ground, though.

Ok maybe it is different as I did not apply for permanent position for about 25 years but I have developed/helped to develop many products on consulting basis for other companies and had to go to numerous interviews. Here is my experience:

Some companies are hiring a pie in a sky while other have real problems and want to hire people that can solve real problems. Hence 2 type of questions:

1) Write me working Lisp code of some exotic sort algorithm, oh and btw what that Hermite–Minkowski theorem is about.

2) They ask what you've done, how you did it, some references and how you can help them to solve their problem.

When I smell #1 I just apologize and leave. #2 can go either way but at least you're talking to a reasonable people with real needs.

This is life though right? These companies pay crazy high salaries -- they're not going to make it easy on you.

The fact that you'll barely be using the algorithms if at all doesn't matter. They use that for interviewing specifically because it's hard, and it screens for intelligence, problem solving speed, knowledge, and even how fast you learn (since everyone's got to learn the same algorithm question prep).

The end goal for them is that all their workers are at a minimum screened for the ability to grind at and break through difficult and esoteric problems, which are the biggest time sinks and therefore biggest limiters on the progress of the business.

I once got a Union Find algorithmic problem in an Embedded Systems phone screen.

Seriously.

I've seen that same role unfilled on LinkedIn for more than a year. How do you stop Google engineers from straight out gatekeeping if they are afforded so much freedom?

I have over 20 years of experience but due to the constantly changing and re-inventing of tooling I consider myself "junior". I like to do my "cooking" using fresh ingredients, but I prefer to use a sharp knife, rather then special purpose cutting tools, so when I get asked: -"Have you used popular framework and tool x,y,z" my answer is often no, so they probably think I've been living under a rock for the past 5 years. But quite the opposite, I constantly read about most of these tools, but they do not solve any problem I have.

If you work at a FANG too much of your income is hoovered up by rent anyways. Especially factoring in the hours and stress. Promises of a career ladder are breadcrumbs for most people. Why bother.

Big Tech has been captured by finance and professional management. In other words those companies are now political bureaucracies where workers, as opposed to connected operators, are exploited.

Workers now need to go elsewhere, save up some cheddar, and start their own companies. Same as it ever was.

There's nothing special about Silicon Valley. It preys on idealism and naivety just as much as Hollywood.

Hard to save money in the Bay if you aren't making FANG money.

I have done multiple hiring and interviews in tech industry and find it quite baffling what has s/w engineering interviewing process degenerated into. I hear many sad interviewing stories these days. Some my conclusions: Interviewing is an art and it takes a very good interviewer to identify good candidates, this algo/prog interview in 45 mins can not do justice. Problem solving is what is really should be checked and extremely difficult to check, dont ignore the attitude of the candidate. Einstein with a bad attitude should be avoided.

You need to follow a pretty similar path to get good at competitive programming, which seems to be what that type of interview optimizes for. Know lots of optimal approaches to a large class of problems, and be able to very quickly identify and classify the problem you are given and apply those approaches to solve the specific problem. I agree this isn't really a good match for real-life work. I'm pretty happy with my non MFAANG job but I took up competitive programming as a hobby just so I can have options next time I want to change jobs.

I start a new position Monday. I expected my search to be exactly like this, so I started early.

Within a week of setting the "would hear from recruiters" flag on my admittedly-thin LinkedIn profile, I had 3 solid leads from 3 companies.

I had 3 in-person interviews, and even feeling like I flailed a bit on a couple of the coding exercises (I had the exact panic about writing The Game of Life in 60 minutes), I had two offers and one almost-offer. (The almost was more due to they wanted a principal engineer vs. senior engineer).

Maybe around where I am companies are learning their lesson.

The priority of a big company is to get a "good enough" person as quickly as possible. They have tons of applications, and interviewer time is expensive. Naturally, the process is geared towards minimizing false negatives, and getting a reasonably good hire in the minimum time. The current process works well for that. People who clear these interviews are usually not terrible, and are good enough. There is no incentive for a large company to do anything differently, unless they are looking for a very specific skillset, which is rare.

Re: 'Time limits are detrimental and discriminatory' the short answer is that it's really testing if you already know the answer - some of these original algorithms took decades to discovery the first time. My interview process if a bit different but still very tough. I talk about some of my opinions on that here https://medium.com/@anthony_sarkis/software-engineering-path...

I wonder if they were actually effective with that recruitment strategy. I got that notification a bunch of times, generally when googling for documentation, and thus when I’m in the middle of something relatively technical. Finally, I accepted the challenge, looked at the problem, realized it would take at least an hour, and then went back to the programming problem I was doing in the first place.

You’re selecting for employees who are able to get distracted for a few hours when they’re in the middle of something else. That’s not who you want.

I think Giant Search and Advertising should make the interview more difficult, then more difficult still, then cease hiring entirely, then atrophy employees until they die and/or are legislated out of existence. You - yes, you, HN reader who already works at one of these companies - are ethically responsible for the actions of your employer. When you're the one on the front lines helping realize their dystopian dreams, then the blame falls on you. Don't work for FAANG.

> Don't work for FAANG.

What did Netflix do? And don't we like Apple now? They ship crypto to billions that annoys the government's spyware programs.

To me the main misstep with a lot of modern interview testing is the time-constraint factor. Having 20 minutes to solve a complex problem sans-Google in a not-really-a-text-editor field on a web page just isn’t a real-world scenario. And, what you do in that setting doesn’t really say anything useful.

If you’re going to test people, either whiteboard it and make it absolutely clear you just want to see how they break it down; or, give them hours to do it right without a lot of restrictions.

There is something ironic about not being able to use Google when interviewing with Giant Search and Advertising Company...

> Hierarchies are real - I am rather confused with the advertised rankings of a software engineer. There seem to be only two rankings: non-senior and senior.

This one greatly differs between large and small companies, but I think for small companies there are only two positions they can interview for, junior and senior. Anything beyond that, be it Director, VP or SVP, the company is no more interviewing a candidate but rather is doing everything in their power to convince them to join.

A lot of the article can be explained by viewing the interview as a test. The economics of false positives vs false negatives are vastly different. Giant search company can afford to not hire great candidates. More will apply tomorrow. The cost of hiring somebody they shouldn’t have is disproportionately higher.

I’m not saying this is a good thing, but to me it does explain why interviews are so hard and why they are so disconnected from actual jobs that applicants will actually perform.

Last year I did the initial phone screen for a management level role at large search company and the next step was the infamous code test. Such a hard pass. Maybe it's different at a FAANG but my day job is communication and coordination, being technical enough to unblock and optimise work across multiple teams. The process just felt like it was optimising for the wrong thing. Not to mention that it's 20 years since my degree and I have better things to do.

Every time I read one of these articles, I'm surprised at the complexity of the coding questions the candidates had to solve. When I interviewed for my jobs, the questions were much simpler, and as an interviewer myself, I (a) pick much simpler questions and (b) even so, the candidates tend to have plenty of struggles solving them.

Am I really missing an army of engineers who can write an involved image filter in 45 minutes without that actually being their specialization?

Ah, image filter is easy with python:

  import math from "some huge math lib that does everything you can think of"
  
  print math(image)

Can we move on? Interviews suck in every industry. "Sell me this pen" isn't relevant to what a saleman will be doing. He will be on the phone, following a script but its so standard.

It could be worse. In the medical industry you have to work for free (or low pay) for 1-2 years to even be considered for a "real job". Law firms are highly competitive, and have very rigorous interviews . And yet software engineers are payed better on average then both.

I feel this personally. But I suppose the author is doing a lot better job that I could of as I typically just don't receive a response at all to anything I would apply for. Finding work here feels quite tough, and even with recently graduating with a bach in CS, I ended with contract work writing English content for Japanese websites. It's not demanding and pretty breezy, but at the very least keeps me from turning up homeless.

I've multiple colleagues who got offers from all of FAANG. They tell me about solving 500 problems on LeetCode 2 or 3 times before appearing for interviews.

I have always found coding interviews weird.

For example, you don't ask a carpenter if they know what a dovetail joint is. You don't ask a bricklayer on which brand of bricks he prefers, or how tall his last wall was. You certainly don't ask a mechanic how an internal combustion engine works!

Sure throw a few algorithms at entry level employees, with no experience, to make sure they understand the basics. But not experienced developers!

I strongly encourage self-taught developers to take a good theoretical algorithms class. In it, you'll learn to represent most problems as some sort of graph problem and map the problem at hand to nodes, edges, etc. and find the most efficient way to solve it, prove your solution and show how long it takes. You'll also learn (more importantly) what classes of problems cannot be solved at all.

Engineering interviews borrow ideas from competitive programming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_programming

The world's top companies receive a flood of applicants and use this format to filter them.

If you work in simple web applications with mild traffic volume, filtering candidates in this way is unnecessary.

The heart of the issue is that the interview and even the application process are geared towards finding this mythical coder who lives to churn out code. "URL for website or GitHub repo" is a required field on so many applications now. Sorry... between music, art, exercise, children, and commuting, finding unpaid time to do my job even more is a little tricky!

It's bad, but it's less bad than all the other ways of testing SWE's. These companies aren't averse to self-reflection on hiring criteria. They no longer care about GPA, whether you went to college, or test scores. Evidently their data have shown that algos questions are effective at identifying high performers, albeit inhumane and non-holistically.

The worst interviews of my life were at Google. The reason is, they ping me when I am not looking and that gives me the idea to look - then they are my first interview. The last time I went through a new job search I studied first for two months. The google interview was before all that. Bombing was painful! IMHO job interviewing is a skill and practice is essential.

They are missing a lot of good engineers by putting sink or float weight on white boardings. Apple does this as many big companies. a lot of candidates can code but can’t white board or they can white board because they studied the cracking the interview. You will get some that can actually get whiteboarding but you are hiring people with very simular minds

I really, really want to see Crystal succeed. I've been playing with it over the past few weeks. Since it is so Ruby-like, it's the first language I sat down and pretty much immediately knew how to achieve most of my goals. And having Spec (RSpec-like testing framework) made me nostalgic. I hope to see a critical mass grow behind this one.

HN explores interviewing again.

At my last job, I was trying to hire a frontend engineer. More programmery than designery, so I would kind of expect the ideal candidate to have heard of Typescript, and to have maybe written a unit test before. Our recruiter put a job listing on the usual places with those exact criteria, and ... we got hundreds of resumes by the time I took a look at the queue a few days later. I reviewed them all! 90% of the applicants had gone to a bootcamp and had nearly identical resumes. They wrote down their camp projects as though they were work experience. They linked to their Github that had line-for-line identical code between applicants that went to the same boot camp. Some were just directly the output of create-react-app with no additional code added. The common theme was, "I hear you get paid a lot to be a programmer. Count me in!" The other 10% of applicants didn't really have anything negative going on. They have some claimed programming experience, and they want to get paid to write computer programs. Why not call them up and ask them to find the k-th element of a binary tree? It's not a super-obscure area of study.

When I was at... erm... "Giant Search and Advertising Company"..., I did in-person interviews. I went through a lot of the shared interview questions to use, but ultimately came up with my own: given a stream of events from a variety of event sources, count how many unique event sources emitted an event in the last 5 minutes and last 30 minutes. I chose this because I literally wrote this exact program, and it took me a few iterations to get it to be optimal. (Or what I think is optimal!) For that reason, I found it to be a pretty fair question. The answer is just a few lines of code. The problem is a real-world problem. It's not a puzzle, but it does involve some thinking and maybe asking some questions.

The last thing I'll say, which I know is kind of snarky... As a Senior Software Engineer at Google, your total compensation is going to be north of $300,000 a year. You should be able to find the k-th element of a binary tree. Teach yourself how; it's kind of fun, and might someday be useful.

I agree with the HN consensus that hard CS comes up somewhat rarely in the day-to-day life of a programmer. But when it does come up, you really do need to know it. You will never be finding the k-th element of a binary tree. But there will be tree structures, and you will come up with some brute-force algorithm because you haven't seen that class of problems before, and you will push your "uses too much memory and time on production-sized datasets" hack to production, and production will crash, and then you find yourself with a production outage you don't have the tools to fix. You aren't getting paid $300,000 a year for that. So that's probably why they ask you CS-y questions.

What I've noticed about interviews is that there are a lot of generally unhappy and insecure people out there. People, especially in the Bay Area, are under the thumb at home and work and have a lot of debt and stressful family lives. Social comparison is an instinctual response in such instances and extreme bias is commonplace.

Here’s an Xoogler talking about how he was given his own hiring packet to review (without knowing it was his) and rejected it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=r8RxkpUvxK0&t...

“When I was asked to write an image filtration algorithm I spent the first 15 minutes just to understand the question. I ran out of time. ”

I have been through few of these, I just assume that there are people out there who can understand and code up the question asked within 15 min. Those are the people this company is looking for. Not you and me.

It's a form of "guess the teacher's answer". I was once observer to a committee that rejected a candidate that came up with a more efficient and correct answer than the interviewer was looking for. I couldn't argue against it because I had recommended the candidate.

After 15 years, patents, open source, and repeats successes it hasn't gotten better. I got into this because I loved it so much... I feel asked to be a hyper energetic, extroverted ego case and really I just want to be humble and quietly write some code I can feel proud of that does something useful with some kind people.

Much of these hiring practices are just a self-perpetuating narrative. Just spreading the news that interviews at your company are hard is a way to discourage unqualified candidates. And candidates that don't want to put up with your (perceived) bullshit. Either way, the choice of playing the game is entirely on us.

I have no desire to work at those kind of companies nor do I expect I would pass their tests.

I've had a successful and well paid career as a contractor in London and highly advise others to check the scene out.

Some of the best contracts I worked on were just casual interviews, I didn't even write any code.

I think the best hiring process is the following:

1. Open source your entire codebase

2. Each user story, commit for feature, etc is tagged

3. Pending features are correlated to (2).

Finally, no interview or references. Simply hire people who can complete high level implementations for the features to extent one can given an arbitrary time frame.

The best part is they might hire someone that knows the answers by chance when someone with much better technical skills doesn’t know the answers to the particular set of questions and then the new hire might be technically savvy but often have very poor interpersonal skills

I almost got into a role as a lead dev only to decline myself later. Their entire team had left for some reason and last developer wanted to leave too. No technical interviews, though lol.

Small companies aren’t that great either, when their main business isn’t tech

I mean interviewing sucks yes. And don’t spend too long on take home work, no more than what you’d expect to put into a normal interview at that stage eg if it’s a screen no more than 1 hr if it’s later no more than a few.

> I lie somewhere between junior and senior and it seems to be slim pickings for my experience level.

In some countries I see job postings with a third experience level: "Medior". Is there an equivalent in English?

The term in English is "mid-level" though most find it somewhat derogatory.

No matter how many APIs and tutorials you do it comes down to being calm under pressure and knowing who you are talking to. You have to practice your communication skills and be cool. Often times you will be interviewed by HR people and managers - rarely will you get to be interviewed by a TDD Clean code geek that you follow on twitter. Eitherway there is nothing out there that you deserve more than other people. If you are young shut up and build stuff. (I wrote this as satire a couple moons ago; http://owensoft.net/v4/item/2162/ )

> rarely will you get to be interviewed by a TDD Clean code geek

Have to disagree. Every interview in the last 3 years was majority technical with top-tier team members. Yes, I talked to a couple HR reps and managers but they were less than 10% of the individual interviews.

Sadly there are too many people applying to too few jobs. So they’ll hit the archives for CS questions that largely won’t apply to the actual job

The secret is to skip FAANG and alikes. You will be surprised how many highly paid and quite interesting jobs outside of that overhyped circle.

"I have always sought to be completely honest and humble with myself and others about my abilities."

Well, there's your problem right there.

There's something I read In The Company of Others by Julie E. Czerneda years ago.

"The pay's respectible when the company's not."

I've gotten so cynical about this that the lyrics of "razzle dazzle" resonate in my mind whenever I'm interviewing.

Face it, FANG companies are mega corporations. All that made them good in the eyes of most employees vaporized when they grow much bigger and they lose their culture. That means less autonomy for the new employees (how many remember mythical 20% own time at Google?) and less freedom of expression (James Damore).

If you want to be part of something special join a startup or at least a small or mid size company made up of people that actually values your whole skillset and creativity instead of only one aspect.

I actually really like Google's process. It's got everything I look for, as a candidate:

* Predictability - I know what it's going to be like clearly from the beginning

* Trainability - I can become better at it

* Memoryless - They don't care that I did terribly a year ago

Of course, in the end, I didn't actually interview even once with them so maybe I'm lying about what I like. I guess I'm one of those guys who goes from job to job not having a whiteboard interview. Lucky me.

This is stupidingly hard and test for the wrong thing but how this is dystopian?

Everytime this topic is mentioned in HN it always garnered so many comments more than any other topic.

And so many people have rehashed over and over their positions. I did, and I will do it again today.

Tech booming just happened pretty recently. People are going from law and finance and medicine to software in droves. Though it is arguably that those people better stick with law, finance or medicine than software, the fact is that software field has lower barrier of entry, from socio-economic/financial point of view and artificial gatekeeping point of view. Majority of people just don't have the resources to study law, finance or medicine.

We have a gold rush, and majority of people want to improve their life, with the least amount of effort/barrier possible.

This result in new supplies of software engineers, whether from graduating bootcamp or graduating CS degree. All of these engineers are of varying quality. Let's not talk about the older experienced software engineers, because I think it is safe to point out the fact that older more experienced software engineers are of better quality in general.

So now, we have massive influx of newbie/junior software engineering candidates. How do companies realistically interview all of them? Knowing that these people graduated with varying degree of skills/quality.

If the majority of the workforce are older experienced software engineers of good quality, then companies won't have this filtering problem. They can just give interviews by talking from previous projects/referral and call it a day.

But now we have this DS&A and take home test as well, because interviewing is hard, and the more candidates out there the harder it becomes.

I am about 5 years into my career in this, and did interviews at a few companies and also FAANG. I experienced take home tests, work for a day, and DS&A. And I choose DS&A every single time because the other two sucks.

I don't have that many projects, or even side projects that I can be proud of. I love doing hard tutorial such as learning how to do compilers rather than doing some projects. All my github is filled with trash/throwaway code. And for some reason I always got involved with projects that ended up being throwaways in my previous companies, because those projects were generally hard problems.

Work for a day, take home tests, those two are a waste of time in my opinion. I can't do multiple of them and get competing offers. But with DS&A I can just learn once and do it multiple times and get multiple competing offers. Not to mention that I won't have to compete with more senior engineers that are obviously more capable than me. By doing this DS&A game I already filtered myself up for better.

Besides, I hate learning about framework this, framework that, technology this, technology that, multiple times. It gets old quick. Don't get me wrong, I love learning new stuffs, but too many of those and I just spin around in circles learning the next Javascript framework flavor of the month. I'd rather be interviewed about how to do recursion than being interviewed about the nitty gritty of React vs Angular, Express vs Koa, etc etc etc.

In general I favor DS&A interviews. For those of you who are more senior than me. Please don't do DS&A. Please stick with what works for you. If competent people like you start doing DS&A and be good at it, then what are the chances of people like me, or other non senior engineers for getting a job. If you think I'm being sarcastic, believe me, I am not. I truly believe there are people out there that can code in circles around me despite me knowing how to recursively generate a permutation.

In general I have success in interviewing at non FAANG/Unicorn companies. I usually finished those coding challenges in 10-15 mins, and the rest 30 mins I just talk to them about random stuff and they ask me about previous project, culture, etc.

However, I still haven't found success in FAANG companies. I still got rejected, despite having solved 300+ Leetcode questions. And yes I know people who solved 500+ and still got rejected.

Now that brings me to the things that bother me the most. I've seen, as many of the commenters here, that there are people who got in despite not doing any preparation at all. I thought at first those were lies, until I saw it myself, and not just once, but twice, three, and now four times. Everytime I heard these stories it demoralized me.

I've seen people who got into L3, L4, E4, without knowing how to reverse a binary tree or do a simple BFS/DFS.

Why? What am I doing wrong? What are they doing right?

p.s. Don't ask me why I want to work for FAANG. I need (not just want) the money. I have people that I support.

They need to make sure you will be obedient to arbitrary orders.

I think this person was not rejected for their coding. They were passed over for an MS or PhD with similar skills.

It is necessary to do well on coding interviews, but not sufficient. optimizing for coding interviews is the wrong approach.

Wrong crushing the code interview is all that really matters.

Thank you for writing this.

I see peoples' opinions here generally falling into one of two camps. The standard way interviews are conducted are either good or bad. I think it's important to consider both the good and bad elements, and then come to a conclusion about what to do in order to move the collective interview process in a better direction. To note, I've never gone through a traditional technical interview, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. Let's look at the example in the given in the blog post, write an algorithm to find the Kth highest value in a binary tree. Now my data structures and algorithms are a bit rusty, so assuming that I remember the correct definition for node height, I believe the solution looks something like the following.

  data Tree a = Tree a (Maybe (Tree a)) (Maybe (Tree a)) deriving Show

  -- Assuming k=1 Means the highest node, k=2 means second, etc...
  -- Note this solution successfully puns non-positive k's
  -- to return Nothing
  kHighest :: Int -> Tree a -> Maybe a
  kHighest 1 (Tree a _ _) = Just a
  kHighest k (Tree _ (Just l) (Just r)) =
    case (lRes, rRes) of
      (Just x, _) -> Just x
      (_, Just x) -> Just x
      (_, _) -> Nothing
    where
      lRes = kHighest (k - 1) l
      rRes = kHighest (k - 1) r
  kHighest k (Tree _ (Just l) _) = kHighest (k - 1) l
  kHighest k (Tree _ _ (Just r)) = kHighest (k - 1) r
  kHighest _ (Tree _ _ _) = Nothing

Barring some fundamental misunderstanding of the problem (entirely possible), the evaluation criteria is not that the solution is exactly correct and covers all edge cases. The evaluation criteria is does the solution show fundamental knowledge about properties that are used to classify things as tree-like, and does it use the common idiom (decomposition into smaller sub-problems) that is used to process tree-like data.

In my opinion, the common criticism that interview questions hold no similarity to day-to-day software engineering problems, holds no water. Yes, you will not directly re-write the tree data type every day in your job. However, you deal with recursive data definitions that require solution by decomposition _multiple_ times a day. If you are not dealing with problems that fall under that category, then you should think hard about which problems you see that could be framed as such because I guarantee you're missing a few.

The beauty of the tree as a data structure is that it captures a common set of algebraic properties. Even when other data structures don't exactly fall under said algebra, the concepts to reason about them are reused (note the early language that specifically said "tree-like").

The point of drawing interview questions from your data structures and algorithms course is not to test you on remembering arcane minutia from 5+ years ago but to see your fundamental reasoning skills within the domain of computer science.

I might be mistaken (and I'm no Haskell expert) but I believe your solution is based on a misunderstanding of the problem.

> Find the Kth highest value in a binary search tree

Your code seems to return _any_ node that is at level K. Where K is 1 for the root node, 2 for its children, 3 for its grandchildren, etc.

But unless I'm mistaken, by the wording of the problem, it's looking for the concretely K highest value, in sorted order. Not "highest in the tree". So if a binary search tree has values (1, 3, 5, 8, 13) the algorithm is supposed to return 8 when K=2, _regardless_ of how the nodes are structured. (E.g. Even if it's unbalanced and 8 is the root node.) Because 8 is the 2nd highest value contained by the tree.

Sounds like a harder puzzle than your interpretation...

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Warning Heavy Cynicism Ahead -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

I've worked at my current job for a long, long time now. Every year or so I decide to peak my head out from it and test the job waters. I get nearly the same set of 4 outcomes each time. I have over 7 years of experience with everything from front-end development to sysops, devops, and management. I've built entire companies by myself in months. Albeit buggy ones.

I bloody hate interviewing.

Outcomes:

1. I get rejected for messing up a programming fundamentals question. Which, honestly stings because, yeah, I should probably be more informed. But, currently, I ain't got no time fo dat. I'm too busy solving a bombardment of problems like: "Hey, programmer X quit, I know you don't work with X language at all but we need this fixed, yesterday".

2. I spend a bunch of my precious time writing a fully functional code test, to be inexplicably rejected. Maybe because I didn't write unit tests? Maybe because I didn't use doc blocks. Maybe I didn't make the code reusable enough given their imaginary scope. Who knows.

3. They're super excited to hire me for a position I am not at all qualified for. Usually for a ridiculously minuscule salary. I had a company ask me, after spending 2 hours on a phone interview, to build and run their development shop. They wanted to on board 50 employees by my 6 month mark, and completely dismantle their overseas workforce.

4. I'm just plain ghosted.

I'm absolutely sick of potential employers asking me why I am excited to work with them. Well sir, to be honest, appearances and mission statements are superficial. I am excited to experience something new. I really hope that your shop lives up to the hype. I am excited to learn.

Take note employers. Saying pretty much anything else is either ignorance or a lie carefully concocted over the countless hours you require of potential employees, just to get in the door. Your interview question responses are almost never genuine talent. They are hours of memorization. I know, because I've asked, and answered them.

Why even require a resume? I've spent hours cultivating a bomb resume and 19 out of 20 employers, have literally no idea what it says.

Employer: "So what languages are you familiar with?" They're literally listed on the resume that you required I send you, with demonstrations. The one I customized to your company and needs.

A different employer: "So, you don't actively work on any opensource projects, we can review"? No, I try to have a life when I am not working, and go outside. I know, hiss...

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Right now 7:23 PM on Valentines day, I am trying to speed up a program, an MVP, that I rebuilt in a week. One that I acquired after the prior developer got fired. One of my many, many projects. This one is particularly pesky as I am also trying to build out another app that is due, about 23 days from now.

Send help.

wow!

In my admittedly limited experience, there's one way to avoid such nonsensical interviews - run away from bureaucracy. Seek smaller organizations (startups in particular) and if you're lucky enough to have a minimally cross-disciplinary background, you can seek out niche organizations where you'll interview with technical specialists who'll ask reasonable questions that are actually related to your work and your interviewers won't be saddled with "standardized" managment pleasing bullshit. One of the biggest problems I see with modern tech (and large industry in general) is this ridiculous idea that MBAs can standardize all processes across all departments across all industries. This is a source of needless pain and waste - but I suppose it keeps execs happy when they can reduce every metric to a nice little [bullshit] number. Interviewing at FAANG is a case in point.

I've never in my life had to implement a recursive memory optimized underwater red black tree balancing algorithm, and it's insulting to be told I'm not a good enough programmer if I can't pass your totally contrived white board problem. Who the hell are these people even selecting for with these kinds of questions? Do they understand how much talent they're throwing away?

In any case, I have a strong suspicion that, aside from compensation, working for FAANG is hugely overrated. And that's not just sour grapes talk - mountains of red tape, processes upon processes, overwork and burnout, and best of all, you get to spend your best years infecting society with the cancer that is adtech.

I agree on small orgs, but... recommending startups is a bit iffy, IMO. DGMW, startups can be great, but if you're just a good programmer wanting a stable job, then that startup job is not the job for you.

However, you could be a huge contributor and positive influence in a small org... and it's possible to gain a lot of life satisfaction that way[0]. Plus, your employer actually knows you and understands the value you bring, etc. etc.

Yes, you probably will not earn as much as you could by indirectly peddling ads, tracking users, or whatever, but personal fulfillment matters... at least it does to me... and I hire people who feel the same way.

[0] It sounds weird, but studies have shown that giving people agency (as they must be in a small org), setting their own goals, etc. has a positive influence on their well-being and productivity.

Agreed. I've never had much difficulty finding software development work at smaller companies. If I have the required skills that they are looking for, I'm usually confident that I'll get an interview. An interview at a smaller company is likely to be much shorter and easier than the algorithm-based interviews at larger companies. The chance of an offer is also much higher.

The pay at smaller companies is still good enough for you to live comfortably, even at the entry-level. I worked a software development internship half-time while going to college, and it was easier and more enjoyable than all of the non-programming jobs that I did before that.

If you can't get a job at the companies that you want, you have no choice but to settle for something else until you have the experience and knowledge that is required.

Thinking some more on it, there is another (long shot) way to get hired at a large company: start your own software company that is eventually acquired by a large company.

I've made a career out of working for and with smaller companies. My paycheck is very good and I'm always learning new/different technologies.

Most smaller companies dont have these sorts of interviews. Most of mine have been technical in nature and some involved take-home projects, which were then discussed.

I've also avoided the dreaded non-compete clauses that FAANG employees need to sign and work on my own side-business with no issues.

> you get to spend your best years infecting society with the cancer that is adtech.

spot on.

What? Startups are the worst at cargo cult interviews, they think they need to copy the big ones when they often don’t.

In my experience, startup interviews are even less personal and more leetcode based than FAANG. aka solve leetcode hard in 40m on a whiteboard

It’s a little weird to say “other than comp”, given that almost no one would work for their employer, whether startup or FAANG, if they weren’t getting paid for it. And the difference isn’t small. Multiple startups in NYC offered me comp of around $200k, while the public tech companies were all in the $400k to $500k+ range.

Additionally, I think overwork and burnout are much worse at startups vs big tech. The offer I took pays more than twice as much as the startups and the people on my team are in the office for 40 hours at best, work from home as needed, no emails or slack on evenings or weekends, and take 4-5 weeks of vacation. It’s definitely not the grind that startups are.

Your complaints about bureaucracy and ad tech are fair, which is why I went with Square over G or FB. I like their business model and they’re a fraction of the size of the bigger tech companies, but still pay much better than most startups.

You mean there is any other reason to work at FAANG other than compensation? I find that hard to believe except for truly exceptional outlier cases.

“ mountains of red tape, processes upon processes, overwork and burnout, and best of all, you get to spend your best years infecting society with the cancer that is adtech.”

Your mileage will vary depending on the team you land on.

This only gets worse when you’re old enough to go in, sit in a room across two or three people and realize you have at least as much experience as all of them _combined_ - not necessarily in terms churning out of code in the language _du jour_ or their domain specifics, but in terms of people management and systems design.

There are multiple kinds of dysfunction at work here:

- When I was looking for purely technical gigs I breezed through phone screens and automated testing only to go up against the ageism wall on the first Skype call. Period.

- Recruiters reproducibly drop out of the blue without a clue as to what you actually do or your experience level. Adding “Senior” to my LinkedIn profile measurably decreased the amount of randos that reach out on a weekly basis.

- Puzzle-based screenings are a complete waste of time. It’s not about the prep, it’s about the likelihood you’ll ever encounter those problems. People are much more likely to have to address system design problems, but those cannot be tested for by the online questionnaire cottage industry, so you get mediocre engineers who know how to write fizzbuzz but have zero clue of how to design an order management system from scratch or where to look for issues in an old one.

- Companies often don’t understand what is involved in the roles they hire for--even if you’re a perfect match for the job description (if there is one), the hiring team has an agenda that seldom matches it.

- Engineering is not just about writing code. The second you start asking questions about how teams interact or if they have a strategy for X, the people in the room (or call) are seldom the ones that can get past canned replies.

- Startups tend to be extremely picky and hype-driven. The language _du jour_, their “triple mocha with a squeeze of raspberry” Agile flavor or someone’s pet organizational methodology (teams/tribes/packs/etc.) usually feature prominently in senior interviews, but even VPs _very seldom_ talk about how they manage people--just product and investors.

As a result, I’ve long stopped applying to “normal” engineering positions (and even senior management ones at startups). I drop out of the process (politely) as soon as I get the first hint of automated tests, ageism or VC hype, and prefer networking and getting to know the culture first.

Even so, I’ve had a few notorious duds--I would talk to a VP, have a great conversation, and then have “peer” discussions with people half my age that might as well have lived inside a bubble (and had obvious gaps in empathy and emotional intelligence), or simply have an “OK, boomer” moment whenever the conversation steered into how they managed people growth or I commented on their org structure.

Or I would go through the _whole_ thing and then be told that they wanted someone at “a different career stage”, even though you ticked all the boxes, talked to around a dozen people, and gotten consistently excellent feedback (that one smarted a bit, because it was in a very niche field I was particularly good at).

My key takeaway is that “vanilla” engineering jobs are most often not seen as being long-term hires that bring in outside experience: they are fresh cogs for an internal hype-driven, Rube Goldberg-like contraption that many tech companies cling to and want to preserve at any cost, and the hiring process (and lack of care in it) mirrors that.

Interviews are so bad because there are too many capable programmers. If there really was a market shortage, companies would not interview like this.

This is the obvious point which needs to be repeated till it sinks in. We are not seeing the evidence we would expect to see if this was a tight labor market.

As a point of contrast, consider American industry in 1942, as the nation mobilized for war. It doesn’t matter what profession you look at, the attitude everywhere was “Just show up and we can train you.” That applied to welders and bolt tighteners and also the engineers who designed tanks and aircraft. Every company was hiring and every company was willing to hire inexperienced workers and then train them.

As someone who interviews, you'd be shocked how many "senior engineers" can't write a function with two for-loops.

If the problem was oversupply, we wouldn't be getting the cushy salaries and benefits we do. I think the issue is more that it's pretty easy for people with no programming ability to appear competent on a resume, especially to a clueless HR rep or headhunter. There are a lot of people out there whose backgrounds look good on paper who can't solve FizzBuzz...

That's what I think every time I see one of these articles but tech companies still have a permanent door into every congressional office to plead the exact opposite while seeking to import more labor into the market.

I think you'd be surprised at the sheer number of unqualified^ applicants that apply though. It's possible to simultaneously have more qualified applicants than you need and even more completely unqualified applicants trying to bullshit their way to a job. Filtering them out can be tricky.

^When I say qualified I mean the informal sense - is able to do the job, not has a university degree.

My God - do we finally have a glut of developer talent now? According to some very simple logic, this really is the only explanation.

There are too many applicants. Not the same thing.

Bad example really. There are many companies where you don't need to know this stuff, Google is not one of them. You want that 350k a year, but you don't know the basics about computer science to find the k-th highest element in a BST, well doh. What can I say...

To be honest, this is really a super simple question and I would be stunned if this was anything but a warmup for you, like the interviewer giving you a simple question to get you into focus. I haven't done anything with BST in years but still I could easily do this with a piece of paper. Back in the days, Google was asking to insert an element in a Red-Black-Tree. Well, this is a clusterfuck and far too specialized. But questions like those were rightfully banned.

Yeah sure, it's not what you do all day, but not being able to answer these questions has implications. There are many code monkey mills where you just write some JS code to hack a webpage together and it would seriously bother me if they would ask you such questions.

Just rethink what you really want. FAANG is not for everyone.

> To be honest, this is really a super simple question and I would be stunned if this was anything but a warmup for you, like the interviewer giving you a simple question to get you into focus.

> Back in the days, Google was asking to insert an element in a Red-Black-Tree. Well, this is a clusterfuck and far too specialized. But questions like those were rightfully banned.

Our blindspots are pretty funny. I can assure you that many people thought Red Black trees were easy enough and if you had a hard time, their advice would be:

> Just rethink what you really want. FAANG is not for everyone

> "The horrifically dystopian world of software engineering interviews"

If you actually read the linked article, there aren't really any interviews.

The OP is just getting let down by recruiters.

I disagree - the recruiters are forced to be the messengers of dysfunction. I've seen some pretty reprehensible examples of this where I actually felt sorry for the recruiters.

There are lots of interviews mentioned in the article.

> If you actually read the linked article...

It seems that you were the one who didn't read the article. He mentions several.

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