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Comment by goostavos | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually a little scared to leave my current FAANG gig for that exact reason tbh. I'm fairly certain I wouldn't make it back in the door without more leetcode grinding + repeated loops than I'm willing to do at this point in my career.

Plus, stack on top of that, I've seen how the sausage is made. I've done 90+ interviews on the other side. At the end of the day, it comes down to how lucky you got in the loop. I've seen some people written off for some bullshit reasons. Similarly, I'VE declined on people who're likely far, far, far more skilled than I am because of the lowers/raises approach and the narrow slice you're tasked with reviewing in the 50min you're given.

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I'm in a similar position - a tech lead role at a Big N - and have recently been doing some interviews for senior roles at FAANG. The most frustrating thing is knowing I can't really leverage anything I've learned over the past 7 years of my career in the interview, at least at the early stages. I've been "studying" Leetcode after work for a month or so but always seem to make stupid mistakes under the time pressure of the interview. I don't want to spend my entire career at one company, but it's clear I'll need to be very lucky and/or practice much harder on my own time if I want anything like a similar position/salary elsewhere.

This is something I find so disturbing, and I experience similar.

I feel extremely little of what I'm doing in my real, actual, job, helps me in advancing in my career. Unless maybe if I choose to stay at my current company until retirement lol.

Otherwise, why bother doing anything more than the bare minimum to get by at work? It would be a far better investment of time and effort to grind leetcode and practice for interviews, instead of going above and beyond to excel at my job. At least until I get into an "endgame company" where I feel it's worth staying long term.

If you want a good career, working on your interviewing skills is the most important thing. Networking and resume fluff are close seconds. Job skill is almost irrelevant. It's an ugly truth.

sad but true. hope as an industry we can find a better way.

I think the answer is we need more innovation. We need a million small startups instead of a dozen tech giants. Software scales but starting up is a moonshot.

My personal career epiphany was moving from a tech giant to a late-stage, pre-IPO startup. The amount of freedom and range of challenges I dealt with were exhilarating. Did it pay as much? Not in the beginning, but I was given the room to grow.

What is wrong with the tech industry? What are we doing all of this for?

I've been asking myself the same question as of late, I haven't come up with a good answer yet.

supply vs. demand.

as long as 9 other candidates are willing to run the LC gauntlet, the 10th doesn't stand out.

At some rare companies people ask questions about real-world scaling which has been nice to leverage some actual knowledge but that's usually just a small part of the process and almost treated as a soft-skill which is kind of hilarious.

We just really want to hire a senior dev who can spit out highly optimized code that in the real-world would be handled by a stable open source library rather than people who have built stable systems.

My dream is to have some kind of "working for myself" career like the creators of the Apollo or Overcast apps. Not contracting with companies as clients, just working on one small great project for regular people to use and selling it yourself. It sounds fantastic.

Stop lumping Apple into FAANG in this way. Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google all have centralized hiring. Apple does not and no two groups interview the same and there is tons of latitude for managers to make this lower toil. There is no cross-organization level setting or job descriptions for any position at Apple outside of an SVP business unit. I know from experience working at two other FAANGs that Apple does things way differently. Apple's biggest weaknesses and strengths come from their lack of centrality, but here it is to the benefit of the interviewee since they are given more individual care out at the periphery.

My understanding is Netflix does not have centralized hiring either?

Amazon does not really have centralized hiring. Each team hires for itself, though there are bar raisers from outside the team designed to be a counterweight to desperate hiring managers.

What is the lowers/raises approach? Google isn’t up to the job (pun was not initially intended, but here we are).

I think it’s the candidate vs team. Is the candidate better or worse than half of the team?

Yep. "does this candidate raise the bar, or lower it". I.e., they have to be better than the average at the company already. As decided by you, from 50 minutes of interaction in a completely artificial, stressful situation.

I don't know what company they're referring to but at Amazon, the criteria for hiring someone is that interviewee would be better than 50% of the people currently doing that role at the company. They should 'raise the bar' in order to be hired.

how do you even gauge that? it sounds like you'd need to keep re-interviewing the current people there to make it relative and fair. which of course isnt going to happen so "raising" the bar doesnt make any sense whatsoever

Doesn't this make it (literally) exponentially harder to hire people?

I think that's part of the point. i.e. the usual line about wanting to avoid false positives (bad engineers putting on an act) even if it means sacrificing many false negatives (good engineers who suck at interviewing, or even just simply wasn't having a good day on the day of the interview).

Ironically the modern technical whiteboarding interview often does require the candidate to effectively act and put on a show,

I knocked together a little simulation.

Suppose programming ability is normally distributed with a mean of 100 and and SD of 15 (values cribbed from IQ). A team starts with 10 people drawn from that population.

More applicants are drawn from that population: if an applicant's ability is above the median of the current team, they are hired, replacing a randomly-selected member of the team; otherwise, we pass.

At the first timestep, half the applicants get hired right away. It takes a few hundred total failed interviews to make the 25th hire, and a few hundred thousand(!) for the 100th hire. These have very long tails too: the longest run (of 1000) took 800M total interviews to hire 100 people.

There's no way this rule is actually being applied in practice.

raising the bar would also mean that their pool of people who are merely good enough gets very small very fast and Amazon just doesn't have the reputation to attract the absolute best

Lowers/raises the bar. As part of interview feedback an interviewer is supposed to rate the interviewee as raises/meets/lowers.

Typically, just one lowers in an a loop of 6 interviews is sufficient to reject. On the other hand, a loop with all "meets" isn't a sufficient either. It needs about 3-4 "raises" to overcome just one "lowers". With two "lowers" the candidate won't even make it to the debrief or worse the loop will be cut-short.

The bar-raiser (it's their job) are expected to specifically look for candidates who raise the bar. Raising the bar == better than 50% of "employees" (not job seekers) at their level. The rationale, when the bar-raiser program was created, was that the collective competency in a corporation should increase as more employees are inducted.

Source: I was a bar-raiser at Amazon; 400+ interviews, 300+ as bar-raiser, conducted hiring boot camp, bar-raiser trainings, trained bar-raisers.

How does the organization gauge its success in bar-raising? Did you guys just progressively hire less people over time?

Companies tend to keep track of the onsite success to failure ratio and then if it's too low examine if the bar raising is too aggressive.

Which ends up going in the direction of meetings like "Should we standardize on what questions we are asking in interviews?" or "Should we standardize what pass means or fail means for a particular problem?"

Bar-raiser program didn't have a feedback loop to track its effectiveness. Bar raisers periodically met to discuss topics related to hiring and increasing interview bandwidth but we didn't evaluate the process as such.

That said, the program (like any such program I guess) didn't scale well with the immense pressure on increasing the head-count which in itself was a result of delivering more. Hiring managers and recruiters (who are incentivised to hire more) would rig up interview loops in a way to get their candidates through.

The program itself came under increasing scrutiny (I guess for the right reasons) as being too restrictive. I distinctly remember period between 2008-2012 they hired at a blistering pace, all over the world. In fact in Seattle when they moved into SLU campus the buildings went from empty to nearly 100% occupancy in a matter of year or so. You could even see it based on the number of product launches from 2012 onwards (AWS, the hardware products, new country launches etc.,).

And now Amazon is such a behemoth that it doesn't even make sense to speak about it or analyse it as a single entity anymore. My prediction is in 5-8 years it'll be broken up into at least three companies under Amazon as a holding corporation --- cloud, retail, and consumer devices.

My judgment of Amazon is tainted badly by a bad apple we couldn't fire soon enough - I had the unsavory role to collect evidence for failing the PIP that would inevitably happen. Week after person was let go, he was at Amazon in a pretty good division.

I keep wondering how they hired this person - never in a million years would they have passed a regular hiring chain even with fizzbuzz type questions. Wonder if they had someone stand in for the interviews.

It's often been mentioned that interviewing skills is different from actual work skills. Could be that he's an interviewing wiz but a poor day to day engineer?

Netflix is well known for firing people that don't pull their weight with far more ease than most companies. But a friend who works there tells me there's still people there that perform poorly but somehow managed to get both hired and stay on.

Not unusual at all. Interviews are team specific and people cheat them all the time if they know people on the team. Bar raiser system doesn't work.

> Bar-raiser program didn't have a feedback loop to track its effectiveness

Which itself is a Bar-lowerer.

What about diversity candidates, is the "bar" lower for them? Genuinely curious.

The general approach to dealing with low diversity in a team seems to be to increase the percentage of phone screens being allotted to diversity candidates (which on the other hand reduces the number of non-diversity applicants that get a phone screen).

And not actually lowering the bar during an interview / hiring committee meeting.

If you select for something irrelevant lika race you ofcourse automatically lower the bar on average (and raise the bar for the discriminated race)

While I was there, increasing diversity wasn't a priority for them. Now that I think about it, I don't remember diversity even as a discussion topic let alone efforts to address it.

Yeah, sometimes you may not be thinking straight, a have a little sleep hangover/anxiety Induced brain fog on the day of, and you can say bye bye to the job.

idk if it’s just luck. i’ve had loops in college where i failed them. but then later in my career i had times where i got every company i interviewed at. Excessive preparation was the key difference. I do think luck plays a big part but i don’t think it’s the only factor, or even the biggest. (maybe 2nd biggest)

Luck is likely not far off from preparation in terms of effect though. Luck could be divided up into separate parts like: chance you get an interviewer who asks easy problems, chance you get a hostile interviewer, chance your interviewer is racist/sexist/tabs-ist/hates-your-face, chance your interviewer loves you for no apparent reason, chance your interview is going through a divorce, etc..

I've seen some of the best interviewers I know still fail at various companies. Including ones they were given offers to before. Luck might not be the #1 component but it sure feels like it's not a distant second.

There are some components to the interview you can directly affect, and some you can't.

By grinding leetcode, you raise the odds that you'll get a problem you've seen before, or at least similar enough that you recognize the way to solve it without having to waste time by starting from absolute scratch. I guess that's still luck, but this is one area you can increase the odds in your favor.

You can't change whether you get a hostile interviewer, etc. of course.

i agree but regarding your example about failing companies that you’ve previously had offers from: ive seen this as well. but it was a case of hubris where the person didn’t put in the work to prepare as hard the second time because of their previous results.

the shitty thing about interviewing is you have to prepare hard every time you approach it

While that might be the case for people you've known - I've seen it with people who prepared even more than the last time.

I've also seen the opposite - right? People don't prepare anywhere near as much as the last time and still get offers. I've seen folks get offers at Google and spent maybe a few hours preparing. Luck is just a very wild component.

Yeah, I'm 40+ but takes the time to prepare well for interviews and that has been the key for me. Gotten job offers from all the FAANG's without being very smart. Just go on leetcode and practice for a few months when needed.

This does very unfairly skew towards people like me without kids that can take the time to do this.

Being good at LC requires being smart. Most people won't be able to do "justify text" in 20 minutes without looking up an implementation (and potentially memorizing it).

for me atleast that also came with experience. ie that would have been impossible in my first job search. But repeating the process of searching for jobs a few times over a decade, each time i’m preparing for interviews i’m able to build somewhat on previous times to where problems like that are manageable.

Not really, most questions have answers and discussion threads - during an interview you can see people just writing up solutions flawlessly - they just memorised them. I have interviewed 100+ people.

I don't think regular coding questions, LC tell you anything meaningful in an interview.

I'm more experienced now, so refuse doing it and recruiters and interviewers get all funny about it. But please, please interview. I know I'm pretty privileged compared to others but I won't ever do a LC question anymore and tell that upfront to Google and the likes. I have canceled loops because of the inflexibilty of some companies in that regard.

Sometimes they tried sneaking it in last minute - also tells you much.

Can I ask why you refuse? For me it is more of a formality at this point. I know it won't tell a lot about me, except I cared enough to put in the hours to get this job, but still you have to do what you have to do. I'm pretty senior as well but don't really see why I should not do this when everyone else has to.

In general though the tech industry has a really hard time hiring senior people, perhaps for this reason. I was at Google for 10+ years and did 100+ interviews, HC etc and once you talked to the people in charge of the process they admitted that the process is really weak for hiring senior (L5+ in Google speak) candidates. They in many ways perform worse than new grads in coding interviews which is not really surprising.

So Google hardly hires anyone experience before you get to the director levels (hardly as a percentage of course).

The other well know secret is that if all of us would try to do an interview unprepared we would probably fail.

As someone who refuse myself I simply think it is a waste of my time. It isn't fun, it doesn't teach me anything I find interesting and it isn't a good way of filtering someone.

I would rather be with my girlfriend, play videogames after work hours, watch netflix, go see some friends.

I lost a team member to Amazon recently, he spent 6 months total (two 3 months stints) preparing for the interview. He bombed in the 1st try and passed in the second.

That's 6 months of your life studying after hours to get a job ... I really have better things to do!

He is there now and he says how his work is not as challenging as the one we were doing from a technical PoV and also how the culture is very toxic compared to ours.

Anyways... he is optimizing to retire early so props to him I guess.

I don't do whiteboard coding. When I thought it was meaningful, or might be meaningful, I did it even though I'm uniformly terrible at it. If I was great at it, I might do it even though I no longer think it's meaningful.

But I'm terrible at it, and I don't think it's meaningful, so I don't do it. Admittedly, it costs me some opportunities, but mainly at companies I'm not sure I want to work for, anyway.

At this stage I'm an old fart with a long resume, and more often than not I get hired by people who already know my work. I guess if I was as bad as my whiteboarding performance makes me look then people who know my work wouldn't want to hire me.

So I think this is partially why these questions actually have value. They cannot completely be faked, you need some level of competence even after months of leetcode.

I witnessed someone who couldn't code fizzbuzz end up at our company (OK it could have been an acquihire or something) then get fired, and then immediately hired at Amazon at a pretty good office. I always had a nagging doubt this person paid someone to stand in for the interviews. Thinking back, who actually cross checks this kind of stuff? Unless they know each other personally or take DNA/fingerprints it wouldn't be very hard to pull it off.

Even when you prepare for months, your preparation needs to be related to what you'll actually see in the interview to pay off. Because few companies actually tell people what to expect in the interview, even preparation involves luck.

I was this way too. I got into Amazon via acquisition so I never actually passed a real interview process (though there was a limited one as part of the acquisition).

I transferred teams within Amazon and then left for my current company. I do wonder if I'll ever be willing to put in the work to get a FAANG job again but at the moment I really don't care. I like where I am so I'll just cross that bridge when I get to it. If I want it badly enough at some point then I'll go through the steps. If I don't, I'll just find another job.

I would think that this is partially by design to get employees to second guess ever wanting to leave and explore other options.

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