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Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

I remember talking to a senior person at FB (wears a suit on friday). I asked "how is hiring?". Their response: terrible. People like this OP game systems, know how to test, understands what the boss wants, know ahead of time the questions they will be asked, etc. They have gamed the entire system. So! They tend to get through the interview with ease. The problem is... now what. What is the next thing they need to game? Turns out, they are in it for the 'game' itself. Eventually they wake up, realize their life now is to ensure people click on FB ads. Basically, they finished the last level on Mario Bros. and now begin a bizarre existential crisis.

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I don't understand what you mean by "people like this OP". They don't say that they struggled with the hiring process or feel like a fraud. Rather they seem to be easily capable of the work.

Actually I'm not sure what any of your post is about. Your friend doesn't like their job because they're hiring people to make facebook ads more effective?

Hiring doesn’t show whether you’re capable of the work, it just answers whether you might be hired.

The reply here is entirely in line with the poster; they didn’t say anything about feeling like a fraud, they said candidates in tech minmax career choices with no thought as to their actual purpose.

And yeah anyone remotely self-aware would feel disgusting working on adtech. It’s just that most tech workers do not think about such things.

Some of us end up working at jobs infinitely worse than adtech, the public service.

What? What do you mean by worse...

Worse as in you try to get things done in a cost effective way in order to deliver value to taxpayers but have to deal with lifers, deadwood, and clueless managers who are completely risk-averse. I know. I work in the public service.

Right there with you. Not saying I'm a bright shining star, but it is amazing the level of incompetence you sometimes run across. It is legitimately the first place where I've found people who actually cost time/resources for anything they touch or interact with.

The other thing is the supreme deference to rank at the cost of initiative.

It was mind blowing coming from a more competitive corporate world.

And in addition slacks as much as he can get away with. There is that option where even if it looks like you can get away with working only on Mondays spreading results, you would work on Tuesday, Wendsday etc too.

I was in the same boat as OP a few years back at an old grimy tech megacorp. I worked my ass off, and couldn't make any progress because of terrible tools, terrible teammates, terrible process. It was a fucking nightmare.*

If that'd been my first tech job, I might have just ragequit the whole industry.

Fortunately, I'd already been around the block a couple of times, so I knew that I just had a particularly bad team at a mediocre company. I hopped ship, and everything was great at the next company.

*A bad job:

My teammates were annoyed any time I asked them any questions. "Just read the code! It's in the code!" Yeah, OK, I'll spend 8 hours digging through this fucking code when you could have spent 10 minutes explaining it. I think this is probably the worst thing for productivity I've come across in my career. Any time someone asks you for help at work, DROP EVERYTHING AND FUCKING HELP THEM. Teach them how to fish, too, don't just walk them through things. Show them where you're finding documentation, show them the local equivalent of a man page, introduce them to the people with the tribal knowledge. If they spent an honest 10 minutes trying to figure something out on their own, it's part of your job to go help them out.

I'd fix a bug, then have to go to meeting after meeting after meeting to try and get permission to check in my fix. It'd often be either rejected, or I'd have to redo the same handful of lines of code a dozen times before I could get it in.

I'd have to set up some internally-developed test infrastructure, but it was a 40 step procedure to get the tool running and if any one of those steps went wrong, you'd have to go back to the start and start over. Nobody who was familiar with it was willing to walk me through it, so it took an incredible amount of willpower to force myself to get that shit set up.

There was another team working on the exact same thing as my team in another org, but we weren't "tented" (AKA: "disclosed") on each other's super secret projects, so we weren't allowed to work together at all or share any information. My team hated the other team, and they in turn hated our team. (I knew this because I had a close personal friend on the other team)

The development environment was almost completely paralyzed by company-wide bugs. The company was sharing a single insanely gigantic codebase across thousand and thousands of engineers, and there'd be month+ long stretches where the build and tools were broken. Since things were broken so long, people would check in new build breaks without realizing it, and it ended up in a vicious circle of badness.

And of course, the product we were building was a useless piece of crap that everybody hated.

If you're hiring smart people and they get into your company and find no way of succeeding, that's because your company sucks, not your hiring. This person isn't complaining that the job is to make people click on facebook ads, they're complaining because the company is so badly organised that 90% of the time is wasted not even on doing the job.

He didn't say they were hiring smart people, he said they were hiring people who could pass the interviews.

But there's literally nothing to indicate this person isn't smart. There's evidence that they are smart- they passed the interview, which let's face it, might not be perfect but certainly requires some level of intelligence. There's nothing int he Op post that indicates they're not capable of doing good work, only that they're in a situation where they and their colleagues aren't.

Smart enough to know yourself > smart enough to pass interview.

Knowing oneself has little correlation to intelligence as far as I can tell.

It's a wisdom skill.

Any effective 'theory of mind' requires intelligence.

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

I knew a very smart guy who even won some competitions and such.

He never found a company or position where he would be productive. He was "demotivated" in multiple companies (I met his former colleges from other companies who confirmed and seen him in multiple teams).

Reminds me of Paul Graham’s essay: http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html

“I had avoided working for big companies. But if you'd asked why, I'd have said it was because they were bogus, or bureaucratic. Or just yuck. I never understood how much of my dislike of big companies was due to the fact that you win by hacking bad tests."

What you are trying to say sounds interesting, but not entirely clear. Was the FB exec complaining that when they hire, they are getting what they asked for ? Ie people who are very good at tests.

They hire people who can pass algorithm tests, those same people once employeed game the performance review process. You can't fire them because they "meet expectations" but they also have no interest in maximizing their impact towards helping the company succeed.

For example, if the company gives you a goal of contributing to OSS you could add some feature that no one asked for and contribute 200 lines of code quickly. Or you could debug and fix a bug that many people complained about and that may take much longer and may be just a one line change. But your manager doesn't have the time to drill down into the details of that on your performance review. So the bug fixers looks worse than the feature adder during performance review.

You could say the problem is management for having a bad review system but as soon as they update the review system it will be gamed by the people who don't care about the company.

This is a side-effect of hiring smart people to do simple work.

These companies optimize for hiring people who've spent their live trying to beat the next "level" of their lives with a bigger score than all of their peers. And once you have them, you make them QA the game of life on easy mode. Some people will invent some meager challenges to stay sane, and others will just be bored and miserable without a challenge and the prestige that comes from overcoming them.

Maybe the focus on leetcode is not the best way to hire.

Every company wants to automate or streamline the hiring process to get warm bodies in chairs in front of computers.

What about culture and vision? What type of people do you really want working for you? A cog?

The only thing I disagree with is that it's "bizarre." I think on average people have 6 careers in their lives. And people change jobs every few years as well. It's just a part of life to improve or change what you work on and there is no shame in that. I've worked in the bay area for almost 4 years at the same company and I think about changing things all the time.

>And people change jobs every few years as well.

That's a fairly tech (and probably Bay Area) view of the world. I've been ~10 years or longer at three separate companies and I know tons of people in the same boat.

If you look at leetcode style interviews this is pretty much exactly how I'd expect it to end up. FB probably is worst as most people would only go there for the money.

I have a different take: Nothing really wrong with gaming the system. If someone has successfully "gamed" the interview but not effective at their role, then the interview isn't testing the candidate for the role and sounds like a broken interview loop.

I'm struggling with the purpose of my job too.

I’ve been struggling with just purpose in general for years. I’m a husband and father - those are supposed to be my purpose. But sometimes I don’t feel very good at them. Hang in there. We’ll figure this all out.

Me too. I've stuck with my miserable job for the last 4 years so I can support them. I feel like if I quit I'd be failing them.

I'm probably not one to be giving advice but I feel like your family might gain more from having a happy fulfilled parent with less wealth possibly? How that might affect you/the way you act/the things you do day to day could be more valuable long term. Obviously thats ignoring a lot e.g. finances, practicality.

That would be nice, but I'm responsible for all our bills and I can't get a job that pays the same or better due to my experience in obscure tech, like Neoxam.

I'll just continue to grind in this job until I get fired, die, or hopefully can retire someday (maybe coastFI).

Yeah, it's never simple unfortunately. Good luck all the same.

You too!

Feeling like you're not doing well at something is a key motivator towards growth & getting better. And yet through growth you have to grapple with the truth -- you're not doing as well at something as you could be. Some days I really struggle because the more you're growing the more you'll deal with intrusive thoughts that originate in that growth. Like you said -- keep going :).

Yeah, I'm familiar with the pyramid/staircase of mastery and the inertia period as it pertains to intrusive thoughts.

I like to learn new things, struggle (within reason), and iterate on my previous attempts or prototypes to build a better product that I can be proud of. I did this when I was building my android apps and loved it.

My problem is that the company sets us up for failure and doesn't even realize it. The business consistently gives us terrible requirements. They can't build a business process map or anything else to describe the processes they follow. They constantly miss big pieces so we end up with systems that are spaghetti code to cover all these things they miss.

The company also views struggling with new tech or roles as a negative. They don't provide any real training either, but I guess the Plural Sight self-learning trend is more of an industry thing. I joined my new team about 4 months ago and worked on a AWS Lambda in Python, Slunk alerts/dashboards, Tableau dashboards, and I have no training in any of it. I had to self-teach AWS (2 certs), Python, Splunk (User cert), and Tableau. The demoralizing part is that little of this seen as valuable. I can't improve my career by "developing" Tableau or Splunk dashboards. I need to have a steady diet of AWS and Python where the requirements are 90% there so I can architect and develop elegant, or at least practical, solutions to an interesting business problem.

I've gotta read up on the staircase of mastery cause I am not familiar :D

When you say self-teaching you mean you're paying for certs/doing on your own time? Or work is paying on one hand but going out after it isn't seen as valuable on the other? I'm just curious but by no means am I saying that there's not just bad situations to get out of, just that discomfort and feeling like you're not doing well aren't _solely_ reasons to leave. Hope your situation improves though, sounds like you're doing the work.

They will pay for AWS certs (contract price goes down as certs in org go up) and a few others, but you have to do it on your own time, which is fair.

I guess the better way to put it is: would you assign Tableau work to someone who has no training or experience in it and then tell them they are taking too long? The only way to do it is to learn it as you go, which is going to be slower than someone who is trained. I really want to become an expert in something useful/marketable like AWS and Python, but these no-value assignments are throwing a wrench in that.

Hysterically this usually "turns" for a company right around the point where someone successfully pitches they really need someone coming to the office in a suit on a Friday to signal seriousness.

Formal Friday was a very loose excuse for a happy hour, I assure you :)

This is on the companies themselves. You show young talent some kind of game then that's the game they'll play.

https://youtu.be/FNEDJPeoHZo

Reminds me of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

considering that the entire point of programming is to automate your job, i'd say it's just about right.

But they can always point to their resume, which lists a prestigious faang company.

I worked for a well-known tech company for a couple years, with a grueling interview process. I regularly get cold called by recruiters asking me about "my time at X".

So it's a good thing, from a career perspective. Whether it's a worthwhile thing of itself is a personal choice.

Does this ever get old? From what I've seen, former FAANG hires get paraded around like some exotic pet at some smaller companies. It's kind of cringy as an onlooker. I once worked at a place with executives who had "hire 3 people from google" as a KPI.

It's cringey as hell, but from a "making my career" perspective, it's clearly valuable to many in charge of hiring.

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