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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

your priorities are different than basically everyone else

you are shortchanging yourself or wealth is not important to you, we are not the same and your reality is not relevant to anyone similar to me

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Not "different than basically everyone else". Different from you, which is fine, but jeremymcanally speaks for a lot of us.

> you are shortchanging yourself

You seem to have the idea that a job at "that kind of place" is the only real fulfillment of our employment destiny. That seems a bit narrow-minded of you.

> or wealth is not important to you

This assumes that jobs at "that kind of place" pay much better than jobs at "other kinds of places". That may in fact be true, or at least mostly true. (Or it may be that, to get to the stratosphere of income, you have to jump through those hoops, but other places will make you jump through those hoops and still not pay that kind of money.)

Money is important to me. I am a for-profit enterprise. But it's not the only important thing. It's worth some money to me to work in a sane environment with non-toxic people.

Extrapolating that a company with a coding brainteaser interview process unrelated to the job would also have an insane and toxic work environment is incorrect.

There is no correlation.

No correlation between an insane and toxic interview environment and an insane and toxic work environment? I don't expect 100% correlation, but none? That seems rather implausible.

The team and manager dictates what your work environment will be like.

All big tech does these interviews and does match making later.

Smaller companies also just have no guidance on a better interview process.

So, no correlation.

So at a big tech company, you're saying that a technical manager has never spoken to an interviewing team? That these kinds of questions materialized from thin air without any sort of technical oversight.

In the small company case you're saying if there was only one employee, looking to hire you as the second employee. There is no correlation between the one person you work with and the asinine questions you were asked in the interview?

Again I think the point was you are correct that it must be taken with a grain of salt, but to say there is "no correlation" is false. There is no way to prove the impossibility of a situation.

The point of language is to convey a shared concept, is that what you are doing? It seems like we already achieved that, which word choice would you prefer over “no correlation” to convey the same concept that there is not a useful signal to glean from an industry standard interview process

What word choice would we prefer? "Some". As in, "there is some correlation".

The issue isn't word choice. The words express what you're trying to say perfectly well. The issue is that we think you are wrong. Simply choosing different words isn't going to fix that.

I’ll wait for the other person to chime in

The “no” was to emphasis “negligible” correlation

Really? I mean I've worked at GitHub, Apple, and now Sequoia Capital and get paid pretty well. I'd say wealth is a pretty important factor to me in choosing a job.

I'd just rather find teams in those organizations that don't have ridiculous interviews and therefore often times cultures that view success in that kind of endeavor as something to be lionized. That or I want to fail out because I'm not qualified.

I interviewed for two teams at Apple. One had a brain-teaserish interview (not totally that sort of stuff but involved a lot of whiteboarding arbitrary things) and one had nothing like that. I'll let you guess which team I chose and additionally guess which team ended up having a healthier culture. :)

But you're right, my philosophies on this stuff probably are different than a lot of folks, and that's OK. That's why we have different teams, jobs, cultures, etc. I just optimize for things I like, and I hope other folks do the same!

Sure, once your in the club you can be picky. But to get in the club these days means leetcode interviews.

I've never done an interview at a place like that where I've worked (even in my early career), but you're very, very likely correct if you want to get into a FAANG early in your career without being able to "shop" around. My experience isn't universal to be sure, but neither is the opposite. :)

Leetcode interviews are thing everywhere now. The days of getting an interview from medium/large firms because you have 20+ years of experience on your resume are over. A lot of companies use “online assessments” with timed leetcode problems that require presumably perfect scores to even get a human on the phone. They seem to range from comically easy (Amazon) to impossibly difficult (Microsoft). I highly suspect they are outsourcing this and the questions are chosen randomly, as the difficulty varies wildly for identical positions.

Maybe this is a recent pandemic thing, not sure. I started job searching this year and I’m totally blown away by leetcode-ification of hiring process.

There’s a few notable exceptions- Facebook and google will fast track based on resume, and some medium sized companies if you’re applying for a specialist position. Otherwise you’ll be spending nights and weekends drilling all the silly leetcode tricks into your skull.

You sound like someone I wouldn't want to hire.

when the third party recruiter shops my resume to your inbox, you’ll see a qualified candidate that will be pretending to be enamored by your startup’s “unique” vision, thinks earning the privilege to buy 0.001% of the company is the most generous thing ever, and knows all the code words for culture fit by having no interests outside of coding and hiking and you will never know it was vmception on hackernews

Fair point

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