There are also a lot of smaller but specialized longstanding loops like front-end, AI... and one off “reqs” for special roles that teams need.
The world of hiring is very fascinating :)
There are also a lot of smaller but specialized longstanding loops like front-end, AI... and one off “reqs” for special roles that teams need.
The world of hiring is very fascinating :)
This is not quite how it works. I was a hiring manager at Facebook for several years. It is made very clear to EMs that team selection is not a second interview or extension of the hiring process. We do not consider team selection part of hiring.
Now, obviously there is a degree of self selection. And if you have multiple engineers coming from boot camp you can, of course, choose an engineer you feel would be more successful. That’s OK.
But I couldn’t turn an engineer down because I felt they wouldn’t be a good ‘fit’ on my team: they’d already been through the hiring process. Conversely, it absolutely can and does happen that people go through the specialist interview loops and end up in a completely different role. For example, you could have spent your entire career writing iOS client code and join a backend server team, no problem.
That’s the theory, in practice of course for some people it does turn into a second phase of hiring, which is very much not the intention.
In fact, I'd say at least some of top tech companies are doing frontend interviews like this. Can confirm with firsthand experience for Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Uber. Go a tier (or more) lower and it seems it's still just leetcode interviews though, barely any different from a general or backend track.
"implement a custom event emitter class in JavaScript" or "implement an image carousel component"...
...instead of something like "invert a binary tree".
Plus you'd get 2-3 rounds of these questions in lieu of the leetcode DS&A rounds. The (usually single) system design round would remain the same (albeit being something like implementing a UI component at a high and holistic level).
As a hiring manager I find it much better to think in terms of a skill mesh. I'm always looking to bring the collective whole forward. A candidate can do that by bringing new skills to the table, by being awesome at existing skills, or some mix of all of the above.
I do notice a substantial difference in average quality between them and less successful Bay Area companies, which does suggest that they are doing a reasonably good job at getting pretty good people in the door.
Even if at the end of the day, it's still a job, I don't think you can get into these companies unless you dedicate a way-above-average amount of time and effort to do so.
Ignore all of the above if you are a natural leetcode wizard; yes I know there are some people like that.
I can't say how true this is or not, but I know there are plenty that _want_ to get in exactly so they can clock in & out without doing much
That being said, I think that it was that they (used to) hire people with drive, give them autonomy and a choice of what to work on from the large set of hard problems, and watch the money roll in.
[0]“The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.”
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Fr... (00:20:40 up to 00:21:10)
Maybe your language isn’t so “brilliant” if some of the smartest programmers in the world still can’t figure it out.
The best coders can demand the highest salary. If you can afford to pay the highest salary you are in an advanced position position to get the best coders. FAANG can afford to pay the highest salary.
Anecdotal evidence to the contrary does not cancel this mechanism.
How would you confirm this with data?
Tons of people remain at jobs they enjoy/companies they like even if they suspect they could probably get a better offer elsewhere. There are plenty of people elsewhere in the country who aren't interested in moving to Silicon Valley and working for one of the large firms.
More generally there's probably some relation between quality (which is an elusive variable to measure and can be dependent on managers/teams/etc.) and salary--but it's far from a perfect correlation.
I'm skeptical about the couple dozen. There are a bunch of reasons someone may choose not to work for Facebook or Google. But all the anecdotal information I see--including the migration of people from and to jobs--suggests to me that it's hard for most companies to outbid FAANG (and probably a few other smaller companies) in general.
By these other companies, I mean more established ones like Linked In or pre-IPO like Slack/Stripe. There are quite a few of them and they are indeed competing with FAANGs for talent. But the FAANGs are going to have larger national spread.
My point is, if someone lives in a 2nd tier tech hub they should have a handful options to make dramatically more than average from one of these companies; but the interviews are tough and whether or not they want to have a conversation in the first place are gating factors.
I think the popularity of untyped languages is one example of that. Clearly worse, you're removing an entire class of embedded test and nuking your ability to refactor safely, but huge chunks of the industry don't see that as a bad thing. I'm a worse programmer because I've spent so much time in Python.
Not really. This is one of those things that sounds correct but when you actually sit down and examine the claim not only is there sparse evidence to support it but it's not entirely clear what the claim even means.
Google cancels so many things, so much work and code tossed, and with entire projects, the point of entire projects axed, how can anyone there feel there's a point to their work?
I'd argue the people at FAANGs are the people who are best at hitting the requirements of a FAANG. That's still a competition and they'll brain drain from smaller companies, but it creates arbitrage on unrecognised ability and other opportunities may exploit that (e.g. starting your own venture relies much more on genuine ability than where you stand on a FAANG progression matrix).
I was contributing to an open-source FAANG project recently and the oversights they'd made in the codebase were surprising to me. There were very basic errors and mistakes and the people managing the codebase didn't understand what some of the functions were even supposed to do. The API wasn't consistent. Tests were testing behaviour that was outright wrong (and, somehow, passing). Feature prioritization was way off. There were half-hearted implementations of some features that were bad enough that they weren't useful. They weren't talking to other departments working on the same basic area (who are also open-source, and hold the state of the art), so there were important features that weren't ported. The project was small, too (but not unimportant).
I don't have high market value, but I was fixing some of these bugs in minutes. The guys managing that project are obviously a lot better than me overall, but I think it betrays a flaw in the institutional structure. Those weaknesses in the codebase would be cheap to fix, the problem is the FAANG standards are such that they are able to go unrecognised.
But they do. You see that happening every time a big company fails. It just takes a while longer because of the inertia the company has built (for example by having made more good than bad hiring decisions in the past).
I understand that good people fly under the radar all the time. Also I understand that there are startups that certainly have a higher skill level than Google does (anything else would be shocking, considering Googles immense work force).
Not all hiring decisions are good. Maybe most aren't. There's just no reason to believe that Google would be any worse at it than Random Small Company, considering that more money and expertise certainly helps when trying to hire the best talent.
Lmao we're not particles in a simulation. Not everybody optimizes for earnings. I optimize for not giving a fuck, so I'll never work at a FAANG. Not everybody wants to trade ten years of their life span for... a modest home in the tri valley and a horrible commute.
As a community are we still stuck pretending that being the real deal will be better for your career than being able to convince other people you are the real deal?