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Comment by 7sidedmarble | Hacker News Reader

Not only does that make no sense in the context of hiring programmers, it doesn't make sense for hiring anyone. Nailing interviews is about impressing someone first and foremost. It's kind of hard to impress when you don't have prior experience to look to.

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While I agree with you, my experience in hiring in this industry for the last few years has been to agree with the parent comment. Once you land an interview, I don't think any of my interviewers even looked at my resume, or cared what it might have said. Most companies, at that point, were 100% and solely interested in my ability to answer leetcode questions. The better companies asked more meaningful technical questions. None asked me about experience, career, projects, skills, etc. And yes, it is a bad hiring practice.

When I was a hiring manager, I specifically designed an interview process that procured me candidates that were great devs that didn't do well in leetcode style interviews, and as a result was able to hire a much better team than I should have been able to at my budget level. We did this, by doing no-brainer things like, actually reading the resumes.

But good hiring practices are hard to scale. Reading a resume or a person is difficult to teach. But a minimally competent leetcode style interview session can be run with some success by most engineers, so it scales. Which means it worked great for some quickly growing tech companies with large amounts of cash and little need to filter questionable resume lists (usually because their name brands guaranteed high level quality applicants). This then became a fad as every company copied the name brand engineering company without wondering if their hiring process had the same constraints as name-brand co, and is now what the industry thinks is 'the one true way.;

They look at the resume. If you are not just OK, then your interview may fix your CV. If you are not the best candidate, just barely OK, your bad CV can fuel worries.

I was asked about my previous internship work experience from my resume by Point72, Salesforce, Google, Addepar, Okta, Iterable, Visa, Veritas from my resume during my interviews.

I work at Google (the only FAANG company in your list). We would ask about it, but it's not a significant deciding factor.

It might be a deciding factor if you get an interview at all, which team you are interviewing with and for which level. Those decisions are made by recruiters, not interviewers or hiring committees.

And a recruiter is not really looking at your resume as anything other than a wordlist with which to shotgun applicants that might earn him/her commission into the process. And then the engineering team just jumps to leetcode. What's so easy to go missing here is the step where the person is interviewed, as a person, by someone who is not a recruiter or equivalent HR screener, and is technically skilled enough to understand the resume. Ya know, in a word, a good manager.

I don't think internal recruiters (what I believe the GP was referring to) get paid a commission.

depends on firms and their work contracts and definition of "internal recruiters"

I definitely read resumes (and ask about it). While it's not the sole criteria for hiring/not hiring, I think it says a lot about the candidate.

People who I have seen hiring definitely read resume prior interview. They did not necessary asked about it directly.

It is not about what your previous job title was, but if you actually have the chops to do the new job.

There are many tricks you can use to get an interview. However nothing abut OPs past shows that he can actually be a productive programmer.

>Dev job at IBM

No details what he did or for how long. I've been in teams with fresh juniors who are amazing. They bring in new knowledge and new perspectives and over all crush the job. Then I've seen juniors who "work" on something for weeks and weeks and when we start for them to demo how far they are we find out that they haven't been able to produce anything working.

>QA at EA

While with normal software I'd say this requires at least scripting skills with games I don't know if that is necessarily true and again probably not a good skill set for getting hired as dev in FAANG

>Cybersecurity team at college

I immediately assume this is some kind of CTF team, which might teach you to use some tools, but again I've seen people in college just "pass through" without really learning anything

If the job OP could do and do well was Amazon help desk then he should aim somewhere between FAANG dev and that position and probably erring on the side of the help desk. The new job will teach them more and in a year or two they can apply for a higher position.

I guess the person aimed for FAANG precisely because they interview skills that are learnable quickly (leetcode) and care less about skill that requires you to grow organically by working on real products

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