Comment by MontyCarloHall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MontyCarloHall | Hacker News Reader

One big issue with tech hiring is that the vast majority of the interview pool consists of terrible candidates. Good candidates get callbacks for (almost) every job they apply for, choose to interview at a few select companies, and get offers from most of the places they interview at. Thus, they’re only briefly in the interview pool. On the other hand, terrible candidates are constantly getting rejected at every step of the process, and must continually re-insert themselves into the interview pool, and thus comprise the vast majority of interviewees.

Because of this, the interview process is not designed to efficiently handle the minority of qualified candidates, but rather efficiently weed out the majority of horrible candidates. It is therefore a terrible process for the people actually qualified to pass it.

(Note that the majority of the interview pool being terrible does not mean the majority of programmers are terrible. Assume 80% of developers are great, and 20% are bad. If the great 80% of developers only need to interview at one company to get an offer, while the bad 20% need to interview at 10 companies before either getting an offer or giving up, then only 0.8/(0.2*10+0.8)=28% of actual interviews will be with qualified candidates.)

Many engineers who I know as friends/excoworkers who are in top companies (including but not limited to FAANG) barely eeked by into their job, usually with a large string of failed interviews behind them. All of them consider themselves extremely lucky that they landed a job at a great company and believe that if they had to re-interview for the same position, odds are much more likely they'd utterly fail it.

Yet they are currently working at highly respected top tech companies and are accorded a certain "elite" status by many of their peers at less prestigious/selective companies.

My best friend is at Netflix and constantly dreads ever having to interview for another job again because he's dead certain he will bomb the leetcode rounds because he hasn't looked at an leetcode problem in five years. Even his current job at Netflix he considers having obtained through sheer luck, and he says none of his experience working at Netflix is of any help in solving leetcode problems.

I quite often hear stories on here, Blind, Reddit, etc. of people who manage to land multiple simultaneous offers from FAANGMULA+ but have yet to meet such a person.

> because he hasn't looked at an leetcode problem in five years

Am I the only one who feels like he could spend a week preparing and shred through any sort of reasonable algorithmic problem testing anybody would throw at me?

When is the last time you touched algos before?

Of course not, but why would anyone assume that me, married, with children and a full time job has any inclination whatsoever to spend a whole week going over a bunch of stuff I’ll most likely never use again.

First of all, I want to spend my limited free time doing other (fun) things, but more importantly, it insults my pride.

You never know what they’ll ask, so full prep is impossible.

The bar is probably higher than five years ago too? A few friends at Google who got in 10+ years ago tell me that there is no way in hell they could pass the typical interviews being conducted there today.

I also think he could prepare himself for such interviews. But, one week? Well, that depends:

- is it one week as in 7 days off, and spending at least 8h/day? Then I would say, it may be enough. It just takes one problem you haven't seen before (you haven't prepared for) and you are out.

- is it one week as in 5 days, and 2h/day (let's say, after dinner?). Then I don't think 1 week is enough. Around a month would be needed to match the previous scenario

> All of them consider themselves extremely lucky that they landed a job at a great company and believe that if they had to re-interview for the same position, odds are much more likely they'd utterly fail it.

Hmmm... this makes me wonder if these kinds of interview strategies aren't promoted at such companies precisely because they make candidates feel more grateful and therefore less likely to leave, less likely to refuse overtime work, less likely to protest anything, etc.

Yes, and it increases the cost to explore other companies.

I'm in this camp, and to top it off, I interview folks. It really is unfair to expect someone to be able to do something I myself probably wouldn't be able to do right now off the cuff.

> I quite often hear stories on here, Blind, Reddit, etc. of people who manage to land multiple simultaneous offers from FAANGMULA+ but have yet to meet such a person.

It doesn’t seem so surprising? They all require you to do and say the same thing, so by the time you can do those things well enough for one, you can do them well enough for all of them (in this case regurgitating leetcode while seeming marginally likable).

The only surprising thing is to land an offer at around the same time at multiple companies, especially the ones with very long interview cycle.

I’d bet money that this is imposter syndrome at work, and that with a couple days of refreshing they’d pass interviews no problem.

There is always variability, and I think good interviewers actually help candidates a decent amount.. so if you get a bad interviewer they’d fail but that’s not on them. I’d bet they’d pass most interviews.

Doesn't impostor syndrome imply mistakenly feeling that they are not qualified to do their work? I think this is different because said people seem to be great engineers and confident at their actual job. What they are not confident is in their ability to be Professional Interviewers/Master Leetcoders, which is a skillset almost completely divorced from their actual work.

I just landed a new job at a FAANG-level company two months ago. Not surprisingly, my actual work has no commonality with my Professional Leetcoder skills. I haven't looked at a leetcode problems since I got the offer and I fear my skills have already atrophied.

> All of them consider themselves extremely lucky that they landed a job at a great company and believe that if they had to re-interview for the same position, odds are much more likely they'd utterly fail it.

I expect we'd see this absolute disaster of an interview "process" fixed overnight if every company required their employees to re-interview for their position yearly (through some blind process so the interviewer isn't aware they're interviewing someone who already works there - yes I'm aware this won't work for small companies... it's not going to happen to begin with so let's just pretend :P).

Every company would immediately start a "task force" to fix their interview process once they reject (and then fire) 90% of their staff after the first re-interview.

Interesting, my experience is the opposite. I find various leetcode and "software architecture" questions extremely hit-or-miss, and my experience interviewing is, either I fail at the very beginning stages (CV review or first 2 interviews), or get to the end (offer stage). The very bimodal distribution is inconsistent with both options in your hypothesis (i.e. either the "terrible" or the "good" candidate).

>The very bimodal distribution is inconsistent with both options in your hypothesis (i.e. either the "terrible" or the "good" candidate).

it is completely consistent. When you fail at the very beginning you're a "terrible" and when you get offer you're a "good" one. The "terrible"/"good" isn't innate characteristic, it is in the eyes of beholder ... err ... interviewer. Most places pride themselves on taking only top 1|2%, and thus most candidates at any given place are "terrible" by definition, and thus the interview is built as the filter described by GP. Of course everybody hiring top 1% means that pretty much anybody would get to be a "good" at some place.

> either I fail at the very beginning stages (CV review or first 2 interviews), or get to the end (offer stage).

I can echo this, same experience here and ended up landing a nice role at a big company while being rejected for objectively worse roles at tiny companies and startups. For the last round of applications, I applied to 10-15 companies, only got an interview with 2 and got an offer from both (and both raised their offers to counter the other).

"Good candidates." I guess everyone who gets stuck in interview hell is an idiot based on your comment? Why would someone who's not trash get stuck? They wouldn't, I guess! Must be trash engineers just out there wasting everybody's time!

I am awful at tech interviews. I mess up leetcode and puzzle questions even aimed for new hires. I get stuck on the wording in the question where the interviewer takes it personally if I don't understand. Sometimes I get my languages mixed up in google docs with no syntax assistance and for example could declare a new java String as a var string javascript style because I got distracted while talking to the interviewer.

I have 5-10 years working as a software engineer / architect. I am frequently put on critical projects, including running 10's of thousands of critical government servers. When tech leads quit, I fill in the gap. In an actual business setting, I'm great at picking up new languages. I frequently code review the work from our top engineers and always find spots for big optimization or critical flaws, such as security issues. I'm not nitpicking for little changes-- These are real considerations.

I've done front end work, back end work, created template code for other engineers, worked with the senior sql developers, senior security staff, the original legacy coders, and the senior devops on scripts. I get put on projects where I'm the only one, and been on teams of up to 20 people. I also monitored splunk and had every error sorted out: New errors I could identify the exact code spot and the original PR in minutes to fix problems. I did this on the side to monitor my work and was asked to speak to the entire engineer team on multiple occasions to get others up to speed.

I'm naturally "good" at a lot of things. I hate any degree of bragging like this. I'm so tired of seeing engineers brag about themselves-- It sounds like they're dismissing everybody else's skills. But this comment is just to just show I'm not someone who comes in and can't figure out an easy story and who refuses to try to ask for help or learn on their own and they just give up work as soon as possible. I legitimately try and put a lot of effort in to my work, and I figure it out. But none of this matters in the current process.

You don't have to say how great of an engineer you are to say that you think coding interviews are terrible.

And the person you're responding to also agrees they are terrible for qualified candidates.

Yes. The market is tight, and mostly full of un-hireables.

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