A confession of a FAANG hiring manager
sagivo.com
sagivo.com
Great article.
An example: one we used a few times was "we decided we want to build a drone for the police. So if a bank is being robbed the cop who arrived first could take it out and it will help solve the crime." Some people would ask a bunch of constraints up front; others would just dive in and ask questions as they went. And they'd think about the problem "so we want to chase the getaway car long enough until a regular copter can get airborne, so let's assume X MPH for Y minutes minimum". Someone else thought "small is probably better because perhaps it can look into the bank when it would be dangerous for a person to try, and we have to assume a lot of them will be destroyed, so cost matters." etc etc.
Another great one is "Jucero (this is just after they collapsed) has inspired us to make a bluetooth-only coffee machine". My favorite candidate started with "even with BT you'll really need a control panel for reasons XXX and YYY. And BT generally won't add much, if anything, but if product management insists, let's think up some halfway plausible use cases..." and then ended up in a discussion of the protocol and how to think about making it robust against failure."
These were always fun, and told us a bit about how the candidate thinks, without the pressure of doing it "right". Often the solutions were excessively elaborate, or missed elements a real product would need, but so what? They were "first drafts" in a situation with some pressure. And who cares about remembering the precise arguments to a function or anything that needed looking up.
And the length of these things helped strain out bullshitters. One candidate immediately said "the best way to solve this is to use an XXX. The other interviewer and I looked at each other excitedly. That was the best way and nobody else had suggested it. The candidate went on to ignore XXX, even when we asked questions in the hope of sending the discussion back that way. It's as if they had said "oh, well for this you'll need an adjustable wing" and then drew a wheeled vehicle that could not fly.
Who can solve a "medium to hard" problem in 15 minutes, on a whiteboard, under stress, twice in a row? Who are they looking for? Leetcode psychos?
Yes :) .
It's known for quite some years that this interview approach produces _those_. By induction, those who have FAANG lines in their resumes are, unfortunately, suspicious for this reason alone. All else being equal, non-FAANG person would get preference on the interview, and seeing somebody applying to FAANG causes both frowns and sighs. One should be really desperate for that these days.
:(
Haha this needs to be said with Zuck's poker face and without a smiley, just "Yes".
Even the slightest problem solving one of those will be a sureshot ding.
I have been burnt doing so many take home exercises, getting ghosted, zero feedback declines that I am drawing a line under the sand and not doing them anymore.
The alternative is prepping for many different interview types, sometimes full of people blindly happy for candidates to burn a weekend in homes of getting a callback, other-times full of unprepared, unmotivated interviewers who pull crappy nonsensical tests out their ass. No thanks. While the leetcode style isn't perfect at least it's reasonably standardized and consistent. I'll stick with that thanks.
There's no shortage of engineers who are preparing months and months on end, solving hundreds or thousands of leetcode problems.
There are coaching institutes, and an entire industry devoted to cracking these interviews.
The financial reward is worth it for most people.
So in essence, the only value in failing at such an interview is knowing what to prepare to clear it later.
I find going into the technical details of projects on the candidates CV quickly sorts them out.
We get to know candidate and the candidate us.
60-75 min is all it takes.
Afterwards we sit together as a team and share our impression, could we see working with them, did anybody see red flags, etc. Maybe 15-30min conversation. Then we reach a go-nogo decision right there and now. No coding questions, no brainteasers or similar. Haven't seen a candidate yet that could bullshit their way through the presentation and crowd consensus decision.
We try to make the candidates as comfortable as can be in a stressful interview scenario by having them talk us through some of their previous work. If that does not do it, i do not know what is. If you feel comfortable to code while others watch, good on you. I personally am not that kind of person.
We try to be mindful of their time by having a single interview with minimal mandatory preparation time and same day feedback.
We want to give them a chance to see how we as a team interact.
By this point I had already spent 8 hours with them. Told them to beat it and stop wasting my time.
It's ridiculous how disrespectful these companies are to our time.
Engineers of the world don't work at FAANG companies, just a very small subset of them. Engineers who want to work there are like teenagers who were told they must study at an ivy league if they want to something with their life. It's a small club, it is not selective at all, it is just not a club that a lot of people would care to join.
What I find more interesting to observe in this post is the recruiter himself. How he was led to believe an awful community was "better" until he realized he had to escape from it, and now he is teaching something that almost every engineer in the world already knows.
So, yes, I'll upvote this one but probably not for the reason I'm expected to :)
Typo. "I was not testing their knowledge..."