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Comment by ryanSrich | Hacker News Reader

It makes sense.

How many creative and truly innovative thinking people do you know that will spend hours studying for and partaking in such a ridiculous interview process? It’s easily one of the top turn offs for me when it comes to FAANG companies. Not because it’s difficult, but because it’s utterly boring, and useless.

It seems these companies are far more interested in hiring very intelligent and analytical type people, but those who have no sense of outside the box thinking. Which in theory makes sense at scale, but in tech your head start will eventually fade, and those same people you’ve hired likely can’t bring you back.

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Here’s what’s funny, amazon and Microsoft are less about leetcode. Google has very hard questions but they are somewhat novel. Facebook has very tough questions but they are basically straight from the book, people getting hired there just need to memorize.

Smaller growth stock companies like coinbase or DoorDash tend towards the Facebook style of interviews.

If you look at stock prices, there’s a near direct correlation between difficulty of leetcode and stock price.

But that maybe because smaller growth oriented companies just need fast memorized results on the job, or it’s just discriminatory

My takeaway has been that the fastest growing (especially consumer-oriented) tech companies put up the highest bars to hiring, simply because they'll still get enough candidates to end up with enough people. IBM can't be as picky as Roblox.

Does that mean one would find themselves in an environment surrounded by bright innovative minds should they go for IBM?

I am not endorsing the innovation idea here. I'm just saying that a well known company that's expected to see a big jump in value in the short term will have too many applicants to reasonably sort through. They can put up arbitrary bars, and arbitrarily high ones, and still manage to hire. Coinbase could disqualify everyone born on Mondays and Tuesdays without seriously impacting their ability to hire, probably

IBM might actually find some. I doubt they could keep them.

I have met a bunch of great ex-IBM people. But they measured their stays in months.

On the other hand, I know very smart people who have been at IBM for decades. It's a big company.

No, because Facebook and IBM aren't the same in terms of culture. My impression of IBM is that you need to file reports in triplicate every time you use a paperclip.

I have worked with and met people from several smaller, freewheeling startups who were either ex-FB, or turned down an FB offer. In all cases the smaller company had a high initial offer that was lower than FB, but also had a more chilled out culture where promos didn't mean the dog-and-pony show it reportedly is at FB (I wonder if FB is, ironically, more bureaucratic than IBM in this regard?).

Maybe look for the type of company you'd invest a lot of money in, where your skillset is considered to be "core business".

That's a texbook "correlation is not causation" observation.

How plausible is it that if you take any startup and populate it with leetcode winners, the outcome will be a high stock price?

>How many creative and truly innovative thinking people do you know that will spend hours studying for and partaking in such a ridiculous interview process‽

I may be posting this defensively, since I practice leetcode to prepare for tech interviews. But I disagree with the assertion that creative and innovative people don't have to put up with process and procedure. Pretty much everyone has to do grunt work sometimes, and it's especially important to "prove your worth" when first meeting a new person or company. The leetcode problems are far from useless, speaking as someone who has given more than my fair share of different types of interview problems. And furthermore the fact that you're willing to put in hours on a skill you don't particularly care about carries valuable signal to employers.

Intelligence is likely when you're knowledgeable but it is not a given.

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