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Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox was known as a hard place to interview since 2014, the tech companies that had the hardest technical interviews are Quora, Palantir and Dropbox(honorable mention fog creek)(this was from a few years back so things may have changed). Just because the company makes it extremely difficult to get in does not mean the company is generally all around awesome or pays great or employs the greatest engineers. It optimizes for people who generally come straight out of an elite CS program with those learned concepts fresh in their mind, and for people who grind out on leetcode or who are great at interviewing. Of the three companies I mentioned above I would not work for any of them now.

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Are you suggesting that these jobs don't mainly consist of quickly banging out dynamic programming and DFS/BFS traversal algorithms as quickly as possible while a stranger stares at you? From interview experience, I assume this is what engineers mostly do at these companies all day.

My brother is an MD and I showed him some Leetcode prep material since I am studying for interviews. Specifically, a problem from Grokking the Coding Interview.

His response - “It would be helpful if they then showed how that is used in real world code“. I had to tell him I don’t think these kinds of scenarios come up often in real-world use cases, haha. They are essentially coding puzzles to filter for people who are good at solving coding puzzles, which may or may not directly translate to being good at writing application code.

We make you prove you know how to implement things correctly in the off chance we ever give you enough time to do so.

Yeah "we are more selective and exclusive than Google and Facebook" was Palantir's whole schtick when they originally took off. And a lot of very smart engineers bought it.

Turns out it takes a lot more than a high leetcode bar for your interviews to run a successful company.

When developers change roles so frequently, being an employer with a reputation for being full of smart people is a good recruiting tactic.

Not because you get good work done, but because people will apply because you look good on a resume.

There's a local agency here in the city I currently reside in that touts they're hiring percentage is lower than Harvard's acceptance rate. They're telling you up front its really hard to get a job there and its a very "bougie" place to have on your resume - as if they're on the same level as the FAANG companies.

The interview process is fairly long, accompanied by an office tour which touts the numerous "Freebies" they offer their employees. Then you find out after the entire process that you'll be getting paid 4050K LESS THAN the industry average. At the time I interviewed with them, I had five years experience in UI/UX and mobile development. What they offered me was essentially what I was making as an entry level dev.

It was easy to turn them down. No amount of free Red Bull is going to pay my mortgage.

Since a good bit before 2014, even. They used to recruit very heavily from MIT (while Palantir was overrepresented at Stanford and Quora at Harvard--all of these reflecting the almae matres of the founders). Note that this was before the popularity of Leetcode and the whole cottage industry around trying to game algorithmic-type interviews. I'm not sure if similar companies founded today would push these algorithm-heavy interviews as hard, since they've probably lost some signal now & prevailing attitudes have changed a bit.

At any rate, it doesn't surprise me at all that Dropbox engineers do better than FANG engineers on these technical metrics. The average Dropbox engineer is almost certainly a bit smarter and a bit better at algorithms than the average FANG engineer. Of course those attributes don't automatically translate into being a better engineer, though, nor do they automatically translate into company success or anything.

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