Please provide proof that a coding interview makes a statistically significant effect on predicting success in a position, all other things being equal.
I’m also not familiar with other fields, but are doctors or lawyers asked to do anything analogous to code assessments during interviews?
Drive, experience, intelligence, communication skills, teamwork, emotional intelligence, grit, curiosity, physical health, mental stamina, family/home situation, and dozens of other factors play into job performance, many of which you can’t even ask about to generate your test dataset. Many of these traits are what you’re trying to measure the effects of in the interview.
a) Its like saying a Tobacco company has a paper saying smoking is healthy
b) Google measures things that matter to them. The operate on a scale that 99% of companies aren't. Their predictor of success only applies to companies of their scale.
c) What is their definition of success? And how does it apply to smaller companies less than 1000 employees?
What works for Google does not mean it will also work for the 99% of companies that are NOT Google or any other FAANMG company.
This only shows that we have an incessant coding interview cargo-cult around how FAANMG companies interview candidates and several startups taking that to the extreme and thinking they are working on complex Google scale problems.
To these interviewers at these startups still under this delusion and for the 900th time as many have previously said for years as a wake up call:
You are NOT Google.
Read up on HN post on Fast. Someone was commenting one how they failed the interview because the HM wanted someone that wasn't a cowboy. They wanted someone that build microservices like Google. Being a cowboy is what you need to find PM fit. Focusing on microservices when you don't even have enough customers is a huge waste of money and detrimental to your company because of operational complexity. Any changes that should take 5 mins, now takes 3 hours. Fast had so little customers that an engineer suggested that they run the system under a single AWS monolith and was quickly shot down.
But I agree that Google is different than most companies. There the main thing is ads and search and infrastructure to run both of those. They can always use more developers to help optimize the profits of those algorithms or reduce runtime costs, the ROI on that is extremely high so that is what their hiring process is optimized for. Some of their other projects might have done better with a different process, but they don't have much weight compared to the revenue generating projects.
One of the Marques Brownlee videos mentions that when he met Eric Schmidt, Schmidt mentions that every problem Google have were scaling. If you look at it from his perspective, it would make a lot of sense why algo is so important for Google interviews. He applied it not only in tech, but with hiring as well.
Funny how the "objective tests" that leaders apply to grunts never get applied to the leaders themselves.
Ultimately, that's how I think these companies eventually mature. The people that know how to steer the cargo ship retires and you are left with workers that only know how to do the work assigned. Bureaucracy ensues and no one dares to steer for fear it would sink it or get fired for causing unneeded risk. And plus, they don't know how to.