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Comment by moduspol | Hacker News Reader

It'd be a fun social experiment if one of the big tech companies replaced the leetcode-style rounds with something arbitrary. Let's say: The "jumping jacks" round. You have to turn your webcam on and do 100 jumping jacks in 60 seconds. Only then will you potentially advance to the next round.

The person watching on the other end can evaluate how far over 100 you got, whether or not your form matches best practice, and assess how you were breathing in case... you know... they hire you and then there's a business need for you to do 500 jumping jacks in five minutes.

They might not even end up hiring anyone different than they otherwise would.

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I know it’s a jokey example but it has insight.

First, it’s probably illegal in the USA due to ADA unless you could show that it tested something physically related to the job. Example: a big company is required to make accommodation for a, say, qualified analyst who is blind, but can reject a blind candidate for a job that required driving.

But after 45+ years of hiring programmers, the world hasn’t yet figured out which factors are germaine and which are not.

I'm pretty sure that most of the benefit of FAANG-type interviews is narrowing the candidate pool to almost exclusively people who'd be OK to hire. IOW they could just hire randomly from the pool with no leetcoding at all, and likely do about as well.

The trouble is, they actually can't do that because then the pool would change, quickly.

Google actually kept statistics on how much they liked candidates and how well they did after hiring. This has the obvious problem of not tracking those they turned down, or those who turned them down, but they published a paper on the results and IIRC basically found no correlation at all.

But I think like you say, what they did do was create a filter that only very patient and technically qualified candidates could get through. Beyond passing the filter, their very standardized process did not derive any useful information about candidates. But I feel pretty certain if they made an offer to every candidate and not just those on the pass side of the filter line, they would have seen some differences.

My guess is that by the time the self-selection of people who think they're ready to apply and have a good enough shot to make it worth all the time the interviews take, happens, and they get to an in-person (having perhaps passed a less-harsh phone-screen leetcode question), most further leetcoding isn't doing much aside from keeping the self-selection effect strong.

The other parts of the interview might be doing something per se useful, I suppose.

Pretty awesome pace if you can do a 100 in a minute.

https://youtu.be/u81LxIlLGnc

Looks like a solid $300k/yr+ software engineer to me. Can you send me his LinkedIn?

You should see the 10x engineer's jumping jacks.

I like that idea. It pretty much performs the same basic function that LC advocates say that it does -- "Okay maybe it doesn't really measure useful skills, at least not in proportion to how they're actually used, but hey, it at least measures their determination to get the job, and their willingness put up with utter nonsense, which is of course hugely important to us" -- and is much quicker. At at least gets you out of your chair, and your circulatory system refreshed and oxygenated.

Have you heard of Amazon's "LP" interviews? It seems to be a little bit like that. The challenge there is to tell a number of well-rehearsed stories.

I'm going through job interviews now (not with Amazon, but others). The whole thing feels like well-rehearsed regurgitation. Well, and a smidge of acting, obviously, because you don't want it to come off as well-rehearsed. But they know exactly what they want to hear and you're competing with other candidates who see the same writing on the wall and are doing their own rehearsals.

I thought it was just the leetcode, but it's the behavioral questions and system design exercises, too.

Eh, I'm coming across as cynical. I'll be fine--I just wish we (as an industry) had a better system.

No it’s totally right. Going in cold is basically impossible. You have to be ready to regurgitate leetcode answers, “approved” system designs, STAR stories about your career that show various BS story arcs. And of course pretend like you’re not just regurgitating for… reasons. It’s all a bizarre cargo cult acting session at this point. Big companies even send you a study guide these days ffs

Amazon sent me a study guide......I told the recruiter I'm going to pass.

Until, I don't have a job I'm not grinding leetcode. I also dislike people who refer to themselves as ex-faang. I really don't care.

LP style of interview optimizes even more towards storytellers and fair bit of BS purveyors. The entire process is far too impersonal to drive any real and effective assessment.

I get the sense that, because of Amazon's roots as a bookseller, they still like to optimize for people who are a bit more well-spoken and well-read, compared to other FAANGs. At the executive level, PowerPoint is banned and all meetings start by reading a well-composed multipage memo.

Being able to tell a great story might not be highly valued at most orgs, but I think it's part of Amazon's culture and something they desire in their skilled positions.

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