On one hand I felt like I was blowing major opportunities by not trying. But something just felt off when receiving so many sudden contacts from the largest of companies offering remote work, despite working in tech for over a decade and never hearing from them before.
FANG still has a very low (<1%) success rate.
So, don't assume that just because you got a recruiter email you'd be qualified to make it
That's misleading. If you're able to get an interview, the success rate is much much higher than 1%. Can you imagine the wasted effort if it was 1%? And I assume if you're getting a recruiter to email you, you can usually get an interview.
The 1% number I always see should include those who try to apply without recruiters emailing them.
Nope.
I was an interviewer for one of the FAANGs. My approval rating was around 2%. And I was one of the most lenient ones, at least in my org.
The actual hire rate was lower than that. Maybe much lower. As I said, I was one of the most lenient ones. I did my best to approve, while still remaining within calibration and hiring guidelines.
I interviewed people over the course of years. I was a developer, so interviewing was not my main role.
And I never felt angry about having my time wasted. I work for money. As long as the company is paying me, what they want me to do during billable hours is at their discretion.
Time spent interviewing has an opportunity cost in terms of learning new things or working on promotion-grade projects.
I studied new things on the side (very important for switching jobs).
It isn't that bad, interview one per week and you end up hiring about one person per three years (5 interviewers per onsite, so about 50 there and 100 phone screens). Most people interview 1-2 times per week there, and that was roughly how fast they grew, so the numbers adds up.
Maybe your FAANG experience is different than mine, but 2% means either you're very picky or your hiring pipeline is awful.
I approved about 2% of candidates.
The actual hiring rate was much lower, meaning that even when I approved them, they ended up being rejected anyway.
Either your org was way too picky, or your hiring pipeline was absolutely awful.
There's no real reason to interview 100 people and only hire 0-2 of them.
But I didn't make the rules, I just worked there.
I’ll call out Google specifically for this. They seemed to just make up their own questions. Difficultly ranged from basic coding to a math brain teaser with a lot of easy graph questions in between.
For context: this was last November.
Edit: lost the point in my rant - 2% approval is probably the result of flexing.
I met a guy on a train, who was working as a server, but just had some HTML on his resume. Like OP, most of these people wear that as some badge and can get into FANG anytime. Reality hits when they actually do reply and actually make it through phone screen
Amazon, Meta, Google were contacting people all over LinkedIn etc and everyone had an interview prep kit that you needed to study in order to get in.
The FOMO was real but it felt so weird and robotic. I rejected all of them. One meta recruiter was even offended when I said no to them. The extra € were not worth the hassle and I’m glad I didn’t going there FAANG rat race in the past 2 years.