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Comment by sidfthec | Hacker News Reader

> FANG still has a very low (<1%) success rate.

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.

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> That's misleading. If you're able to get an interview, the success rate is much much higher than 1%.

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.

I'm also an interviewer at a FAANG. 2% is extremely low, and would be a massive waste of time. You have to interview 50 people to fill one role? Complete waste of time.

Maybe your FAANG experience is different than mine, but 2% means either you're very picky or your hiring pipeline is awful.

You misunderstood me.

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.

Which strengthens my point.

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.

I wanted more people to be approved.

But I didn't make the rules, I just worked there.

so only 1 out of 50 people can solve a leetcode medium?

In my experience, FAANG leetcode questions are generally pretty easy. Once in a while, one of the interviewers just tries to flex on the interviewee and just throw out a trick question that may be easy in the right mindset, but not really a good question.

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.

You hired 1 in 50 people you interviewed? Did you have time for anything else? Were you not constantly angry at the rest of the hiring pipeline for wasting your time?

I approved 1 in 50 I interviewed.

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.

That’s not completely true.

Time spent interviewing has an opportunity cost in terms of learning new things or working on promotion-grade projects.

I didn't want to be promoted. I prefer getting raises by changing jobs.

I studied new things on the side (very important for switching jobs).

I think at Google about 10% passed phone screen, and then 10% of those passed onsite.

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.

And yet, look at where this beautiful grinding machine got them.

I interviewed 50+ candidates at a FAANG and never saw a hire

Once again recruiters emails almost everyone with a pulse.

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

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