My spiciest take on tech hiring
haskellforall.com
haskellforall.com
- 30 minutes of basic theoretical questions: SOLID, design patterns, DDD, clean architecture etc. just to get an overview of what they know and what their experience is, and if we'll have to assign them some courses later
- 30 minutes of a practical task: they're given a very bad piece of code (1 screen), and their task is to review it. Things like: SQL injection, lack of transactions (data consistency), lack of locks, bad variable names, bad program structure etc. The review is interactive where the interviewer can give tips. Usually it gives a pretty accurate picture of their actual experience/skills, and weeds out 99% unfit candidates.
If all is well, there's then 1 hour interview with CTO to check the soft skills: motivation, corporate culture fit, they also negotiate the salary (based on the previous interview)
We don't do leetcode and don't ask to write a test project.
Observations:
- many candidates who are good at theoretical questions completely fail the code review: i.e. they simply memorized it without deep understanding
- there are candidates who are not good at theory but pretty good at spotting most problems during the code review. For us, it's usually OK. It's often good self-taught engineers.
Anyone know a good resource for something like this?
I think if you really want to preserve your culture long term, you need to start looking to exporting your culture outwards into general society rather than filtering things in. Try to make the general candidate more like you in the first place.
Google could have made the world googley, but they kept the googley to themselves.
Google can't build anything, only buy.
1. They quite obviously put the bean counters in control. Google famously originally said "they were a different kind of company", and early on, they were. But it was a leadership decision to forever squeeze each additional penny out of their ads systems. I think some people may put the "turning point" as to when Ruth Porat joined, but I think it's colossally unfair to blame her - after all, she did a phenomenal job raising the stock price, which is basically the job of the CFO. But setting the vision and goals for the company comes from the very top.
2. Regarding their lack of ideological diversity, that was also a very conscious decision. I went to a Google hiring event about 8 or 9 years ago, and the hiring manager was very clear that her number one goal was increasing diversity by raising levels of underrepresented groups, and it was stated as a source of pride. Not technical excellence, not innovation, etc. If anything I think that mindset was inculcated at some of the elite tech companies before society at large.
But my point of how internal culture gradually changes is in effect an exportation from another culture to this one. If the toxic practices you are describing were to begin to become relentlessly exported to the environment around you, remaining defensive dosen't work long term. You'd need to push back.
It popularized algorithmatic puzzles via Google Code Jam way before LeetCode was a thing. I might be completely mistaken, but Google seems to be the one company that popularized free food among SV companies.
And they have a slogan that became a meme, while not necessarily in a positive way.
Once you've read someone's resume you should have a pretty good idea whether or not you want to hire them. The interview should confirm that they can discuss their relevant experience and address any potential concerns that you might have without raising red flags.
Beyond that, if they have deep flaws that you didn't suspect from the resume or the interview, they're probably good enough at hiding them and more interviews aren't going to help.
The hard part of a resume is having the experiences to talk about. Either you've got it, or you lie, that hasn't changed.
I disagree. The experience in resume is basically a name-dropping, it doesn't tell you much about how much they know / what are their abilities.
As an interviewer, what interests me is whether they have non-surface knowledge about something. I'm looking for a T-shape - getting a broad, but surface level knowledge is not that difficult (often just reading some tutorial suffices), but not everybody can get deep into the topic. So a major part of the interview for me is going through their resume and probing whether this is their deep topic and how deep can they go.
Poor candidates say something like "it's all great!" or "it's all awful", which is almost never true. They're unable to go beyond a very surface level "I called this library and it worked" kind of analysis. Good candidates are able to compare and contrast the pros and cons of lots of underlying details.
They care a lot less about what you've done and where you are in your career, mainly because most of the what and how of the job is fairly unique to Meta.
They want good Meta employees and people who thrive specifically in their culture and not necessarily people with a career trajectory and goals beyond the company.
Turns out that there's a lot of over-achieving types out there whose sole desire in life is to be Good Germans. You will know immediately if this is or isn't you.
In truth I really know just one retired FAANG engineer who put 12 years in at Microsoft until he was put on a team with a bad manager who had it out for him and stack ranked him out of the company. He's been happily working on side projects in the few years since that and sitting on his millions. It also doesn't hurt that his wife is also a Microsoft employee and is still there.
Also I don't know if you've seen Meta offers in the last year or so since their layoffs but they've been absolutely lowballing the shit out of everyone they can justify doing so to.
Now that they have a big office in Moynihan and SWE teams that do operations work they're a little more consistent about being able to work out of the location that you expect, but they still can't seem to always figure this out for sure _before_ you accept their offer.
Bonus: we self-selected for people who don’t like to pair. We paired 100% of the time.
Either way it is customary to start new hires with a 6 month probation, and their long term contract only kicks in after that. That’s long enough to detect if someone is incompetent (I’ve had to fire people during their probation when finding out they weren’t actually capable altho I don’t think they outright lied).
If your team is at all well run, and your work-sample testing mirrors the team's work, it's not a very good scam to run: it'll be immediately obvious on the job.
We thought we'd put some energy into this back in 2021, and we have yet to reach a point where thinking about this makes any sense (except for tech writers, where spotting GPT is maybe somewhat useful).
I have _heard of_ great teams, but even the one person I knew who worked at Pivotal ended up there long after things went downhill culturally.
The problem isn't the process. It's just like dating. Everyone is lying and pretending to be their best self. Hiring process can't fix that -- you fix it by making employing people and taking employment low risk. Give a generous evaluation period and the option to take walk-away money/severance.
You can never see how terrible a company's culture truly is until you've been there 3-6 months.
Real human beings with real responsibilities are usually looking for fulltime work or they're running their own business and charging you for services.
I guess I'm not a real human being.
You are blessed.
Also, as so many others have stated on this site, many people just as talented or better than in silicon valley aren't looking for 500k+ a year because they don't live in a hyperinflated shithole, but that's another topic altogether.
All I can say is salary is relative and nobody should let that go to their head. The economy in the USA, but especially on the west coast has never experienced inflation like we currently have and are in for a rude awakening soon.
My brother used to contract-to-hire in the 90s-00s for banks and not even getting issued a laptop for the first few months of a contract happened nearly 100% of the time. Literally months of sitting around writing emails going "I can't do the work you're paying me for because you haven't issued me equipment yet" and that was routine. Or if it wasn't working equipment, it was company accounts/logins. I even did a year of this once with a hedge fund in the early 00s. Once and never again.
Contractors don't get meaningful responsibilities and meaningful responsibilities are how I justify myself (and my price) to my next job. No thanks.
Hard disagree. They're not really looking to extend full employment to people like you, but may from time to time. If you're really that good you have nothing to worry about. I'm speaking from experience working on both ends of the contract-to-hire process.
Might as well skip the games.
I've been on both sides of it too and I would never hire that way looking for good, experienced people. My experience with people successful at work is that they're successful in other endeavors too such as their private life. Experience also tells me that most peoples' life partners are extremely intolerant of career uncertainty, unless as a couple they are both very young.
I can only laugh at this statement.
I know multiple guys with wildly successful side-hustles, years-long backlogs of clients and more than enough income to exceed their day jobs and their wives absolutely will not allow them to leave their fulltime jobs because they're fearful of the risks of self-employment. These are the kind of men that put their family as their first priority.
If you're only in the business of hiring kids, maybe you're entitled to your perspective but that's not somewhere I'm looking to work.
This isn't even an about inflation. There's an entire cohort you're not looking at and they're about to eat your lunch and so is your wife :D
Especially because I was given just that choice a few month back.
"Contract to hire" is the worst of both worlds; I've only seen that work for bottom-of-the-barrel employers/employees.
I don't know how you'd get a good signal from a "work-sample test" in under a week or so, in which case you've basically weeded out most of the people you want to hire.
For most senior people, a new job is leaving an existing cushy job. We're not going to do that for some nonsense like this.
I've since used that method when I was a hiring manager, both for technical roles, and even a Manager of Compliance. Was extremely successful, both for us on the hiring side, as well as two very good hires.
I'd love this, because I have a feeling I'm better at working with people than whiteboarding, but realistically unless I'm on furlow or out of a job it seems really hard to pull off, especially if it's longer than one day, even if I ignore the compensation, which would not be a pet peeve of mine, but I've heard it as a valid argument from others.
"Drawing out the interview process is a thinly veiled attempt to launder this bias with a "neutral" process that they will likely disregard/overrule if it contradicts their personal preference.
That doesn't mean that I think this sort of interviewing bias is good or acceptable, but I also don't think drawing out the interviewing process corrects for this bias either."
I do agree about the "you only need 15 minutes" part, but the solution there would seem to be replacing four hour long interviews with four 15 minute interviews, rather than with 1 hour long interview.
Where do you get the varied interviewers really? Is it from the same biased hiring process?
People who haven't build sustainable, profitable organizations typically have no clue about hiring. Sure, they may be able to hire well for their little project. But, if you care about the culture of the company and how you want to shape it, you almost want all of your current members to have a say in the new member
For most companies, including Google as a more mature company, the dynamics are different. You might be quite happy to hire candidates who weren't top of their class but who are going to be easy to work with and get stuff done. And you want to make very sure you don't either reject or turn off the (maybe small number of) outstanding performers who want to work for you.
Google IMHO completely fail at the latter these days. A solid A student who knows how to present themself and really wants to work at Google will be hired. A genius with an unconventional educational background probably won't be.
spyrecovery36 @ gmail com if you need access to your partner’s phone
- I'm a 20+ year tech veteran with an award winning engineering background and a solid 20 year career in major (albeit Non-FAANGM companies) and I recently went through 5 interviews only to be told the remaining 3 interviews and 1 final onsite (which I need to fly in for) will be postponed to next month..
In the past 9 months that I've been looking full time roles, its been a series, 3-4 rounds of initial interviews, take home projects, etc so far to no avail...
Each time I'm afraid that some sharp 25-35 year old will get the job..
It really sucks that longevity, skill, wisdom and experience is valued so little by tech culture..
During that session, which lasts about an hour, I usually have pretty good idea if the person would work out or not for the team. Works pretty well for a lot of fakers too (usually consultants that have crazy padded resumes).
Of course, if your hiring is more beurocratic where your technical teams aren't really involved in hiring (or don't want to be) then don't be surprised if you get pretty much randomly skilled persons (or fakers).
I'd rather work on a team that did their best to make sure there were no duds even at the expense of missing a genius, so long as everyone that did make it was on right side of the bell curve.
OP has never worked in a corporate environment