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Comment by kabes | Hacker News Reader

I was way more likely to succeed the faang tech interviews coming straight out of university than I do now after working for 10 years.

But I do think I'm a way better software engineer now than back then. So something is broken with that interview process.

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Maybe they don't want to hire experienced engineers but prefer smart juniors they can teach their own specific ways of doing things?

Juniors often lack the experience to make good long term decisions which has consequences for the maintainability of the software. However, the uncharitable interpretation of this behavior is usually that a junior is easily fed a narrative about career growth that seniors may not be so willing to accept.

What if people came up with other, better ways of doing things? What if they're just straight up doing something very wrong and very inefficiently and they don't know that because they've hired a bunch of ignorant people who accept the status quo? That doesn't seem a very open minded approach.

The vast majority of choices are between things that are roughly on par with each other if used by people with similar experience in them, respectively.. But then you don't have shared experience for when someone is on vacation if everyone is doing the better way in their opinion, or you lose a ton of time on the arguments to choose the best way when it doesn't matter, retrain the majority on the least experienced engineers suggestion as they can offer no negative critiques of their solution, etc.

Very tolerant senior engineers are basically what you want, opinionated juniors are who apply to senior roles and make people seek out juniors who apply to junior roles.

On the other hand, the choice might have bad in the beginning but it is hard to go the better route now, meaning a rewrite to switch to the better way would cost way too much time and resources.

In this case ignorant people would be way better for the company because they wouldn't care. I've gone into a job that was like that and it bothered me a lot that I had to work with a shitty foundation but there was nothing to do about it so the job sucked for me while a junior was just grateful for the opportunity

Yes, and the job itself is not that challenging or important compared to minimizing friction between people.

Maybe selecting the people who memorized their algorithms labs also selects for people who are self-effacing and accommodating to what the seniors in the organization expect of them?

I agree, at least the one FAANG company I worked at didn't hire like it want experienced, well-rounded people. Instead it hired a bunch of "brilliant in a vacuum" type people who proceeded to do brilliant-in-a-vacuum things create impressive projects that ultimately were far inferior to the industry norm because those projects never had a input from designers, customer support, the interoperability/standardization of the best-in-industry tools that were out there.

So ultimately I think it was largely to their detriment -- they reinvented everything and by and large I'd say most of what they built in-house was inferior to the industry-norm.

I think it’s simpler than that. They just don’t know what they are doing.

Or smart juniors that don't know enough to demand a decent work/life balance, even when offered FAANG money.

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