Could this lead to a manager that tries to have the best team for himself will always include average employees that they can easily fire?
It's setting a bar that when evaluated on a curve a certain percentage of your employees wind up being below that bar. You derive the ratio from how aggressive you expect your bar to be.
But no one is saying you need to fire people. They're saying they expect a certain amount of lower performers and if they don't see it, they want to know reason. But it also only manifests at much higher populations than an individual team. Totally possible a small enough team has everyone >= meeting expectations.
Interview process at Meta isn't that hard. Mostly medium leetcode questions (in front of single interviewer), not particularly tricky. With enough preparation, it's doable by any reasonably good undergrad. Google was slightly harder though. Similarly, system design can be prepared.
The hardest part is to get the interview in the first place. But if you do, it's just a matter of preparation. You want to be able to nail these questions.
That's quite the qualifier. I could not regularly pass these interviews when I had done 200+ LC problems. It's only when I got to 1000+ LC problems and had done hundreds of technical interviews that I was able to regularly pass a lot of these interviews. Even now, it still requires me to prepare a lot because how often am I really thinking about suffix tries? It's an arms race. It has happened in universities as well. An arms race between the professors trying to make sure a lot of students still fail their classes while every student needs a 4.0 to get an internship/job now.
It will get higher and higher as time goes on because we're mostly focused on H1B candidates who come from a similarly culture of grinding for exams. You can see this lifestyle is very normalized on the LC, 1point3acres, etc. Cheating is also seen as completely fine too. At this point, I feel like it's almost unfair to not be cheating due to how many people are. Your competition doesn't care about some sense of ethics (nor does the hiring manager - they cheated to get in too!).
I've met with multiple folks at FAANG and such where these practices of grinding + a little "magic" get you in. You talk to someone and they'll say, "oh yeah, I have like three guys I went to high school with in [country] in my house. Once one of us got accepted, it was easy for the rest of us."
Also, the follow ups are designed to eventually lock the candidate, since is not enough to pass the low bar, they want to know what your high bar is too.
My assumption based on some interview experience articles[1][2] is that there's an internal arms race between the recruiting and engineering at Meta where candidates are not forwarded for the interview process until they feel sufficiently prepared, often giving them months (in any other company, I feel this would be a big red flag), and interviewers expecting the equivalent of Djikstra or Knuth to join their team, regardless of what the team actually does. (I assume not everyone writes distributed system or database implementations from scratch at Meta.)
[1] https://medium.com/@rohitverma_87831/my-interview-experience...
[2] https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/5132569/Me...