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Comment by dakiol | Hacker News Reader

My take is:

- “big” tech companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft came up with these types of tech interviews. And there it seems pretty clear that for most of their positions they are looking for cogs

- The vast majority of tech companies have just copied what “big” tech is doing, including tech interviews. These companies may not be looking for cogs, but they are using an interview process that’s not suitable for them

- Very few companies have their own interview process suitable for them. These are usually small companies and therefore the number of engineers in such companies is negligible to be taken into account (most likely, less than 1% of the audience here work at such companies)

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And what is wrong with being a cog? Not everyone is going to invent the next ai innovation and not everyone is cut out to build the next hot programming language.

Bugs need to be fixed. Features need to be implemented. If it weren't for cogs, you'd have people just throwing new projects over the fence and dropped 6 months after release. Don't want to be another cog? Join a startup. Plenty of those hiring. The reality is that when you work at a large company, you're one of 50,000 people. By definition, only 1% are in the top 1%.

Someone has to wash the dishes and clear the tables. Let's stop looking down at jobs just because it's not hot and sexy. People who show up and provide value is great and should be appreciated.

>And what is wrong with being a cog?

The interview process being a circus of how many hoops you'll jump through. Which in this case is upwards of 3 months of trivia, beauracracy, and politics. And these days they don't even give you the grace of a response; they may just ghost you.

But being a cog itself is personally fine. Work to live, not live to work. But leading people on to drop them on the tip of a hat is disrespectful of everyone's time. At least a 1-2 stage interview for a dishwasher or table busser is only wasting a few hours per role applied. Time is the most valuable resource we have, of course people want to use it carefully.

> And what is wrong with being a cog?

Human cogs are going to be phased out. I'm not an AI doomer who thinks engineers are going to be replaced across the board, but the need for a human being who functions like a robot is going away fast. We need humans to do what humans do well, and humans don't do well as cogs in a machine—machines are better at that role.

The days of leetcode interviews are numbered not because they're too easy to cheat at, but because they were always optimizing for the wrong traits in most companies that cargo culted them, and even the companies that used them correctly (Big Tech) are going to rapidly need a different type of interview for the new types of hires they need.

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