Big companies need to hire tons of people and interview even more so they need some sort of scalable process for it. An early stage startup can just ask you about your past projects and pair program with you for an hour.
Small companies have the benefit of the pressure to fill a role to get work done, the lack of bureaucratic baggage to "protect" the company from bad hires, and generally don't have enough staff to suffer empire-building.
Somewhere along the line the question changes from "can this candidate do the job that other people in this office are already doing?" to "can this candidate do the job of this imaginary archetype I've invented with seemingly impossible qualities".
There seems to be a weird selection bias that if you're FAANG or FAANG adjacent these small companies aren't interested.
It's much worse when the interview gives you different vibes (and expectations) than the actual day-to-day work.
In the best case applicants needs to apply multiple companies. Companies need to interview multiple applicants and have a way to compare those applicants.
Those are the most basic constraints I can think of. How do you make that cost tens of hours for each round?
For me as a job applicant even in the best case I would need to do 3 to 5 interview interviews. The same is true for companies in the best case it will take at least 3 to 5 interviews to find somebody. Are they supposed to have 3 to 5 temporary staff for weeks at a time?
How much time should that take per interview? How would somebody that currently has a job manage that kind of time commitment?
What changes to expectations are you talking about?
Many smaller companies have noticed that former and wannabe FAANGers are looking for FAANG-type jobs, and are not good fits in their niche. Small companies often have more uncertainty, fewer clear objectives, less structure, and often lower pay. They’re not a good substitute for megacorps.
Not everyone at a FAANG is purely motivated by the amount of money that they can get.
I’m looking for a smaller company because I’m tired of the FAANG mentality personally.
Your path through will probably look like having the luck of breaking in at one of these kinds of companies, and then staying for several years to demonstrate earnest commitment/fit while building a new network of connections, and then leveraging those connections to get more opportunities if it becomes necessary to do so. If you have connection from your previous non-FAANG work, that's probably your best route.
It won't happen overnight and you'll always be at a disadvantage when you find yourself applying through resume portals. Good luck!
In my time at tier one companies I have worked with the best engineers I have come across in my entire career (even the worst engineers were more than competent) who were working on deep issues that could affect the revenue of the entire company because they’re laser focused on providing value to the business, instead of doing engineering for engineering’s sake. I have grown by far more in these kinds of roles than I have anywhere else because the kind of problems you encounter at such a high scale just don’t exist elsewhere. And most of them have been there for at least five years if not longer you don’t make those kind of contributions to accompany without a long tenure.
Just like there are innumerable brilliant, effective engineers who would contribute tremendously to a FAANG but don't suit the modern interview funnel (leetcode, etc), smaller companies surely do miss out on strong, suitable FAANG engineers in anticipation of negative experiences they've had with others.
There are a lot of people who accumulate FAANG entries on their resume and many of them really don't suit smaller companies for a number of reasons.
Honestly, though while I'm only seeing a very narrow picture of you here, it sure sounds like you see these "tier one" companies as a desirable place to work, with prestigious colleagues and profound learning opportunities on high scale problems that just don't exist elsewhere, and surely for much more money. Are you sure you're really going to be happy somewhere else? Or might you get restless? That's precisely the kind of concern these smaller companies carry when seeing FAANG stuff on a resume, and it doesn't seem like it should be baffling that they would do.
As I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121594)
You’re throwing a giant red flag right here. First of all, FAANG isn’t “tier one” except to people who idolize these companies. More agile startups are trying to disrupt these dinosaurs and do not thing very highly of them. Many of us who have worked with FAANG and ex-FAANG engineers were not impressed.
As someone that never had a desire nor ever made an attempt to work at any of those companies, do you mind elaborating on the mentality of such places?
I'm just your boring below-average to average dev, so I know I'm not cut for those types of places, but it never truly bothered me anyway. Any reason that I can personally think as to why I would work for such a company would either be due to my own egotistical desires or for monetary reasons, but those were never strong enough to actually compel me.
I am just mainly curious about two things:
1. Is working at those places all it's cracked up to be?
2. Assuming one had to work hard to get into such companies, was the juice worth the squeeze?
I've often wondered if one's experiences for these companies is often something akin to the old advice of, "Don't meet your heroes." In other words, was the conflicting dyad of expectations vs. reality present?
That said the amount that you make is insane some of the smartest engineers I’ve ever worked with have been at these companies and a lot of them have really strong engineering cultures, and standards.
The current work environment seems designed to use up bright young engineers, and burn them out within a few years. This is a significant shift from 15 years ago, where it was a much more sustainable place to be.
Was path dependency for careers always this bad?
And most refused to look at anybody deviating from their ideal background in my experience.
This is often because the culture of job-hopping for better pay every 18 months has eroded the willingness to pay for training or adaptation. Why pay for someone to learn if they're just gonna leave soon; the pre-trained person is a better deal if you'll have to pay to retain anyway.
We’re just seeing the end of the cat and mouse struggle that’s been going on since the 60s. And massively accelerated in the 80s.
It’s unfortunate for companies though because they’re the ones that will lose out in the end when all the experienced people start retiring and they have no one to hire.
It’s an untenable position to not train people, period. There is no schooling you could go through that would educated junior dev to the level of a senior dev. And it’s the same for any other role. Experience is not optional.
I agree that this situation is undesirable, but it seems to be stable, somewhat like the result of repeated play of the prisoner’s dilemma.
I agree that other industries are not YET at the point where software is , but you’re not looking hard enough if you don’t see the short tenures compared to the 25-30 years they used to have.
And yeah, it might be in an equilibrium now, but how long can it stay in an equilibrium? I’d guess at max 10 to 15 years.
I'm guessing the majority of people now in their 50s and 60s in computer-related careers had very eclectic jobs before settling down in computer-related stuff. After all, many never used computers at all until college or beyond.
Edit: my point was not that specialized software applications didn’t exist. It was that people were expected to be able to jump from stack to stack when they change roles in a way that has disappeared from modern job applications.
Well, and mainframes. And trading and financial systems. And numerical/scientific computing. And network services. And web sites and e-commerce. And flash, java applets, and browser plugins. And control systems. And operating systems and tooling. And cell phone applications. And games. And video/image/audio/music processing. etc etc
Oh, wait... maybe not!
That’s the point I was trying to make. Not that the software didn’t exist or people weren’t doing specialized applications.
Depending on what you could bring attention to in your prior experience and the size/needs of the new orgs you seeking to move to, certain transitions were more feasible than others, but you could easily spend decades working in mind-numbing enterprise applications while wishing for opportunities in game development or trading or whatever and never get your resume so much as looked at. (And vice versa, even, for those who dreamed to "retire" into the supposed quiet of enterprise apps or government IT or whatever)
Also, those types of stories tend to pop up with any engineer who’s only worked at a single place.
My point isn’t that there’s not bad engineers at Facebook it’s that there’s bad engineers everywhere and filtering based on random signals like this is not useful.
Especially in a small company where your hiring manager may also be busy with development and sales, and not have an HR department to run the process for them, you're much better off interviewing candidates you are 50% sure of being a good fit vs 5%. Personally I prefer interviewing candidates coming from FAANG-ish companies and often make exceptions for candidates that demonstrate exceptional skill/interest, but when you can only interview 1-10% of your applicants you have to prioritize those who are likely to succeed at your company (keeping in mind implicit bias and such).
> filtering based on random signals like this is not useful.
In aggregate it most likely is useful for those companies.
Big cos can afford to onboard their engineers for months, sometimes years. Startups usually can not
But I have also had really terrible experiences, similar to what you've mentioned. Sounds like you've just gotten unlucky and gotten the terrible ones.
If a startup can spend 20 man-hours filling a single position, why can't a big company spend 1000 man-hours filling 50 positions?
If the person interviewing your candidates messes up, you’ll know soon enough. In a large company, the bad people will take over and your company is dying a slow death.
That approach doesn’t work on a large scale. Some interviewers are too nitpicky, elitist, others approve anyone who uses the same language as them for side projects. Some are racists, sexist, or have other kinds of biases. Some might have a crush on the candidate. Sometimes the interviewer thinks about their own task while they squeeze in an interview. In some countries, “undoing” a bad hire is hard, so they need to make sure that the candidate can work on any team (or at least on multiple teams reasonably well).
IMO for large companies it makes sense to standardize the interview process.
Also, in my opinion grinding leetcode is also a good personality check for FAANG hires: it shows the candidate can suck it up, study hundreds of hours, and do whatever they need to do to pass an arbitrary test, even if they themselves think it’s a broken process. The larger the company, the more this quality matters in candidates as they will need to deal with a lot of things they will probably not like.
Comparing candidates based on how they “vibe” with the interviewer during a pair programming session is a recipe for lawsuits and bad hires.
I’m just speculating here, I don’t have any significant hiring and interviewing experience
Avoiding pair programming for the reason you listed sounds like lawyers getting in the way, not scaling. But yeah we'd need to hear someone say if that's actually happening.
However, I do feel like there is perhaps some amount of truth to the thought behind the interview questions, no? As in, I would imagine someone that could invert a binary tree in 15 minutes on a whiteboard could probably learn React. However, I am not sure everyone that can learn React can invert a binary tree in 15 minutes on a whiteboard.
However, maybe I am projecting my own insecurities because I wish I could invert a binary tree in 15 minutes on a whiteboard as well as being able to solve all those other problems.
leetcode is really a culture fit test and success points to the combination of "smarts", diligence, and conformity to some acceptable degree. It shows you have some baseline of familiarity with computing, can focus on an arbitrary task to pursue a goal, and will conform to an arbitrary process when it's asked of you.
Those are genuinely essential skills in an organization with 1000's of white collar professional workers.
More precise insight is gained when the test covers a binary tree inversion than that were it just some contrived logic puzzle like the LSAT or a critical reading exercise. The computer science bit does provide some signal and isn't completely arbitrary, but it's only a small part of what's being evaluated.
Among otherwise strong engineers, it tends to filter out the especially willful, prideful, independent, meandering, creative, and pragmatic ones. These personality types can be extremely valuable in some work environments and can still sometimes in through leetcode challenges, but spoil big bureuacratic systems like FAANG's when they're overrepresented.
Having done a lot of interviews at least 70% of the time it’s filtering candidates who just aren’t very technical and haven’t studied computer science. The kind of people who hate reversing a linked list are the kind of people who haven’t touched a polynomial since high school.
It’s not unreasonable for a junior tech interview to expect you studied something like CS or EE. It’s a blessing that our field is open to all to give it a shot, but if that doesn’t describe you - you need to recognize that there is effort and study to fill that background.
Now it selects for the very very very bad trait of high ambition and knowing to play the system.
Why is this the assumption. I would rather say any big org. is converging towards the average talentwise by necessity. It is like Hawaii can't have 100 olympic level swimmers no matter the recruiting proces.
Because big companies are run by bean counters and they also don't require the same kind of talent that is useful to startups. There's less competition for hyper-specialized seniors and middle of the pack generalists.
Huh. That’s actually a great question! I actually don’t know.