Kinda sad that it has come to this.
Maybe I'm naive but I think an interview should be an honest exchange of what you actually know, not what you crammed for before the interview.
Maybe I'm naive but I think an interview should be an honest exchange of what you actually know, not what you crammed for before the interview.
But something did change when I stopped treating interviews as "convince them to like me" / "convince them to hire me" and started treating them as "find out if I want to work (in order) 1) at this company, 2) on this project, 3) with/for this person." I'm sure part of it is just experience, knowing more of the technical stuff, sure, but when you're approaching it honestly as determining whether you give a shit about the person sitting across from you or the glorified Excel spreadsheet you'll be working on it is a lot easier.
It's a big part of why I hate leetcode interviews and consider them a huge red flag especially for non-Tier 1 companies. If your 90 minute interview is 80 minutes of me reversing trees and writing maze solvers then letting me ask 2 questions while you check your email and Slack on your other monitor I am not learning anything from the process and am extremely uninterested in working for you.
Me being on my high horse is not going to change Facebook's hiring practices. But if I get asked to interview somewhere local where they may only be interviewing a half dozen people for a role over a few months, and I stop it early because they start throwing out LeetCode hards, that could be a non-trivial signal for them.
So much less need for time to decide if you’re interested in working there.
So it only makes sense for those Tier-1 companies to be asking questions that are related to the a vast amount of problems they face on a regular basis.
Your startup is not Google.
Startups are the opposite. They are default dead. If they hire good enough people, they die. They need exceptional, hungry people. The kind of people who abhor busywork. Startups will pull much lower quality on average and paying higher rates drastically increases the odds of death. So their hope is to get lucky on an exceptional junior. They're also more willing to fire fast instead of doing some odd layoff down the line.
Basically Tier 1 will bias towards minimal false positives, and startups will bias towards minimal false negatives. Most companies are somewhere in the middle, default dead in 30 years or so.
Tier 1 also has a huge funnel and they hire lots of people so they need it. A lot of junk gets into the funnel because of the sheer size of it. They need that 1 out of 300, so they just layer enough filters to hit that rate.
Tier 2 companies who need to filter 1 out of 50 should not be adopting Tier 1 practices. Startups probably have like 10 applicants and 6 of them can't do FizzBuzz. But they still need to filter, even if sometimes they end up with 0.
I don't believe this at all, they're unlikely to not comply and execute arbitrary commands. Which at least in my experience is orthogonal to whether they're able to actually problem solve or build good things.
I don't think there's any correlation between "willing to spend 3 months cramming LC Hards" and "doesn't screw up on the job." The speed at which you can figure out time complexity in your head, or how clean your maze solver is on the first try has nothing to do with your skill or ability in managing services in AWS or implementing a Figma design or making sure you're utilizing cache correctly.
> Most companies are somewhere in the middle, default dead in 30 years or so.
Uh, no? What's the evidence supporting this? I haven't seen any organizational literature or research suggesting you have "Tier 1 tech" on one extreme, "Tech startups" on the other extreme, and "every other company" in the middle.
I think the general thrust of your point with regard specifically to Tier 1 tech is spot on - keep on layering more and more filters until you go from 500 applicants to a handful, then make offers to those people. My sibling comment from yesterday says basically the same thing, that it's not "ok," but TC and competition are so high they can get away with it. Home Depot or Kaiser Permanente or JP Morgan can't, despite having their own set of unique and pretty interesting technical problems.
The startup stuff doesn't line up with my experience though.
If I have to go through that bullshit, I would at least like the opportunity to use it to show how I think, ask clarifying questions even if it is just to show understanding of edge cases, create some small talk, etc.
Why would I allow some rando company’s corporate spyware onto my personal computer?
If you’re that worried about me using AI, maybe the interview should be on-site. And maybe it should be relevant to the work I’d be doing, not solving a bunch of leetcode questions.
Or maybe the dystopian future of tech interviews just involves a burner laptop tethered to a burner cell plan.
The future is absolutely flipping fantastic.
The most recent example for me was even worse- the position was for a web dev asking for experience in C#/.NET. The integrated IDE had all of the usual spyware did not actually compile anything or run any example checks. Then it proceeded, without any brief at all, to ask 7 more 'optional' gotcha-like questions on C pointers and nuances.
It's a terrible time to want to pivot into dev full-time, from the lense of being in the job market anyways.
All the way back in ~2012, Amazon's own recruiters were recommending candidates cram "Cracking the Code Interview" (to the surprise of the actual interviewers, who didn't want you doing that). This is the way things have been for a long time now.
The hiring rubric gets items added/dropped based on what portions are statistically significant when compared to post-hire performance reviews.
There's a lot of research in the public about "Structured Interviews".
Like pushing a total RTO and not having space or desks for employees then having to delay the RTO.
I've found myself in that situation helping my kids with their homework. I might not be able to define L'Hôpital's rule off the top of my head, but it only takes a few minutes of reading to reload it into my brain.
And eye for eye leaves the whole world blind. I don't think there are any winners in this war.