Hacker News Reader

Comment by akoboldfrying | Hacker News Reader

In my experience the signal is pretty strong.

Are you able to share how you evaluated this? Is this based on gut-feeling or is it data-driven?

Gut feeling based on the generally very high competence of my colleagues when I was at Google.

I am glad that you mentioned Google. At this point, their interview process is legendary. It is so good that many other companies have tried to copy it.

I trust they were really competent, but it's a bit depressing that these competent people will need to go through the leetcode rituals and 5-10 interviews to get a new job at Meta, Netflix, AWS or adjacent companies. That's actually the point of the original post; you are never judged by your (years of) experience or even your past companies, only by the results of a test from a random person/company.

I disagree; I don't think a full day of interviews is a huge price to pay for a FAANG job. The stakes are high for the employer, the rewards are high for successful applicants, and if you get to that stage, you've already passed a lower-stakes phone screen.

Put yourself in the employer's shoes: You want a high-quality SWE, you're prepared to pay them top dollar, but if they turn out to be not so great, it's expensive to get rid of them. Would you be satisfied by years of experience at other companies by itself, when you know that (like in many job markets) there's a big market for lemons? I wouldn't. I would want to see the candidate demonstrate some specific skills -- ideally the skills they'd be using day-to-day, but if that's not feasible for time reasons (it usually isn't), then adjacent skills that generally imply (though are not necessarily implied by) them, like recognising the shape of a toy problem, and knowing and applying the right algorithm to solve it.

I am not commenting on the interview effort-salary ratio, but the fact that credentials and experience mean nothing to the tech industry, also comparing to the rest of professions. I mean working in Google/Meta/Netflix, is like working on the best hospital if you are a doctor, in the best construction industry if you are an engineer, to best law firm if you are a lawyer, etc. Imagine having to pass a leetcode or iq test everytime you want to move to the next one. I definitely know that my cousin, who is an exceptional doctor in Greece with only 10 years of experience, laughs about it.

I think it should be the other way round: In an ideal world, everyone, including doctors and executives, should expect to have to demonstrate their skills when applying for a new job.

It's just unfortunate that there isn't (TTBOMK) an easy way of measuring, in a few hours, how good an executive is at executive-ing. Which is why the field is crammed with useless pretenders who nevertheless manage to flit from job to job, soaking up fat compensation packages before their incompetence is exposed.

I'm curious why there doesn't seem to be the same market for lemons for doctors. Or is there? How does a person actually know if a doctor is good?

    > executives, should expect to have to demonstrate their skills when applying for a new job

They do. The interview process is a review of your "wins and losses" (public and verifiable is the gold standard), plus you need to complete some case studies.

That's better than nothing, but not much better -- many people have an outsize ability to "dress up" any arbitrary thing as a win, and in that case what the interviewer is really testing is a mixture of (1) that person's ability to produce wins, and (2) that person's ability to dress things up as wins.

(As far as I can see, there's no obviously better way to interview executives, since in general their actual day-to-day work -- building relationships and making strategic decisions -- takes months or years to prove out, and in any case the outcomes are heavily dependent on external factors and their ability to read them.)

    > experience mean nothing to the tech industry

This is not true. It is basically impossible to hit L7 before 30 years old. A lot of it is indirectly related to experience: What have you accomplished for us. MDs on Wall Street trading floors are similar. It is very hard (nearly impossible) to make MD before 30 in this era.

For me too, anyone that does horribly, bad signal. Anyone who does perfectly, bad signal.

I've found that looking for mediocre and sub-par results will give you professionals that spend their time getting good at the profession instead of getting good at leetcoding.

I have never and will never hire code monkeys. AI already takes care of that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com