So exactly what kind of interviews do you suggest that a company do at scale to hire people who will make $300K+ a year? Just talk them?
You'd be amazed just how much you can learn about someone's actual skills and experience (or lack thereof) through long-form discussion. I think we don't truly talk enough in our currently broken interview process.
My current job was also behavioral where I am a staff architect at a 3rd party company and it does require coding. As an interviewer, I also only do behavioral interviews. But let’s be realistic, it doesn’t take much to be a competent enterprise dev or even an enterprise architect.
The type of hard problems that BigTech has to solve is completely different. While I would never have trusted any developer I ever met at AWS within 100 feet of a customer, they also shouldn’t let me within 100 feet of the code that runs any of the AWS services.
Even at my medium size consulting company we have a 0.4% application/offer rate. Can you imagine what it is at BigTech? How do you filter just by talking to someone?
I'd almost be down by literally hiring devs by picking resumes out of a hat and just having them on probation. The sheer amount of time and energy wasted having good devs doing interviews instead of doing code is horrible.
> I hired a guy at essentially minimum wage to write some very basic HTML pages. Within weeks he was writing code. Within a couple of years he was a much better dev than I'll ever be.
There is something like that for jobs in design and art sector. Checking what kind of projects someone already did. Checking their website. How does that look? Is it well designed? What are they showing on their website about what they have done?
But the issue with these ideas is, that apparently these days there is zero time planned for actually checking candidate background properly like that. That's why hiring a dev can feel like a lottery. Hiring people work with utterly incomplete knowledge.
You should definitely have a coding task when hiring programmers but it doesn't have to be very big or difficult.
If I have 10+ years of proven experience with positive public recommendations written by high managers from F500 companies why should I be challenged with puzzles?
Talk an interview to figure out motivation and if we have the same vibe. Then hire me and decide a month later if I'm worth your money.
Trial period exists in labor law for a reason.
Also, hiring is very expensive for those first few months at big tech. It’s also very morale draining to see your peers fired constantly - which is what would happen. Morale at faang is already hitting rock bottom due to the mandatory yearly+ 10%+ layoffs.
Background check is a thing.
>> It’s also very morale draining to see your peers fired constantly
Also cannot agree, firing from the probation period does not affect morale. It is rather expected some people cannot make it through.
The problems that spawn these leetcode barriers are WAY better solved at the source.
Prob 1: the interviewer doesn’t know shit about the actual role. I know it’s an uncommon opinion, but this should just not happen ever. I would gladly sit in on a speaking interview for my would-be coworkers, with the hiring manager, to check this. And the actual manager should be present and knowledgeable too. But 3 employees doing something is too much $ I guess.
Prob 2: credentials and high degrees are prolific, super mandatory, but also treated like they are meaningless. Experience is borderline ignored entirely. Worked with a software deeply for 10 years, but your cert is out of date? You won’t even get past the computerized HR filter. But because this is so openly stupid, companies tack on leetcode as another filter instead of rethinking the value of experience and relying on probation and bullshit detectors.
It's not a group engineering meeting. Unless it's big-tech hiring of fungible worker drones, everyone in that meeting should be trying to get more signal about the others as individuals.
I've been the "1" in 2-on-1 three times recently, all for startups. For me, it's hard to think about the hard-thinking questions, and also be finding rapport and getting signal from two different people at once. I'd much rather spend twice as much of my time, to get each person 1-on-1, no additional cost to them.
Two of the recent 2-on-1 interviews were on videoconf, and, with the videoconf setup they chose, I couldn't even see one of the people most of the time.
The other interview was 3 people in tiny conference room/closet (the size of what used to be a one-person cubicle), for an hour, so it was especially stuffy and crowded with 3 people, and a great way to get Covid.
Besides more people complicating the situation, people tend to speak candidly with me 1-on-1, but are less likely to do that if their colleague is in the room or on the call.
Here's an intuition: Imagine you were a company interviewing startup candidates, and HR suggested saving time by you interviewing two candidates at once. It would be awful, and you wouldn't be able to get much read off of either (other than to tell if one or both were sharp-elbowed). So why do it 2-on-1 in the other direction, unless you're saying it's not important for a candidate to get signal about the company and colleagues?
I had a strong recommendation (halfway to hired, before they even met me, with a colleague's favorite ex-manager/mentor) to take over engineering and technical leadership, from a startup's technical CEO.
After I passed his interview, he had me do a 3-on-1 interview with the 3 engineering team members.
They all seemed a little awkward with the circumstances or format, and none opening up.
I passed the 3-on-1 from the CEO's perspective, and he gave me a written offer.
After I confirmed with him that one of the 3 existing engineers didn't want the role (I'd gotten a little leadership role vibe from him, despite 3-on-1), I asked to meet with at least one of the engineers 1-on-1, so I could get a better feel for the team.
The CEO pushed back hard on that, because what you see with them, is what you get.
We don't all get our intuitions the same way. Maybe the CEO could've gotten all the info he needed in a 3-on-1 videoconf meet&greet, including all the info I would get from 1-on-1. Or maybe I could've gotten info that he couldn't have, yet he seemed to be rejecting that possibility.
It might've been a great situation, but I ended up not taking it, arguably traceable to a low-info n-on-1 interview.
But the actual solution is to not let bean counters and bootcampers do the hiring, but we're a few too many programmer-generations away from anyone who actually knows what they're doing being left at most of these companies, so.
I recommend making furniture.