ken47

> AFAIK communication skills are routinely evaluated in those interviews: if you have the best code but can't explain how it works, you won't score highly on them. You should be able to discuss tradeoffs, how you reason, etc.

I want to specifically address this because communication can make or break teams. The kind of communication that you describe - conveying objective information - is not enough to build a well-functioning team. One of the most important questions, IMHO, is how do your teammates disagree with one another, especially on issues that don’t have a clear right answer? If you don’t probe for the answer to that question, then you’re hiring with a huge unknown.

There’s no way to know if Mrs. leetcode master X is a team player based on these kinds of interviews. She could come in and destroy a team with her personality. Granted a socially adept person can fake a pleasant personality during a few hours of interviewing, but the rare great interview processes will at least force a mini disagreement or few and gauge the candidate’s response.

I’ve don’t think I’ve ever seen engineers complain about the rejection rate of Google’s interview process. The more common criticism/meme regards the laziness of running candidates through a unidimensional leetcode gauntlet. Half joking, but why even have engineers run these interviews at all? A proctor could get the same job done at a fraction of the cost. If a proctor can run the interview process, then how valuable is the signal?

1. I would guess that many of the commenters in this subthread work for Silicon Valley big tech, including some apparent (ex-)Googlers who are openly skeptical of their company’s interview process.

2. By reputation, most big Silicon Valley companies, including those that operate “high scale” apps don’t put as much stock into leetcode-style interviews as Google.

3. Silicon Valley, obviously, does not have the monopoly on high scale applications.

Talent that is evaluated in, effectively, one dimension? Commercializing a product successfully is a highly multi-dimensional endeavor.

Even building a reasonably well-functioning engineering team is highly multi-dimensional.

Google reached out to me a few times to see if I'd interview with them. On the one or two phone calls I had with their recruiters, they explicitly advised me to practice algorithms (leetcode et al) if I wanted to move forward. Perhaps what you were doing was not the norm.

> people who hire for software engineers who write CRUD apps used by 20 people

It seems like you believe that anyone who doesn't work for Google works for a boutique web design firm?

> Internal restructuring of the company may even take you from working on backend web apis to distributed databases

This is a stretch. It's unlikely that an interview process would test such disparate skills directly, and a competent company will avoid moving an engineer into a role that requires a drastically different skillset without separate verification that they can handle the new role.

Agreed. The implication that a lack of algorithms testing during software engineering interviews has much of anything to do with successful innovation, as opposed to the infinitude of other factors that go into commercializing a product, is unpersuasive.

And do these leetcode style questions test innovation at all? I don't think they're asking candidates to invent new algorithms.

Your assertion is that Google asks “just easy level programming problems.” Assuming we accept this argument, that probably tells most of us more about Google than it does about some straw-man developer.

But I’ll give Google a bit more credit than you and guess that they ask questions that are at least above the “easy” level.

I've seen plenty of HN threads where good alternative processes were described. I'm not going to be exhaustive here: writing a program over a few hours that is reflective of the kind of work that the company actually does, coming up with and debating the architecture of a system, mock code reviews, etc.

You might say these don't scale as well as standardized testing of university classical algorithms knowledge. The general response to that would be that if you're optimizing for scale, then you're not optimizing for quality, so stop the hype around Google only hiring "the best."

It's telling that as Google has begun to regularly lay off engineers, they have also begun to deemphasize classical algorithms in their interview process.

Agreed, but highly doubt the effect is nearly as dramatic as claimed. If the effect is to the extent that engineers in their 40s can never make the money they made in their 30s, that would be trivial to prove. Even a big corp would have significant trouble defending such a statistic.

Google is overrated. It's been obvious for over a decade after they built an interview process that is heavily biased towards those who recently took an algorithms class. You had talking heads yammering about how hard it was to get into Google, which to be honest, made the company even less appealing. Is this a software engineering company or some kind of hyped up nightclub?

Yeah, maybe it's a hard interview if you've been out of college for a while, haven't written classical algorithms professionally for years, and don't want to spend weeks or months of free time bashing your head on leetcode. What isn't pressure tested by the Google interview process? Just about every other skill that is needed to be a good software engineer.

Obviously, Google has some good engineers, but my goodness was the hype around the company offputting.

You're never going to make as much again after 40: based on what metrics? Ageism is illegal in the US, and if this is true for you, you probably did not cultivate the type of software engineering skillset that scales well as you advance up the career ladder.

Pretty sure that if you have glowing perf reviews, your job is safe.

The "best engineers" you're talking about were the best by which metrics, and why were these metrics so different from those that execs used to determine who to lay off?

If they are indeed superior engineers, and your company is simply bad at evaluating talent, then they did a huge favor to these engineers by laying them off. Trust me.

I’ve lived in America all my life, and it isn’t commonly brought up in my American peer group.

You’re also conflating the perception of intellect with the actual possession of it. It seems like you don’t have much confident in your measure of either. Maybe find a therapist. Help with this is beyond the scope of HN comments.

There are countless people who have not attended a top tier college, e.g. people who might be regarded as “intellectually inferior” who are richer than you and I. Meditate on that.

I don't know what subset of society you live in, but the university you attended is not commonly brought up in America. If you're referring to your intellectual aptitude rather than the credentials attached to your name, just try to be a good person and do the best you can with what you've got.

What I meant is that China will be able to - at least - replicate all of these things within a few generations, even without us handing over the tech to them. As an aside, I don't see why India wouldn't be capable of the same, as their society also imparts much higher status to STEM education than us, although they probably won't have the same magnitude and type of motivation as China.

> China is experiencing demographic collapse. If they can’t gain the upper hand within about a decade, the opportunity will have likely passed as the surplus capital it has enjoyed to date as a result of its demographic dividend will reverse.

Even if their population collapses, their (STEM-proficient) population will still significantly outnumber America's - especially if America continues to implicitly funnel its brightest into non-STEM fields through societal pressure.

I think this varies by corporation, but large corporations at their root have a desire to treat their employees as cogs, because that is the simplest system for them to implement. It is on the employees to make it clear that they are not cogs, which is why politics tends to be a much bigger factor in such companies.

If your corporation is not compensating you enough to deal with the additional headache of politics, I'd try working for a smaller company.

I don't think China "needs" American tech. My impression is that, while they have not yet reached technological parity with America, given the country's intellectual capital and culture, that can only remain true for so long.

And it only "matters" to the extent that we care about whether China surpasses the US technologically within a few generations. If you don't care, then I suppose it shouldn't matter to you.

I think the better question is, if we didn't think they were so good at this stuff, why would we limit their access?

I believe the US possesses the human capital within it to compete with the likes of China in terms of STEM, but American society does not value this ability at nearly the same level as Asian (including India) countries.

Anyone who grew up in the US can gut check this. Which is more prestigious: MIT/Caltech or [insert almost any Ivy League]? The average American will pick an Ivy League. That, not our latent ability, is going to be the seed of our eventual dethronement.

Granted many from Asia might also pick an Ivy League, but I'd wager a lot of money that the proportion that picks a tech school will be much, much higher than America.

This is why acceptance rates cannot be considered in a vacuum as a measure of universal quality. Informed people generally understand that there is a lot of overlap in the bell curves of the intellectual abilities of Stanford and Berkeley undergrads. Stanford may generally have a higher stature in that it has a stronger association with wealth, but only fools believe it has the monopoly on student intellect in the Bay.

We do. Even just recently, US presidents have been cutting off China’s access to US tech out of fear.

If the kind of work these people do at your company doesn’t pressure test the skills they exhibited to get into MIT, then that stands to reason.

It’s nowhere near the stature or notoriety of Princeton, Harvard, Yale, etc. It feels like you’re moving the goalpost.

Anyway, maybe you should change the way you measure yourself.

I’ve personally witnessed schools of Stanford’s stature accepting students on multiple occasions, who were unable to handle AP Calculus AB in high school, or at least without significant assistance. When I mention this to associates from Asia, they are genuinely astonished. Anyone who got into a top university in East Asia will generally have breezed through such subject matter in high school. How can the United States hope to compete with Asia in a century? IMHO it’s going to be very difficult. Hard skills of this nature will rule the world.

These schools can offer harder, accelerated courses under the presumption that the floor of the student body’s ability is higher than average. In that sense, the education can be more rigorous and faster. Is that actually the case in practice? I’ve never gone to a mediocre university so I can’t compare.

But I can say that aside from intellect, attendees of top universities are not ethically superior to the average person.

You mean like Steve Jobs who, by your definition, didn’t go to a top school, but is more highly regarded than 99.99% of graduates of top schools?

What is your class of people? The 99.99% that you alluded to in another comment? Can that be called a class of people?

Throwing out numbers like 83% and 33% seems like a handwavy attempt at precision and diminishes your argument. The real world is not like university, unless you live in the very small subset of the world that makes its living off research. Formal education / book smarts !== leadership.

Do you have any first hand sources of Disney’s thought process and strategy as you’ve summarized them here? Calling Disney naive is bold.