Look, a lot of people have good-looking CVs and can't code shit. I don't know about you but my experience was that one really can't hire based on CV alone. Also, I've seen "architects" that are smart and fairly knowledgeable people that failed to code very very basic stuff (as in, merge 2 sorted arrays).... I get it that at some companies you are expected to draw diagrams in Confluence as a main job, and might no longer have actual coding skills; but we want even the most senior people to actually code, and that doesn't seem unreasonable to me. So just because you're a very-senior FAANG employee doesn't automatically mean you'd be a good fit. I'm not saying they're bad employees, but maybe they just wouldn't be a good fit and wouldn't enjoy the job if they expect to just design stuff instead of actually implementing, too.

1) you're expected to spend 3 or 4 hours on some HackerRank test before you've even spoken to anyone. Some of these tests (outside HackerRank) can actually be projects that take a day or more to get right. The issue is that at this point I don't know if the attitude is "hey, this seems like it might be a good hire, let's check if he can actually code" or if it's "let's send anyone this test and discard anyone who doesn't pass". I suspect that in a lot of cases it's the latter. I'm not opposed to investing time, but it quickly becomes unmanageable if everyone just asks you to pass their several-hour tests just to be considered for application. There is very little time investment from the company, and it feels almost like a dDoS attack on my time.

and 2), that a lot of these tests are asking you to solve some hard problem that you will rarely face in real life and where people have quite literally won Turing awards for finding solutions to them. Many previous discussions about this on HN in the past.

I don't think it's even all that much more effective at actually weeding out bad programmers than a simple test. We used to ask people to write a CSV address book importer with some very basic requirements; nothing fancy, you could do it in 30 minutes. It worked well enough, and a lot of the results we got back were horrible.

If I applied to 10 companies, and every single one of them asked me to come onsite for whiteboarding as the first step, that would also suck tremendously, but at least it would be limited in scope by the employer's time as well. As it stands, arbitrary companies can expect a large time investment without any of their staff ever having to speak to anyone.

I'll take a calculated stab at Amazon's once every 6 months I guess, because if I pass (which I haven't) I can potentially earn a hell of a lot more than any other place. I get it, whatever. If every company is doing it (they are)? I might just leave the industry if I can't find a way to be specifically good at remembering the implementation details of every data structure and algorithm. Sucks to be someone with pointless skills I guess.

Besides, if someone is duplicitous enough to have a good looking CV and no coding ability, what's stopping them from just cheating on the HackerRank?

TBH that's another argument I don't really get. Almost everyone agrees that basic CS knowledge trumps specific technology knowledge (I'd rather hire someone with strong CS fundamentals that didn't use Java before than someone who is a "Spring Boot expert" but lacks basic CS knowledge, even if I actually use Spring Boot right now).

But then, why complain that you don't do that in your work? Surely you need to traverse data structures from time to time, yeah it won't be the exotic tree traversal that I'd ask you to write but that's exactly the point - to test that you can be put in a novel situation that can't be directly-pasted from StackOverflow and you're able to write a recursive function that takes _a little bit_ of skill).

The hidden test case is opportunity for discussion during actual interview. And this answers your "what's stopping them" question, too - regardless of problem, I can tweak the input slightly so that your solution doesn't work - and more often than not, I don't even tweak the input, I just provide an additional testcase where your solution doesn't work. If you can quickly fix it ("oh, yeah, I forgot that URLs may have a fragment appended to it, let me quickly adjust my log-parsing condition") then it's awesome, it's exactly the signal I'm looking for, and we can go on to discuss system design and your relevant experience (but honestly, at that point my mind is likely ~80% made up, from CV + how you explain/modify your hackerrank solution).

The longer a candidate has worked on very capable teams the more surprised they will be to have those problems presented in a job interview.

I am not one for LC type of problems, but at the least I have to admit they have the potential of being more objective than everything else during the interview process. You get the specs, you write the code and it gets tested via multiple test cases. It does not matter if the interviewer agrees your solution will work or not, and the interviewer won't have to copy&paste your code, compile and run it (like someone else mentioned in this thread).

On the other hand, what I particularly dislike about the LC problems is that many of them are essentially trick questions and brain teasers. Can't we just stick to problems that are relevant to an SWE?

Currently I'm going through the interview process with a ton of companies (because my company is really dumb and is forcing everyone to move back to a certain bay area city post-covid), and I have been happily surprised to find that most of my interviews are very practical, project based, ones instead of straight whiteboarding leetcode problems. I've received several take-home projects that are followed up with a simple add-on interview to sit down and explain the choices made during the take-home. They have all been specifically focused on domain knowledge to the mobile platform that I'm interviewing for. Its really nice! I hope this trend continues.

That said, I am still reviewing leetcode problems for the stupid faang interviews I have coming up as well.

This was after a 10 minute conversation with the company's recruiter. To top it off, nothing in the job listing said anything about software. Just Cloud and Devops management role.

I am absolutely ok with take home or some presentation of my skills. However, I expect to know that I am being taken seriously as a candidate by that point. I don't want to waste my time on something with no investment from the company.

As you can guess, I bowed out of the running explaining that I didn't think it was appropriate for me to give them so much of my time with no commitment from their end. I also told them I could tell their take home project took them less than 5 minutes to generate for me as it was everywhere on the internet. How can I trust a process where the answers to the interview are everywhere? How can they really know my skills as a candidate if I can just steal the answers off of GitHub? Worse, how can I know how I will stack up to someone who might be less scrupulous than I and steal those answers when I tried in earnest and actually burned an afternoon trying to solve their test?

The tech test seems often like it's cargo cult. It's on Joel's list so everyone thinks it is a must do. Instead of realising that the entire point of the tech test was to make sure people could actually code. With some of the original tech tests being do FizzBuzz or do something really simple in a short amount of time. Not, build me a production ready toy project using techincal DDD aspects.

Of course. But consider how that attitude looks from the perspective of a candidate - you'd rather waste my time that yours is a really good reason for me to drop out of the interview process.

This is essentially what's wrong with hiring right now. Companies don't want to have anyone "waste their time", so they have many levels of filtering to reject candidates as early as possible while doing as little work as possible to make hiring good for candidates. In other words, companies have largely forgotten that candidates are people, and wasting anyone's time is a pretty bad idea.

I think sometimes people forget people working at these companies are people too and noone wants to have their time wasted. This isn't companies deciding these things. It's people. It's the person on the otherside that doesn't want their time wasted.

more competition = worse time for you