I struggled early in my career with interviews. Granted this was 2008-2010 era so the job market was not great, especially in a not-quite-urban non-coastal city where I was for a junior developer.
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.
I've had two "Online Assessments," as they're called, in the past couple of weeks and they're even weirder than that now. The request access to my desktop, webcam, microphone, akin to a proctored exam. They don't let you use your own editor, or even leave the window. There is no one there to interact with, ask clarifying questions, etc. It then plays everything back with keystrokes sync'd to video/audio for the reviewer.
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.
If I had that leverage, I certainly would hard-pass, but the market just isn't there right now. I have hands-on dev experience (and the education) in different roles, but none of those roles are solely as a "software developer," so just getting the opportunity to do these goofy things is almost necessary just to get a seat at the table so to speak to begin talking about my background and KSAs. One thing to note is it is all perms given through the browser.
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.
Tier 1 is default alive and thriving. They don't need the smartest people. They need people who do not screw up. Someone who's willing to spend 3-6 months cramming interview questions is also someone who is unlikely to drop the ball.
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.
> Someone who's willing to spend 3-6 months cramming interview questions is also someone who is unlikely to drop the ball.
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.
This sounds good but I don't think it lines up with reality at parts.
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.
I don't think it's ok, but the compensation and competition are both so high they can get away with it. A senior dev at Google in Manhattan will make more than a general practice physician in the same area. This is for a job that you can do with zero credentialing, no degree required, for half the hours and none of the liability. The competition is insane.
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.
The problems FAANG companies and an exceptional group of frontier AI companies are solving are leagues different to the problems regular startups think they are solving.
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.
At a tier 1 tech company the work will be ads/tracking on a global scale. You know that before you enter the door, and if you didn’t like it you wouldn’t be interviewing there.
So much less need for time to decide if you’re interested in working there.
> 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.
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.
Maybe it's time to question it. I don't think there's anything wrong with the now traditional whiteboard interview as such, but the notion that the same questions are all just as relevant to disparate teams is highly questionable. Technical questions should be based on the actual codebases or systems, IMO. I would also question the Hogwarts style approach of interviewing the candidate as a generic dev and then sorting them to the right team.
I agree but I companies like Meta/Apple/Amazon hire so much that they probably have full time statisticians just to analyze interview process and map that back to performance. So you have to assume this maps to real world success. Even if you are just testing an employee's preparation, maybe that means something.
The "Big corporation analyzes everything thoroughly and arrives at the most optimal solution" is a ridiculous myth, and I don't think I even need to give examples. Maybe not Apple, but Amazon surely has a lot of embarrassing failures.
When I was an engineer at Amazon, we all just made up our own questions, or passed fun ones around the office. I assume the Bar Raisers probably had an actual rubric, but the rest of us didn't (and we all had interviewing quotas to meet)
I left a while back, but folks still there tell me not much has changed (except they do a lot less hiring these days, so quotas aren't as big a part of the promo package)
In fact, for me it is pretty hard if not impossible to remain genuine to my ability and personal touch to navigate corporate world having to swallow all those keywords and behave properly in front of interviewers. Thinking that hacking/mastering it is often the single way out.
It should be. If the interview tests for what you crammed for, it doesn't test for what you'll remember a month onto the job. That's a sub-optimal strategy for the interviewer.
I occasionally interview people and that wouldn't really bother me. If you can learn something once you'll be able to re-learn it down the road when needed.
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.
Devil's advocate: there exists a corpus of questions solvable with a small number of techniques after a few weeks of decicated study. When someone has the right brain, these questions are the barrier to a 99th percentile income. What does it say about an interviewee that doesn't bother?
That they're unwilling to jump through random arbitrary hoops that are unrelated to their actual work. If a potential employer considers that a negative, what does it say about the employer?
It says they lack the social capital to know what these questions are and how to study them. Is the goal to optimize for people with family and friends already in tech that can pass on the "secret" or to maintain the fig leaf illusion of meritocracy?
Indeed. This has turned into a show about nothing. Recreational and competitive programming sites incentivize candidates for speed and one-upping. With such a group in the candidate set, companies rose up to the challenge of defeating them at their game by picking even harder questions. With the rise of AI, candidates don't even have to know or read the question.
And eye for eye leaves the whole world blind. I don't think there are any winners in this war.
When you're interviewing junior developers, you have no standard measure, they don't have enough actual experience to speak to. So before a leetcode and CTCI, you'd either have junior developers who went to a good university and were able to get an internship via that network, or they made some great open source contribution or project on the side as a student
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.