this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Yeah, they kinda suck and they are brutal to go into cold. Having to grind a bunch of leetcode problems is a burden, particularly if you currently have a job and god forbid a family.
I would still take them over the puzzle questions that used to be popular, or the personality test nonsense that dominates most fields. At least Leetcode problems are reasonably reflective of programming skill. I'll also take them over vague open ended questions - ain't nothing more fun than trying to ramble my way into whatever answer the interviewer is secretly looking for.
Personally, when the day comes when I'm In Charge, I plan on experimenting with more day to day type evaluations. I think there's potential for things like performing a mock code review or having someone plan out a sprint based on a very detailed design document. "Here's an icky piece of code, tell me what it does and what you would do to improve it" seems to have fallen out of style, though it's not clear to me why.
That said, like it or not it's how the game is played and not changing anytime soon. Get on the Grind75 train, or don't and keep failing tech screens.
I have never found the ability to regurgitate Leetcode solutions as reflective of programming skill or even good performance. I’ve seen what talent I get from FAANG hires and what talent I get from random people with state degrees. Most of the time I will take the later. I have yet to staff some crazy R&D project that actually required anything like the things Cracking the Code Interview tells you to do.
I’ve found a lot more success giving people reasonable design exercises based on company projects and code exercises related to actual work done. I have made a career of only taking jobs with similar interview processes and as I’ve grown into leadership I’ve continued to give interviews that accurately test day-to-day skills. Am I missing out on really good talent by usually ignoring FAANG resumes? So far I don’t think so and I don’t need those idiotic attitudes polluting strong, elastic teams either.
Why are you assuming FAANG resumes can't do system design?
I have two problems with FAANG candidates.
First, having gone through the full interview process at several and rejected all due to laughably low base salaries, I know how those candidates are selected. The skills being evaluated have fuck all to do with what I’ve actually needed engineers to do. That gives me zero confidence in their ability to do anything meaningful. Solving tic-tac-toe doesn’t mean you can actually walk your way through security problems in an API.
Second, the toxic cultures at these companies is not something I want infecting my teams. Google, for example, is famously about making yourself look really fucking good for a performance review board, not making the company better. Amazon makes people think the talent pool is big enough for perpetual unregretted attrition and pits peer against peer. Meta completely strips any semblance of ethics and therefore customer understanding. Twitter doesn’t fucking care about security.
Most engineers meet expectations. Period. People think FAANG is hot shit. It’s not. It’s arguably worse than most run-of-the-mill places because people on the internet like to make FAANG out to be hot shit. The chances of someone actually doing something big at FAANG are so fucking tiny it’s just like thinking you’re going to make the next killer indie game.
It's pretty shitty that you are attributing the cultures of companies to the personalities of individuals. You're going to miss out on a lot of good people doing that.
I think it’s fine to attribute those values to employees who fought to work at companies with those problems. I’m not calling out hidden problems; I’m calling out the issues you can easily find when you do a cursory search for information on the company you’re going to work for. If you think it’s okay to go work for a company like Meta I know you’re okay with some disgusting shit and I don’t want you near my team or my customers.
I hope you reconsider your stance cuz you’re making a lot of assumptions about people based on very limited information.
You do you, but throwing out applicants because you think they personally agree with everything their past employers have done is ridiculous.
Although I agree with you that people shouldn't equate company values and employees' values, I'd say that it could be true, especially if they did work there for long enough.
As for my personal opinion, this could likely be solved by a short questionnaire on why they left the company and what do they think of this and that.
I have never tried to get into FAANG (MAAMA 😅) but if I did, I'd definitely focus more on how to get there, not on why that's a bad idea, so it's not quite correct to judge based on the fact that someone worked somewhere.
As a side note, I had never did a thorough research of companies I applied to, somehow it mostly worked out, but I did sometimes end up in the company I wasn't quite comfortable in ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But OP was experience hiring both sorts of candidates and found non-FAANG employees to work out better.
And no, one shouldn't judge completely on a former company's culture, but some people do indeed drag that shit with them. My old boss would be great for some roles in my new company, but she has absolutely poisonous management skills stemming from her environment.