I tried to hire a known, trusted, high performing engineer at Google. He was rejected. After reading his packet I could not figure out why. I had to call the recruiter and ask her if he’d said something so unmentionable they couldn’t even write it down.

They decided to pass on him because he was so good his promotion path at the role would be inadequate. I could have told them that before they wasted his time flying him out and sitting him through 8 hours of tech screen.

I literally had to fly him back out and do it all again, because “that’s the process”

I hate to break it to you but the process is broken.

Spend some time doing initial technical screen interviews. You'll quickly realize most people with years of industry experience have barely any clue what they're doing.

Think about the average quality of engineer you've seen make it to a panel interview. Then realize the majority of applicants don't make it to a manager screen, and the majority of those screened don't make it to the panel. And a large percentage (varies by company) won't make it through the interview panel. If you're only thinking about people who are hired, you're even more distant.

None of this is to insult people. This skill set is hard. It's just that if you work with competent engineers and spend your days in technical communities, you're in a bubble that tricks you into thinking most people in the industry are way more capable than they actually are.

I've never passed a technical interview.

I got my internship at a company that thankfully valued informal broad technical discussion over a conventional technical interview, then from there I slid into a full-time job at the same company with no additional interview. By the time I applied for my second job I was senior enough not to be asked to do a technical screen.

I've attempted conventional tech interviews in between and absolutely crashed and burned! So I'm impressed by anyone getting through these interviews, because I can't do it!

I have been rejected many, many, many times because the first screening (CV check by non-technical recruiter). My last example was at a well know tech startup were I had to hack my way to get noticed in order to get the first interview. The funny thing is that I was the fasted candidate to get hired + I won a company-wide award for my work at the company just 4 months after joining.

I haven't finished a degree because I thought was boring and I was learning things I already taught myself before, but this fact makes my resume go down the list very fast. Because interviewers don't have time to lose and thousands of candidates to check I'm sure they will find very useful the use of technology on getting those good prospects in front of everyone else.

Something I've seen many times at my past jobs is having good technical applicants, some of them are even referred by one team member and are turned down later because culture. I don't know why but engineers and technical people are more likely to fail at those than others. The surprising thing is that they check culture as the last step because those who can run those type of interview are a few and can't become full-time culture keepers. This is an enormous waste of time and resources for the applicant, the interviewers and the company itself.

Typically, I ask questions that give me an idea about the candidate's depth of experience and awareness. For example, "I see that you've spent X years using Subversion for source control. What are your opinions on trunk-first development vs. branch-first development?" I ask questions that speak to practical experience and design ability, without getting into too much depth. For example, "Pretend that you're using an OO language to build an application for <insert purpose here>. Just off the top of your head, what are some classes that you would expect to see in your class diagram?". Etc.

I find that this level of questioning is a much better screening tool than trick questions about programming language quirks or the minutiae of frameworks, or cliche puzzles about how many golf balls fit on an airplane. However, I groan and roll my eyes when I hear people challenge the need for technical interviews at all. Yes, they are necessary.

Having performed a thousand interviews by now, I am awestruck by how poor the software development talent pool is. I am aware that the Bay Area is overrepresented in HN's readership, and that crowd tends to take for granted the talent level found in the technical equivalent of Mecca. However, I assure you that the rest of the planet is dominated by sleepy line-of-business developers... who have all the passion beaten out of them in the first 5-10 years, and spend the rest of their career just phoning it in and not growing.

I sometimes ask candidates what the letters "MVC" stand for. The successful response rate is around 50/50. I ask candidates to briefly explain the advantages of the Model View Controller pattern, and only 10-20% can field the question. We bring in Java and C# candidates who have been working with their respective language for 10 or 15 years, and they get COMPLETELY EXPOSED during the face to face round when asked a series of basic certification exam style questions. Nothing tricky, just core fundamentals.

People who post here are not the norm. The "norm" is atrocious. So yes, unfortunately we all must endure technical interviews... to filter out people who have enough confidence or personality to excel in the other interview segments, yet are utterly useless.

Let's put it this way: the more experience I've had with interviewing, the more selective I've been in my own job searching, and the more aggressive I've been in my salary negotiations. If you are really good, and are located outside of San Francisco, then you are worth your weight in gold and should value yourself accordingly. You wield tremendous leverage once you make a strong showing in a technical interview.

A portion of those people who were filtered out because they get nervous during interviews or got stumped by a riddle or esoteric question, could have been entirely qualified to be a good or great engineer.

Big tech companies should be designing interviews that don't find just people who are awesome at interviews and riddles.

> I cannot help but think that these big tech companies (FAANG, et. al) are missing out on diversifying and increasing their engineering expertise by passing over developers like you.

I think this is certainly true.

> I often think what would Google/Facebook would be like if they hired in some experienced engineers that may not be able to whiteboard a BFS tree or can tell you Djikstra's algorithm, but have proven business track records of getting projects done, on budget, and on time.

Well... how do we find these people? By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it? By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates?

Practically speaking, FAANG companies do hire such individuals, they just do it through acqui-hires. If a person works at a company that is good enough to be worth acquiring, then we have a good signal that they are effective employees even absent a direct evaluation of their technical abilities.

Don't send technical pre-screens to candidates before you talk to them. You're not Google. I'm not going to waste my time on something before I know anything about the company, the team, or the job itself.

I haven't really seen this interviewing for jobs on the west coast, but there's a lot of shops in Chicago (fintech) that seem to be under the impression that anyone applying for an engineering job is desperate.

Of course, but you still have to get to them first as no sane company makes their engineers to do 1st round CV screening (especially for publicly announced positions where tens or hundreds of CVs are applied). From my personal experience, technical interview with an engineer is usually only on 2nd/3rd round, so we are back to square 1. Yes, I know the best positions are filled through networking and recommendations, but that's not an option when you live outside of tech bubbles.

Just to clarify, at least for the SRE hiring process, you first have a single technical phone screening with a technical recruiter (not an engineer) which is literally on the phone. At least it was for me, no webcam or anything. It's a pretty short and back-to-back question/answer type of conversation similar to what is told by the article (although the article strikes me as odd and does not match my experience). After that you have a couple (or more if need) of "phone" (read: hangouts with webcam and shared doc) interviews with actual engineers and those are more technical and require you to write code as well. Then you'll be moved to on-site interviews.

(This is for Europe at least, I imagine it'd be similar in other areas but can't know 100%).