As of recently I started having really confusing opinions on the state of interviewing and our industry in general.
Since there is no gatekeeping (for better or for worse), you get a large pool of people with wild variety of skills, so these silly interviews are the laziest way to assess people as an alternative to having credentials such as that of a Civil Engineer, Doctor or other professions.
I don't know of any other industry where the interview is this silly, but studying for it for a few months top could get you a 6 figure salary (not everyone makes it, but the chances are quite high) if you know what you're doing/skilled enough.
I started to play the game as well and actually got a lot better at solving this type of problems than say few months ago. My confidence is high and I'm a lot less intimidated by this type of interviews, but so is my I-take-no-shit-ometer since even if I aced some of these interviews recently and the interviewer(s) was/were acting in ways I didn't appreciate, I can just say no. I mean, I can play your game, but I'm not gonna put up with your shit.
They’re just too high pressure and picky nowadays, and you’re competing with too many good candidates
Indeed. Many people (including myself) find it hard to reconcile our lived experiences with the hysterical claims in the press about a desperate skills shortage.
To the OP: if it helps, understand that these kinds of interviews and how you do on them are in no way reflective of your skills as an engineer or your worth as a human being. You’re just being hazed, by someone you probably wouldn’t want to work with anyway. Keep at it, and eventually you will get to speak to someone who is basically normal that you can have a real conversation with.
Learning and building stuff won't help you pass these interviews.
Which is ironic but it also means that applying for a company that uses such interviews is a completely different task to becoming a better engineer.
Personally I avoid such places, there is sufficiently good compensation available elsewhere from people that don't expect me to perform parlour tricks on a whiteboard for their amusement.
You're not alone. I detest these interviews, refuse to participate in them on either side. Of course, that's from the privileged position of currently being employed so it doesn't carry a lot of moral weight since it's currently causing me no pain.
I think they're terrible at what they claim to be doing (determining if a candidate is good at software engineering) because never in my life have I had to do a leetcode style thing under time pressure in my 15 years of professional software work.
I have a pet theory to explain them - I think it's simply a form of hazing. Many engineers have the mindset of "I had to go through this, you will too". It also allows the interviewer to intellectually flex on the interviewee which staves off impostor syndrome in the interviewee if only for a moment.
They also remove people like you and me, older and further into our careers with less stomach for make-work and less free time to practice for it.
All my recent job interviews have been like that. Although they've all been for software and data analysis jobs at non-software engineering firms. In my experience companies used to interviewing not-software engineers have much more sane interviewing practices since they know that a chemical or structural engineer with 10 years of experience won't put up with that sort of thing.
It's funny. It's like the interview process is designed to build bad habits. If somebody needs to troubleshoot, I'd prefer someone who reads manpages. If you need an actual algorithm for something, I'd prefer someone who has a look around for libraries first and if it's really necessary, cracks a fucking book and figures out what the right answer is, rather than over-confidently pulling utter bullshit out of their ass on the fly.
Honestly though, annoying interviews are just no-poach 2.0. It's a form of wage suppression if you really think about it.
Right. I despise the interview process we've landed on in the industry, but have slowly and painfully come to terms with it as a decent bad way of doing it to balance between having some competency bar and the usual heavy gatekeeping solution.
How many creative and truly innovative thinking people do you know that will spend hours studying for and partaking in such a ridiculous interview process? It’s easily one of the top turn offs for me when it comes to FAANG companies. Not because it’s difficult, but because it’s utterly boring, and useless.
It seems these companies are far more interested in hiring very intelligent and analytical type people, but those who have no sense of outside the box thinking. Which in theory makes sense at scale, but in tech your head start will eventually fade, and those same people you’ve hired likely can’t bring you back.
Not all younger developers have to jump through those hoops. There are plenty of companies that don't do that kind of nonsense, because they're trying to hire good engineers, rather than, specifically, engineers -- good or bad, that'll get sorted out later -- who will happily sacrifice their spare time to figure out how to jump through the arbitrary hoops that their jobs entail.
Holding this kind of bullshit interview isn't a bad idea if you're a megacorp with chaotic teams and fourteen levels of management hierarchy where people spend most of their time on infighting and career building. You need people who jump through hoops, because successfully delivering most projects in these environments is 10% difficult technical work (which the good engineers can handle, and you can typically hire enough of them via recommendations), 40% YAML-poking bullshit work, and -- optimistically -- 50% jumping through all sorts of technical and non-technical hoops, most of them self-inflicted.
I navigated this kind of process successfully early in my career, and the only thing that made me more miserable than interviews like these was the work I got to do afterwards, after accepting the offers. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is probably just how these things are -- I'm now pretty convinced that the quality of the interview is (barring statistical accidents) highly correlated with the quality of the actual position.
I worked at a unicorn that did these type of interviews under the premise that they provided a way to reduce bias in the process. That seems reasonable if you believe that qualified engineers can walk in and compete these tasks without having practiced extensively.
I don’t happen to believe that and thus believe it biases in favor of candidates who can devote considerable quantities of free time to preparation.
I too, would like to be working on a real project. But most if not all companies that I'd be thrilled to work for are gatekeeped by these leetcode style interviews.
I don't like that that's how it is, but that's what the game is, and most people are in no position to change the rules of the game.
I also acknowledge that despite all its flaws, the SWE interview landscape is still better than say, that for lawyers, where if you didn't graduate from a top law school some doors are immediately and permanently shut for you.
You can still get into a top tech company without an outstanding pedigree. The closest analogue to the lawyer situation is that if you have a top tech company on your resume, I'd say many doors are opened (or opened much more easily) to you than someone without such name brand companies on their resume.
God, this is just painfully embarrassing. It's a real shame we -- as an industry -- haven't pushed back against these kinds of practices (maybe the pay is just too good). At this point, technical interviews are just a meme.
Is it though? Seems pretty specific to the tech industry (and some others).
Never heard that there were crazy interview rounds for experienced lawyers, marketers, project managers, even other non-tech engineers. After a certain amount of experience, people assume from your resume that you are not an impostor and interviews are mostly about motivations / behavourial fit.
I don't understand this attitude. There must be lots of great companies to work at where the interview process is a bit flawed and the questions a bit unrealistic. Why let that stop you? Why handicap yourself when you can just learn it?
My career path in tech so far has been junior engineer -> mid level -> senior -> tech lead.
As I've progressed through that path, I have had literally no opportunities of applying the stuff I've learnt on HackerRank, save for a couple of interviews.
At this point I'm convinced that the focus of those interviews was entirely wrong. Once you pass those tests and get hired, you will be dealing with tons of legacy code riddled with dumb queries, questionable code quality, and very often the wrong stack for the problem at hand.
I'd be OK with modern interviews if they reflected the job you will be doing to a reasonable degree. But knowing the state of the industry I feel that they fall somewhere between gatekeeping and a bait & switch scheme.
If you haven't spent enough time practising those problems, you will look like an idiot. If you have spent enough time practising them, your expectations will be high, and you will feel scammed when you read the steaming shit your new employer wants you to improve.
Interviewing is a perennial topic because it doesn't make much sense.
Case in point - over the past week I've interviewed for four positions. Three gave me offers within a day, with very little effort on my part. On the other hand, one told me that I had little idea of what I was doing and told me to study up and apply again next year. And, that was after wasting my time with 3.5 hours of interviews. Of the offers I received, two were well over 120k plus great bonus. The other came in under 90k but told me that I could work anywhere in the world, whenever I wanted, as long as I got my work done.
Over that same time, I flat out rejected three recruiters from large engineering companies because their recruitment processes would have cost me $700-1500 just in opportunity costs. And, they weren't even willing to give me the info I needed to help me determine my chance of success or even my expected pay.
Everyone these days seems to believe that their company is so important that they deserve or need a team of top 1000 engineers. When in fact a top 20-percent team who bonds well together would likely be sufficient.
The topic of interviewing is fascinating because there seems to be very little science behind it. Who knows what works?
Is there any other field that normalizes this type of insane interviews.
They are even applauded by the vast majority in this thread.
Do mathematiticans have to interiview like this? Medical doctors? Police officers?
Rocket scientists? Chemists?
Architects?
I cant think off a single profession apart from the IT domain that does this.
I dont think there is a single profession that gets mocked on their interviewing strategies as much as IT still I see senior devs defending this insanity.
I recently suggested to them not to dumb down their interviews as they simply make the equation about talking to them not worth the time. I remember they used to have much tougher interviews in the past, which were super motivating; now it's like standard hackerrank stuff which is pretty uninteresting. OTOH, each company has its blind spots so that they won't be on top forever, so maybe it's better that way as those that were very capable but rejected could dethrone them at some later time.
To me their approach lately is like forcing a top tennis player to play with kids (well, you would be surprised how many pros have issues slowing down their game) or a double diamond slope skier to ski on blue slopes only (and increasing the risk of getting an injury as their timing/moves are optimized to ultimate performance instead of basics). I've heard of people that solved stuff on interviews nobody solved before them but were rejected as they messed up some basic stuff and recruiter was communicating back to them that it looked bad in the hiring committee.
The whole interviewing process is ass-backwards for smart people.
I have little interest in working for a company where I'm going to struggle to do the job. I'm not going to apply for a job where I'd be out of my depth for any more than a month or so, because that sort of "if I don't get better at this soon I'm going to be fired" sort of stress is horrible. I want to find a job where I can succeed right off the bat, learn new things and get better over time, and where I can see myself staying for several years at least. No one wants to be a job hopper; it's a symptom of poor interviewing on the interviewee's part.
From my point of view then, I know before I even get to the interview that I'm perfectly well suited for the company and can do the job - if I wasn't, I wouldn't have applied. So I approach interviews in reverse: I'm going to grill you, your team, the baristas in the nearest coffee shop, and anyone I can find on LinkedIn who's recently left. If you ask me stupid puzzle questions that have little to do with what I've come to understand the job entails, I'm going to take that as a sign that your company is less than functional in the interviewing arena, and I know from experience that that extends to the actual engineering too.
Interviewers seem to treat these types of questions as shit filters. I do exactly the same. If you ask them, that's a smell.
I've been interviewing in the past month as I need to find a new role and it is just crazy.
It is SO random, a lot of useless questions, small startups having a long hiring process harder than the big 4.
Just one example: I've received an offer from one of the big 4 after going through their process. I was lucky in the questions - things I had studied.
I also applied for around 40 start ups / small companies. I made through the final on-site interview in only 5 of them. Lots of white boarding, silly technical questions that don't proxy to day-to-day work and etc.
I really think that passing in a process in a company like Facebook and not passing in other companies working in a much less complex environment says a lot.
Another thing that annoyed me a lot was that in some companies, when I froze upon a problem and was in a dead end, instead of them trying to help me or give constructive advice they would just keep adding pressure. It's craaazy. You're in a white board in a position of someone judging you in a on-the-fly-absurd-problem and the guys is trying to talk you down instead of help.
Since there is no gatekeeping (for better or for worse), you get a large pool of people with wild variety of skills, so these silly interviews are the laziest way to assess people as an alternative to having credentials such as that of a Civil Engineer, Doctor or other professions.
I don't know of any other industry where the interview is this silly, but studying for it for a few months top could get you a 6 figure salary (not everyone makes it, but the chances are quite high) if you know what you're doing/skilled enough.
I started to play the game as well and actually got a lot better at solving this type of problems than say few months ago. My confidence is high and I'm a lot less intimidated by this type of interviews, but so is my I-take-no-shit-ometer since even if I aced some of these interviews recently and the interviewer(s) was/were acting in ways I didn't appreciate, I can just say no. I mean, I can play your game, but I'm not gonna put up with your shit.
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