> 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.
there's a huge pool of employees that are in companies which aren't potential acquisition targets.
> Well... how do we find these people? By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it?
internal references? if you've got a couple of internal folks who are doing good work, and they all worked with and vouch for old bob, maybe that's better than anything you're going to find out from <8 hours of whiteboard scribblings?
> By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates?
even the faintest whiff of implication that FAANG interviews might not be subjective is hilarious.
At each place it was people from other teams completely unrelated to that team who interviewed (or would interview) me and eventually turned into a decision panel where everything about me would be considered by these people who really knew nothing of my character/skills aside from the resume and white boarding.
Between that and the amount of times I heard "Stanford" tossed around in a way that put down other schools (while not having a degree at all myself) I decided to give up on ever working at any of these places without being an acquihire. It just seems like a far fetched pipe-dream and I'd never check the required boxes that they expect for someone to sit in the same building with them. And honestly, none of that sat well with me.
It was an interesting time and I got to finally experience SV and realized it's likely not a place for someone like me.
First of all it sounds like your interview experience was unpleasant so if this was at Google I apologize.
Secondly, I can totally relate to feeling like I don't belong having also come from a nontraditional background (No college degree).
> At each place it was people from other teams completely unrelated to that team who interviewed (or would interview) me and eventually turned into a decision panel where everything about me would be considered by these people who really knew nothing of my character/skills aside from the resume and white boarding.
This sounds similar to what we do at Google; people who know you actually aren't allowed to interview you because they will be biased. We try to make the interview as objective as possible. Note that information from anyone who knows you or referred you will be shown to the hiring committee though so it's not as though that feedback is not used.
> Between that and the amount of times I heard "Stanford" tossed around in a way that put down other schools (while not having a degree at all myself) I decided to give up on ever working at any of these places without being an acquihire. It just seems like a far fetched pipe-dream and I'd never check the required boxes that they expect for someone to sit in the same building with them. And honestly, none of that sat well with me.
I understand why you feel this way but that's definitely not true! I don't think you necessarily should want to work in FAANG but I strongly think you should believe you are capable.
It's weird that it's that skill, and only that skill, that gets evaluated. I did another interview at a different one where there was at least a design interview (though I flubbed it and wound up being incoherent).
It really feels like they aren't even trying to evaluate anything other than whiteboard coding. Accepting that it's not a great signal and yet fully investing in it.
It's such a weird skill and it's so easy to perform badly; I'd be kind of shocked if the test/retest validity wasn't very low.
Also... I mentioned that working on teams with other women was important to me... but every technical onsite I've had has been given by a man. They've pitched teams led by women, and my HR/recruiting contacts have been nearly all women. But for the interview itself? All men.
At big companies this is hard to scale because you have to protect against nepotism at the top layer. This forces policies protecting against the bad outcome.
At small companies this does happen.
Get a sense of the projects they have worked on if those skills relate to the position. Make a decision based on that.
Random coding tests, whiteboarding, buzzword dropping are only helpful to a point.
I’ve never heard of any other company doing this, but I haven’t been looking especially carefully.
From FAANG, to start ups, to established traditional engineering companies.
While not perfect I wonder if a person's projects are a good signal for this. There certainly are those who have developed a significant open source project but who get rejected by the FAANG companies, the author of Homebrew being a recent infamous example.
As an interviewer, I can definitely say that GitHub has become a bigger part of helping to evaluate people.
Many people can’t work on open source, either due to a lack of time or corporate policy.
Not to diminish his accomplishment... he could be a good candidate for PM but his tool is more of a dev-tool (so I suppose this is a niche-ish?)
> I wrote a simple package manager. Anyone could write one. And in fact mine is pretty bad. It doesn't do dependency management properly. It doesn’t handle edge case behavior well. It isn’t well tested.
But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.
It’s always possible that Google felt he wasn’t what they needed. And keep in mind that Howell ended up being hired by Apple and working there for a while.
I mean... Yes?
This system, backed by "trusted recommenders" is exactly what academia uses, and they seem perfectly capable of discovering Higgs Bosons and whatnot.
This is inherently biased and proven to be the worst way to hire people.
I would argue that pair programming or take home projects do a far better job than the standard Whiteboard Algo interviews. In fact I don't think it's even close but SV engineers have been captured by this Whiteboard Interview Stockholm Syndrome/Hazing and continue to perpetuate the insane idea that there is no better way.
How does one not have time for pair programming? It's the exact same time commitment, from both the interviewer and interviewee, as a whiteboarding session. It's just a different format for the interview.
I don't think it's the case that people don't like interviews. I think you're making a strawman. I'm not going to go and say that you're part of the cycle of SV engineer being hazed, reproducing it and exhibiting a sunken cost fallacy/bias towards the way you've done it, but it's possible. I don't think this is the ideal way to interview.
What's more, I've been seeing actual improvement on the state of the art in this area. Platforms like Karat et al (not sure if Karat is the best in this area but I did have a good experience with a company that used them and interviewed me well) are actually incentivized to minimize false positives and negatives rather than just one. You might be surprised at how much better a good technical interviewer can be than an average strong engineer.
And their education, previous employment, etc.
No one makes a neuro-surgeon perform a surgery before hiring them.
Google allows you to write code on a Chromebook instead of a whiteboard (don't know if it's for everyone or some people). Is that pair programming? Or do you mean actually working with your preferred IDE/text editor, terminal, browser to look stuff up?
