Kinda brutal world out there though if you have to study for 3 months just to get the chance to interview at a FAANG, and at a startup you're going to be at a huge disadvantage to any ex-FAANG.

If compaines actually gave a **** about building a good product and not just what they signal to their investors - I doubt ex-FAANG would mean nearly as much. Why did they leave? Clearly FB and Google aren't in the habit of letting their rock stars go.

The whole idea is FB and Google can afford to let good devs go that don't pass muster on their whiteboard grilling. But literally everyone admits there are great devs out there who couldn't pass a FAANG grilling session - including many of the old timer devs who work there. Other companies should be looking for devs who fall through that crack imo, not devs who passed the academic portion, then decided to leave or were forced out a few years later.

I'm not arguing it's not the state of things - I'm arguing it's bullshit. I'm arguing the whole thing is as much about image and exit strategy as it is about executing. Varying degrees with each company I'm sure.

We had two senior managers leave at my last company - one to Amazon and one to become CTO somewhere or something.

Both put us through hell with their bullshit initiatives - then published articles that made it look like they had unleashed some innovative cultural phenomenon within the company that everyone loved.

One was a stupid gamefied thing that was forced down our throats. Every single person hated that ****. But when he literally wrote a book that made it sound like we loved playing the games so much we jumped through all these hoops. GAMEFICATION! TOTAL BULLSHIT!

Sheesh I haven't even gotten into the endless ever-evolving stream of BS buzzwords. Can I sell you guys a Big Data / AI-powered toaster? Our industry lies. At every level. Every single "future roadmap" powerpoint ever produced is massively full of ****. My boss has a whole machine learning story she sells to the higher ups which will get us to squeeze more money out of donors somehow. It's never going to happen. I think even she knows it on some level. But life is boring w/o the BIG DREAM stretch goal right?

The Amazon guy had us to some kind of "self-driven" "tiger team" innovation lab thing - over and above all our regular stuff of course - when we were in the middle a 1.5 year crunch time on our big project. They kept saying they would relieve us of some of our duties - which was complete bullshit because they never changed timeline or scope - and no one else could do it.

He wrote that **** up and made it sound like some amazing thing and leveraged some fancy job at Amazon with it. It produced exactly nothing. It was all theater. And it caused us a lot of stress. Everyone else on the tiger team but me and my direct coworker weren't that busy and seemed to enjoy it at least. Me and my buddy were useless though.

It's. All. Bullshit. And you will never convince me otherwise.

That's what I'm talking about fake it until you make it. They understood the game and they made it work for them to jump to bigger and better things.

It's literally no different than someone who went through what jmakin did - somehow convincing a shaky startup to give him a high-up position and then maybe in a year leveraging that into a more solid position somewhere with a similar title. But that person would need to be good at BSing their way through and not feeling in over their head - and jmakin doesn't seem to want to do that. I'm just saying someone in his spot could.

I'm way too fat and too old. I could not. I never wanted to do that **** anyway. I love programming. But I'm just pointing out most of the factors don't really have anything to do with your actual experience - just your ability to learn quick and BS your way through what you don't know until you get your feet under you. And look the part. I'm sure there are startup bros that are exceptions - but holy cow 98% of them look the exact same. Any by that I only mean young(ish), male, and generally in good shape. Race isn't super important.

Again, in the bay area, if all you cared was talent, you would naturally end up with a lot of them, because that's where so much of the senior talent is right now. The rate at which these types of companies are soaking up available talent from everywhere has been breathtaking and in the bay area, it's become pretty ridiculous. It's really not about which engineers the startup is choosing to hire but at which startups top engineers are choosing to work. It's more or less impossible to have any reasonable hiring process in the bay area and have a highly desirable company for top engineers to work, and not end up with lots ex-FAANG/Uber/Airbnb/whatever engineers, given how many engineers currently work at these types of places.

This means the converse is also true. Once you're past a certain size - again, in the bay area - if none of your engineers came from top tech companies - barring some exceptional situations (maybe you hired everyone out of school or have some super weird recruiting process or need expertise that is somehow not found at those places) it's somewhat unlikely that you do in fact have a company where best people want to work at.

Think of it this way - if none of the lawyers at your law firm are from top-14, your law firm is probably not one of the most prestigious law firms. Top-14 doesn't have a monopoly on the best graduates and I'm sure tons of great lawyers come from other schools, but if none of the top-14 graduates wants to work at your law firm, there's a reason. At some point, it doesn't matter if it's a signal, it's also the reality.

Virtually no company that sees itself as a top tech company and is at a reasonable size will care if you were an ex-FAANG or not - the reason why ex-FAANGs would disproportionately get these jobs is because 1) well they passed this type of interview before and 2) working at a real tech company effectively prepares you for non-coding portions of these types of interviews.

These are big companies and there are all kinds of reasons why people would want to leave.

The interviews are not that hard and the level of intelligence and knowledge required to pass these types of tests is fairly low. Beyond that, it's mostly about preparation, demonstrating some motivation and grit. And as it turns out, these are pretty strong predictors of success. If some college football player showed up out of shape at the combine and talked about how the combine is not real football, there's plenty of tape demonstrating his skills and athleticism, so why should he bother and proceeded to put up not-so-great numbers, even if you were sure that he's a great athlete that's better than what he's shown, wouldn't you be concerned about this person's drive and makeup? It's sort of the same thing.

At this point, almost every top tech company has the same process.

Well I can guarantee you the process fails when someone is a) old, b) rusty because they've been out of the game for a bit and c) panicky because of a) and b).

I can't think on my feet and be creative in whiteboards anymore. It's like fog of war stuff - just very mechanical. Maybe it would be different now that I'm back in the game. Also I never studied all the bubble sort/big O stuff so I'd literally be something just as an academic exercise that I have zero real world experience in. Not sure what that's supposed to test other than IQ - which they could test w/o making you study CS concepts you're never going to use for 3 months.

And anyway - only about half the startups I interviewed with had much whiteboard grilling. The best one had me just walk through and design a 'like' widget - from end to end. Soooooo much more real world to the kind of stuff I'd actually be doing. I loved that interview.

I don't think every company does a day of white board grilling and bubble sorts.

My boss at my current job did basically the same thing my previous boss did. Just talk to me, then give me a chance with a 6 month contract that could be terminated at any time. Imagine!

I wish every job just offered temp to perm contracts. I'd snap take that because I know they'll want me. Then it's up to me if I want them. Seems like they might not be so terrified to give people who really sound like they know what they're talking and have relevant experience about a chance.

Not everyone is good at whiteboards. We interviewed a kid one time who came super highly recommended and he just couldn't do anything. I think he just panicked, which I have a lot of empathy for now. The job should not have a "perform quickly while on stage" component. No aspect of programming needs those skills.

The most hilarious interview I had was when I was much younger (like 2007) at a travel company in Manhattan Beach (which I think might have been Trip Advisor but I'm not sure). They wanted me to randomize something so I just did myHashmap.keys() and went from there. Which is funny because it's not even random - it will produce the same result every time.

But the manager was so impressed with my creativity that he really wanted to hire me and they made a hard play for me. Did I mention I was a lot younger? Never had a job interview where I didn't get the job when I was under 40. Over 40 pretty much the exact opposite.

But I can't think outside the box like that on a whiteboard anymore - or at least not in this round of interviews I just did. It was gone. I'm a much much better developer now than I was in 2007 btw. But when you've already got one strike as a greybeard, then you stammer and stutter on the whiteboard - it's basically over.

Maybe next time I'll shoot for 'architect' instead of 'full stack developer' and see what happens. Probably a whole different world of bullshit.

I suspect that some of these people at least understood some theory behind what they were doing and/or had some learnings from previous jobs that allowed them to plausibly describe a reality in which what they are doing would work, even if it wasn't working at your place. Either way, this is very different from jmakin's situation.

It's not about not wanting to do this - I don't believe he has a perspective that allows him to take the experience he's had and explain in a way that makes it sound like he knows what he's doing to anyone competent. Even bullshitting along these lines requires some perspective, some ability to imagine how things could have worked out in a better situation. All this is pretty tough is if he's literally never been in a functional situation and never seen a competent lead.

My experience is that there's substantially less bullshit at companies that have a rigorous, standardized technical interview process that is difficult to pass without preparation than at companies that do not. To me it's almost tautological - if a company is rigorous about hiring, standardized processes like this have to emerge. If the company is rigorous about hiring, 1) it's also going to be more rigorous about other things and there will be less bullshit and 2) you will end up with better leaders that can cut stuff like that out.

I personally don't deal with anything like this - my job is brutally about the external, business reality, my roadmap is absolutely about solving real world problems, every success we have has a direct positive impact for the business, every mistake we make can set us back substantially etc. Sometimes I wish I had more time for complete bullshit. And last time I had to deal with a lot of bullshit, it was at a company that didn't have a standard technical interview process until I instituted one.

I've interviewed candidates of all ages - age doesn't have much to do with it and it's much more about preparation. Most engineers that don't work with low-level algorithms or practice these types of problems for fun are going to have to prepare. You can't expect to just walk into these types of interviews and ace them without any preparation. I've failed some stupid easy coding interviews because I didn't care and came unprepared.

Well this is why you have to study. And if they gave you a specific type of IQ test, you will have to study for that too - you know other people will. That's kind of the whole point.

But you keep ending up at places that you feel is full of bullshit. You should not let your enjoyment of the interview process dictate where you work. It would be like a top college football player going to some shitty league instead of the NFL because they didn't want to prepare for the combine and the other league was happy to have him purely based on tape.

Sure, but knowing the efficacy of these filters, I would absolutely not work at any place that does not require coding interviews. The one time I hired someone without a test, it was a total disaster. My last job, there were some people who got hired through non-standard processes and they were all terrible.

Sure but weren't you just complaining about the bullshit your boss was selling?

No one is born good at whiteboarding. And it's just like the combine and workouts and stuff like that. You are being judged against others, the stakes are high and other people will prepare. It's fairly obvious what you should do.

I don't know that what you did there counts as "thinking outside the box" - you just got away with something because your interviewer either went off-script or never had a consistent guideline for the question they were asking. You're simply not going to pass any rigorous interview by impressing your interviewer and sidestepping the actual question, because in most systems, your interviewer is there to document how you did and grade you objectively, not to make hiring decisions based on arbitrary criteria that aren't consistently applied across all candidates. This is another reason why you have to actually study.

Jesus, I hope half the stuff that suzzer said is not true. I do not want to continue the career in programming if I'm going to be that jaded lol.

This is an interesting viewpoint. But could it also be that the company is not able to attract them because of not being able to offer a competitive pay? It's not necessary true that to be a successful company, you have to pay a lot.

suzzer, you ever hear the saying... "if every place you go to... smells like ****, perhaps it's time to check your shoes?"

By avoiding all these whiteboarding interviews, you might be self-selecting these companies were you are driven to hate. It might be best to figure out how you are choosing which companies you are working.

is finding remote jobs hard? i thought after a few years of experience (all of which was actually remote) that i would be getting more responses. maybe my resume must look like dogshit.

Regarding the bolded you need to show your work. I know Google has spent a lot of money and time regarding the interview process in identifying successful candidates.

A First Person Account of an On-site Interview st Google

IMO having the knowledge required is good to have. Of course companies want people with at least sufficient cognitive skills. A collective lack of knowledge in technical areas can be and often is detrimental to product development.

Lots covered here, but if you don’t know why top engineers are leaving a bunch of FAANG companies right now you’re probably not particularly qualified to talk about the tech industry. There’s a ton of obvious reasons - many of them reported on regularly.

Do you know why companies don't do the temp to perm contracts very often? It's because most engineers won't accept them because they're getting bigger and better offers from other places. Let's pretend everything else in two offers is equal, would you accept the offer that is 6-month temporary to a potential permanent position OR would you accept the offer that is permanent right from the start?

A permanent position offer is a benefit over a contract position (all else being equal - which they usually aren't because temp contracts are often worse). And its a trivially easy one for most companies to grant because really they can still fire you after 6 months and you can still quit whenever you want.

Besides that, hiring people that don't work out has a real cost. It's the cost of hiring the bad person, but possibly more important its the cost on your retention of your great employees that won't put up with working with duds. And the message an easy interview process with short-term contracts sends is that the company doesn't really care if you have to work with a bunch of people that don't work out.

And I'm not saying the current interview process is good. Even at companies where its done "well" its generally terrible. It's a really hard thing to get right. But most of the alternatives I've heard seem much worse or are unworkable at scale when engineering talent is in such high demand.

It's been a great career and I love what I do. I'm just not one of those devs who keeps their head down and doesn't notice what's going on around me. I'm probably one of the only people at that big company below upper management level who realize what those two managers in my story did. Most devs just don't have that kind of nose for bullshit because it doesn't concern them.

Jobs 2-4 in my career I basically had zero experience in what I was being hired for. But I knew I could figure it out. And I did. There's nothing wrong with fake it until you make it imo.

Regarding the interview process - the most boring jobs I've had are with a bunch of similarly aged James Damores w/ Star Wars figurines on their desks who talk about nothing but video games and super hero movies and axe-throwing or beard oil or whatever the current dumbass hipster 3rd way man craze is. One or two is fine - too many 20-30-something tech bros is stultifying.

Conversely the absolute best jobs I've had, the ones I still treasure and feel lucky to have been a part of - were with people from a diverse group of races, nationalities, cultures, genders, sexual preferences and ages.

I feel like the whiteboard bubble sort stuff tends to self-select for the former.

A very sharp dev I worked with at my last job made it all the way to the end with Netflix and somehow failed the last step - the "cultural interview" - which I guess is a last chance to weed out people who don't fit your mold? Great dev, super nice guy. But he's Mexican and has kind of a thick accent. I can't help wonder if that somehow caused someone to give him the thumbs down. Also he's like 40. We'll never know and he'll never know. You can't convince me this process is somehow objective and eliminates pre-conceived biases.

I'm sure Netflix would tell you they have a very rigorous objective process - but candybar you know first hand from my homework assignment that the dev who graded mine was out in space (not that my submission was perfect by any means - but his comments were just lol). Our other buddy who you know felt the same way. You and him are the sharpest front end devs I know. So that's been my experience. It's all I know. That and all the other pushback that's out there against the whiteboard grilling process: https://www.karllhughes.com/posts/rethinking-hiring

And that's all I'm gonna say about that. Not sure how I got sucked into the vortex here from a simple joke about jmakin stepping up his t-shirt game.

Suzzer, I wholeheartedly agree with you on the diversity stuff.

Your link about interviewing is exactly to my last point:

There is no way that this is possible at a company of any non-trivial size. This guy is at a small start-up, so that's cool.

Edit: It's also likely a bad process for diversity because each interview is totally unique and with a single person. So that person's biases (conscious or unconscious) are going to have a large effect on the result with very few ways to control for that.

This is night time CEO/CTO game. Day time the t-shirt should be some kind of obscure comic or sci-fi thing. The less recognizable the better. But cool looking. And black background.

This is a big part of it - if your pay is not competitive, you're not going to attract the best.

You don't need the best talent to be a successful company but from an individual engineer's perspective, it's probably best for your career to be surrounded by the best people, especially early in your career.

This is just a very small part of the job market and honestly, a lot of companies hire remotely because they want to find engineers on the cheap. So you're often selecting for bad or mediocre situations, though they are obvious exceptions. Most great remote jobs don't start as remote, the company or the employee moved and they worked out an arrangement because they didn't want to let go.

Yeah I agree there's always going to be bias. I'm just saying FAANG process doesn't eliminate bias. It's actually actually baked in to the "cultural interview" - which seems like basically just a chance to blackball. If you've already got a mostly mono-culture of tech bros who are suspicious of people who don't look and sound like them (Damore), and don't value a diverse culture (which many don't) - then it's a problem.

And btw I'm not talking about diverse project managers and SQA. That helps. But if all your devs are in the same mold - you still have a mono-culture.

I disagree that a dev can't take a few to pair program a candidate when they can sit in whiteboards all day interviewing people.

If you can't do that I think just talking to them and give a few little problems to make sure they're not completely FOS is fine. It worked for decades in the tech world until the FAANGs brought us this wonderful improvement of the "totally objective and fair and highly correlated to job performance" whiteboard - which is actually none of those things.

Agreed. There's an instinct-level human interaction thing that happens when you get to know someone face to face, which just isn't there if you work over the phone. It's possible but an uphill struggle. Conflict is always nasty.

But if you start out face to face then separate, it's much easier.

I was very suspicious of the startups that showed interest which were all remote. Especially after the side job I worked for. What a disaster.

Netflix is a bit weird - I think when people are talking about FAANGs from the perspective of the job market (as opposed to the stock market, which is where the acronym originated) they are more talking about Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, or even Microsoft above Netflix, which I'm sure is fine but is run quite differently than others, especially in terms of human resources. This is not a standard process - a take-home IMO does not scale and isn't something other big tech companies do. Same with "cultural interview" - that's more of a small startup thing, not a big tech thing.

It has nothing to do with the time spent pair-programming. Obviously there's time spent either way. It has to do with the amount of available problems that can be meaningfully worked on.

IP/NDA issues mean that there's a whole host of internal problems that you can't have a candidate work on. To be an effective interview the employee pairing with the candidate has to have a decent sense of the problem they're working on and ideas of how to solve it. So you're pretty much limited to Open Source projects and issues that your internal engineers know a lot about... that doesn't scale for the vast majority of companies.

Ok so only all the companies I have direct experience with are bullshit. I guess I just got really unlucky.

I still wouldn't be shocked though that if I got a job at some 100-person startup (or whatever you call them at that point) with say 10 ex-FAANG devs - those devs end up being worse than the others. I mean they have to be working for like half what they used to make right? That's always a red flag to me.

Every dev with PhD I've worked with has been terrible. But they always come with their reputation preceding them.

But I don't have direct experience so I have to take your word.

NO MORE VORTEX DAMMIT

You can find something to work on. The point is to remove the stage fright aspect of it and get a sense how the dev thinks and works. Just seeing how someone navigates around a computer tells you a lot.

But overcoming stage fright and very quickly coming up with creative solutions to complex problems as the Jeopardy! clock ticks down is not a requirement for the job. At all.

Maybe when you guys hit 50, where you start losing your train of thought mid-sentence more often, and have to do a whiteboard interview - this will all make a lot more sense. I loved them when I was younger too. Yay I get to show off.

It still doesn't effect my job though. I've learned more new tech since I turned 45 than I did between 40 and 45. I just need a little more time to meditate on stuff.

Suzzer, like I mentioned above, people leave those big companies all the time for lots of reasons. Political/social reasons. Lack of interesting problems to work on. Big company bullshit. Poor stock performance. Or hell, they've already made a bunch of money and just want to try something else.