Is the situation really this bad?

[jonneymendoza]

The FAANG was up to some next level bullѕhit for a long time now. Such as hiring all the top talent despite needing it or not, only so that the competition couldn't hire them. Then they would give these people to work on some bullѕhit projects to keep them occupied, until the day when their skills could be needed. The bloat was absolutely insane.

And now of course hundreds of thousands FAANG devs were dumped on the market, scrambling for all those second tier non-tech companies that guys like me used to work for, and we are pushed out completely.

Mental right?

And those fanng jobs you got to do 5 stage interviews, spend a week or two researching pointless university algorithm skills that you don't need or use in the real world to say right a backend api service or a app or website etc only to to just fix a few tiny bugs and write maybe 10 lines of code a week once you are working in a FAANG company.

Shambles

 

[Screeeech]

Tbh during the pandemic Amazon was utter chaos, I was an L6 NDE III - our team of 25 who looked after the design for a big chunk of AWSs network - had work for 3000 people, it was absolutely insane.

Not many people realise but the demand for AWS more than doubled during the pandemic, within a couple of months, we literally couldn’t hire enough people.

Then the pandemic went away and they had all of these people who were excess so they had to dump them….

It was all kinda silly really looking back.

 

[malachi]

And those fanng jobs you got to do 5 stage interviews, spend a week or two researching pointless university algorithm skills that you don't need or use in the real world to say right a backend api service or a app or website etc only to to just fix a few tiny bugs and write maybe 10 lines of code a week once you are working in a FAANG company.

Its like that now with non FAANG companies for an basic IT roles

Tbh during the pandemic Amazon was utter chaos, I was an L6 NDE III - our team of 25 who looked after the design for a big chunk of AWSs network - had work for 3000 people, it was absolutely insane.

Not many people realise but the demand for AWS more than doubled during the pandemic, within a couple of months, we literally couldn’t hire enough people.

Then the pandemic went away and they had all of these people who were excess so they had to dump them….

It was all kinda silly really looking back.

That will come back to bite all of them in the ass. People will never forget how easily they were binned off.

 

[Screeeech]

That will come back to bite all of them in the ass. People will never forget how easily they were binned off.

It is true and is already biting them now.

At one point Amazon was fully invested in the art of “churn and burn”. You employ someone, onboard them, show them the RSUs, then dump on them - big time. They deliver a heap of good work, however they burnout then quit - usually in 6-9 months.

Amazon has a large enough critical mass, that it’s always attracting fresh talent, however it’s now starting to hurt them.

People are shying away from working there, and it’s usually the more experienced really wise people who go - the ones you really don’t want to lose, they just don’t want the aggro.

 

[HangTime]

In my experience it's slowed a bit compared to a couple of years ago but getting interviews (for roles with appropriate fit) is still fine, there is more competition / pickier hiring managers however. In other words I guess it has changed from being a situation where firms would just hire everyone they interviewed who was good instead of cherry picking the best of the lot.
Appreciate it depends on the type of role however, could be for engineering roles there is simply a lot more competition just to get to the interview stage.

 

[D.P.]

Mental right?

And those fanng jobs you got to do 5 stage interviews, spend a week or two researching pointless university algorithm skills that you don't need or use in the real world to say right a backend api service or a app or website etc only to to just fix a few tiny bugs and write maybe 10 lines of code a week once you are working in a FAANG company.

Shambles

You are not really understanding why algorithmic questions are valuable. Mostly, you are testing problem solving skills , but you can tie that i to knowledge and understanding of programming by creating an algorithmic interview question. The fact that "you don't need or use in the real world" is then irrelevant, although in reality the ability to actually understand algorithms and their complexity is critical n many areas. But the main thing is to test the candidates processing in solving difficult problems, understand how they are aware of complexities, memory usage, good design choices, edge cases. See how they cope with making poor choices and quickly re-iterating to improve their design.

The problem interviewing is there is very limited time to extract as much information as possible, and information that can be verified easily. In a previous company we would give candidates a difficult programming task that would take 2-3 days to complete, and then the interview itself was an all day affair so getting them to spend 1-2 talking about their solution was feasible. But not everyone has that kind of time, so rather you need things that take 1 hour or so to gain a good insight. People demoing their own github page or whatever can be nice, but for the interviewer it is very difficult/time consuming to go through amounting of someone else's code to then ask pertinent questions . And someone personal git page is in itself useless because you can't very any of it. You don't know how much the author copied from elsewhere, how long it took, who else contributed, how much was a stackoverflow C&P.

Then you have to consider technologies, libraries, programming languages, technology stacks, software paradigms change with the seasons so asking anything specific doesn't provide you anything useful if you hope the candidate will actually be a long term employee. Fine if you are hiring a contractor for a specific project but not insightful. Conversely, asking someone to write some pseudocode on a whiteboard is timeless.

The rest of the interview time is then best spent on behavioural tests to see how they cope in team/remote work/managing deadlines and priorities.

 

[jonneymendoza]

You are not really understanding why algorithmic questions are valuable. Mostly, you are testing problem solving skills , but you can tie that i to knowledge and understanding of programming by creating an algorithmic interview question. The fact that "you don't need or use in the real world" is then irrelevant, although in reality the ability to actually understand algorithms and their complexity is critical n many areas. But the main thing is to test the candidates processing in solving difficult problems, understand how they are aware of complexities, memory usage, good design choices, edge cases. See how they cope with making poor choices and quickly re-iterating to improve their design.

The problem interviewing is there is very limited time to extract as much information as possible, and information that can be verified easily. In a previous company we would give candidates a difficult programming task that would take 2-3 days to complete, and then the interview itself was an all day affair so getting them to spend 1-2 talking about their solution was feasible. But not everyone has that kind of time, so rather you need things that take 1 hour or so to gain a good insight. People demoing their own github page or whatever can be nice, but for the interviewer it is very difficult/time consuming to go through amounting of someone else's code to then ask pertinent questions . And someone personal git page is in itself useless because you can't very any of it. You don't know how much the author copied from elsewhere, how long it took, who else contributed, how much was a stackoverflow C&P.

Then you have to consider technologies, libraries, programming languages, technology stacks, software paradigms change with the seasons so asking anything specific doesn't provide you anything useful if you hope the candidate will actually be a long term employee. Fine if you are hiring a contractor for a specific project but not insightful. Conversely, asking someone to write some pseudocode on a whiteboard is timeless.

The rest of the interview time is then best spent on behavioural tests to see how they cope in team/remote work/managing deadlines and priorities.

Based upon what you said I still do not agree with doing algorithm university questions that have nothing to do with the day to day job unless you are a data science engineer or AI engineer.

I've been in this game for a long time and know that these questions are pointless and doesn't tell me if a engineer is the right person for the job.

Each to there own but that's my thoughts on it based on being one that has done some and also having to review and choose a candidate based on them.

Real world problems are not solved by knowing how to sort a list in the quickest most efficient notation,

Real world problems is about understanding the use case, interacting with the team around you to solve a use case that doesn't necessarily mean it the solution is some fancy code...

Sometimes if not more often than not, the solution to a problem is tweaking and re evaluation of the the use case, evaluating the designs or evaluating to see if there is a well known tool by a third party provider that helps with the solution.

These are things no leet code test will teach and asset you in...



Does this problem you encountered even needs to be addressed as part of a user using the product?

Why Is it complex in the first place? Just for the sake of it when maybe a user doesn't even care or want that feature?

Or why is the api so complex to use for at high level, is a simple feature to the eyes of a user?

Plenty of things are complex because of bad design, bad scope, unrealistic use cases that a user of the real world diddnt ask for etc etc etc

 

[malachi]

You are not really understanding why algorithmic questions are valuable. Mostly, you are testing problem solving skills , but you can tie that i to knowledge and understanding of programming by creating an algorithmic interview question. The fact that "you don't need or use in the real world" is then irrelevant, although in reality the ability to actually understand algorithms and their complexity is critical n many areas. But the main thing is to test the candidates processing in solving difficult problems, understand how they are aware of complexities, memory usage, good design choices, edge cases. See how they cope with making poor choices and quickly re-iterating to improve their design.

The problem interviewing is there is very limited time to extract as much information as possible, and information that can be verified easily. In a previous company we would give candidates a difficult programming task that would take 2-3 days to complete, and then the interview itself was an all day affair so getting them to spend 1-2 talking about their solution was feasible. But not everyone has that kind of time, so rather you need things that take 1 hour or so to gain a good insight. People demoing their own github page or whatever can be nice, but for the interviewer it is very difficult/time consuming to go through amounting of someone else's code to then ask pertinent questions . And someone personal git page is in itself useless because you can't very any of it. You don't know how much the author copied from elsewhere, how long it took, who else contributed, how much was a stackoverflow C&P.

Then you have to consider technologies, libraries, programming languages, technology stacks, software paradigms change with the seasons so asking anything specific doesn't provide you anything useful if you hope the candidate will actually be a long term employee. Fine if you are hiring a contractor for a specific project but not insightful. Conversely, asking someone to write some pseudocode on a whiteboard is timeless.

The rest of the interview time is then best spent on behavioural tests to see how they cope in team/remote work/managing deadlines and priorities.

No attack on you but all I read is artificial barriers. No wonder why people get annoyed with today's interview process, including myself. It wasn't like that 20 years ago, so why have this BS process now. Especially with how big tech companies can bin you off whenever they want.

Its not a good method of picking the best people for the role, it's a method testing who get can get through the companies recruitment maze because HR doesn't actually know the market.

For me, I don't need an personality test, an amplitude test and an 4 stage interview for an non senior Windows Systems Engineer role with a no name company. When I have been working with the various version's of the software for 18 years. I'm applying for an IT job, not a rocket scientist for NASA.

 

[neverminder]

No attack on you but all I read is artificial barriers. No wonder why people get annoyed with today's interview process, including myself. It wasn't like that 20 years ago, so why have this BS process now. Especially with how big tech companies can bin you off whenever they want.

Its not a good method of picking the best people for the role, it's a method testing who get can get through the companies recruitment maze because HR doesn't actually know the market.

For me, I don't need an personality test, an amplitude test and an 4 stage interview for an non senior Windows Systems Engineer role with a no name company. When I have been working with the various version's of the software for 18 years. I'm applying for an IT job, not a rocket scientist for NASA.

Bill Gates liked puzzles, so he started the whole puzzle interview trend a long time ago and everybody jumped on that bandwagon. I've seen people talking about how they spent months, years even preparing for FAANG interviews. There are freaking massive books written about how to pass FAANG interviews. Entire industry exists solely for that purpose - the likes of Leetcode, Hackerrank, etc. Harvard acceptance rate is 4% and FAANG acceptance rate is something like 0.2%. People who got into FAANG early on pulled up the drawbridge behind them. Their thinking is something along the lines of: "If I went through hell to get here, then so will you!". There was a case where FAANG hiring committee was given anonymized resumes and they rejected every single one of them. Then they were told those were their own old resumes... The FAANG interviewing went beyond ridiculous a long time ago.

I personally know people who are very good at interviewing, but suck at the actual job.

 

[D.P.]

Based upon what you said I still do not agree with doing algorithm university questions that have nothing to do with the day to day job unless you are a data science engineer or AI engineer.

I've been in this game for a long time and know that these questions are pointless and doesn't tell me if a engineer is the right person for the job.

Each to there own but that's my thoughts on it based on being one that has done some and also having to review and choose a candidate based on them.

Real world problems are not solved by knowing how to sort a list in the quickest most efficient notation,

Real world problems is about understanding the use case, interacting with the team around you to solve a use case that doesn't necessarily mean it the solution is some fancy code...

Sometimes if not more often than not, the solution to a problem is tweaking and re evaluation of the the use case, evaluating the designs or evaluating to see if there is a well known tool by a third party provider that helps with the solution.

These are things no leet code test will teach and asset you in...



Does this problem you encountered even needs to be addressed as part of a user using the product?

Why Is it complex in the first place? Just for the sake of it when maybe a user doesn't even care or want that feature?

Or why is the api so complex to use for at high level, is a simple feature to the eyes of a user?

Plenty of things are complex because of bad design, bad scope, unrealistic use cases that a user of the real world diddnt ask for etc etc etc

Again, you are failing to understand why these questions are useful.
They are used to assess problem solving skills. The relevance to coding doesn't matter. Think of it as more of an IQ test but within that you are testing things like approaches to problems, communication, ability to accept help etc. I see this misunderstanding all of your post, e.g. "knowing how to sort a list in the quickest" . These problems are not to determine knowledge, in which case they would be useless.

Furthermore, no one said it is the only aspect that should be considered when interviewing, just that it provides a lot of important information that is highly correlated with the ability to produce good quality code. Being a good quality software engineer requires more than just coding, which is what some of the questions you have added become valuable as well.

 

[D.P.]

No attack on you but all I read is artificial barriers. No wonder why people get annoyed with today's interview process, including myself. It wasn't like that 20 years ago, so why have this BS process now. Especially with how big tech companies can bin you off whenever they want.

Its not a good method of picking the best people for the role, it's a method testing who get can get through the companies recruitment maze because HR doesn't actually know the market.

For me, I don't need an personality test, an amplitude test and an 4 stage interview for an non senior Windows Systems Engineer role with a no name company. When I have been working with the various version's of the software for 18 years. I'm applying for an IT job, not a rocket scientist for NASA.

It is not an artificial barrier, it is an assessment of peoples ability to produce software and well proven to be highly correlated with someone job performance . Is it perfect, no, but if it can whittle out a lot of the time wasters quite quickly and give you a reduced pool of strong candidates that you can then devote more time to interviewing deeper questions then this just accelerates the process in finding the best candidiates.

But in general I agree the process should reflect the level of candiate required. But note this discussion from jonneymendoza was about engineers at FAANG

 

[D.P.]

Bill Gates liked puzzles, so he started the whole puzzle interview trend a long time ago and everybody jumped on that bandwagon. I've seen people talking about how they spent months, years even preparing for FAANG interviews. There are freaking massive books written about how to pass FAANG interviews. Entire industry exists solely for that purpose - the likes of Leetcode, Hackerrank, etc. Harvard acceptance rate is 4% and FAANG acceptance rate is something like 0.2%. People who got into FAANG early on pulled up the drawbridge behind them. Their thinking is something along the lines of: "If I went through hell to get here, then so will you!". There was a case where FAANG hiring committee was given anonymized resumes and they rejected every single one of them. Then they were told those were their own old resumes... The FAANG interviewing went beyond ridiculous a long time ago.

I personally know people who are very good at interviewing, but suck at the actual job.

There is a lot of nonsense in here. Yes, interview process and acceptance rate at these companies is hard, but comparing an acceptance rate to a complete different different things is apples and oranges? What si the acceptanece rate at say IBM or even a 3rdt tier company? possibly even lower. Acceptence rate is mostly a measure of popularity and company size.

No one pilled the bridges up at these companies. Quite the opposite, they expanded massively, and at some point the interview process simply turned in to "have you got a pulse?" Thhat lead to them deciding they had to axe a chunk of their work force last year.

 

[nomadd]

Reading this thread and the stupid interview processes reminds me of why I retired from IT at the ripe old age of 56. So much BS to deal with these days.

Glad I stuffed so much into the SIPP and ISAs during those 32 years of contracting. I was going insane as it was, but you guys seem to be going through hell. Best of luck to all of you.

 

[malachi]

Reading this thread and the stupid interview processes reminds me of why I retired from IT at the ripe old age of 56. So much BS to deal with these days.

Glad I stuffed so much into the SIPP and ISAs during those 32 years of contracting. I was going insane as it was, but you guys seem to be going through hell. Best of luck to all of you.

Ahh...here we bloody go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Applied for a role during the week with an world famous sports company. Friday got an email which said,

Thank you for your interest in xxxx. We’d like to invite you to take a brief video-interview for our Cloud and Endpoint Engineer position.

The interview has 7 questions and will only take you a few minutes. We request you to please take it within the next 48 hours. Its a good idea to take the interview in a quiet room with good internet connection and good lighting.

So its not a actual interview, just answer an bunch of non related IT question while being recorded

Again, more BS just to get an simple interview!

 

[D.P.]

Ahh...here we bloody go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Applied for a role during the week with an world famous sports company. Friday got an email which said,

Thank you for your interest in xxxx. We’d like to invite you to take a brief video-interview for our Cloud and Endpoint Engineer position.

The interview has 7 questions and will only take you a few minutes. We request you to please take it within the next 48 hours. Its a good idea to take the interview in a quiet room with good internet connection and good lighting.

So its not a actual interview, just answer an bunch of non related IT question while being recorded

Again, more BS just to get an simple interview!

probably because they gave lots of applications and need to easily filter. If it only takes a few minutes then what is the problem?

 

[malachi]

probably because they gave lots of applications and need to easily filter. If it only takes a few minutes then what is the problem?

As I said before, this wasn't the case 20 years ago. Complete the application form, which takes long enough and wait for the interview. Not jump through more hoops to MAYBE get an interview.

Also it look longer than just a few minutes as you have to record your answers. Not a simple tick box exercise.

I'm sure doing an tick box exercise would be quicker for them to filter, instead of watching a bunch of videos?

 

[HangTime]

I've seen these used before (another department used them at a previous employer). Its basically a way of seeing how the person articulates themselves without having to invest in an actual interview (the relevance of this may vary with role, perhaps less appropriate for a engineering role). I ended up hiring someone who was rejected by the original hiring manager (luckily a peer from my business unit was on the panel and suggested her), it was helpful having that recording as I wasn't involved in the original process at all.

When it comes to interview process the key factor for me is how efficient is it in terms of time between stages, timeliness of feedback etc. I have no issue with multi-layered processes if they proceed forward at pace, and I quite enjoy take-home projects or online tests, as I see that as an opportunity to demonstrate my prowess rather than being at the mercy of chance (what questions does the interviewer ask me, do we have a natural rapport or not etc). I've had some interviews where I've come away feeling blindsided by them just happening to ask a question about something unexpected that I'm weaker on or conversely thinking "wow that was lucky they asked me about X and I have really good examples of that". As one gets more experienced with interviews you learn how to steer conversations round to your strengths but you don't have complete control. Unless very well constructed, most interviews barely scratch the surface of most areas and it then becomes a question of where does the interviewer choose to dig beneath the surface, do you have a pot of gold or a dead body under that random spot?

 

[D.P.]

As I said before, this wasn't the case 20 years ago. Complete the application form, which takes long enough and wait for the interview. Not jump through more hoops to MAYBE get an interview.

Also it look longer than just a few minutes as you have to record your answers. Not a simple tick box exercise.

I'm sure doing an tick box exercise would be quicker for them to filter, instead of watching a bunch of videos?

20 years ago was a completely different era, so what do you expect?

I would say that the process is probably working well because if you can't be bothered with the initial step then your enthusiasm and work ethic might also be questionable if hired.

 

[dlockers]

Bill Gates liked puzzles, so he started the whole puzzle interview trend a long time ago and everybody jumped on that bandwagon. I've seen people talking about how they spent months, years even preparing for FAANG interviews. There are freaking massive books written about how to pass FAANG interviews. Entire industry exists solely for that purpose - the likes of Leetcode, Hackerrank, etc. Harvard acceptance rate is 4% and FAANG acceptance rate is something like 0.2%. People who got into FAANG early on pulled up the drawbridge behind them. Their thinking is something along the lines of: "If I went through hell to get here, then so will you!". There was a case where FAANG hiring committee was given anonymized resumes and they rejected every single one of them. Then they were told those were their own old resumes... The FAANG interviewing went beyond ridiculous a long time ago.

I personally know people who are very good at interviewing, but suck at the actual job.

I guess as a retort, if all the guidance is out there and you can prep - there is no excuse. If you aren't willing to put the effort in, well that's sufficient understanding of the candidate already nailed.

Edit: beaten by @D.P.

 

[peterwalkley]

20 years ago was a completely different era, so what do you expect?

I would say that the process is probably working well because if you can't be bothered with the initial step then your enthusiasm and work ethic might also be questionable if hired.

Or they're only interested in people/peasants willing to jump through the hoops of impersonal processes. Depends on the level of the role in my view. Using that as a screening mechanism for a senior/exec role where dealing with people is actually far more important than technical skills will lose them a lot of good candidates right off the bat.

For me that process would be a major red flag and highly likely a "no" straight away. I would certainly want to know how long they would keep the video, both when you got the job and also didn't.