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Please stop the coding challenges

(blackentropy.bearblog.dev)
261 points CrazyEmi | 3 comments | 15 Nov 24 15:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.404s | source
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CharlieDigital ◴[15 Nov 24 16:21 UTC] No.42148313[source]▶
A small anecdote.

A partner of a friend quit their job earlier this year. They then took 4-6 weeks to prepare for each interview with Big Tech companies (4-6 weeks for Meta, 4-6 weeks for Stripe, etc.). Along the way, they also took random interviews just to practice and build muscle memory. They would grind leetcode several hours a day after researching which questions were likely to be encountered at each Big Tech.

This paid off and they accepted an offer for L6/staff at a MAANG.

Talked to them this week (haven't even started the new role) and they've already forgotten the details of most of what was practiced. They said that the hardest part was studying for the system design portion because they did not have experience with system design...but now made staff eng. at a MAANG. IRL, this individual is a good but not exceptional engineer having worked with them on a small project.

Wild; absolutely wild and I feel like explains a lot of the boom and bust hiring cycles. When I watch some of the system design interview prep videos, it's just a script. You'll go into the call and all you need to do is largely follow the script. It doesn't matter if you've actually designed similar or more complex systems; the point of the system design interview is apparently "do you know the script"?

Watch these two back to back at 2x speed and marvel at how much of this is executed like a script:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_qu1F9BXow

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K-eupuDVEc

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1. crazygringo ◴[15 Nov 24 18:51 UTC] No.42149705[source]▶
If you talk to hiring at some of these companies, it is intentionally designed to be this way so that it is fairly meritocratic.

In other words, anybody, regardless of what university they went to or what courses they took out what advantages or disadvantages they had, can learn this stuff in a couple of months if they have what it takes for the role. And because the skills are so standardized, the process is pretty differently objective.

It's not expected that they'll actually use the specific skills in the job. But it shows they can learn skills of that type and then perform them at a high level in a stressful interview situation. Which is a great signal for whether they can learn the skills needed for the specific project they wind up on and perform in a high stakes deadline scenario.

I'm not defending the system, but I am saying there's a clear logic behind it.

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2. bb88 ◴[15 Nov 24 19:51 UTC] No.42150246[source]▶
The thing I think is funny in all this is that hiring a new manager is fraught with a high amount of risk (more so than an engineer), but they don't have nearly the level of hurdles to get over. Does the company interview past employees of the manager? Did the manager applicant have alcohol, drug issues, or weird sexual things he did to his direct reports or others? Or, instead, would you enjoy his presence on a golf outing?

I know one manager who had issues with all three got hired at Google. So. Think of the poor HR person that will have to clean up that mess.

3. derangedHorse ◴[16 Nov 24 17:18 UTC] No.42157528[source]▶
The idea of it being positioned as meritocratic is hilarious to me. As if having a process outside of the leetcode question bank will lead to any more bias. I'm generally of the belief that an interview process should be standardized in an attempt to reduce bias, but I disagree that it needs to be something people can study for to the extent that leetcode questions can be studied.

I've interviewed people with leetcode questions where my co-interviewers made the candidate's confidence in presenting the correct answer the tipping point for hiring (with women mostly being targeted in this category). Bias can happen in any process, and with "culture" frequently being a consideration it's hard to tell what should be justified. Meritocracy in the tech industry is mostly a joke outside the overachieving outliers.