> The strain comes from context switching. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, I had to care deeply about our quarterly goals and production stability. Then, from 6:00 PM to midnight, I had to care about inverting binary trees and system architecture design.

We really need to stop the tech interview nonsense.

Here is an experienced, practicing software engineer, who can't get a job without drilling for and performing frat hazing rituals.

▲

raw_anon_1111 3 hours ago | parent [-]

So exactly what kind of interviews do you suggest that a company do at scale to hire people who will make $300K+ a year? Just talk them?

▲

stack_framer 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why not? People can't fake their way through a deeply technical, probing, 2-hour conversation.

You'd be amazed just how much you can learn about someone's actual skills and experience (or lack thereof) through long-form discussion. I think we don't truly talk enough in our currently broken interview process.

▲

raw_anon_1111 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Funny enough, I got into my one only and hopefully last BigTech company without a single coding interview even though my job description required me to know how to code. It was all behavioral. It was for a cloud application architect position at AWS ProServe (yes direct hire with the standard 4 year structure between base + bonus + RSUs).

My current job was also behavioral where I am a staff architect at a 3rd party company and it does require coding. As an interviewer, I also only do behavioral interviews. But let’s be realistic, it doesn’t take much to be a competent enterprise dev or even an enterprise architect.

The type of hard problems that BigTech has to solve is completely different. While I would never have trusted any developer I ever met at AWS within 100 feet of a customer, they also shouldn’t let me within 100 feet of the code that runs any of the AWS services.

Even at my medium size consulting company we have a 0.4% application/offer rate. Can you imagine what it is at BigTech? How do you filter just by talking to someone?

	▲	I_AM_A_SMURF 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In my experience, by the time you get to do a full round interview your chances are pretty high, about 50% in big tech.

▲

sokoloff 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Now imagine there are 1000 people who are capable of submitting an application that appears to match the job description. Do you have a way to help either winnow out the 750 worst or (better) identify the 50 best of the lot to start to engage in these 2-hour deeply technical discussions?

▲

qingcharles 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hiring developers is half lottery, half dark art. Best guy I ever hired was when I was tech lead for a large streamer. I hired a guy at essentially minimum wage to write some very basic HTML pages. Within weeks he was writing code. Within a couple of years he was a much better dev than I'll ever be.

I'd almost be down by literally hiring devs by picking resumes out of a hat and just having them on probation. The sheer amount of time and energy wasted having good devs doing interviews instead of doing code is horrible.

▲

squigz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do CEOs and other executives have to go through leetcode-style interviews to be considered for their jobs?

▲

autarch 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

If you think the engineer interview process is painful, try interviewing to be CEO of any company. I guarantee it will be _much_ more involved.

▲

raw_anon_1111 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

No because they aren’t coding.

▲

immibis an hour ago | parent [-]

Do they go through leetmanage?

You should definitely have a coding task when hiring programmers but it doesn't have to be very big or difficult.

	▲	ruszki 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The leetcode style tasks have nothing related to coding for the past 2 decades. That part is solved for a long time now. They ask for knowledge, which is a search away from everybody. I don’t know anybody, who knows those, and not only because of interviews. Also interviewers ask these, yet average code isn’t optimized at all. A simple question, like what’s your opinion of <anything> will tell you more than any leetcode question.