What other industry has it's interview process so transparent with such high rewards?
A lot of people complain because this is the very example of cargo culting, you hire people who went through the same questions and reject those who haven't, even though it has no bearing on their ability to do the job.
You will get shortlisted for top jobs and bombarded by opportunities by recruiters forever and you will be able to skip any screenings and phone interviews and just go for final onsite interview mostly.
Investing several weeks or couple of months once might be worth it as you will reap benefits for a long time, perhaps until retirement.
You need to consider this before you decide not to spend the time to go through CTCI etc.
Maybe I'm not smart enough, but on-site rounds are a different story. I've practiced CTCI and solved my fair share of questions on Leetcode. Yet I find pretty hard to get back into it on a short notice. It's not a one-time investment. I assume I'm not the only one since
- The on-site to offer conversion ratio is typically between 6:1 and 8:1 at such companies.
- Most people do better with practice. It implies that a standardized process is biased towards people who have the opportunity and time to interview a lot for fun. (Some companies let teams do their own hiring though, where this is less of an issue).
Not everyone lives in the valley or in a place with a high concentration of tech companies. At least the Microsoft-era questions such as "how much would you charge to clean all the windows in Seattle" were more equally silly and unfair to everyone, including outsiders.
Funny thing is, I have been called by Google, Amazon and FB recruiters in London couple of times. But I never went for onsite interview. I figured they can't really match contractor pay and they only outsource "shitty" jobs to London (I told recruiters my contractor rate and asked them if they can match/beat it and answer was no).
Netflix got back to me within a couple hours after a one-click application on their careers page! Unfortunately I had to prioritize other companies at that time, we put things on hold due to the visa situation in the US and I never got the chance to have a technical interview.
Before I left Berlin, Twitch seemed to be hiring engineers there.
I applied to US. I was never interested in moving to Berlin.
Want to work in finance? Have fun doing boring shit and working long hours for years. Doctor? Blow your 20s on 4 years of school + several more years of residency and maybe a fellowship. Lawyer? First, get into a good law school then spend an enormous amount of time working to get your billable hours in. And if you're a woman and want kids, good luck balancing all that with starting a family.
Imagine you discovered an opportunity for arbritage in currency exchanges, for example. A normal person might quickly act to start printing money before the market corrects and the opportunity ends.
Meanwhile, programmers have noticed that being able to solve algorithmic quizzes with a smile is a free ticket to an oversized salary. Their collection reaction? Disgust and defiance!
As you say, people in other professions would probably be happy to replace their black box interviews with a set of relatively uniform tests. All a programmer has to do to get a job is ring up a recruiter and then complete some algorithmic challenges. From the perspective of the programmer, why do we want to replace this?