Comment by usaar333 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by usaar333 | Hacker News Reader

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Great post, though a few nits.

> There are companies that will pay near FANG levels (maybe 10-15% haircut) without subjecting yourself to onerous completion of hundreds of LeetCode problems.

Some even pay more. I wouldn't say FAANG companies even have the highest pay - a lot of the top-tier unicorns are in the same ballpark range.

> FANGs? You must prove yourself to gatekeepers before even knowing if there are teams with personalities you will agree with.

This is not universally true. From experience, while Google does this for their HQ, they don't for remote offices (where there's more risk you can't find the right personalities). Amazon's Principal Engineer interview loop is conducted by the targeted team. (I actually think this is true for other levels as well).

> Money is important, but for a small haircut you can have better WLB, less competitive peers

Might I ask what companies fit this profile? It seems like a rare find for any company to both pay a lot but not be competitive.

>> From experience, while Google does this for their HQ, they don't for remote offices

This is not true. Google interview experience is identical everywhere. Source: spent 6+ years at Google, not in HQ.

/shrug. When I was considering positions in SF a few years back, I was chatting with hiring managers I'd be under first before going through any whiteboard interviews. Maybe things have changed?

Yeah, you can chat with whoever you like if you're reasonably senior, but then you do the same exact interview as everybody else. That "chat" was just a "chat". It wasn't a part of the hiring process. There are likely exceptions at the truly stratospheric levels, for people whose credentials aren't debatable, but for 99.99% of people it's all the same 5-person loop with a whiteboard or a Chromebook.

Makes sense.

Honestly, this I'm perfectly fine with -- if you need a calibrated panel to assess your eng bar. What is annoying (the case for Google MTV for me at least) is if gatekeepers block you from identifying if there is potential fit in the first place.

Their interview process itself makes very little sense though. There's literally nothing in it that resembles the job you'll be doing on a day to day basis (copying from one protocol buffer to another, while sipping a free latte), so they're hiring for some proxy traits the correlation of which with job performance is low to non-existent. They know this, too. They've done a study where they just hired some number of people at random, without looking at their interview results, and then tracked their performance over the next few years. Those folks performed about as well as people who received high interview scores.

can you please link the study?

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