Lots of things are broken. The question is do you want to work hard enough to overcome it? My guess is you’ve got a good enough job already, so it’s not worth the effort.
It is possible (and in fact common) to lead a full and successful career as a dev, where A.) you don't ever work for FAANG or SV, and B.) You make plenty of money, have plenty of freedom, build high profile, successful technology, have plenty of career mobility.
So, if you believe those things, "Learn these things that you learned in college and then never really touched again directly" seems like an absolute waste of time. You've seen them, and you've seen that while you were _actually building things_, they didn't really come up, or at least directly. And when the value add is "Work for big fancy company for a couple % more money per year", it doesn't really seem like that much of a value add.
I’d never make a bet like that on myself by choice, but in hindsight it would have been an excellent investment years ago. My quality of life is immensely better working for a big tech co than it was at any startup.
There are plenty of big tech companies that pay well, offer a lot of freedom, interesting tech, but are also not FAANG companies with silly interviewing practices.
IMO if a company messes around with soft skills, take homes, techno chit chat, long lunches, brutal arcane automated domain knowledge screenings, shibboleths, “day in the life”, present your solution to the group, heuristics, or some other creative way to justify their own biases, I can be fairly confident that I’ll have at least a few co-workers that really just can’t code very well.
I have not met an engineer at my current company who didn’t impress me when I dig into their code a little. There are low performers, but even they produce excellent code when they feel like it.
Nothing is more frustrating than taking a day to interview and getting maybe 30 minutes of watery technical challenge.
edit Also, to be clear, you seem very proud of your interview, your company and coworkers, and I do not mean to discredit your pride or success. I am simply pointing out that your experiences are not universal experiences and might be due to lots of other factors, totally unrelated to interview methodology (healthy attrition rates, supportive teams, constructive code review, etc).
This is regardless of outcome, including many offers and years of working at companies with broken interview processes.
I don’t think whiteboarding is a great methodology, but the other methodologies are worse.
As an interviewer, I find it stressful to give whiteboard problems and my data point usually feels fairly noisy. At startups I preferred giving a tiny take home and working with the candidate on extending it in an open ended way.
As a candidate, I refuse to do take homes (known too many take homes)
I’d imagine it’s very hard to distinguish between a good talker and a good worker. Maybe some people can do it, but this is not a skill set I’d expect everyone conducting interviews to possess.
The data shows that humans are terrible at every kind of interview assessment. This is why I appreciate an approach with mechanized layers such as “ask problem with known answer, take notes”
I think the problem with whiteboardy-type interviews is they've become closer to trivia. The fact that you grinded LeetCode and others read CTCI kind of prove that, no? As in, people go far out of their way to learn a skill _just to pass the interview_.
> I’d imagine it’s very hard to distinguish between a good talker and a good worker. Maybe some people can do it, but this is not a skill set I’d expect everyone conducting interviews to possess.
Interviewing is a skill and should be treated as such. This means possessing a set of skills any dev off the floor won't necessarily have, and that should be expected. 99% of devs don't have the skills required to conduct a whiteboard interview as an interviewer correctly either, and yet that seems to be generally accepted as okay.
> The data shows that humans are terrible at every kind of interview assessment.
Exactly, which is why, in my posts above, I pointed at things other than the interview as reasons you might be very happy with the quality of your coworkers work. It seems silly to say "The data shows that humans are terrible at every kind of interview assessment", but then also attribute anything from your job to a specific style of interview assessment, right?
You'd get further as a company by investing in training, code quality (review, analysis, etc), leadership, and healthy firing processes.
Names? I’m genuinely interested in places paying near 400k/yr but without stringent whiteboard exercises. Haven’t seen them tho...
Are you currently making 400k a year?
My personal situation doesn't seem relevant to the question. Depending on how you look at it - I am. It's just that over half of it isn't liquid right now - but will likely be next year or the year after.
Very much aware what they pay.
> I'm only going to be joining FAANG or similar if they pay that much as I have no incentive to otherwise
If this is your perspective, best of luck to you, I hope it works out. You've ignored most of what I was trying to say, which is fine. I hope you find the success you're looking for.
And yes, I meant that seriously. Every fortune 500 company is held together at some level with bandaids and bailing wire. Being able to deal with things like that might be important.
In my firm, I know we place a much higher emphasis on being able to just roll with it than technical perfection. But my firm is but a drop in the ocean compared to everyone else.
Companies also need a lot of people that are creative and "think outside the box". With this you are optimizing for conformists and people that "think inside the box", and that optimize to fit the game.
No wonder the big companies have a hard time to create things..
Western society need badly to know how to deal well with impermanence, and this are such a case were there's not much prediction that can be done.. its just like dancing expecting the rain will come.. sometimes it will, and we will gladly think it was because we danced.
The best tip for hiring is someone that you know that knows a little bit to point a couple of good people for you. Because those things are pretty hard to know, and there are very little we can do, without the experience to show for some specific characteristics we need.
I don’t know why people think this. Is there some data to back this up...? I’ve seen great engineers go onto the open market and have to go through the hoops...
Meanwhile I’ve seen plenty of terrible ones have no issues getting through side doors.
After a decade of software being a desirable job and everyone trying to get into it, we can bet good money that it's now a buyer's market rather than a seller's market.