At some point you have to accept that the fence maybe doesn't serve a purpose, or its purpose may be forgotten and not applicable, and its worth the risk to take it down and see what happens.
Disagree. After reading and participating in the endless HN hiring discussions, I'd say I've come to an understanding of why, at least in SF, interviews are done the way they are.
It seems to be a lowest-common-denominator approach that serves candidates and companies in different ways.
For the candidate, they can do one set of study (leetcode/system design) and that effort is applicable at a wide range of companies.
For the company, they are finding the intersection of people who are at least intelligent enough to grok CS fundamentals (I know it's just pattern matching after you've studied it), and willing to jump through enough hoops.
Hiring works a very different way outside FAANG leetcode style interviews. It's mostly a chat between a couple devs about what you've worked on in the past and how applicable that experience is and trying to get a sense of where you're at in your career and if you seem like you'd be good to work with. It's a lot less standardized, so it can be very hit and miss sometimes as sometimes you get quizzed on knowledge of their particular stack. Often the study you do for one company isn't necessarily translatable to another.
There is a long history of dysfunctional processes being replaced with other processes that often turn out to be as dysfunctional as the previous one. Just in a different way. See Scrum and Agile as examples.
Aline has said some good stuff but she loses me at: "There’s no substitute for chemistry, in dating or in hiring."
Hiring is not fucking dating. You are not having sex with your coworkers, you are not discriminating on gender, race, body type as everyone regularly does in dating. Dating is not a healthy system that you should aspire to in employment. It's very much broken in comparison with swipe apps and the like, just broken in different ways.
Two possible expanations:
- What works for a big company of FAANG type is not necessarily a good idea for other companies.
- Because the FAANG companies have found a formula for printing money, they can afford such a hugely broken hiring process.