Ugh yeah it’s ridiculous. We can’t hire anyone! Have you considered not putting candidates through months of studying to memorize a bunch of algorithm tricks and then grilling them for 5-10 hours total on those? No - that’s not what the cargo cult manual says.
What kind of team is that? Are you going to be surrounded by mentors? Free of bozos? In a world of competent executioners?
Unlikely. Look at how terrible a lot of the products are that these companies make.
They're fundamentally selecting for the wrong set of attributes. Look at the turnover rate - how many projects go nowhere and collapse, the quality of the output. Nobody ever leaves a job, they leave a team. The evidence is all around us that this process produces total shit results but it's become too much of a cult to change it.
Whenever I'm looking around for potentially better work and I see companies doing that, I don't even bother. It doesn't lead to better teams, more competent execution or better products.
Why on earth would I squander my time with some random ship of people who know how to do a sliding window? I'm sure they're all friendly, but we're doing hard things here and need the right mix.
I mean what on earth, fix the fucking process and maybe they'll stop incinerating dumptrucks of money on badly executed technology
And just product-wise, it's just way too easy to find counterexamples, like, how worse would the world be off if there was never invented google, gmail, chrome, iphones. Before google, there was no reliable way to search the web. Before gmail, there was no such thing as a dynamic web application. Before chrome, we were stuck with microsoft making up their own standards with IE and an inconsistent web spec. Before iphone, we were stuck with feature phones. The list just goes on and on.
There's four excellent examples of things that were better 10 years ago before this practice was instituted. The youngest thing on that list (chrome) is 14 years old.
Both Apple and Google used to not hire in this 3-4 interviews of canned programming question way. Then they did. Those products are now stagnating and deteriorating so much that it's obvious to everyone.
If you think it's exclusively a FAANG practice, you're mistaken. There's tiny firms that do it and really large ones that don't.
Bringing the worst practices of standardized testing into the tech hiring process produces the same kinds of problems that standardized testing does elsewhere. Silicon Valley used to be better than this.
It's a dumb arbitrary ceremony - might as well be a physical challenge from Nickelodeon's Double Dare.
(Also your narrative history is wrong, but that's not the point)
Ok, I understand that google search is worse, but it isn't obvious to me that's a result of engineering vs executive choice.
FWIW, I interviewed with Google in 2009 and the interview was 100% pure leetcode (not even design/architecture questions). It was exactly a series of four back-to-back 1-on-1 meetings, which consisted of "Hello" followed by an algorithmic puzzle.
If anything they seem to have broadened the scope of interviews since then.
I'm not a researcher in the field but I'd love to see some study. Let's say measuring for deadline slippage, budget overshot, and retention rate.
The testing groups will be teams that use these tactics almost exclusively and those that use a variety of other methods.
If my assumption that this is a mostly arbitrary attribute is correct, their averages would be nearly the same.
If they produce statistically better results then I'd literally quit my job and go work for one. I'd be happy to be wrong about this but I don't think I am
More likely has to do with monopolization and business models that favor advertising over users.
This is why the web is stagnating with near Chrome monopoly, just like during (shudder) the IE years.
Same for Google itself. Bing/DDG are only half-assed competitors. Google seems to be making search worse for all kinds of bad reasons, just because they can.
I'd guess most people who use an alternative to gmail specifically don't want to use Google, not because something else is better.
That I commonly see complaints about how other people "without" skill were getting job offers just because they put in the months studying, seems to indicate that it's actually quite a generous chance.
The vast majority of tech companies including startups are asking algorithm style questions these days. It’s adapt or die.