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Comment by gcheong | Hacker News Reader

Does this happen in any other field? If I was a doctor and wanted to work at some other company, would I need to study the MCAT every year in order to pass a screening interview based on one possible question? What's the equivalent in other fields? Closest I can think of is an acting audition but even then they give you the script beforehand. I'm beginning to think that the industry somehow settled on this approach not so much as a skills verification process but, by making the process so onerous on the candidate, talent retention is a lot easier.

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Software engineering is the only field I know of where someone with zero pedigree or education can make as much as a doctor. If you can pass a grueling technical interview then you can get a high paying job (200-500k+) no matter who you are or what your background is.

The tradeoff is that you have to go through the same grueling process every time you change jobs. I think the tradeoff is well worth it and would not like to see software become more like medicine where you have to put in 10+ years of schooling to prove your worth.

I don’t need a 200k+ job at a FAANG, but it doesn’t seem to matter as FAANGS are perceived as having the best hiring practices (because they wouldn’t be so successful otherwise, right?) so the entire industry just blindly follows suit.

> "If I was a doctor and wanted to work at some other company, would I need to study the MCAT every year in order to pass a screening interview based on one possible question?"

If you were a doctor, you would have gone through 4-5 years of supervised residency after medical school (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine)) to guarantee some minimum level of competency before becoming a practitioner. Pay is notoriously poor and the hours are extremely long.

Programmers have it exceedingly good and the only reason for that is that software is still in its growth phase. I doubt we'll all be still riding the gravy train in another 25-50 years.

Yes but once you get through your residency your expected earnings go up quite a bit and you don’t go back to square one. If someone had told me that I’d still need to prep for leetcode interviews at age 55 I’d have chosen the MD path given a choice, but I’m also old enough to remember the days when you could get a decent coding job based mainly on your experience so from my perspective things have in general gotten demonstrably worse in terms of process for anything other than a lottery-ticket FAANG position.

Welders typically have to demonstrate their welding skills. That's the only one I can think of though.

At least a welder actually welds stuff during their day-to-day. Still looking for a job that needs people who can implement efficient graph traversals though.

> I'm beginning to think that the industry somehow settled on this approach not so much as a skills verification process but, by making the process so onerous on the candidate, talent retention is a lot easier.

There are plenty of applicants who just can't do the job, and the cost of restarting the search all over again is high. It's important for a team to vet their new hires.

> applicants who just can't do the job

While that definitely matches my observations, the current interview grind:

a) filters out people who can do the job too

and

b) somehow also manages not to filter out people who can't, either.

Is that avoidable though? It's not perfect but I'm not convinced any of the alternatives are any better.

I’ve had interviews where I implemented a small feature on an existing application. It didn’t take any longer than your typical hour-long algorithmic implementation interview. Given that we don’t have post-hire data on any of these practices, my hypothesis is the one that most closely resembles the actual work would give the best signal as to whether that person would be able to do the job or not.

I agree that style of interview can be better. I think FAANG companies don't use this style because it's not selective enough and it requires special questions for every role.

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