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Comment by b20000 | Hacker News Reader

b20000

well, where i graduated, people DID have those skills. so you are wrong.

besides, companies already ask what university you went to and could get your records and individual class grades and use that combined with number of people fired that had the same degree to figure out if they want to hire you or not. after all, we are in the era of data science?

and instead of paying recruiters lots of money for shuffling word documents around, they can use that money to pay prospective candidates for a month. it will be cheaper.

the real reason for coding interviews is to wear you out so they can pay you less. the problem is that people go along with this clown show instead of simply walking away and doing something else.

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You end up with a far less merit based hiring pipeline. I work at a top tech company and don't have any degree at all. The current process gives people like me a chance, yours wouldn't.

the current process rewards people who memorize and grind leetcode answers, rather than those with an actual education and skills, which is a problem. so no, the current process is not merit based but rather measures to what extent you are willing to exhaust yourself to get a job.

I did maybe 5-10 hours of preparation for my current job's interview and most of my colleagues didn't grind either. I'm skeptical of this idea that the only people who work at FAANG are Leetcode machines that have sacrificed their lives to grind questions.

then maybe you are an outlier and were asked the exact questions you prepared for. most people here mentioned 2-3 months of grinding and that is what i also experienced firsthand.

Part of the interview process is to find positive outliers. I don’t want average people. I want great people.

the interview process does not optimize for great people with relevant experience but for those who repeatedly grind leetcode problems irrelevant to the job.

i interviewed a while ago at a FAANG where they had a long standing problem related to their OS. i knew the solution because i recently brought a product to market built on top of a similar OS and had to address the same problem.

but it was more important to them i passed their coding test within a few minutes, and that i choose the optimum solution, which can only be found if you can spend an hour thinking about it. i bombed the interview due to not being used to coding interviews and having to talk while i think, and having to do all this in a few minutes.

they are probably still wondering how to fix their problem.

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