Unless one takes extraordinary steps to examine what brings truly brings value, most people interview for clones of themselves. Or worse: their idealized self-image.
Google started off with very mathy people, and highly competitive people, and interviewing this way has always worked for them, so why change?
Some people have done internal studies showing how wildly counterproductive their interview process is, and yet it does not change.
I suspect psychological factors are the main reason why this process persists.
Google gets so many applicants it's irrelevant how counterproductive the interview process is. It selects for people similar to the interviewers, but that matters little, since they can afford to say No to 99% of candidates because thousands will still apply.
What boggles my mind is to see the same type of "skill testing" whiteboard coding interviews at smaller companies and startups that pay far less and don't have golden handcuffs to offer.
I've been at Google for 8 years. If I went to one of these smaller companies to interview and they asked me to whiteboard a data structure or algorithm problem I'd just walk out. I'm not the best programmer in the world or particularly shit-hot, but I'm sure there are many that are that would do the same.
Companies copying this process are doing themselves a disservice.
>Google gets so many applicants it's irrelevant how counterproductive the interview process is.
It still may be relevant when you are looking for a specific domain knowledge instead of a generic "programmer". A great example is Amazon Game Studios. They employ the general Amazon hiring process from what I understand yet, as a game studio, it's a complete and utter failure. There are just few thousand experienced game programmers in the whole world and only a fraction of them wants to apply at Amazon at all for different reasons. You cull 99% of them and you are left with inexperienced people who will not be able to learn anything since there is nobody to learn from. Even if few experienced people got through or went around hiring process (e.g. celebrity programmers hired without whiteboarding) they will be in a minority and unable to mentor the rest of the studio. Google and Facebook are spinning up their own game studios and I expect the same result from them.
One thing I wasn't aware as a nerdy teenager was how everything is valued IRL in its guaranteed minimum performance, not conditional maxima.
No one is interested in your peak performance, all it matters is consistency, predictability, stability, those robustness metrics. Say interview questions kinda sucks, but you show some competency still, means predictable most of what they have to throw at you will at least partially stick, minimizing factors.
You could argue that a workplace that prefers a trait like that doesn't sound like a place for artists' dream place we all desire, but more towards a "software manufacturing factory" envisioned by electric companies like Hitachi in the '80s, if you do I think maybe it is and maybe they were right to a certain extent.
I agree that the interview process looks for self clones. I've been in interviews where interviewer was like "why you used Dictionary to do this? Nobody uses dict in prod code"
But unearned privilege seems a little harsh doesn't it?
Now I’m curious why they didn’t use dicts, I love dicts. I’ve been writing Python for a living for almost 15 years now and dictionaries and (reasonable) list comprehensions still attract me like they did the first day I “met” them.
To be honest the lady taking the interview didn't understand my code, at least that's what I got. The guy with her definitely didn't understand a line I had written.
Maybe that was her way of protecting herself or something else
But I've never come across any real reason to not use dicts
Frankly though, I think there's something more fundamental about large organization as to why this sort of stuff happens (not just at companies). Perhaps it's the iron law of oligarchy, but corruption seems inevitable at scale. Very few innovative people seem able to reap or retain the most value of their work.
> Very few innovative people seem able to reap or retain the most value of their work.
Once a company pays you, it's not your work, it's their work. They paid you fair and square.
IMHO a developer need to produce about 10x what's his paid as to cover for the company costs and profits. If one thinks that they can cover those 9 tenths in marketing, office space, infrastructure, admin and legal costs in a more efficient manner, they should quit and start their own company.
They don't own your innovation outright unless that's in your work contract and you haven't negotiated a fairer deal.
And I have no idea where you get your 10X figure from. In fact it's very hard to estimate the specific business value of specific dev work in very large companies, over any time period.
From a high enough level the job becomes "Pay devs to keep the engines running." Unless you're innovating new products/services at a senior level, it's hard to break it down further.
Which is partly why the interview process has become homogenised. Realistically most developers are engine components, not engine designers - although it's easy to be fooled when your component value is process optimisation - and FAANGs have optimised the funnel to select good components.
You need to be senior++ and/or in startup land to be an engine designer - which differs from being a component because it allows independent agency for strategic goal setting, instead of optimisation of tactical implementation.
most groups don’t change until it is obvious to most of them that what is going on is not working.
When most people stop returning Google’s phone calls, so that positions go infilled, then they’ll start talking about change. Right now there’s still enough supply that they don’t have to do anything,
Unless one takes extraordinary steps to examine what brings truly brings value, most people interview for clones of themselves. Or worse: their idealized self-image.
Google started off with very mathy people, and highly competitive people, and interviewing this way has always worked for them, so why change?
Some people have done internal studies showing how wildly counterproductive their interview process is, and yet it does not change.
I suspect psychological factors are the main reason why this process persists.