I live in Scandinavia, and I have yet to encounter the levels of rigor I see in the US (tech) interviewing process - which is kind of weird, as we have much, much more stringent workers rights/laws, making it more difficult to get rid of a bad hire.
Sure, US companies, especially in tech hubs, operate on a completely different scale than companies over here - at least in terms of funding/capital, size, and impact; So one might suspect your companies and startups to be more selective. But yet, it seems like a completely different world.
Over here, there seems to be much more emphasis (and trust) on your resume, and the hiring process is more focused on fit. If you have the basics down, most can be thought - but it's pretty difficult to teach culture.
As a counterpoint, I had to intervene when I discovered one of our European offices was interviewing mobile developers with a 40-80 hour take home project. They were not happy when we made them reduce it to a 4-5 hour take home problem.
Same thing in Germany. I've had just a few interviews for the last three jobs. None of them was a multi day (or even one whole day) interview. The max. that was asked was a (really short) coding challenge with a salary at 80k - to put in perspective I pay 600€ / 105m² for rent and live near some big cities in western Germany.
I definitely went through a stupid interview process when I lived and worked in Sweden. "Name and define 5 design patterns", "sort this array", followed by the "personality test". Everyone was nice and all, and I got the job, but it was definitely on par with what I see now in the US.
I hate stupid leetcode based interviews. It's like "gotcha journalism " just to have a justification for a subjective rejection
It's like when as couple of weeks ago some random recruiter was interviewing me and asked "what's your weak point as a manager" ... I was sincere and if course the reason I was rejected is because they are looking for someone who doesn't have THAT exact weakness. GOTCHA!!
I feel that asking candidates negative questions gives you a better idea of a programmers aptitude than asking positive questions. Asking a candidate to give an example of a problem they couldn't solve, what they attempted when trying to solve it, and why they couldn't solve it, gives you an idea of their problem solving process and a real sense their upper limit of ability. Any candidate can gas themselves up and cherrypick some impressive achievements, or provide a laundry list of tools they have "experience" with.
Rejecting candidates based on their response to those types of questions is completely counter-productive. You'll just end up with a bunch of employees who are either liars, or very good at delegating blame. You want employees who take ownership of their work and assigned tasks.
As for programming tasks/questions in interviews. I think that it's important to test applicants' practical knowledge of sorting and other enumerable operations as it's a common task that's often done wrong, often with significant performance impacts. However, requiring a candidate to re-implement a common sorting algorithm for an array of numbers does nothing but stroke the interviewer's ego. The last time I actually had to write a sorting algorithm from scratch was in a 200-level computer science paper.
An actually sane interview question/task would be to ask the candidate to sort an array by an unconventional comparison, using a language's standard sorting functionality.
For example: sorting an array of coordinates by their absolute distance from (0, 0), or sorting an array of RGB colours by intensity. They're problems that a programmer would realistically encounter in a real-life application, and test that the candidate actually understands how to manipulate non-trivial enumerable/comparable data.
Asking candidates to implement quicksort selects for applicants who have a case of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome. You don't want to hire programmers who implement their own sorting algorithms from scratch, there's a >90% chances they'll implement it worse than the language's standard implementation, while wasting a bunch of time that could be spent solving actual business problems, and creating technical debt to boot.
The US pays a lot and there's a lot of competition for positions. The H1B system doesn't help that competition. When you have 50 well qualified applicants (ie: could pass most interviews) per position then you need some way to weed out 49 of them. Resumes can be exaggerated and downright lied on so once there's enough competition using them just means you're selecting the best liars/sociopaths.
I think there's certainly some truth to coding interviews being an effective mechanism in shifting hiring towards H1Bs. It's much easier to say that Americans can't do the job when you create a test around studying for 500 hours to memorize hundreds upon hundreds of coding puzzles in order to build up a mental encyclopedia of how to quickly apply your algorithmic "training" to the puzzle of the day.
I'd bet H1Bs are going to be much more motivated to jump through that hoop. Benefits them and the company doing the hiring that conveniently just can't find enough qualified American engineers to do the job.
This is an absurd characterization of coding interviews. I've been on both sides of big tech interviews, and I've been at a few companies. I've seen two extremes. At one end, the company had pretty lax interviews, and I rarely interviewed anyone while I was there. The quality of people at this company was relatively low, from my small sample size of coworkers. At the other end, a company well known for challenging coding interviews, and I regularly interview people. The quality of people at this company was relatively high, again from my small sample size of coworkers.
I think coding interviews are actually working fairly well. They divide people into at least two groups: a first group is people that can pass them without too much trouble, and they mostly seem to get hired, but of course there are mistakes. A second group is people that need to spend 500 hours cramming to appear qualified, and basically are trying to game the system. These people mostly don't get hired, and I suspect also are completely driving the conversation on HN and elsewhere about how coding interviews are a terrible failure.
FAANG nowadays wants you to be able to solve 2 leetcode mediums (or an easy+hard) without errors and with optimal computational complexity in 35 minutes. This is done up to three times so that's six problems and if you miss even one you likely fail the whole thing. To me that's really really hard unless you study to the point of having the solutions memorized. It's not the problems that are difficult per say but the time constraint which means going down the wrong path leaves you with no time to fix things.
I'm not necessarily anti coding interviews, but somehow convincing yourself there is any degree of innate talent is a myth. There is a linear relationship between practice and performance. It's as simple as that. Some people are privileged with better resources to practice more effectively, but at the end of the day, it comes down to who has done it more.
I've worked with people that I consider pretty smart, and they definitely study (and enjoy) the kinds of problems that are given in interviews. 500 hours may be an exaggeration, but I think the idea that this stuff comes naturally to successful people is a bit ridiculous.
I would say I've never met anyone who can "invent Quicksort" without too much trouble. However I've met many people who've memorized it for interviews.
> Over here, there seems to be much more emphasis (and trust) on your resume, and the hiring process is more focused on fit. If you have the basics down, most can be thought - but it's pretty difficult to teach culture.
That's probably because OP makes triple to quadruple your total compensation at minimum as an L5 ML Engineer at Google.
Obviously the salaries are quite different, but at the same time - you're pretty much walking around in golden shackles, no? I can't imagine those salaries being relevant, other than a handful of places in the US.
And for the price of a small 2-bedroom apartment in the SF-area, you can pretty much buy a mansion where I live.
Then you have things like healthcare, school costs, daycare / cost of raising a child, etc. etc.
The US is a large place, you can save money for a decade in one location and then use that $1-2 million you built up to move somewhere cheap, buy a mansion and not give much a shit for the next 40 years. Taxes are also generally lower so you keep more. Healthcare costs don't matter since your employer pays for that and gives you good health insurance. School/child only matters later, and you can either move away by then or get promoted to making $600k+.
edit: Two engineers together can make $700k+ which is $450+k after taxes per year. After one year and reasonable spending that's enough for a down payment on a house in the Bay Area. Every single year you get enough to pay for 1.5 kid's worth of college education at a top private school. Very few costs actually matter in comparison at that point.
Sure but do people want to actually want to live in those places? My wife and I both live in SF and we were able to buy a house which would be impossible now, but I don’t think we’ve ever cleared more then 250K max combined in actual salary. Now with only one of us working which could drop to zero at any moment it seems a move to cash out our equity in the house and move to Europe is a more feasible option than staying in the US
>Sure but do people want to actually want to live in those places?
I don't see why not. It's not like the Bay Area is particularly great culturally, culinarily or in most other ways. It's a giant suburb sandwiched between a medium sized city and a place that is only technically dense enough to be a city. There's plenty of mid-sized cities and suburbs in the US with reasonable costs of living.
Yeah I don’t know. I think there is a difference between places with reasonable costs of living but I don’t know if those are places where 1-2M is going to last 40yrs. I grew up in Astoria, OR with population of 10k and can say that at least compared to that place SF Bay Area is miles beyond culturally and culinarily. Even Portland seems rather lacking just in the sense that there really isn’t the amount of cultural diversity there as you can find here. I feel like if there is anything I am interested in getting into here there is almost always a club or group of people you can find here that are doing it which wasn’t always the case in other places I’ve lived. On the other hand, if you’re into things like hunting and similar recreational pursuits, the Bay Area doesn’t seem as good as other places where there aren’t as many hurdles to overcome and a lot of people are doing it as well.
I didn't mean you could retire with 1-2 million but simply you could take whatever job you wanted and not worry about major expenses. The person I was talking to mentioned kids a few times so I was talking more from that point. With kids, your free time shrinks dramatically as do your priorities. So hobbies and so on matter a lot less than good schools, stable environment, etc, etc.
In terms of diverse activities I've personally found east coast cities better and most have broader suburbs than the bay area (due to not being restricted by mountains) so it's easier to trade commute against price.
Most software engineers I know don't even leave the house much. What's the point of living here if you're just going to watch LoL streams all day in your bedroom?
As I see it, beyond a certain level money and things don't make you much happier. They just give you a different set of things to feel the same level of happiness about.
edit: This is as someone who has experienced household lifestyles going from <$40k/year to >$250k/year.
> I want more and if a job comes up tomorrow that will pay me more, I'm there.
Tere's diminishing returns on wealth accumulation. You need to give up something to make that extra more. Different people have different thresholds for "giving up" certain aspects of their life.
The kids you are thinking of certainly enjoy nice cars, good food, and so on.
However, the housing stock is mostly old & run down even at two million dollar prices. Not to mention, a kid with two full time Googler parents? They are attending an academically rigorous private school with 3-4 hours of cram classes after, not sipping virgin daiquiris by the pool.
the parenting attitude isnt "we got it made, lets enjoy the good life", it is "i expect you to do even better". also, most kids are not the product of 750k hh income families. the median hh income is about a hundred k.
350K is about enough to start considering buying a house in the bay area. Less than that and you have to make big compromises.
The life you can't imagine are all the lucky Engineers to be paid bay area salaries at reasonable cost of living locations like Seattle. You may laugh at me calling Seattle "reasonable" but compared to the bay it is.
Housing prices and the cost of any good school beyond a select few good public ones pretty much brings the lifestyle down to the same level. My friends with kids and solid incomes live comfortably but not extravagantly considering one lay-off can take your income from comfortable to 0 at a moment’s notice.
Sure, two engineers together technically can make $700k+, just like runners technically can run a 4 minute mile. You're not talking about average engineers at average companies here, so it's not really generalizable advice.
I live in Scandinavia, and I have yet to encounter the levels of rigor I see in the US (tech) interviewing process - which is kind of weird, as we have much, much more stringent workers rights/laws, making it more difficult to get rid of a bad hire.
Sure, US companies, especially in tech hubs, operate on a completely different scale than companies over here - at least in terms of funding/capital, size, and impact; So one might suspect your companies and startups to be more selective. But yet, it seems like a completely different world.
Over here, there seems to be much more emphasis (and trust) on your resume, and the hiring process is more focused on fit. If you have the basics down, most can be thought - but it's pretty difficult to teach culture.