Comment by hiq

> so how come that I find a good chunk of swe at FAANG are not that smart

You put the bar wherever you want. A company can decide to set it lower than what you would expect or like, but it could still make business sense, e.g. if 99%+ of hires still perform well with this bar and the company would like to hire faster.

This is related to:

> and barely get anything done. Plus the quality of their work (generally speaking) is very low

That's a problem of the performance review process. If everybody considers that someone is not delivering, that could be for multiple reasons, and even with a very high hiring bar that could still happen, so you can't rely solely on interviews.

If you don't have a good performance review process, you'll end up with worse hiring because you can't measure the impact of your changes.

> I passed candidates that did not do well on coding, but I was convinced they had potential. Whereas I did not pass candidate that did very well on coding, but did not show any interest or passion at all.

Can you do that objectively? It's very easy to introduce bias if you try to evaluate whether candidates show passion.