Comment by joshdavham
2 days ago
I've (unfortunately) been interviewing the last two months and the main pattern that I've noticed is that a) big companies have terrible interview processes while b) small companies and startups are great at interviewing.
Big companies need to hire tons of people and interview even more so they need some sort of scalable process for it. An early stage startup can just ask you about your past projects and pair program with you for an hour.
I hear this all the time, but I have yet to experience it. It may be because the small companies that I interview with are all startups, but I have yet to be able to get a call back from any other kind of small company. And the startups I do interview with have a full FAANG interview loops.
There seems to be a weird selection bias that if you're FAANG or FAANG adjacent these small companies aren't interested.
At a former gig we had a newly hired ex-facebook employee give notice within a month because she didn't like that dev setup had bugs that devs themselves had to fix. At fb they obviously can spend millions of dollars for a whole team that ensures that working dev env is always a button click away, a startup (even a scaleup) usually can't afford to. This is just one example out of many I can tell...
And I’ve heard just as many horror stories about companies hiring from small companies that the engineers haven’t kept up with engineering, culture and practices and are coding like it’s 2004.
Also, those types of stories tend to pop up with any engineer who’s only worked at a single place.
My point isn’t that there’s not bad engineers at Facebook it’s that there’s bad engineers everywhere and filtering based on random signals like this is not useful.
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>”There seems to be a weird selection bias that if you're FAANG or FAANG adjacent these small companies aren't interested.”
Many smaller companies have noticed that former and wannabe FAANGers are looking for FAANG-type jobs, and are not good fits in their niche. Small companies often have more uncertainty, fewer clear objectives, less structure, and often lower pay. They’re not a good substitute for megacorps.
And then there's people like me who have been at startups, midsize companies, tiny small businesses and FAANGs.
Not everyone at a FAANG is purely motivated by the amount of money that they can get.
I’m looking for a smaller company because I’m tired of the FAANG mentality personally.
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Yup. You can check out of FAANG anytime you like, but you can never leave.
Was path dependency for careers always this bad?
I don’t feel like it was. Every role is hyper specific nowadays.
And most refused to look at anybody deviating from their ideal background in my experience.
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It's a more mature industry.
I'm guessing the majority of people now in their 50s and 60s in computer-related careers had very eclectic jobs before settling down in computer-related stuff. After all, many never used computers at all until college or beyond.
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I've had a few good experiences with interviews at small companies and startups, so they do exist.
But I have also had really terrible experiences, similar to what you've mentioned. Sounds like you've just gotten unlucky and gotten the terrible ones.
Yeah, been there, done that; wannabe FAANGs are the worst.
At least those are typically honest about what they try to be and give a very clear signal, right at the interview time.
It's much worse when the interview gives you different vibes (and expectations) than the actual day-to-day work.
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What exactly does "scalable" mean here?
If a startup can spend 20 man-hours filling a single position, why can't a big company spend 1000 man-hours filling 50 positions?
In a small company, you can tell your buddy “just have a chat with the candidate and if you like them and you think they can do the job, hire them”.
If the person interviewing your candidates messes up, you’ll know soon enough. In a large company, the bad people will take over and your company is dying a slow death.
That approach doesn’t work on a large scale. Some interviewers are too nitpicky, elitist, others approve anyone who uses the same language as them for side projects. Some are racists, sexist, or have other kinds of biases. Some might have a crush on the candidate. Sometimes the interviewer thinks about their own task while they squeeze in an interview. In some countries, “undoing” a bad hire is hard, so they need to make sure that the candidate can work on any team (or at least on multiple teams reasonably well).
IMO for large companies it makes sense to standardize the interview process.
Also, in my opinion grinding leetcode is also a good personality check for FAANG hires: it shows the candidate can suck it up, study hundreds of hours, and do whatever they need to do to pass an arbitrary test, even if they themselves think it’s a broken process. The larger the company, the more this quality matters in candidates as they will need to deal with a lot of things they will probably not like.
I'm quite conflicted on this. While I do not think one needs to remember/memorize a bunch of brainteasers or past computer scientists'/mathematician's PhD discoveries in order to build CRUD applications.
However, I do feel like there is perhaps some amount of truth to the thought behind the interview questions, no? As in, I would imagine someone that could invert a binary tree in 15 minutes on a whiteboard could probably learn React. However, I am not sure everyone that can learn React can invert a binary tree in 15 minutes on a whiteboard.
However, maybe I am projecting my own insecurities because I wish I could invert a binary tree in 15 minutes on a whiteboard as well as being able to solve all those other problems.
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> In a large company, the bad people will take over and your company is dying a slow death.
Why is this the assumption. I would rather say any big org. is converging towards the average talentwise by necessity. It is like Hawaii can't have 100 olympic level swimmers no matter the recruiting proces.
But I'm talking about the idea of pair programming for an hour or two. Why can't the standardized test still involve that? What doesn't "scale" about it?
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> If a startup can spend 20 man-hours filling a single position, why can't a big company spend 1000 man-hours filling 50 positions?
Because big companies are run by bean counters and they also don't require the same kind of talent that is useful to startups. There's less competition for hyper-specialized seniors and middle of the pack generalists.
> If a startup can spend 20 man-hours filling a single position, why can't a big company spend 1000 man-hours filling 50 positions?
Huh. That’s actually a great question! I actually don’t know.
> small companies and startups are great at interviewing
Small companies have the benefit of the pressure to fill a role to get work done, the lack of bureaucratic baggage to "protect" the company from bad hires, and generally don't have enough staff to suffer empire-building.
Somewhere along the line the question changes from "can this candidate do the job that other people in this office are already doing?" to "can this candidate do the job of this imaginary archetype I've invented with seemingly impossible qualities".