Agreed. The FAANG now like to filter people via multiple rounds of coding interviews.
This is why “Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions” is #1 in Job Interviewing (Books) on Amazon…
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Thanks. Yes, I am at least ten years out of date on Google’s hiring practices! Also, there’s no reason for anyone to consider FAANG their gold standard. There is a lot of work to do in tech, and you’re going to have more autonomy in a less established company.
That is common in computing, not just in big companies. However, assuming that FAANG all have similar hiring practices generally would be a mistake, just like assuming that all STEM majors in college have similar characteristics.
Yes! Many companies make you do the coding thing. My son had to do them for multiple companies when he was looking for a job. And as said many times before, it is about fit. You don’t need to go to the most “prestigious” named school to get a great job or to necessarily compete with others. My son had offers from these companies with only a high school degree. Same pay, benefits, bonus, etc.
so a high schooler who does codeforces 24x7 will have a better chance at industry
A HS’er who does codeforces “24X7” needs to stop exaggerating and maybe get a life…
I would never recommend hiring anyone solely on a coding test, but it’s an easy thing to evaluate and a necessary job skill. It always amazes me when companies don’t have a coding test or even a rigorous technical interview. This is going to tell you a lot more than anything you see on the resume.
If they dream about coding, they might be closer to 24x7 than you think.
That is not a good thing, @pbcparent. 
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um yea but he’ll have a better chance at cracking interviews than some person who just does CS because the salaries are good
There’s no universally correct way to conduct interviews. Something I noticed during my career was that everyone thought they knew the secret to effective interviewing, yet the results were always equally hit or miss when it came to who got hired. In fact, the best places I worked only seemed to look for a baseline level of technical competence, and spent as much or more time trying to figure out whether the prospective candidate could mesh well with the rest of the team. They wouldn’t necessarily hire the best technical developers (luckily for me.)
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I agree, but there’s no excuse for missing the baseline. In fact, I have been interviewed and left wondering what useful piece of information they could possibly have gotten from their questioning. Usually, though, I don’t get an offer in cases like that, so it may be they were just going through the motions to begin with.
There’s no well-defined baseline. It’s different for different interviewers and different companies. I probably wasn’t clear in that the baseline level of technical competence I was talking about doesn’t require any kind of coding test or rigorous technical interview.
What I eventually ended up doing when interviewing people was asking four or five very basic technical questions, and I was able to eliminate a large percentage of candidates just with those. If they could answer those questions, they’d have met my baseline definition of technical competence. At that level, they’d be able to look up how to do things they didn’t know how to do. I’m not going to ask someone to explain the algorithm for a particular search or sort when they’re not going to be writing search and sort algorithms on the job. After that, the interview was about determining whether the candidate’s preferred approach to software development fit the group’s approach, and finally I’d try to figure out whether the candidate’s personality would mesh with the group’s.
Looking for a baseline level of technical competence is important, but I am quite doubtful that throwing programming problems at the interviewees on HackerRank or LeetCode, as the latest trend seems to be, is the best way to do so.
To me those tests mostly check the ability of candidates to memorize solutions to known problems and regurgitate them quickly. I would argue that those skills are not that valuable compared to critical thinking, ability to express ideas, and fit with the team/organization.
Or different jobs within the same company or organization within the company. There may be different expectations for an entry-level bachelor’s degree graduate versus someone with extensive experience in a specialty subarea applying for a job in that subarea.
Even for the same job, expectations may also vary depending on what the applicant claims to know and have done.
“I would never recommend hiring anyone solely on a coding test”
Agree, I don’t think hiring decisions are made based on them, but they are used to screen out candidates who don’t do well on them. It does vary a lot by company though.
As this post seems to have veered off course, has become argumentative, and the OP has disappeared, I am closing the thread. The OP has all the needed information to make an informed decision at this point.
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