The gatekeeping of tech screening is broken

Question

Most interviewers of now universal one-hour tech screen don't care about your resume. They're not asking you questions about what you've built, problems encountered, or successes had. It's strictly, and often times, an overly complicated, open-ended, and trick coding problem. Did you reject that candidate who struggled to center a DIV for 5 minutes? You just passed on a core member of the React team.

Who is this process serving and why are we still doing it?

A candidate with 15+ years of experience hesitating even slightly will be passed on because of the endless queue of other LeetCoding candidates that will have seen the problem before, but have no real-world experience, who nail it.

Who would you rather have on your team?

madscience · Accepted Answer

I'm not sure I would say it's gatekeeping necessarily, but there is definitely a problem with tech interviewing in general. I would see hiring managers put new hires as interviewers on panels. I'm talking like 3 weeks into the job, this guy doesn't even have his insurance setup yet, and he's interviewing for new members of the team.

I think it honestly comes from companies overstating how much they like to make 'data-driven' decisions. It makes it so interviewers aren't looking at a candidate for the work they can do, but moreso can they provide the right data to make a hiring decision. Sometimes, those things go hand in hand. Other times, it's just checking the boxes and putting feedback into a system.

Not sure what the solution is, but if your team is missing out on good candidates because you can't evaluate them correctly, then something will end up changing.

SayidCoder · Answer

While you see a lot of folks agreeing with (rightfully) here, there are a lot of other candidates who are ignoring all these comments, studying all that "leet code" shit, and getting the job you might deserve. My experience is that leet code crap reduces false positives. This is the mindset: If you are willing to practice something that has nothing to do with your actual job, you would be willing to put in the effort needed to learn anything relevant to your job while on the job. I can't entirely agree with this, but this is a massive driver for some to do it.

The other motivation is simply confirmation bias. For some, because they did the same thing, they assume every qualified candidate should be able to do the same. This is complete BS because, as mentioned here, people who are interviewing themselves already know the answer and might not be able to do a similar question on their own without excessive practice.

To sum up, life is crap, and nothing is fair. It is what it is, and you need to adjust to it. Good luck with your job hunting.

Lore · Answer

This unfortunately is becoming more common as faang enforces their nonsense on the downstream employment ecosystem.

gymbeaux · Answer

This is a very common complaint in the tech world, but I don’t think I’ve seen it worded so succinctly while also conveying the issue in a way that may make an interviewer question the system.

The only person I’ve ever spoken to who offered a compelling case in favor of leetcode interviews interviewed me at US Digital Service (USDS) which seems like a really cool place to work despite being government. Their process did not involve leetcode, but we were discussing it towards the end of a conversation-style interview, and his view was that leetcode style interviews can show us who has motivation, discipline, and dedication to grind leetcode for months ahead of interviews. So he realized that it was bullshit as a measure of technical ability, but he praised it as a tool for finding people who essentially “want the job bad enough to spend months of their free time preparing for it.” I still disagree with the leetcode style interview, because I think you’re still passing on excellent candidates who for example have kids and can’t really grind leetcode for months. There’s also the luck aspect- imagine grinding leetcode for three months, clearing the entire Cracking the Coding Interview, only to have a stomach ache during the interview and bomb because you can’t focus? Don’t feed me the “just be up front about the stomach ache and ask to reschedule” crap, it will probably not work and just come across as you trying to prep for that question ahead of the rescheduled interview. Interviewers have a keen (too keen) nose for tricks like that and it seems will write off legitimate things only to make the hire/no-hire decision easier (it’s a hard decision, admittedly, when most of the candidates look like good hires on paper).

So yeah, leetcode is ass mostly because it’s easy to game, partially because it usually has little correlation to job performance. A company building a web app doesn’t need someone who can implement a bloom filter from scratch… in fact I hope they don’t try to implement one from scratch. It will be inferior to whatever package/library already exists for that language/framework because it wouldn’t have been scrutinized and vetted by the thousands of users of that package.

Ivan · Answer

I just thing that FAANG the way we knew it 5-10 years ago is not the same. These companies are not creating innovation and are just buying out smaller projects. This heavily reflects on the way these companies hire people, as their main goal is to not get somebody creative/talented/skilled to solve a new problem, but to sustain existing codebase and provide small improvements. I honestly don’t know anybody who would like to work for faang for any reasons except for money in 2023.

The gatekeeping of tech screening is broken

Coding Interview with Dan Abramov

About

Tech

Members