I would like to see data on if these interview systems actually achieved their goal of rejecting bad candidates.
I worked at a FAANG company and saw several people get let go for underperforming. I have no idea if they could have been productive doing something else but they were clearly not productive at the tasks assigned them or that they chose to do. I also saw several other people I thought were a candidate for going down the same path before I left. Whether they got moved to something they were more productive on or whether they were showing value in other ways I have no idea.
The point being the hiring system didn't reject these people. My guess is they either got lucky like me, easy questions, or they are good at answering the questions but not good in actual production.
For example one person that was let go was clearly smart and could make the code but they would refactor forever looking for perfection and end up taking 4x - 8x longer than others around them. Maybe in some place that's a plus but for our team we needed to ship and this person was not able to prioritize shipping and after several attempts they were let go.
Another had a task that they were taking a long time on. Others on the team gave them the benefit of the doubt that it was harder than it looked but when they were finally let go it turned out it was not harder than it looked and was finished rather quickly.
Another wrote bloated obfusticated code that seemed to be 6x the number of lines it needed to be. Maybe they could have been helped via code review.
Yet another was one I interviewed and they passed the "can write code test" but in the entire time I was there I don't think I saw them submit a single PR. I have no idea what was filling their time.
I don't know if that ratio of unproductive candidates is better or worse than anywhere else I've worked on average. Pretty much every place I worked before FAANG was 100 people or less and my team 30 people or less and those teams were 10 engineers or less. There were always 1 or 2 engineers in the company known for being slow or writing bad designs. Sounds about the same but I didn't measure.
I worked at a FAANG company and saw several people get let go for underperforming. I have no idea if they could have been productive doing something else but they were clearly not productive at the tasks assigned them or that they chose to do. I also saw several other people I thought were a candidate for going down the same path before I left. Whether they got moved to something they were more productive on or whether they were showing value in other ways I have no idea.
The point being the hiring system didn't reject these people. My guess is they either got lucky like me, easy questions, or they are good at answering the questions but not good in actual production.
For example one person that was let go was clearly smart and could make the code but they would refactor forever looking for perfection and end up taking 4x - 8x longer than others around them. Maybe in some place that's a plus but for our team we needed to ship and this person was not able to prioritize shipping and after several attempts they were let go.
Another had a task that they were taking a long time on. Others on the team gave them the benefit of the doubt that it was harder than it looked but when they were finally let go it turned out it was not harder than it looked and was finished rather quickly.
Another wrote bloated obfusticated code that seemed to be 6x the number of lines it needed to be. Maybe they could have been helped via code review.
Yet another was one I interviewed and they passed the "can write code test" but in the entire time I was there I don't think I saw them submit a single PR. I have no idea what was filling their time.
I don't know if that ratio of unproductive candidates is better or worse than anywhere else I've worked on average. Pretty much every place I worked before FAANG was 100 people or less and my team 30 people or less and those teams were 10 engineers or less. There were always 1 or 2 engineers in the company known for being slow or writing bad designs. Sounds about the same but I didn't measure.