For context, I'm a L6 at FB right now and have more than a decade of experience. I've never seen tech interviews become as stupid as they are now. In the last 3 months I've applied to a few places, including one where I literally built from scratch what the hiring team wanted to do (and got promoted for it at FB), and I've never seen the difficulty of the programming rounds so high as now. In the company I mention I got asked 5 LC hard questions between the 2 phone screens and the first 4 interviews of the zoom "on-site". No relevance whatsoever with what I did before or would've done on that team. I don't know if I passed the first day, but I told them right after I finished I wouldn't be doing the next day of interviews. Other places while not as extreme were more or less the same, they expect the optimal solution in 20-30 minutes max with no hints so that they can ask you a more difficult follow-up question. Many places say they want to know about your "thought process" but it's complete bullshit. Changing jobs is literally a dice roll, depending on who you get as an interviewer: do you get a stickler who's gonna ask you a tricky mathematical problem and expect picture-perfect compilable code because he has a chip on his shoulder and nobody told him it was a stupid way to hire a generalist, or do you get someone who's asking a reasonable problem and mostly looking for signals that you're a well rounded engineer, like choosing tradeoffs, being a team player, helping people around you, and so on. In my experience lately it's been mostly the first type. I don't know if it's simply bad luck or something else, but despite having a pretty good track record these companies are telling me I don't know how to program.
I know it's pretty much impossible for a no-name peon to change the current state of hiring in tech, so in the interviews I conduct I now only ask the hardest possible questions I can find and always put no-hire if the code is not perfect. I've blocked or helped block every single interview loop I've been in except when I knew this person was supposed to join our team directly if they passed, then we just had an reasonable problem and a good talk. My goal is to make hiring slow down to a crawl, make it so hard to find anyone that it hurts the company and is forced to change it. Maybe this is the kind of interviewer I've been finding, someone also fed up with the status quo In that case, I applaud you. The current way we do tech interviews is just idiotic and is absolutely not finding good engineers, it's finding people that lucked out to be in the intersection of "problems they practiced" and "problems you can get asked in an interview".
I am baffled by your approach toward “improving” coding interviews at FB.
If you want them to change, you should be taking positive steps towards that change, by getting involved with things like debrief/candidate review, mentoring new interviewers, or making a proposal for a new interview type that could be A/B tested. Large changes to things like interviewing practice do happen, but they don’t come from out of nowhere, and they certainly don’t come from a single engineer passive-aggressively tanking all their interviews.
Wow, I've never seen someone admit to being that much of an asshole on HN in all my years.
People are literally spending months studying for interviews hoping they can get hired at FB and you are sabotaging their chances. You're admitting you aren't even trying to evaluate if they would be someone you want on your team or an asset to the company, and instead just wasting people's time and hurting careers as a protest.
It's seriously an incredible admission. Talk about toxic!
It makes me wonder if this is really a person who works for FB at all, or just someone masquerading for the sake of making an already loathed company look even worse.
I think this is a genuine possibility given that the poster describes themself as an L6, whereas a FB engineer would typically refer to themself as E6 or IC6.
The guy's an asshole, but people spending months studying in the (mostly vain) hope that they'll get a job at FB kind of have it coming (myself included). If anything, it's a good lesson for them to learn the value of their time, and whether they want to dedicate so much of it to then be subject to people's whims.
Have realistic goals, and know yourself well. If dedicating months for an interview and getting rejected on a whim is going to affect your mental health, don't do it. You can make a pretty good living without working at a FAANG.
> and hurting careers as a protest.
Sorry - but being rejected at one company won't hurt your career. If it does, you have bigger problems.
(Non-disclaimer: I'm not at FAANG, but I don't approve of their interviewing styles).
Do you realize that when seen from the outside there's literally no difference between what I'm doing and me being a "bar raiser" or "preventing false positives"? I'm simply using the system against itself within its own rules.
When someone comes in and is able to solve the 2 hardest problems I have cold there's no way I can reject this candidate in a debrief. There's people out there who are able to do this, either through practice or raw intelligence, it's just that they're very rare. If I said I'm filtering for top talent nobody would bat an eye. If you think I'm being unfair you can simply become more skilled at these problems so that I have absolutely no reason to say no, or to not interview in these places (the better approach).
Yes there is a difference, a 'bar raiser' is still looking to hire someone and trying to evaluate if a candidate would be a good addition to the team.
You said it yourself you aren't trying to evaluate candidates you're trying to make it so no one can get hired. It's no different than if you asked the most obscure piece of technical trivia you could find and failed everyone who didn't know it. Sure someone might know it but that doesn't make it anymore or less of a dick move.
You just found a way to spike people that you think you can get away with. Insane.
Wouldn't your approach have the unintended consequence of making other interviewers pick up your slack by increasing their false positive rate or by weighing other less measurable qualities? aka going by ivy or "feeder" schools?
It seems like your over-reaction is in fact counter productive and may make the whole thing less meritocratic.
My big assumption here is that FB and other places need to hit some numbers every year in terms of new hires especially with FBs no promotion by X years then you're out process.
If an applicant gets an interviewer who doesn't do the current frat pledge rituals that some CS students (with little/no industry experience) 20 years ago thought would be a good way to gatekeep who could work in industry...
I'd say that the interviewer seeing past that is a very good sign you might want to work with that person. And that person's implicit endorsement of the company is also a good sign for the company.
Separately, responding to something else in the comment... if an interviewer is actively sabotaging their own company's process.. Is the company very broken in this and possibly other regards? Is the company not able to fix itself, to the point of guerilla insurgencies, rather than constructive dialog and processes? Why is this person still there? Why do they think that sabotaging an applicant's individual aspirations is a good idea? Is the company so bad that discouraging the applicant is deemed almost certainly in that person's interests? Or does the person not care how this affects the individual applicant?
Do you… do this in other aspects of your work as well? Like, if you disagree with decisions being made on a project you’re working on, do you sabotage it?
In general, obstructionism is not a good way to effect change; it just hurts everybody. There are exceptions, but this probably isn’t one.
Your strategy to "improve hiring" is a dick move. You are just wasting the time of those candidates for... what? Really disrespectful.
Also, your experience indicates that you are only applying to a specific kind of company - FAANG, or a company just about to IPO or a certain type of venture-backed startup. The job market is much bigger than these companies, and there is a lot more diversity to interviews than your post suggests.
>Your strategy to "improve hiring" is a dick move.
I'd say it's less a dick move and more actively harmful. I really don't need any more to believe that FB was declining internally, filled with self-important engineers only propped up by a single revenue source and buying out the competition. In his attempt to prevent anyone else from hurting the company, he decided to hurt the company first?
Imagine working on any other system with 100s of engineers and one of them deciding he doesn't like how it's being run so, instead of raising his concerns, he decides to sabotage it. Absolutely insane.
The programming interviews are getting ridiculous. It is really an immense pain to go through an interview for a senior developer role nowadays, and it is super arbitrary. I did like 5 at the end of last year and I was just sooo tired. Got mixed results as well even when I felt like I understood the problem better than some interviewers. On the other hand, I got two companies that gave me take home assignments which both took me an entire day to complete, but it was fun as hell at least!
BTW I also did a developer interview at FB to transition role (after writing code for two years at FB) and failed. It’s just really random.
It's bad for any level, not just senior. I literally haven't received an offer in over a year of varying interviewing, because no matter what I'm applying to, I get hit with a hackerrank test that compares me to probably anyone in terms of simply whether or not I solved every test case. Others will put me through 5 interviews before deciding to not hire. I can't support myself financially with programming skill as a result (in Canada). It was bad 5 years ago, it's worse now.
Yeah I agree, also with the home assignments. Personally I prefer home assignments infinitely more than leetcode interviews and they are much more realistic to what you do on the job. The problem is that some companies are doing both, first the assignment and if they like it the standard 4-8 interviews.
> My goal is to make hiring slow down to a crawl, make it so hard to find anyone that it hurts the company and is forced to change it.
Hmm. I agree 100% on the intersection of practiced and asked as a key indicator for modern tech interviews.
Have you done any estimates of how long it is going to take Facebook to notice your efforts? I looked and they hired 15k people since 2019. Even if you block three a week, you're only a couple percentage points of drag.
Yeah I know it's a drop in the bucket but for now it's all I can afford to do. I've talked to my SWE friends (inside & outside FB) and have convinced a few to do the same. Others simply don't care or feel it's disloyal to the company, which is fair enough.
You could change the process by being the person who rubber-stamps everyone, regardless of how silly the "process" is. If the person didn't get the PhD algorithm perfect, yet still did a good job, let them in. Anyone who is good enough to be considered for an interview at FB or G is good enough to do the job. That's the truth of the matter. Be the change you want to see-- this somewhat reads as a 'stick-in-mud' approach which may not get your desired outcome.
> I've blocked or helped block every single interview loop I've been in except when I knew this person was supposed to join our team directly if they passed, then we just had an reasonable problem and a good talk. My goal is to make hiring slow down to a crawl, make it so hard to find anyone that it hurts the company and is forced to change it.
Have you considered that you might be frustrating the interviewees and your colleagues too?
This is why I don't interview at FB. I always told people the interviews I've had with FB just seems ridiculously off. Your story kind of corroborates that.
Im curious to hear what types of companies an L6 / E6 at FB is applying to. Without mentioning company names, what types of opportunities are out there that convince you to leave this type of comp [1]
To put it simply, I used to have hobbies before working at FB. Now I don't have time for anything besides work. While the pay is really good the job is a non-stop, grueling grind with no downtime allowed. I enjoyed my time but I'm done with it. Also I can't say I'm proud of working there. There's people inside that are really great to work with and the job was challenging and interesting, but I don't care for FB the company and what it's doing in general.
With that said, and I know it's a first world problem, I'm looking for a place that aligns with my views and in some specific fields that I find interesting. I'm fine taking a pay cut depending on the company and the position, I don't care so much about money anymore as an employee.
Have the exact same experience at another FAANG company in a security org. Endless grind, incredible politics, employees endlessly backstab each other. Great salary, but really nothing else as a positive. Depressing.
Going to be hard going from 500+ back down to 150-200, but I imagine doing something I'm actually passionate about will be worth it.
I appreciate the cold game theory of your approach. Quite hilarious if others are following it too, although I don’t think so from what I’ve seen. (Edit: I was also reading it from the perspective of forcing companies to raise comp.)
For context, I'm a L6 at FB right now and have more than a decade of experience. I've never seen tech interviews become as stupid as they are now. In the last 3 months I've applied to a few places, including one where I literally built from scratch what the hiring team wanted to do (and got promoted for it at FB), and I've never seen the difficulty of the programming rounds so high as now. In the company I mention I got asked 5 LC hard questions between the 2 phone screens and the first 4 interviews of the zoom "on-site". No relevance whatsoever with what I did before or would've done on that team. I don't know if I passed the first day, but I told them right after I finished I wouldn't be doing the next day of interviews. Other places while not as extreme were more or less the same, they expect the optimal solution in 20-30 minutes max with no hints so that they can ask you a more difficult follow-up question. Many places say they want to know about your "thought process" but it's complete bullshit. Changing jobs is literally a dice roll, depending on who you get as an interviewer: do you get a stickler who's gonna ask you a tricky mathematical problem and expect picture-perfect compilable code because he has a chip on his shoulder and nobody told him it was a stupid way to hire a generalist, or do you get someone who's asking a reasonable problem and mostly looking for signals that you're a well rounded engineer, like choosing tradeoffs, being a team player, helping people around you, and so on. In my experience lately it's been mostly the first type. I don't know if it's simply bad luck or something else, but despite having a pretty good track record these companies are telling me I don't know how to program.
I know it's pretty much impossible for a no-name peon to change the current state of hiring in tech, so in the interviews I conduct I now only ask the hardest possible questions I can find and always put no-hire if the code is not perfect. I've blocked or helped block every single interview loop I've been in except when I knew this person was supposed to join our team directly if they passed, then we just had an reasonable problem and a good talk. My goal is to make hiring slow down to a crawl, make it so hard to find anyone that it hurts the company and is forced to change it. Maybe this is the kind of interviewer I've been finding, someone also fed up with the status quo In that case, I applaud you. The current way we do tech interviews is just idiotic and is absolutely not finding good engineers, it's finding people that lucked out to be in the intersection of "problems they practiced" and "problems you can get asked in an interview".