Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era
Not my experience at all.<p>For context, I&#x27;m a L6 at FB right now and have more than a decade of experience. I&#x27;ve never seen tech interviews become as stupid as they are now. In the last 3 months I&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;on-site&quot;. No relevance whatsoever with what I did before or would&#x27;ve done on that team. I don&#x27;t know if I passed the first day, but I told them right after I finished I wouldn&#x27;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 &quot;thought process&quot; but it&#x27;s complete bullshit. Changing jobs is literally a dice roll, depending on who you get as an interviewer: do you get a stickler who&#x27;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&#x27;s asking a reasonable problem and mostly looking for signals that you&#x27;re a well rounded engineer, like choosing tradeoffs, being a team player, helping people around you, and so on. In my experience lately it&#x27;s been mostly the first type. I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s simply bad luck or something else, but despite having a pretty good track record these companies are telling me I don&#x27;t know how to program.<p>I know it&#x27;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&#x27;ve blocked or helped block every single interview loop I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s finding people that lucked out to be in the intersection of &quot;problems they practiced&quot; and &quot;problems you can get asked in an interview&quot;.