The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
This will probably be lost in the pile of comments, and I&#x27;m sure some people will interpret it as humble bragging. But I genuinely do not get the angst and anger over the tech screen, from the perspective of an applicant. So I want to explain why I like them.<p>My background: I&#x27;ve never taken any kind of CS or programming class in my life. Mediocre grades in college. My first exposure to programming was at age 24, as I fell into it with an IT tech position. Went from there to a series of jobs at several startups. Before applying to a FAANG, I went through Elements of Programming Interviews and solved all the problems in it, which at around 10 hours&#x2F;week took maybe 6 months of prep. I then sent in two applications, one to FB and one to GOOG, immediately got phone screens, passed, and then two weeks later went through the on-sites. Every one of the questions was either lifted from the coding prep book or trivial.<p>End result? Offers from both, joined as an L4, at a total comp higher than I had ever dreamed of, and significantly higher than friends in medicine who have easily spent over a hundred times as much time preparing and studying as I have.<p>So I&#x27;m kind of left flummoxed. Am I just incredibly lucky? There are huge issues in the hiring process, but if you want a job at FAANG, as far as I can tell it&#x27;s incredibly easy to game the system. Set aside some time each week (easy, if you don&#x27;t have kids), study for a couple months, and then apply. There&#x27;s literally no other field than ours that is so open to motivated people without paper qualifications and that simultaneously offers so much in terms of lifestyle and compensation. Whether it hires the best candidates is another question entirely, but that&#x27;s an issue for the company, not for the applicant.<p>But, when I give an interview to an applicant and use my go-to question, which I initially feared would provide no useful hiring signal for being too easy (and which, yes, I&#x27;ve tested on all my coworkers, who solve without any difficulty), I find that only maybe a third of applicants complete it at LH or higher.<p>To be clear, I&#x27;m calling this out as a blind spot I have--there&#x27;s clearly a massive gap in perspective here--but hopefully it&#x27;ll provide a useful data point for why tech screens aren&#x27;t universally hated and why they manage to persist.