The tests have become a pure filter, screen out those who dont study heavily prior to taking them. They are uncorrelated from the candidates ability at every day tasks.
Hmm. Y'know, that's a great point. I could build a whole conspiracy theory off of that idea:
If I'm a FAANG, I'm simply not using my normal interview process to hire for the really interesting jobs. I reserve those ones for people who got the job by virtue of their publication history in the academic literature, or because they built some well-known cool thing, or because they got promoted into the position. Those people get shunted over into the "you didn't come to us, we came to you" interview process.
The seats I'm looking to fill with the more public interview process are mostly seats for the grunt coders who work under those people. My ideal candidate for that position isn't some rock star creative genius; it's a workaholic who is resistant to boredom. And what's something a workaholic who's resistant to boredom would be really good at? Grinding away on programming interview questions, of course.
This isn't a conspiracy theory - it's literally exactly what business schools do...
Teach a bunch of people to think in a certain way, speak a certain language and respect authority. Someone who excels at the repetitive mundanity of business school will be a perfect junior marketing manager at BigCo.
It's basically taking the way the Army trains new recruits and applying it to white collar jobs.
I wonder if the added friction of changing your place of work caused by this practice is meant to somewhat counterbalance the heavy incentives engineers have to job-hop in the current climate. Kind of makes sense from the point of view of tech employers.
> I wonder if the added friction of changing your place of work caused by this practice is meant to somewhat counterbalance the heavy incentives engineers have to job-hop in the current climate. Kind of makes sense from the point of view of tech employers.
I am not sure what to think about this claim: it is the other company that prevents you from working for them by this interview process. The current employer has the incentive that you don't leave. The other (potential) employer rather has the incentive to poach you.
These same employers (famously) had a cartel that prohibited job hopping before - the Jobs/Schmidt email - so it’s not surprising that the system would trend toward the same equilibrium again.
> These same employers (famously) had a cartel that prohibited job hopping before - the Jobs/Schmidt email - so it’s not surprising that the system would trend toward the same equilibrium again.
This explains this phenomenon plausibly for the FAANG companies. But I think there also exist lots of startups that could easily act as a cartel breaker - to their advantage, since this way they can poach from other companies.
Time spent by a new employee learning the ropes is time wasted from the perspective of an individual employer-actor. On the surface, it sounds similar enough to the iterated prisoner's dilemma so I'm inclined to think that a greedy strategy would do poorly here.
But they are not supposed to be boring? At least to me they never are, it's just that they are rarely high on my list of important (or fun) things to do on my self-improvement time.
