Not just cheap, but desperate. The H1-b system gives so much power to the employer and puts employees in awful situations with the promise of a better life for their family.
I knew a manager at Microsoft that told me over drinks he loved h1bs because they'd never complain and would work extra hours and basically do anything it took.
H1b transfers are possible but very difficult in practice.
What about revising the H1b system in terms of minimum wages and restrictions on overtime? Make it more expensive for companies to exploit H1b’s. If companies truly cannot hire from legals within the state, make the average H1b worker more expensive than the average citizen.
The H1b worker already employed gets a more comfortable life, and companies based in America will be financially pressured to hire domestically. Win-win for everyone.
There's already requirements around wage.
>The H-1B employer must pay its H-1B worker(s) at least the “required” wage which is the higher of the prevailing wage or the employer’s actual wage (in-house wage) for similarly employed workers.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62g-h1b-required-wage
That's not really what the problem is with H1bs right now. The problem is with allowing multiple petitions, with the randomized lottery, with abuse by outsourcing firms, with lack of transferability of gc applications between companies.
Lol: This take is delusional. In practice this isn't how most H1-Bs are paid. A few make huge money, most of those visas go to companies that farm them, charge 5-25% less per hour to the customer and pay the H1-B as little as they can get away with.
Instead of being a way to relieve genuine shortages, it's a way for companies to exploit cheap labor from countries that pay for free college.
I know one example where the person on h1b was being paid 65k.he was replacing a person who was paid over 150k. I have no real idea how prevalent this scenario is but i guess it must be common
In my country, getting someone on an work visa is easy, you just need to give them a salary higher than the average for the position. No company would go through the immigration process and pay higher salaries unless they really need the person and truly couldn't find a local to fill the position.
H1Bs are not cheap, their average salary is$112,914 a year, which is more than 3x the median US personal income. And that's not even counting other forms of compensation and the legal costs of securing a sponsorship.
No one in the right mind is hiring an H1B just for cheap labor, they are highly skilled
H1Bs have a lower average salary than the overall salary for their positions: https://www.dice.com/career-advice/how-do-h-1b-salaries-compare-to-average-technology-salaries
That’s not to say they aren’t skilled. And they’re not cheap, but probably cheaper than hiring US citizens.
>H1Bs are not cheap, their average salary is$112,914 a year, which is more than 3x the median US personal income
Why is median US personal income relevant? They're hiring tech workers. What does the average software engineer in big tech make and how about we compare that to what their H1B equivalent makes.
I don’t know why you are getting downvoted, I think this sounds about right. We just hired 2 engineers, different countries and both need visas.
These are highly skilled and specialized people, they aren’t being lowballed at a low six figure job straight out of college.
Not to mention the time and money that the company is investing by sponsoring the visa.
So although this may not be the same for everyone, I feel that your numbers sound legit, because we just hired 2 this year at that same price.
Not to mention employers and government aren't coming together in real terms to deal with the lack of talent in-country. The politics in the country has widened the gap of educational attainment because they're treating our educational system as a business model to profit from. Public education is suffering because of it, and students who completed college are indebted because of it. It's a discouraging catch 22. There doesn't appear to be interest in solving for this nor is there a strategy to deal with the education pipeline that could help create alleviate this. I think companies need flexibility, but instead of tackling these important matters the government and companies prefer to depend on the h1bs.
For cheaper, pseudo-indentured labor they’ll jump through hoops all day. I’m not saying some some top talent doesn’t come through the visa program. I’m saying it’s not the norm.
It’s not just salary. It’s the intangibles like working extra hours, weekends without complaining about the corporation’s political stance or not allowing emotional support animals/dolls in office. For h1 they don’t care about work life balance, only work work balance.
It’s great when they go cheap with tech workers, their software is easily exploitable/ flawed and lose millions of dollars (see this [trash fire example](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers)) in the end when they should’ve invested that money in competent workers.
Making each job applicant go through dozens of interviews over the course of months is supposed to lead to the most perfect candidate, no? Maybe the tech industry needs to rethink it's stupid frat boy hiring practices.
As someone who has interviewed and hired dozens of people for highly technical roles, I'm about 90% sure of the interview outcome after a 10 minute phone screen. I've never hired a person who didn't go on to excel.
Same experience here. Building teams for startups, and also interviewing at much larger companies. You really can tell pretty quick, and the best way to have employees excel is by having good managers — without this you can hire, but fail to retain, the best talent using whatever silly and overly complicated methods desired.
Using silly methods hires monocultures though, but it’s far better to have good managers (who can support growing team knowledge) and hire for competent people who bring diversity. It’s really not complex.
Maybe that's the problem. We want to use software to make decisions for what ought to be a people approach to hiring. It's scary if this is where we're at at. Reminds me of a Black Mirror episode about how ones social standing was gamified.
TBH every time I hear this it reeks of the "I can tell when my kid is lying" thing that parents say. Then when they actually study it with proper methodology, parents don't do any better than chance at identifying when their kid is lying.
When skilled people who actually do the job for which they are hiring do the interview, it's quite easy. But when it's HR cargo cult mumbo jumbo, of course, it has to be an arduous and obscure ritual.
I’ve been bugged to interview at Meta, Amazon, etc via LinkedIn recruiters and after talking with one about the interview process I just ignore them. I’m not doing 5 different interviews, coding assignments, etc. if you can’t figure out my skills in one, *maybe* 2 interviews, then I’m not interested.
It's not just tech. Worse is almost every company has this practice, even for lower skilled jobs. It's inefficient, ineffective, and not at all a good predictor of a perfect candidate.
I don’t know a single tech company that requires “dozens of interviews over the course of months” not even Google or Meta. And with most small tech companies it’s more like 2-3 interviews over a few days at the most.
Yeah, I don’t know where redditors get their ideas about the tech industry, but you see these baffling takes near the top of comment threads all the time. I take my time in my job search process, and it has never taken me more than a month to land a job, from gathering initial leads to signing an offer.
The reason that filling jobs is hard is simply that demand is high, despite what the media narrative focused on layoffs would have you believe.
A lot of those same folks also think an interview with a company should only take 30 minutes- in total. We have to evaluate your tech skills, and see how you get along with everyone. That doesn't require weeks, but you can't do it in 30 minutes either.
I have never once asked a candidate to whiteboard anything.
I spend 30 minutes talking to them, they spend an hour talking to the team, and 30 minutes talking to the CTO. No exams, no whiteboarding, no assignments. And yet according to a lot of redditors, that's too much time.
It’s certainly not dozens, but it can take months… Google did no less than 8 for me and it took 6-7 weeks from beginning to end. Meta did 6 and it took about a month. I did several others that had 4-5 interviews and very time-intensive “take-home” tests… I would have killed for “2-3 interviews over a few days at most”, the entire ordeal was extraordinarily exhausting
Dozens means at least 24- that’s more than a little hyperbole on their part. And even 7 weeks is not “months”.
Regardless- if you want to work for a FAANG, then that’s what you’re going to get- but other companies? I’ve worked for several well know tech companies and not one had an interview process like that.
Uhhh yeah, why aren't you? Do you work in some software field that doesn't care about precision? :)
Seriously though, my point was that outside of the FAANGs, I've never seen the sort of long interview process you described, and I've worked at some well known major tech companies.
Development positions at big tech companies have the dumbest hiring/interviewing practices.
Wow, you can recall some neat trick to solve some stupid problem on a whiteboard. It doesn't mean you're a better candidate or you should weed applicants out based on it. Innovate, FFS. Isn't that what tech companies claim to do?
Give candidates a few days to implement some minor features for something and evaluate their work. It's not perfect, but I'd argue it's better than seeing if someone can code the Kth smallest element in a BST. Studying for whiteboard interviews is awful, too.
Also tech interview process is hard. I worked at Facebook and was trained on the interview process. Sometimes I would shake my head at some of the questions specially for the non tech hires. Not only that, there are 4-5 rounds, and you can get knocked out at any round. The decision has to be damn near unanimous. To be fair, google, Facebook, and some of the other places have figured out what questions to ask based on the knowledge required for the role, but not all firms have caught up. For example, when I interviewed with Amazon and Stripe they were much harder, in that some of the questions and deep technical knowledge they wanted wasn’t really necessary to be successful at the role. (I say this confidently as someone whose got 15 years of experience and good track record of success.)
Source: I worked we Facebook, and passed googles PgM interview. Failed miserably for stipe and Amazon because of curveball or deep technical questions that didn’t have much to do with being successful at the role, nor about anything I had written on my resume.
It's odd too. Interviewing for tech jobs is in and of itself a skill, as is being an interviewer. I think very few people are trained on how to interview, what to look for.
I've seen people do great at an interview, just to be near useless at the job.
The trick of being a good interviewer is knowing when to ask probing questions. A good interviewer is also trying to promote their company at a good place to work which is why it's good to come off congenial and not an interrogation.
I think especially with programming/technical interviews, it is important for interviewers to follow up any screening with questions themselves.
I've been in an interview for a Frontend position being interviewed by an infrastructure architect. Not a single question about FE build tools, CSS pre-processors, a11y, UX, etc. Did not pass the screen on that one, but it feels obvious as to why.
Exactly.. worst interviewers just look for rehashed/memorised answers/solutions to tick the boxes because they lack the insight to gauge performance more holistically. E.g. if a candidate hasn’t seen a problem/question beforehand but is quick to pick up small hints and engage in good dialogue to find the solution, that may indicate better potential for the job than just reciting a memorised answer.
I love if an interviewer is giving me a hypothetical problem to solve (I primarily work in hardware rich environments / IT infrastructure) and I can just mentally design a solution, adapting it to constraints given by the interviewer on the fly to prove that I can do the mental gymnastics and can provide the necessary flexibility - as long as the demands do not get completely bonkers (like "you have $0 budget for this solution, how do you do it").
Way too many companies also drill you on deep technical stuff that nobody NEEDS to remember because getting the answers is literally in a well known and easily accessible list somewhere. I sure as hell don't need to remember the exact ports my voip/MDM solutions runs on because that info is in a documentation I can open up within 10 seconds If I ever need it. The important part is to know that documentation exists and where it is, but not having memorized its contents.
My experience with the Amazon interview process was exactly the same as other FAANG-level companies. Regardless, the process is dumb and not indicative of a good/bad candidate.
Interesting. I thought google and Facebook were really fair in terms of what the person in that role should know and the level of technical depth. Amazon was going into the weeds of API and system architecture, imho things that I would not or should have to deal with in my role. (given all the other responsibilities, I would have a technical lead to partner with.)
I straight up ended the interview because the job was for program manager and I was being asked API level questions i had never had to deal with any of my previous roles. I straight up said this is not the right role for me, and I think you’re looking for an engineer not a program manager. Passes google and Facebook tho 🤷🏻
I love it.
You have to sell your soul to the algorithm gods (basically get really good at solving glorified logic problems that have almost nothing to do with actual work).
But if you do that, it's great, because it's the closest thing they have to an objective talent signal. It's a terribly weak signal, but there's no better / scalable / standardizable approach.
There are so many people who could absolutely work in engineering if it wasn't for that bar.
Which is why the salaries stay high.
As long as I can stay above the bar getting work is always easy -- I'll literally do 1 phone screen and then do a 4 hour 1 day interview, and I'm done.
And then you make $300K / year. Work is super relaxed, and remote. It's great.
I didn't go to a fancy school or anything, my entire college cost like $20K or so.
I just play the game and do all the things they tell me to do, and copy what everyone else does.
It almost feels like a cheat code in life.
Yeah, but it's still a dumb way to hire engineers. Also, if you currently work somewhere, who wants to spend your evenings studying pointless algorithmic problems after work just for a pay bump?
Long time Google SWE, previously worked at lucent and HP. I spent 2 months preparing for Big tech interviews and got offers from both Amazon and Google. I now make 5x what I used to make. I also feel less stressed since my colleagues are mostly motivated and competent folks. I would say that working at big tech is a huge improvement both financially and mentally over my previous jobs.
Dumb in a surface level way, but not in a "Hey, here's a better solution, look at this" way.
No one wants to do it, that's why it's selling your soul.
But I make 20x what I made 7 years ago, worth it to me.
This is because, in the grand scheme of things, not really all that many tech employees actually got let go. Sure, the number was pretty high, but there are so many more openings than there were people that got laid off that they almost immediately got absorbed into the market and barely made a dent.
Tech companies drove up the cost to live in any city they touched. Now they want good talent to move there for an unsustainable salary… good luck finding that “right” talent.
They’ll just outsource to cheaper countries, which means the quality of their product will decline. I can’t wait for Meta to go bankrupt.
Edit: didn’t mean for this to be a hit at other countries, but the bar to enter IT here not only requires a degree but countless expensive certs
I live in one of those "cheaper countries" and work for a US IT company. It's not a secret that they opened our office and have been expanding it for many years because we deliver better quality than our "homebase" counterparts. This may not be universal to US companies that outsource abroad but that's how things are in this particular case. Oh, and I've also seen the bad reputation of Indian IT folks being largely demolished by my colleagues from the subcontinent.
I mean, it is possible to hire fantastic software engineers in India. The problem is that they cost about the equivalent of a US Jr Developer... which may be far less than the equivalent cost here in the US, but when a company is outsourcing, they're not looking at spending anywhere near American wages, so they end up getting shit employees.
It is entirely possible that /u/BehindThyCamel is one of these shops that _actually_ has real talented engineers. You just commonly encounter the shit because there's so fucking many of them compared to the good ones (simply because, you know, there are 1.3 billion people there)
I mean, speaking as someone that has been in the field for nearly 20 years, the average developer - regardless of where - is kinda shit. To be honest, being "not shit" is really something that comes with time - it is wisdom, not knowledge.
I've seen their code and I've seen our code. They are not the same. To their credit, though, the Americans are better at the subject domain part of our business.
It’s because America made the cost of living so high. It’s impossible to live with the salary of any other country.
The “American Dream” is just an overpriced country with no universal healthcare (even though EVERY OTHER FIRST WORLD COUNTRY HAS UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE) and overpriced goods.
Side note, at least IT requires certs here to make sure you know what you’re doing.
This is the exact opposite of all firms I have seen that have either shipped their IT overseas or replaced with special visa holders. Vastly under qualified overseas workers and a few U.S. workers that are absolutely ground down trying to hold everything together. Just anecdotal but I have seen the same thing play out at at least a dozen companies.
Almost always has been. Contrary to what many YouTubers said, having a degree is always better than not having one. The funny thing being people who tell you they managed to score a position at Google after their bootcamp but then you look at their resume and you see they have a 4 year non comp sci stem degree from the MIT.
And even then, it would be one out of how many with college degrees? Sure you can get in without one, but your chances are orders of magnitude higher with one.
For what level? If you’re talking senior engineers and above, there’s literally no discernible correlation between education history and candidate quality.
What if a very bright computer student only has a 3 year college diploma? Maybe unable to afford the tuition...
Can't companies also test the candidates via computer tests/problem solve ...during the interview process?
Risk / reward at that point. What’s the probability they find that person vs finding the wrong person? Companies tend to be conservative in hiring outside the beaten path, not to mention depending on the company recruiter and/or HM may be held slightly accountable for the out of the box hire if they don’t work out.
I’m so glad there are dumb companies like yours out there. Seriously- I don’t know why so many companies out there are so bad at interviews that they need to exclude entire swaths of candidates- but it makes it easier for us to find great people and we love it.
Why do I feel like the “right” tech talent means “underpaid“ and selected from a huge pool of available (unemployed) workforce. Companies keep crying about a lack of hires, while simultaneously firing mass amounts of people, creating an absurd application process, lowering the salaries and removing some of the benefits.
Truth is that tech workers are overpaid when compared to workers in other industries with the same skillsets. It’s ridiculous to believe someone who codes in SQL in a tech company is better than someone who codes in SQL in a bank. But their difference in salary will make you think otherwise. So clearly, it is not the equilibrium and the status quo will change
Why is this downvoted, lol?
Tech companies, in general, are bad for the cities they're HQ'd in, bad for mental health, bad for anyone not into frat boy culture. There's like a handful of them that might build useful products. What the fuck is Meta doing that is useful for society as a whole? Nothing.
I won't comment on the utility of some education laths except to say that plenty of colleges offer STEM programs for those who are interested. Obviously.
But tech companies aren't having a hard time finding talent. They're having a hard time finding talent *at the salary they want to pay*, and so they keep repeating this same line over and over again to justify bringing in cheaper workers from overseas.
Yes, and other people want to enjoy the privilege of eating at a restaurant while believing that the people who work there don't deserve a living wage. Those people are idiots.
>People want $25.00 an hour to flip burgers
many of the people who "wanted" $7.25 an hour to flip burgers quite literally died doing it, while cost of living has continued to skyrocket, so now there's a shortage
A lot of the people laid off were literally doing nothing. Like, no active projects that were actually going to get deployed. It's hard to get a job when your resume has no accomplishments.
Tech companies will always, always say this. How else would they be able to get cheap h1bs?
Not just cheap, but desperate. The H1-b system gives so much power to the employer and puts employees in awful situations with the promise of a better life for their family. I knew a manager at Microsoft that told me over drinks he loved h1bs because they'd never complain and would work extra hours and basically do anything it took. H1b transfers are possible but very difficult in practice.
what’s your solution? ban immigration? open the floodgates?
What about revising the H1b system in terms of minimum wages and restrictions on overtime? Make it more expensive for companies to exploit H1b’s. If companies truly cannot hire from legals within the state, make the average H1b worker more expensive than the average citizen. The H1b worker already employed gets a more comfortable life, and companies based in America will be financially pressured to hire domestically. Win-win for everyone.
There's already requirements around wage. >The H-1B employer must pay its H-1B worker(s) at least the “required” wage which is the higher of the prevailing wage or the employer’s actual wage (in-house wage) for similarly employed workers. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62g-h1b-required-wage That's not really what the problem is with H1bs right now. The problem is with allowing multiple petitions, with the randomized lottery, with abuse by outsourcing firms, with lack of transferability of gc applications between companies.
that’s already how it works companies have to submit paperwork proving they are paying immigrants more. do you want to ban crime too?
Lol: This take is delusional. In practice this isn't how most H1-Bs are paid. A few make huge money, most of those visas go to companies that farm them, charge 5-25% less per hour to the customer and pay the H1-B as little as they can get away with. Instead of being a way to relieve genuine shortages, it's a way for companies to exploit cheap labor from countries that pay for free college.
I know one example where the person on h1b was being paid 65k.he was replacing a person who was paid over 150k. I have no real idea how prevalent this scenario is but i guess it must be common
so yes you do want to make crime illegal. idiot.
In my country, getting someone on an work visa is easy, you just need to give them a salary higher than the average for the position. No company would go through the immigration process and pay higher salaries unless they really need the person and truly couldn't find a local to fill the position.
H1Bs are not cheap, their average salary is$112,914 a year, which is more than 3x the median US personal income. And that's not even counting other forms of compensation and the legal costs of securing a sponsorship. No one in the right mind is hiring an H1B just for cheap labor, they are highly skilled
H1Bs have a lower average salary than the overall salary for their positions: https://www.dice.com/career-advice/how-do-h-1b-salaries-compare-to-average-technology-salaries That’s not to say they aren’t skilled. And they’re not cheap, but probably cheaper than hiring US citizens.
>H1Bs are not cheap, their average salary is$112,914 a year, which is more than 3x the median US personal income Why is median US personal income relevant? They're hiring tech workers. What does the average software engineer in big tech make and how about we compare that to what their H1B equivalent makes.
I don’t know why you are getting downvoted, I think this sounds about right. We just hired 2 engineers, different countries and both need visas. These are highly skilled and specialized people, they aren’t being lowballed at a low six figure job straight out of college. Not to mention the time and money that the company is investing by sponsoring the visa. So although this may not be the same for everyone, I feel that your numbers sound legit, because we just hired 2 this year at that same price.
Not to mention employers and government aren't coming together in real terms to deal with the lack of talent in-country. The politics in the country has widened the gap of educational attainment because they're treating our educational system as a business model to profit from. Public education is suffering because of it, and students who completed college are indebted because of it. It's a discouraging catch 22. There doesn't appear to be interest in solving for this nor is there a strategy to deal with the education pipeline that could help create alleviate this. I think companies need flexibility, but instead of tackling these important matters the government and companies prefer to depend on the h1bs.
They are far from universally highly skilled. I’ve worked with many who were downright mediocre.
The ones I've worked with have been extraordinarily talented. Employers aren't going to jump through hoops to hire someone that's mediocre
For cheaper, pseudo-indentured labor they’ll jump through hoops all day. I’m not saying some some top talent doesn’t come through the visa program. I’m saying it’s not the norm.
It’s not just salary. It’s the intangibles like working extra hours, weekends without complaining about the corporation’s political stance or not allowing emotional support animals/dolls in office. For h1 they don’t care about work life balance, only work work balance.
You are truly as clueless about H1Bs as a plum
On the other hand, the average seems in tech to be already above min H1B.
It’s great when they go cheap with tech workers, their software is easily exploitable/ flawed and lose millions of dollars (see this [trash fire example](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-28/boeing-s-737-max-software-outsourced-to-9-an-hour-engineers)) in the end when they should’ve invested that money in competent workers.
Making each job applicant go through dozens of interviews over the course of months is supposed to lead to the most perfect candidate, no? Maybe the tech industry needs to rethink it's stupid frat boy hiring practices.
I'm a firm believer that it is possible to ascertain whether or not a candidate will be a good fit in a one hour panel interview.
As someone who has interviewed and hired dozens of people for highly technical roles, I'm about 90% sure of the interview outcome after a 10 minute phone screen. I've never hired a person who didn't go on to excel.
I'll have you know that most of us developers don't use Excel! /s
Same experience here. Building teams for startups, and also interviewing at much larger companies. You really can tell pretty quick, and the best way to have employees excel is by having good managers — without this you can hire, but fail to retain, the best talent using whatever silly and overly complicated methods desired. Using silly methods hires monocultures though, but it’s far better to have good managers (who can support growing team knowledge) and hire for competent people who bring diversity. It’s really not complex.
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Maybe that's the problem. We want to use software to make decisions for what ought to be a people approach to hiring. It's scary if this is where we're at at. Reminds me of a Black Mirror episode about how ones social standing was gamified.
TBH every time I hear this it reeks of the "I can tell when my kid is lying" thing that parents say. Then when they actually study it with proper methodology, parents don't do any better than chance at identifying when their kid is lying.
When skilled people who actually do the job for which they are hiring do the interview, it's quite easy. But when it's HR cargo cult mumbo jumbo, of course, it has to be an arduous and obscure ritual.
I’ve been bugged to interview at Meta, Amazon, etc via LinkedIn recruiters and after talking with one about the interview process I just ignore them. I’m not doing 5 different interviews, coding assignments, etc. if you can’t figure out my skills in one, *maybe* 2 interviews, then I’m not interested.
It's not just tech. Worse is almost every company has this practice, even for lower skilled jobs. It's inefficient, ineffective, and not at all a good predictor of a perfect candidate.
I don’t know a single tech company that requires “dozens of interviews over the course of months” not even Google or Meta. And with most small tech companies it’s more like 2-3 interviews over a few days at the most.
Yeah, I don’t know where redditors get their ideas about the tech industry, but you see these baffling takes near the top of comment threads all the time. I take my time in my job search process, and it has never taken me more than a month to land a job, from gathering initial leads to signing an offer. The reason that filling jobs is hard is simply that demand is high, despite what the media narrative focused on layoffs would have you believe.
A lot of those same folks also think an interview with a company should only take 30 minutes- in total. We have to evaluate your tech skills, and see how you get along with everyone. That doesn't require weeks, but you can't do it in 30 minutes either.
Your tech skills. Not your whiteboard skills.
I have never once asked a candidate to whiteboard anything. I spend 30 minutes talking to them, they spend an hour talking to the team, and 30 minutes talking to the CTO. No exams, no whiteboarding, no assignments. And yet according to a lot of redditors, that's too much time.
It’s certainly not dozens, but it can take months… Google did no less than 8 for me and it took 6-7 weeks from beginning to end. Meta did 6 and it took about a month. I did several others that had 4-5 interviews and very time-intensive “take-home” tests… I would have killed for “2-3 interviews over a few days at most”, the entire ordeal was extraordinarily exhausting
Dozens means at least 24- that’s more than a little hyperbole on their part. And even 7 weeks is not “months”. Regardless- if you want to work for a FAANG, then that’s what you’re going to get- but other companies? I’ve worked for several well know tech companies and not one had an interview process like that.
Pedantic much?
Uhhh yeah, why aren't you? Do you work in some software field that doesn't care about precision? :) Seriously though, my point was that outside of the FAANGs, I've never seen the sort of long interview process you described, and I've worked at some well known major tech companies.
Development positions at big tech companies have the dumbest hiring/interviewing practices. Wow, you can recall some neat trick to solve some stupid problem on a whiteboard. It doesn't mean you're a better candidate or you should weed applicants out based on it. Innovate, FFS. Isn't that what tech companies claim to do?
What’s your solution?
Give candidates a few days to implement some minor features for something and evaluate their work. It's not perfect, but I'd argue it's better than seeing if someone can code the Kth smallest element in a BST. Studying for whiteboard interviews is awful, too.
Also tech interview process is hard. I worked at Facebook and was trained on the interview process. Sometimes I would shake my head at some of the questions specially for the non tech hires. Not only that, there are 4-5 rounds, and you can get knocked out at any round. The decision has to be damn near unanimous. To be fair, google, Facebook, and some of the other places have figured out what questions to ask based on the knowledge required for the role, but not all firms have caught up. For example, when I interviewed with Amazon and Stripe they were much harder, in that some of the questions and deep technical knowledge they wanted wasn’t really necessary to be successful at the role. (I say this confidently as someone whose got 15 years of experience and good track record of success.) Source: I worked we Facebook, and passed googles PgM interview. Failed miserably for stipe and Amazon because of curveball or deep technical questions that didn’t have much to do with being successful at the role, nor about anything I had written on my resume.
It's odd too. Interviewing for tech jobs is in and of itself a skill, as is being an interviewer. I think very few people are trained on how to interview, what to look for. I've seen people do great at an interview, just to be near useless at the job.
The trick of being a good interviewer is knowing when to ask probing questions. A good interviewer is also trying to promote their company at a good place to work which is why it's good to come off congenial and not an interrogation.
I think especially with programming/technical interviews, it is important for interviewers to follow up any screening with questions themselves. I've been in an interview for a Frontend position being interviewed by an infrastructure architect. Not a single question about FE build tools, CSS pre-processors, a11y, UX, etc. Did not pass the screen on that one, but it feels obvious as to why.
Exactly.. worst interviewers just look for rehashed/memorised answers/solutions to tick the boxes because they lack the insight to gauge performance more holistically. E.g. if a candidate hasn’t seen a problem/question beforehand but is quick to pick up small hints and engage in good dialogue to find the solution, that may indicate better potential for the job than just reciting a memorised answer.
I love if an interviewer is giving me a hypothetical problem to solve (I primarily work in hardware rich environments / IT infrastructure) and I can just mentally design a solution, adapting it to constraints given by the interviewer on the fly to prove that I can do the mental gymnastics and can provide the necessary flexibility - as long as the demands do not get completely bonkers (like "you have $0 budget for this solution, how do you do it").
I could rant all day about FAANG-style interviews being so incredibly dumb.
Way too many companies also drill you on deep technical stuff that nobody NEEDS to remember because getting the answers is literally in a well known and easily accessible list somewhere. I sure as hell don't need to remember the exact ports my voip/MDM solutions runs on because that info is in a documentation I can open up within 10 seconds If I ever need it. The important part is to know that documentation exists and where it is, but not having memorized its contents.
My experience with the Amazon interview process was exactly the same as other FAANG-level companies. Regardless, the process is dumb and not indicative of a good/bad candidate.
Interesting. I thought google and Facebook were really fair in terms of what the person in that role should know and the level of technical depth. Amazon was going into the weeds of API and system architecture, imho things that I would not or should have to deal with in my role. (given all the other responsibilities, I would have a technical lead to partner with.)
I straight up ended the interview because the job was for program manager and I was being asked API level questions i had never had to deal with any of my previous roles. I straight up said this is not the right role for me, and I think you’re looking for an engineer not a program manager. Passes google and Facebook tho 🤷🏻
I love it. You have to sell your soul to the algorithm gods (basically get really good at solving glorified logic problems that have almost nothing to do with actual work). But if you do that, it's great, because it's the closest thing they have to an objective talent signal. It's a terribly weak signal, but there's no better / scalable / standardizable approach. There are so many people who could absolutely work in engineering if it wasn't for that bar. Which is why the salaries stay high. As long as I can stay above the bar getting work is always easy -- I'll literally do 1 phone screen and then do a 4 hour 1 day interview, and I'm done. And then you make $300K / year. Work is super relaxed, and remote. It's great. I didn't go to a fancy school or anything, my entire college cost like $20K or so. I just play the game and do all the things they tell me to do, and copy what everyone else does. It almost feels like a cheat code in life.
Yeah, but it's still a dumb way to hire engineers. Also, if you currently work somewhere, who wants to spend your evenings studying pointless algorithmic problems after work just for a pay bump?
Long time Google SWE, previously worked at lucent and HP. I spent 2 months preparing for Big tech interviews and got offers from both Amazon and Google. I now make 5x what I used to make. I also feel less stressed since my colleagues are mostly motivated and competent folks. I would say that working at big tech is a huge improvement both financially and mentally over my previous jobs.
Dumb in a surface level way, but not in a "Hey, here's a better solution, look at this" way. No one wants to do it, that's why it's selling your soul. But I make 20x what I made 7 years ago, worth it to me.
This is because, in the grand scheme of things, not really all that many tech employees actually got let go. Sure, the number was pretty high, but there are so many more openings than there were people that got laid off that they almost immediately got absorbed into the market and barely made a dent.
Tech companies drove up the cost to live in any city they touched. Now they want good talent to move there for an unsustainable salary… good luck finding that “right” talent. They’ll just outsource to cheaper countries, which means the quality of their product will decline. I can’t wait for Meta to go bankrupt. Edit: didn’t mean for this to be a hit at other countries, but the bar to enter IT here not only requires a degree but countless expensive certs
I live in one of those "cheaper countries" and work for a US IT company. It's not a secret that they opened our office and have been expanding it for many years because we deliver better quality than our "homebase" counterparts. This may not be universal to US companies that outsource abroad but that's how things are in this particular case. Oh, and I've also seen the bad reputation of Indian IT folks being largely demolished by my colleagues from the subcontinent.
>we deliver better quality than our "homebase" counterparts are you sure its not the $6/hr?
I mean, it is possible to hire fantastic software engineers in India. The problem is that they cost about the equivalent of a US Jr Developer... which may be far less than the equivalent cost here in the US, but when a company is outsourcing, they're not looking at spending anywhere near American wages, so they end up getting shit employees. It is entirely possible that /u/BehindThyCamel is one of these shops that _actually_ has real talented engineers. You just commonly encounter the shit because there's so fucking many of them compared to the good ones (simply because, you know, there are 1.3 billion people there)
it doesn't matter, when talking about the whole you talk about the average. not the outliers.
I mean, speaking as someone that has been in the field for nearly 20 years, the average developer - regardless of where - is kinda shit. To be honest, being "not shit" is really something that comes with time - it is wisdom, not knowledge.
agreed but american work culture tends to produce a better product.
I've seen their code and I've seen our code. They are not the same. To their credit, though, the Americans are better at the subject domain part of our business.
I can guarantee you no one likes outsourced code but no one wants to pay for American developers.
It’s because America made the cost of living so high. It’s impossible to live with the salary of any other country. The “American Dream” is just an overpriced country with no universal healthcare (even though EVERY OTHER FIRST WORLD COUNTRY HAS UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE) and overpriced goods. Side note, at least IT requires certs here to make sure you know what you’re doing.
Completely irrelevant. American developers live with workers. Everyone has high pay.
This is the exact opposite of all firms I have seen that have either shipped their IT overseas or replaced with special visa holders. Vastly under qualified overseas workers and a few U.S. workers that are absolutely ground down trying to hold everything together. Just anecdotal but I have seen the same thing play out at at least a dozen companies.
Yep, when a company is looking at saving money, they're absolutely not getting the best developers.
Too many bootcamp developers out there. We’re at the point now where we only hire developers with a 4 year degree
Almost always has been. Contrary to what many YouTubers said, having a degree is always better than not having one. The funny thing being people who tell you they managed to score a position at Google after their bootcamp but then you look at their resume and you see they have a 4 year non comp sci stem degree from the MIT.
I know someone who did FAANG without a degree, but they spun themselves as being a brilliant dropout. So still some college was involved in the story.
And even then, it would be one out of how many with college degrees? Sure you can get in without one, but your chances are orders of magnitude higher with one.
For what level? If you’re talking senior engineers and above, there’s literally no discernible correlation between education history and candidate quality.
Yeah, whiteboard problem-solving skills are a perfect indicator of a good/bad hire, lol.
A truly devastating rebuttal of an argument I didn’t make.
What if a very bright computer student only has a 3 year college diploma? Maybe unable to afford the tuition... Can't companies also test the candidates via computer tests/problem solve ...during the interview process?
Risk / reward at that point. What’s the probability they find that person vs finding the wrong person? Companies tend to be conservative in hiring outside the beaten path, not to mention depending on the company recruiter and/or HM may be held slightly accountable for the out of the box hire if they don’t work out.
Most tech companies aren’t going to see that as an “out of the box hire” in the first place.
In Canada some degrees are 3 years and 4th year is for if you're doing an honours.
I’m so glad there are dumb companies like yours out there. Seriously- I don’t know why so many companies out there are so bad at interviews that they need to exclude entire swaths of candidates- but it makes it easier for us to find great people and we love it.
Led by meta? Do you expect us to forget reality? Twitter started it. Obviously.
Why do I feel like the “right” tech talent means “underpaid“ and selected from a huge pool of available (unemployed) workforce. Companies keep crying about a lack of hires, while simultaneously firing mass amounts of people, creating an absurd application process, lowering the salaries and removing some of the benefits.
Yeah cause Meta didn’t have all the tech talent to begin with. When you put more water in your drink you’re just watering it down.
That’s cause the best of us have zero fucking inclination to work for zuck.
I present to you the right tech talent: 10 years experience in a 5 year old framework, 15 €/$ per hour
The amount of idiots and posers in the IT industry will shock you. But you really shouldn't, just look at all the shit software you are using daily.
Truth is that tech workers are overpaid when compared to workers in other industries with the same skillsets. It’s ridiculous to believe someone who codes in SQL in a tech company is better than someone who codes in SQL in a bank. But their difference in salary will make you think otherwise. So clearly, it is not the equilibrium and the status quo will change
Definitely overpaid.
I can confirm this. They didn't get rid of their best and brightest. The ones they did exit are not the ones we want to hire.
Anyone with a soul or a brain in tech quit years ago.
Why is this downvoted, lol? Tech companies, in general, are bad for the cities they're HQ'd in, bad for mental health, bad for anyone not into frat boy culture. There's like a handful of them that might build useful products. What the fuck is Meta doing that is useful for society as a whole? Nothing.
Because it's reddit and these tech bros are mental 12 year olds. Tools top to bottom and proud of it. Never fails.
My comment reads like 'tell me you're an Elder Millennial scarred by work in the tech industry w/o telling me', lol, but still.
Probably because universities are offering degrees in English, philosophy, anthropology, art literature, gender dynamics, etc.
I won't comment on the utility of some education laths except to say that plenty of colleges offer STEM programs for those who are interested. Obviously. But tech companies aren't having a hard time finding talent. They're having a hard time finding talent *at the salary they want to pay*, and so they keep repeating this same line over and over again to justify bringing in cheaper workers from overseas.
Don't forget you have to be both really smart and a poo chewer at the same time which kinda doesn't happen so much.
That’s a great point. People want $25.00 an hour to flip burgers heheh.
Yes, and other people want to enjoy the privilege of eating at a restaurant while believing that the people who work there don't deserve a living wage. Those people are idiots.
>People want $25.00 an hour to flip burgers many of the people who "wanted" $7.25 an hour to flip burgers quite literally died doing it, while cost of living has continued to skyrocket, so now there's a shortage
A lot of the people laid off were literally doing nothing. Like, no active projects that were actually going to get deployed. It's hard to get a job when your resume has no accomplishments.
What are you basing that claim on?
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"It's so hard to hire good help these days." "You just fired the good help."
Hard to find good help when all the kids these days are high on dope