I've had internal referrals at a few FAANG myself, I have one of the "unique" (no degree, some high school, ops/coding since 12 so about 15 years on/off) backgrounds and the people who referred me would be on the team that I'd be joining and all seemed incredibly excited to get me on board. I work on FOSS projects with them already.

At each place it was people from other teams completely unrelated to that team who interviewed (or would interview) me and eventually turned into a decision panel where everything about me would be considered by these people who really knew nothing of my character/skills aside from the resume and white boarding.

Between that and the amount of times I heard "Stanford" tossed around in a way that put down other schools (while not having a degree at all myself) I decided to give up on ever working at any of these places without being an acquihire. It just seems like a far fetched pipe-dream and I'd never check the required boxes that they expect for someone to sit in the same building with them. And honestly, none of that sat well with me.

It was an interesting time and I got to finally experience SV and realized it's likely not a place for someone like me.

I work for Google, opinions are my own.

First of all it sounds like your interview experience was unpleasant so if this was at Google I apologize.

Secondly, I can totally relate to feeling like I don't belong having also come from a nontraditional background (No college degree).

> At each place it was people from other teams completely unrelated to that team who interviewed (or would interview) me and eventually turned into a decision panel where everything about me would be considered by these people who really knew nothing of my character/skills aside from the resume and white boarding.

This sounds similar to what we do at Google; people who know you actually aren't allowed to interview you because they will be biased. We try to make the interview as objective as possible. Note that information from anyone who knows you or referred you will be shown to the hiring committee though so it's not as though that feedback is not used.

> Between that and the amount of times I heard "Stanford" tossed around in a way that put down other schools (while not having a degree at all myself) I decided to give up on ever working at any of these places without being an acquihire. It just seems like a far fetched pipe-dream and I'd never check the required boxes that they expect for someone to sit in the same building with them. And honestly, none of that sat well with me.

I understand why you feel this way but that's definitely not true! I don't think you necessarily should want to work in FAANG but I strongly think you should believe you are capable.

One of my recent FAANG interviews was ENTIRELY whiteboarding. It kind of shocked me.

It's weird that it's that skill, and only that skill, that gets evaluated. I did another interview at a different one where there was at least a design interview (though I flubbed it and wound up being incoherent).

It really feels like they aren't even trying to evaluate anything other than whiteboard coding. Accepting that it's not a great signal and yet fully investing in it.

It's such a weird skill and it's so easy to perform badly; I'd be kind of shocked if the test/retest validity wasn't very low.

Also... I mentioned that working on teams with other women was important to me... but every technical onsite I've had has been given by a man. They've pitched teams led by women, and my HR/recruiting contacts have been nearly all women. But for the interview itself? All men.

Trust me, companies would love to have at least one woman on every interview slate, and not just for women candidates. The problem is that the ratio of women engineers at the FAANG companies is such that this would put an incredibly unfair burden on women engineers. They would have to spend all of their time interviewing, or at the very least a disproportionate amount of time.

>I'd be kind of shocked if the test/retest validity wasn't very low.

It's absolutely very low, and they're okay with that. One of the things recruiters at these companies will tell you if you get rejected is some variant of, "Don't worry, you can always try next year." These companies fully understand that they're rejecting good engineers. They don't care, because, historically, the number of engineers applying has been so high that they could reject 75% of the good engineers and still have enough to fill their headcount.

We'll see how that attitude towards interviewing changes when high Bay Area/Seattle housing prices make it more difficult for them to recruit.

> internal references? if you've got a couple of internal folks who are doing good work, and they all worked with and vouch for old bob, maybe that's better than anything you're going to find out from <8 hours of whiteboard scribblings?

At big companies this is hard to scale because you have to protect against nepotism at the top layer. This forces policies protecting against the bad outcome.

At small companies this does happen.

Provided references are at the core the worst way to judge if someone can do the job and the laziest way. If you want to rely on references you have to get them yourself through background check or the risk of gamification is huge.

Get a sense of the projects they have worked on if those skills relate to the position. Make a decision based on that.

Random coding tests, whiteboarding, buzzword dropping are only helpful to a point.

Good points - provided references are shit, simply because they can be gamed. If you work for me and I dislike you but don't have the courage to pull out the fire hammer, I can give you a great reference. If I really like you because you're extremely good (and make me look good), I can give you a horrible reference and hold onto you.

However, OP was talking about internal references. This would be a situation where I work at Company A, but I know you and trust your work. Therefore, I refer you to Company A, big up you a little and suggest that they pursue hiring you.

The difference is that if you suck, it reflects poorly on me (and quite likely kills my dreams of upward mobility). Normal provides references don't have the same motive to be truthful!

What? Is this just conjecture? If you give a bad reference to an employee you are directly putting you and the company in harm's way in terms of litigation. Usually, you just don't give a reference other than confirming tenure existence and duration if you won't go into positive detail.

That's a textbook answer, but in actual practice, the probability of litigation is extremely low.