I feel extremely little of what I'm doing in my real, actual, job, helps me in advancing in my career. Unless maybe if I choose to stay at my current company until retirement lol.

Otherwise, why bother doing anything more than the bare minimum to get by at work? It would be a far better investment of time and effort to grind leetcode and practice for interviews, instead of going above and beyond to excel at my job. At least until I get into an "endgame company" where I feel it's worth staying long term.

as long as 9 other candidates are willing to run the LC gauntlet, the 10th doesn't stand out.

We just really want to hire a senior dev who can spit out highly optimized code that in the real-world would be handled by a stable open source library rather than people who have built stable systems.

Typically, just one lowers in an a loop of 6 interviews is sufficient to reject. On the other hand, a loop with all "meets" isn't a sufficient either. It needs about 3-4 "raises" to overcome just one "lowers". With two "lowers" the candidate won't even make it to the debrief or worse the loop will be cut-short.

The bar-raiser (it's their job) are expected to specifically look for candidates who raise the bar. Raising the bar == better than 50% of "employees" (not job seekers) at their level. The rationale, when the bar-raiser program was created, was that the collective competency in a corporation should increase as more employees are inducted.

Source: I was a bar-raiser at Amazon; 400+ interviews, 300+ as bar-raiser, conducted hiring boot camp, bar-raiser trainings, trained bar-raisers.

That said, the program (like any such program I guess) didn't scale well with the immense pressure on increasing the head-count which in itself was a result of delivering more. Hiring managers and recruiters (who are incentivised to hire more) would rig up interview loops in a way to get their candidates through.

The program itself came under increasing scrutiny (I guess for the right reasons) as being too restrictive. I distinctly remember period between 2008-2012 they hired at a blistering pace, all over the world. In fact in Seattle when they moved into SLU campus the buildings went from empty to nearly 100% occupancy in a matter of year or so. You could even see it based on the number of product launches from 2012 onwards (AWS, the hardware products, new country launches etc.,).

And now Amazon is such a behemoth that it doesn't even make sense to speak about it or analyse it as a single entity anymore. My prediction is in 5-8 years it'll be broken up into at least three companies under Amazon as a holding corporation --- cloud, retail, and consumer devices.

Which itself is a Bar-lowerer.

I keep wondering how they hired this person - never in a million years would they have passed a regular hiring chain even with fizzbuzz type questions. Wonder if they had someone stand in for the interviews.

Netflix is well known for firing people that don't pull their weight with far more ease than most companies. But a friend who works there tells me there's still people there that perform poorly but somehow managed to get both hired and stay on.

Which ends up going in the direction of meetings like "Should we standardize on what questions we are asking in interviews?" or "Should we standardize what pass means or fail means for a particular problem?"

And not actually lowering the bar during an interview / hiring committee meeting.

Ironically the modern technical whiteboarding interview often does require the candidate to effectively act and put on a show,

Suppose programming ability is normally distributed with a mean of 100 and and SD of 15 (values cribbed from IQ). A team starts with 10 people drawn from that population.

More applicants are drawn from that population: if an applicant's ability is above the median of the current team, they are hired, replacing a randomly-selected member of the team; otherwise, we pass.

At the first timestep, half the applicants get hired right away. It takes a few hundred total failed interviews to make the 25th hire, and a few hundred thousand(!) for the 100th hire. These have very long tails too: the longest run (of 1000) took 800M total interviews to hire 100 people.

There's no way this rule is actually being applied in practice.

This does very unfairly skew towards people like me without kids that can take the time to do this.

I don't think regular coding questions, LC tell you anything meaningful in an interview.

I'm more experienced now, so refuse doing it and recruiters and interviewers get all funny about it. But please, please interview. I know I'm pretty privileged compared to others but I won't ever do a LC question anymore and tell that upfront to Google and the likes. I have canceled loops because of the inflexibilty of some companies in that regard.

Sometimes they tried sneaking it in last minute - also tells you much.

In general though the tech industry has a really hard time hiring senior people, perhaps for this reason. I was at Google for 10+ years and did 100+ interviews, HC etc and once you talked to the people in charge of the process they admitted that the process is really weak for hiring senior (L5+ in Google speak) candidates. They in many ways perform worse than new grads in coding interviews which is not really surprising.

So Google hardly hires anyone experience before you get to the director levels (hardly as a percentage of course).

The other well know secret is that if all of us would try to do an interview unprepared we would probably fail.

I would rather be with my girlfriend, play videogames after work hours, watch netflix, go see some friends.

I lost a team member to Amazon recently, he spent 6 months total (two 3 months stints) preparing for the interview. He bombed in the 1st try and passed in the second.

That's 6 months of your life studying after hours to get a job ... I really have better things to do!

He is there now and he says how his work is not as challenging as the one we were doing from a technical PoV and also how the culture is very toxic compared to ours.

Anyways... he is optimizing to retire early so props to him I guess.

But I'm terrible at it, and I don't think it's meaningful, so I don't do it. Admittedly, it costs me some opportunities, but mainly at companies I'm not sure I want to work for, anyway.

At this stage I'm an old fart with a long resume, and more often than not I get hired by people who already know my work. I guess if I was as bad as my whiteboarding performance makes me look then people who know my work wouldn't want to hire me.

I've seen some of the best interviewers I know still fail at various companies. Including ones they were given offers to before. Luck might not be the #1 component but it sure feels like it's not a distant second.

By grinding leetcode, you raise the odds that you'll get a problem you've seen before, or at least similar enough that you recognize the way to solve it without having to waste time by starting from absolute scratch. I guess that's still luck, but this is one area you can increase the odds in your favor.

You can't change whether you get a hostile interviewer, etc. of course.

the shitty thing about interviewing is you have to prepare hard every time you approach it

I've also seen the opposite - right? People don't prepare anywhere near as much as the last time and still get offers. I've seen folks get offers at Google and spent maybe a few hours preparing. Luck is just a very wild component.

I transferred teams within Amazon and then left for my current company. I do wonder if I'll ever be willing to put in the work to get a FAANG job again but at the moment I really don't care. I like where I am so I'll just cross that bridge when I get to it. If I want it badly enough at some point then I'll go through the steps. If I don't, I'll just find another job.