At Google I've worked with some very humble but also super intelligent awesome engineers, people much smarter than I. Definitely the majority of my interactions. But I've also worked with people who clearly took the "Google hires the smartest people" company line, and their own success at it, a little too personally.
I don't think it's a good message to send. Although to be fair I haven't heard internally in a while.
Also I don't know if it's really a gold sticker anymmore. Nor do I think it's true that the smart people leave. Some do, but honestly, there are some damn brilliant people at Google who have found their brilliant corner and produce brilliance there.
Or some people here who are just brilliant at playing Big Company. Unfortunately there's more of that all the time.
That's what they keep saying. However, it remains to be proven that regurgitating answers on a whiteboard in 45 minutes implies that the candidate is not a false negative, or even a true positive to begin with.
That's the crazy thing about this. FAANG has near-infinite resources, relatively speaking. Google could be A/B testing their interviewing process, experimenting new approaches, experimenting (as the OP study did) with eye-trackers and other tech to try to gain insights on candidate behavior. They have the "engineering for the sake of engineering" and "innovation for the sake of innovation" culture that allows for moonshots and boondoggles. I don't think they're exactly known for following "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", given how many times they kill off products only to recreate them later on, especially their chat apps.
Yet they stick to the traditional whiteboarding method because-- why?
People use this argument often, but is technical competence of engineers- specifically at passing their interview process -the explanation for their economic success? And not market penetration, near-monopoly positions, great UX, etc.?
Not to mention, as we've seen in the high-profile Facebook SDK crashes this past week, share price doesn't necessarily mean product quality.
These events are noteworthy because of how rare they are for such a large software-based company.
It's also noteworthy because of how destabilizing this was for the immense number of apps that depend on that software.
The compensation is much better. The management is much better. The work life balance is much better.
I moved from SEA. Everything is worse there.
I read this and feel like people have unrealistic standard. FAANG isn't good enough? Working there for a year probably put your wealth of life at 0.1% of the world. That's not good enough?
Generally speaking, I think more intelligent people will have an easier time learning the patterns in algorithms.
It's not the best filter, but it's easy to see why it's an attractive option for companies.
The problem is this isn't what gets you the smartest people on the planet. A small number might be interested in DS&A to that level, but most are not. They will learn enough to know how to google what they need and move on to what they are interested in. Smart people are constantly getting job offers from coworkers and bosses who move to other companies if they don't start their own.
The few smart people who do put in the effort necessary to go to the FAANG companies always leave after getting the golden sticker on their resume. They leave behind them a residue of SAT preppers who have PhD's in inversing binary trees.