I think in general I can see that startups are exploiting the interviewing process itself as an arbitrage to get smart people in. Large companies to some extent are very set on the interview "loop" and would go through the whole assortment of their test suite irrespective of who it is, maybe they can afford to and they may even have to at scale as a process discipline to avoid false positives. But this is a clear advantage for startups hiring since by their nature itself get lower inbound so they can customize their interviews to either make it more specific or remove certain rounds altogether depending on the signal they get from the candidate.
Thanks for the data points. Those lengthy tests focusing on stack components you've never claimed to know or use - yup, those are my favorites.
Do you mind disclosing what you consider medium salary for Canada? I live in Canada and my survey of companies shows most are offering very low salaries relative to what glassdoor/levels report.
Great. So if they give you 2 or 3 mediums in the course of the interview process, with a strict 30 minute deadline -- what is your chance of failing?
b: all of them
c: at least 2.
d: see below.
d#2: 2 so far.
e: poorly.
I haven't interviewed properly in 10 years so this experience been a bit of a shock.
1. FAANG: Leetcode hard; failed hard.
2. Another FAANG: everything went ok; eventually rejected. Found through back channels that fudged the system design. Didn't go low enough in the stack .
3. Medium sized company: took a take home. Never heard from them again after 2-3 follows up.
4. Small company: talked to the CTO. Discussed compensation, CTO said I was too expensive (medium salary for Canada)
5. Medium sized company: automated test 3 hours, Java/DynamoDB that I've never done. Why?
6. Small company: conversation with CTO, and dev, no test. Interesting product, pay is not great. Got an offer.
7. Small body shop: 90 minute take home (while recording your screen). Got an offer, way less than discussed.
8. Medium company: zoom tech interview, reasonable questions. moving to "virtual onsite"
9: Medium company: zoom tech interview. failed.
This is over the course of the last 3 weeks.
Some take aways:
- market is hot
- there's absolutely no consistency in the interview process.
- it's hella stressful, impostor syndrome full steam.
- I'm a generalist, so I don't really have a preferred language. Some interviews do pseudocode which is fine, but for interviews where you run code you _MUST_ be fluent in one language. Looking stuff up seems to make a bad impression.
- I spent a few weeks doing leetcode before xmas, and it's certainly been helpful. I'd say most interviews use some sort of algorithmic test as a gatekeeper. You should be able to do easy before you start.