It’s indicative of a very inexperienced staff or one that is desperate for interviewers, presumably because they are binge hiring. There are places that go out of their way to get very junior people interviewing early on purpose but in those cases there is usually someone more senior also involved.

For most places though it means they were throwing whoever they could find at the interviews.

Why would you need someone with decades of experience to hire an intern or a new grad?

It's customary for a lot of companies to have an interviewer which is above or _at_ the level that you are recruiting. Therefore someone with a year or two of experience is perfectly able to hire an intern or someone that will be hired at the same level as them.

Looking at Amazon for example, "Hire and Develop the Best" is one of the leadership principles, and you CANNOT be promoted if you don't conduct interviews.

Inexperienced engineers simply don’t have the experience to make good hiring decisions. Having them being involved in the process is fine, but they should be shadowing someone more senior.

Well, most FAANGs would like to disagree. But they must all be wrong.

They clearly were right? they're all laying off 20% of people. Maybe this is what you meant and I just missed the sarcasm

I don't have data nor an opinion on this matter, but maybe most FAANGs are successful despite their hiring practice, not because of it.

Really?

That little experience makes it hard to judge applicant quality well and means they probably aren’t answering questions accurately. It’s a dead tell of a company which has a shortage of experienced staff and is growing too quickly — very strongly reminiscent of the dotcom bubble where people had the same “number go up!” mentality & some would openly say they were just looking busy until the IPO.

Plenty of wildly successful companies (Google, FB, etc.) have all had junior engineers interviewing people.

No wonder tech interviews these days are so bad.

In the emerging points of their business. Or “juniors” with some kind of valuable expertise to the interview.

Not, “just graduated web dev boot camp and have a fleeting interest in web3” junior.

Which is not at all what we're talking about here since the original comment talks about people with one or two years of experience.

It’s was an exaggeration, but the point still stands. Two years experience is “just graduated” into the workforce. The lifespan of a worker is 30+ years.

I think there’s also something important about that period where you’re moving from only doing what other people instruct you to do towards making decisions and supporting them over time.

It's certainly possible, more so in the early days, but it's relatively rare that you see a successful company continue to have people with only a year or two professional experience making hiring decisions. If those people have solid backgrounds that approach isn't necessarily disastrous but it'll be limited - e.g. a fresh CS major doing a startup will probably hire people who can create working code, but they're probably going to over-value certain academic characteristics over practical engineering and miss solid candidates or (worse) expose the company to liability. Inexperience can also just lead to things like hiring people who seem like they're someone you'd want to hang out with.

Note also that I would draw a distinction between 1-2 years of total experience and, say, someone transitioning from academia to industry. Someone who was, say, a successful grad student likely also accumulated a fair amount of other life experience that a 22 year old is unlikely to have.

The only consistent thing yet hear about the FAANG interview process is how universally bad it is, but also how you should just play along to get your $300k/yr salary.

The effect Amazon's Bar Raises have on its long term success is highly undervalued.

I agree, and my experience of interviewing in the big tech has been very varied. Amazon's was the most professionally conducted one.

There's nothing inherently wrong with having junior engineers conducting interviews. But if a junior engineer is on my interview panel, I'm going to politely decline and end the process. A junior is not going to have the experience to accurately evaluate someone with close to two decades of experience writing software. Same goes for kids with < 10 years of experience who call themselves "senior," which I find happens often at FAANG.

Last I was interviewed by a junior, I brought up a concept for which he had never heard of. Even after explaining it in great detail, he argued with me for half the interview trying to explain why such a system would never hold in practice. Needless to say, I did not get the position. Total waste of my time.