I can tell you Indian new graduates interview very well. They grind years on these DSA puzzles. But have very little engineering knowledge or skill in general.

It's all about gaming the system here.

I have literally seen people justifying lying on the resume, by feeding the job description to ChatGPT and let it come up with a resume.

Yet, there's not much influential software coming out of India, where leetcode hards for graduates are the norm, but these graduates don't understand what a virtual machine is.

On the other hand I have seen prolific open source contributors in the same age bracket (they contributed not to some web design project, but very much used cloud / system software) struggling to get a job, because they didn't do enough "DSA".

I am not saying people of my country are dumb. Quite the contrary.

I am saying when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be good measure.

That's the case with leetcode problems.

It selects for people who can grind through it. Not the people who have other interesting things to do.

> have literally seen people justifying lying on the resume

> prolific open source contributors...struggling to get a job

The market selects the best, if it's best at lying, who are we to tell the invisible hand that it's wrong? /s

I've seen environments where a certain amount of manipulating the truth is expected. Individuals eventually figure out what's expected of them.

You know it's not the truth, they know it's not the truth, and you know they know.

Obviously this depends on the company, but after 15 years at multiple FAANG, I'm leaning towards no. It might have been true at 2010-era Microsoft but the painful transition where they fired all the SDETs got rid of most of the people who "made it through" and after that I never felt this to be the case.

Google, for instance, has a slow tedious hiring process with a lot of false negatives, but in my experience those who made it through were absolutely qualified and great to work with. There certainly wasn't 30% to cull. In my opinion there wasn't even enough people to fill the percentage quota that need to be given ratings lower than satisfactory - before the layoffs. After them, the fact that they're still enforcing these quotas on teams is absurd cruelty that kills morale.

I mean looking at Googles abysmal track record compared to its peers when it comes to creating and sustaining new products and product categories over the last two decades is not exactly an argument for their hiring process.

The decision to sustain products is at the executive level, not the ground level.

It’s also part of the promotion culture where no one shows “impact” by sustaining an existing project.

Sure, but is hiring people smart enough to identify and follow incentives a flaw in hiring or ground level employee capability or a management flaw?

Do you realize how relatively easy it is for a CS grad with time and motivation to “grind leetCode” enough to pass an interview at Amazon?

I didn’t go into AWS as a developer. I worked there in Professional Services. I shadowed a few coding interviews and conducted a few system design interviews of software devs while there.

The problem is that forced attrition doesn't create a dynamic, competitive environment full of go-getters. It creates an environment full of treacherous bums who work as little as possible, and spend all of their efforts making sure they look good and don't take the blame for any failures.

You can see the results of this in Amazon's consistently poor companywide performance in every arena. They're even managing to lose ground to Microsoft in cloud computing. It's pathetic.

When you have the scale of Amazon, you don’t need a lot of go getters. Just a relatively few and a lot of grunts. One CS leetCode grinder at the L5 level is replaceable with another.

I think this is really important point. Somehow lot of folks are missing it. As if each engineer is responsible for launching a new Amazon service every year. I have heard and met many current Amazon software engineer. Most of their job description sound rather crappy routine work even for me earning 1/3rd salary of Amazon.

I surmise large number of engineers there are just collecting bounty on Amazon monopoly on cloud infra. Their skill and work is not more challenging or interesting than hundreds of thousand engineers at 20-30% income of Amazon in boring enterprise IT shop.

That’s not just true of engineers. It took years for a friend who worked there as an L6 in the finance department for Amazon Retail to match his compensation after he left and it took him becoming a director at a manufacturing company.

Another former coworker who was a project manager (engagement manager) got maybe 60% of their compensation and is doing more work.

Myself personally, I was an L5 at AWS and now I’m doing at least L6 level work and I’m still making 15% less than I was making at Amazon.

It’s going to take a couple of years at the company I’m at now and building out an entire specialty practice - L7 level work - to get to my L5 compensation.

I have a roadmap I designed with my manager to do it and it’s a straightforward process, it’s just going to take time. I’m excited about doing it. It’s the scope/impact level of work I did to get into AWS on a much smaller scale at a startup.

Yeah, to be fair.. the people I know from Wall St tech that left for Amazon were not the best tech people I knew. The best tech people would have found more well compensated roles within Wall St tech.

Generally a mix of people who exhausted other paths to higher compensation by their mid 30s - mid 40s (senior management track / trader track) and this was the next big thing.

"Wall Street tech" has it's own levels as well.

We're they from a top tier IB, top tier HF or Prop trading company?

Or from lower tier IB/HF/Trading company or worse one of the 1000's of fintechs.

They are losing ground to Microsoft because MS is already in bed with the “enterprise” and big enterprise was late adopters to cloud.

Source: I worked at AWS ProServe for a little over 3 years and saw how hard it was to detangle BigEnterprise from Microsoft

This is something Amazon is going to have to get better at, as I see Azure beginning to become the default (IBM) choice for many businesses.

Google already seems like an also-ran, and did you even know that Oracle has a cloud offering too?

>CS grad

>time and motivation to grind

>pass an interview

Let's be honest, what more are we looking for?

Ability to deliver the projects? Be a pleasant, reliable collaborator? Teach, learn, critique, take feedback, adapt?

I agree with you and my interviewers that I conduct are always more behavioral. Most of the positions I interview candidates for are for bog standard CRUD jobs that anyone can do technically. The deciding factor are the traits you mentioned.

Technical skills can very much be the barrier to delivering CRUD projects, but it is usually more like troubleshooting, debugging, unscrewing your dev environment, understanding the behavior of your framework and database engine, leaving yourself good log messages, etc.

That's an interesting question camouflaged as a boring question.

The assumption is that though interview processes are acknowledged as imperfect, they're largely considered to measure something like productivity or worker value.

Under that assumption, then it should be exceedingly difficult to "cheat" the interviews such that a person could do great at an interview, and be of low "worker value". Not impossible, but difficult. And I'm just pulling stuff out of my ass here, but if we were to do a survey here on HN, the most likely consensus on how difficult that is would be something like "it's actually more difficult to fake it in the interview than to just be good enough at what you say you're good at".

Imagine if you were one of the fastest sprinters in the world, but to be "hired on" to the Olympic team they decided to interview you for it. Sure, they'd probably ask in the interview what your latest 100M times were, stuff like that, but after the interview they'd all talk privately about whether or not you were a good "culture fit", and whether your smile was sincere or fake, whether you were too nervous or smooth and a "real go-getter". In such an environment, the Olympic team might well have 30% of its members that could be safely culled. The only jobs interviewing is even a good process for are those jobs where the actual work itself resembles interviewing... sales positions, PR, being the "public face" of an organization (news anchors, I dunno). The reason we use interviewing for technology jobs is because that's what the big bosses know works for their jobs, a CEO is the public face of the organization.

Of all the ex-FAANG people I've worked with, I've found the ex-Amazon ones to be, by a wide margin, the least impressive group.

I'm not huge fan of Google, but will readily admit that, on average, the ex-Googlers I've worked with have tended to be great engineers and very sharp people.

So, at least from that anecdote, there does seem to be a difference in each of these hiring filters.

Yes. Difficult doesn't mean good.

Sure, I've seen plenty of very capable people put very little to no effort into their work.

If Amazon's only management stick is to mark 30% underperforms & cull 6% every year, then they need to send their managers to manager school.

Their stated goal is for each person they hire on a team to be better than 50% of their peers. For a company that professes to think a lot about the long term, I'd suggest they need to go to math school before they go to manager school.

Well you are right. But reality here is company is printing boat load of money with their cloud infra monopoly. So what to do? Blabber non sensical bullshit that no one will question because again everyone is making money and if they are so smart to challenge leadership dictates why wouldn't they just leave and apply their ideas some place else that needs them.

This is not on the managers. This is HR gone wild. Most managers close to the frontline understand perfectly well what an incredibly stupid idea this is.