[UncleMeat]

Googler here. I've probably done 150 interviews.

I've never once adjusted my question based on where the candidate was coming from. The idea that people would ease up if they saw FAANG on a resume or a 10+ year career is just not a thing I've ever seen.

There are a few truths in modern tech interviewing:

1. There is a large amount of randomness. Between the question that an interviewer chooses to ask and whether the interviewer is having a really bad day, you might just get screwed.

2. A lot of people are genuinely working really hard to do a good job interviewing. I've seen careful and detailed interview feedback and talked with a huge number of people who really care about interviewing well.

3. Interviewing has less oversight than ordinary work, so some people are bad at it and don't get feedback. Some people get back luck and are assigned one of these interviewers.

4. Interviewees suck at evaluating their experience. This means that when somebody says "I did everything well except I missed some impossible optimal algorithm and they rejected me so that's bullshit" you should become skeptical.

5. Angry people get signal boosted. Online discourse around interviewing is dominated by people with bad experiences.

[christiansakai]

You answered some of my questions in some other HN posts. I remember you.

Thanks for the replies.

Btw I am curious of this one thing. Say a FAANG has X years of experience in a FAANG company and then quit. When he/she reapplies to the company, is there any sort of stuff that makes he/she preferred over other candidates? Why I'm asking this question is this. I imagine that a FAANG engineer who has more than X years of experience, say x = 10, he/she must have better things to do rather than just memorizing 1000 Leetcode problems. Therefore if being judged strictly by using Leetcode style questions, I imagine he/she would not do well.

[UncleMeat]

I only have experience with this at Google.

If you leave and then re-apply, hiring managers will look at your past performance reviews when considering you as a candidate. If your past performance reviews were excellent, it'll be a lot easier to come back. If you left another FAANG company... it doesn't matter beyond maybe making it easier to get a phone screen.

I expect that everybody has better things to do than memorizing Leetcode problems. That's because I don't expect people to memorize problems at all. I strongly believe that candidates should be able to succeed at the question I ask despite never having seen it before in their lives.

[christiansakai]

That makes sense. Thank you.

[Apocryphon]

#5 Is very true, but also remember that outrage that the online masses finds particularly true and relatable gets signal boosted more.