[MichaelMoser123]

The thought crossed my mind, that they are doing it on purpose: to make the whole experience of switching jobs as unpleasant and traumatic as possible, so that people will stick to their jobs. However a conspiracy is highly unlikely, given that there are so many players involved.

More realistic explanation: they try to make an 'American Idol' like process, this gives them the feeling of having chosen 'the best'. Now it probably takes some standardized task to do that kind of competition, as it is necessary to maintain the claim of having an objective hiring process.

I was once told, that in the olden days there was a different kind of hiring process (that was not about programming jobs, actually, they didn't have that job at the time). It would go as following: the owner would invite the candidate to join the crew for lunch, if the candidate eats a lot, then he would count as a good worker. Actually that would make a good test for 'culture fit'...

BTW, the article has a link to a free course on hiring practices, thanks for the link! https://course.jobsearch.dev/01_introductions/01_course_intr...

[deckard1]

> make the whole experience of switching jobs as unpleasant and traumatic as possible, so that people will stick to their jobs. However a conspiracy is highly unlikely

I've thought this too. Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm were hit with antitrust litigation starting around 2010 because they were all involved in colluding to reduce the ability of devs to switch jobs. Since then we've only seen the rise of leetcode style interviews. We're way way past the days of tree traversing and FizzBuzz. We're asking candidates to recite Dijkstra's but pretend they've never seen it before. It's just way more convenient for tech companies if people don't leave in the first place. I know I've stayed at my job much longer than I should because I hate interviews.

> as it is necessary to maintain the claim of having an objective hiring process

Yeah no one wants to admit they don't know what they are doing. It's bad for FAANG myth-making. A company the size of Google or Facebook is never not hiring. They are a big boat that can't just stop moving like that. They have a constant churn rate, the need to keep interviewers sharp, and a certain target rate they need to hit of applicants in, new employees out. All the process between the in side and out side is Scientology. It's just complete fabricated cultish nonsense. The owners of LeetCode must be enjoying it though.

[MichaelMoser123]

>were hit with antitrust litigation starting around 2010 because they were all involved in colluding to reduce the ability of devs to switch jobs

I didn't know that, really interesting detail.

>no one wants to admit they don't know what they are doing.

Interesting perspective, though I don't know about the vodoo part. They seem to be taking the matter quite seriously, at least google does. Take the matter of competitive programming: Peter Norvig says they were checking, if taking part in programming contests would correlate with good performance at the job [1]; I think having read somewhere that Norvig revised his negative judgement later on, as they had examined more data [2]. (actually that would mean that they didn't act on the data to begin with, well well).

These companies are good at data processing, any data that is, at least they seem to be taking it dead seriously (disclaimer: I never worked at google, though I have managed to fail at interviewing there, however i am not sure if i would have accepted an offer ;-)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdmyUZCl75s

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_programming#Benefi...

[deckard1]

Oh, definitely. I'm sure they do take it seriously. I just don't believe taking it seriously to be the same as actually producing results. Managers still take OKRs/KPIs seriously. There are still people that believe in the healing power of Agile.

If any of these companies knew what they were doing then they wouldn't require multiple interview rounds. I expect the correlation between one's ability to perform at Google with their ability to pass the interview gauntlet to be no better than a coin toss.

[MichaelMoser123]

Well, i have worked at Amazon, for less than a year; My rather limited impression was, that this is a very dysfunctional organization. Now if this impression is correct, then the leetcode appoach has some merrit; the leetcode approach would select for people, who stick to the technical part in the narrow sense of the word, and who would not question the state of things too much.

But I guess, that this is all speculation..

[hiptobecubic]

Working like that, at least at Google, will only suffice up to about L4. If you're good at leetcode, you might be hired at L4 directly, but if you're a normal person then it means you have one promotion before you need to learn completely different skills to advance.

I do nothing that looks anything like leetcode whatsoever.