[elijaht]

Current Googler. I think these are reasonable standard for the vast majority of hires. For the most part The large FAANGs just need talented or high potential generalists. I don’t think leetcode has a direct correlation to what I do day to day but I think it is a reasonable way to hire for that at scale. Anecdotally I do think the talent here is quite high

I would agree with comments here saying leetcode isn’t appropriate for super senior roles. I am not privy to what hiring at these levels look like though. That being said I think most people overestimate how senior or deserving they truly are- for even staff engineering positions there are enough reasonable candidates that I think a more standard interview works

I will also note that for all but the lowest level there is some component of system design in an interview loop. This I think is a better test for most roles

I don’t think leetcode is perfect and at smaller companies doing it instead of a more bespoke interview is lazy and suboptimal

[lapcat]

> For the most part The large FAANGs just need talented or high potential generalists.

Is this actually true? It seems to me that BigCos have a huge number of very specialized roles, and a corresponding huge need for very specialized talent.

[notacoward]

In my experience outside knowledge can actually be a detriment at a FAANG (FB in my case but retired now). They want people who will learn their tools, their ways, etc. so yes, talented but "unformed" people are their ideal candidates in the great majority of cases. Specialists - such as myself - are brought in only as needed, and often find that trying to apply experience gained elsewhere gets them odd looks at best. The NIH is very strong.

[elijaht]

Not for the vast majority of software engineers, in my experience. Most teams do have some type of specialization (even CRUD apps often require some detailed knowledge of scale, localization/i18n, etc) but that just leads to the expectation that a generalist will need to spend some months onboarding. I do think our hiring process captures a lot of the skill needed to onboard and be successful in this situation

There definitely are a handful of roles that require more specialized backgrounds. I would say that leetcoding for something like that is a disservice to both parties, but I think that is a small fraction of the overall workforce

[lapcat]

The question, I think, is whether the quality of work of a generalist after some months of onboarding is going to be comparable to a specialist with years of domain-specific knowledge and experience.