[neilv]

> Most of big tech, and Amazon specially, massively lowered their hiring floor to hire more over the years, and are full of extremely incompetent people

If that's true, it'd add insult to injury, for the people who were interested in the better FAANGs... but got turned off by the stack of months' worth of prep materials that FAANG in-house recruiters would send to candidates, for their kabuki theatre of interview processes.

One of my recent theories about the interview processes promoted by FAANGs is that they (by accident or design) tend to neuter students against becoming upstart competitors. Think of all those students in school who could have time for side projects, considering startups, developing skills that woudl be useful in startups... and instead FAANGs have trained students to conceive of the very skills as passing the FAANG interview rituals, and to spend their spare time practicing for those rituals. Not only are those students less likely to start a startup, but startups that happen still have to find the workers who are amenable to thinking like creative engineers, and working as a team focused on a shared goal, despite all the FAANG-like messaging to young developers that has infected CS departments and broader industry.

[crop_rotation]

The interview process, despite all it's shortcomings, was a good filter. It has been massively neutered in the recent years and is gamed every which way now by the hiring team's leadership, which is the one of the main reasons responsible for massive dilution in median talent.

The interview process is flawed, but it did prevent totally incompetent candidates. Now instead of being replaced with an alternative which measures something else, it has just been watered down.

[CSMastermind]

Large tech definitely hires in part defensively. They might not need all those people but no one else can have them either.