[thw09j9m]

This is the toughest market I've ever seen. I easily made it to on-sites at FAANG a few years ago and now I'm getting resume rejected by no-name startups (and FAANG).

The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.

[bberenberg]

I can’t solve everyone’s problems but I can say that I have 1-2 (depending if an outstanding offer is accepted) open principal engineering roles directly working for me. The process will be talking to the recruiter, then two tech interviews, then an interview with me. This will take you a couple weeks to go through because of our team is tiny and we’re fairly busy. Team is 100% remote and async. All the stuff in the JD applies, the one update that we haven’t gotten out yet is that you must know terraform really well. Comp is scaled for engineers outside the USA.

Apply at https://moduscreate.com/careers/5984037003/?gh_jid=598403700... and feel free to mention that you saw Boris (me) post this on HN.

[shnkr]

God's work. Simple process but didn't find a matching profile to apply - boring backend principal engineer with 10+ yoe.. will keep an eye though.

[bberenberg]

Not sure what you mean by matching profile? The link above should be a direct link to the role I am hiring for.

[MarcelOlsz]

This looks fantastic. Applied!

[bubbleRefuge]

My observation as well. Going remote makes it harder to switch jobs because of loosing the personal connections and networks that get developed working on site. Going through the front door when applying for opportunities is usually more difficult than the back door. Back door as in getting introduced via your network. As a result, I've learned that a good recruiter is now a necessity because they have those relationships with hiring managers which can put you to the front of the line and also prep you better for the process.

[obeid]

I don't mean to sound harsh, but it does sound like front/ backdoor metaphor is code for filtering people by the social biases that form much of the personal connections and networks you mention.

The effect of remote work, seems to be leveling the entry point for everyone; an advantage for people who got discriminated against before and a disadvantage for people who enjoyed their privilege for far too long.

[authorfly]

The comments above you replied to were saying something different to your interpretation, I believe.

They were saying that by going remote (the last 5 years), people haven't formed as many deep connections by legitimate social connections at jobs and their reputation. You could say this is the "good" or "reputation" based way of getting jobs in the back door and it's not all just likeability. So there is less of this kind of back door hiring right. I don't know if this is true or not.

But the back door hiring for nepotism or "my brothers girlfriend" is still as ever present, since the connections aren't predicated on real life in person social interactions.

Discrimination or disadvantage comes in to neither of these hiring methods innately. Subconscious bias could exist for back door recommendations ofcourse.

So if anything, it's not really leveling anything. It just means for increasingly experienced engineers, benefits don't accrue so much when looking for work if remote. If anything these backdoor references could help people (e.g. from poor families) get a shot even despite other innate culture differences (e.g. style of speaking). And nepotistic hires will remain.

[bubbleRefuge]

Think it has to do with trust. If a hiring manager, for example, has a contributor who is good and recommends a former colleague, that resume can get to the front of the line. There are plenty of engineers who are interview/leet code ninja's or have fluffy resumes. Getting someone to vouch for work ethic, skills, etc of a candidate carries allot of weight. Thats just the reality. Its less risk of a bad hire if you have first hand knowledge of a candidate.

[red-iron-pine]

Aye. Of my 5 jobs, 4 were via personal connections; 2 were basically bumping into strangers and chatting them up, one at a wedding, the other at a Linux User Group.

My current job is the only one I applied for. Even then, dudes from previous jobs have hit me up in the past for gigs in the last 6 months.

Who you know matters, even w/r/t code, so know people.

[lurking_swe]

my experience must be an outlier. I’ve applied and gotten the job via the “front door” 3 times in my 10 year career so far. This is in the US at large companies, 2 of them with competitive salaries, 2 fully remote. The last one was at the end of 2022, right as the market was turning to shit.

I probably _could_ get a job more easily today because i’ve made connections over 10 yrs. But i’d probably still try the front door first because i’m stubborn lol. But the resume needs to be PERFECT when there’s so much competition, especially for remote roles. Everything on 1 page, needs to be very easy for a hiring manager to visually scan in 10 seconds, to make a quick decision. And obviously add necessary keywords for the stupid “resume filters”. It’s a real chore…

I will say though, there’s something really rewarding about getting the job you want without asking for favors.

It’s tough out there today. Many experienced engineers were laid off, i bet it’s brutal.

[ghaff]

Essentially post-school every job I’ve been hired for was through strong personal connections. And I certainly feel I don’t develop the same kinds of connections remotely. Maybe some folks who grew up in that of remote environment are better adapted.

[thaumasiotes]

> The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.

Bearing in mind the implicit comparison to "a few years ago", a few years ago I interviewed with Google, at which point the recruiter told me I'd passed the interview, wished me congratulations (!), told me to expect a job offer, and finally, ~6 weeks later, informed me that while I'd "passed" the interviews, my scores were too low for them to make an offer.

It remains a mystery what it might mean to "pass" without actually advancing beyond the threshold you passed.

[equity]

There will be a pool of candidates who "passed", and hiring managers can search through that pool to decide who to take for their team. If there are fewer openings than candidates who "passed" or hiring managers aren't interested in taking someone, then these folks won't get an offer.

[thaumasiotes]

Is it normal to congratulate those people on the fact that you're not offering them a job?

[smugma]

As someone with a couple of open (not engineering) recs, I can agree this is the toughest market I’ve ever seen. For both recs, we received many highly qualified candidates with relevant skills, often in a relevant domain.

I’ve never seen this before. It’s always been very hard to find a single highly-qualified candidate.

[thesuitonym]

The media seems to think the great resignation has ended, but really it’s just that jobs have dried up. Professionals, especially good ones, are eager to leave their current jobs, but the pool is so small, there’s just nowhere to go.

And with so many people looking for new positions, if you’re not highly keyword targeted, you won’t go anywhere.

[dartos]

I can’t wait until linkedin charges people to boost resumes a la tinder.

[thesuitonym]

They already sort of do. Every time you apply to a job on LinkedIn, even if you click through to the company's ATS, LinkedIn tries to upsell their premium services, which allegedly promotes your resume. I saw no difference in the applications I submitted during the trial, which I assume is similar to the results folks see with super likes on Tinder.

[joshuaturner]

I think a lot of this comes down to AI. In a recent hiring round we experienced multiple candidates using AI tooling to assist them in the technical interviews (remote only company). I expect relationship hires to become more common over the next few years as even more open-discussion focused interview rounds like architecture become lower signal.

So with that in mind I'll see you all at ReInvent

[rsanek]

If you're giving remote interviews, your loop should assume candidates can use AI. it's like giving a take home math test that assumes people won't use calculators at this point

[joshuaturner]

I disagree. We pretty explicitly ask candidates to not use AI.

While it's fine when doing the job the purpose of the interview is to gauge your ability to understand and solve problems, while AI can help you with that you understanding how to do it yourself signals that you'll be able to solve other more complex wider-spanning problems.

Just like with a calculator - it's important for candidates to know _why_ something works and be able to demonstrate that as much as them knowing the solution.

[ryandrake]

Asking candidates: "Don't use AI" is like all those other arbitrary handicaps that interviewers used to (and sometimes still do) weirdly insist on:

"Write this code, but don't read the API definition (like a normal developer would do in the course of their work)"

"Whiteboard this CRUD app, but don't verify you did it right using online sources (like a normal developer would do in the course of their work)"

"Type this function out in a text document so that you don't have the benefit of Intellisense (like a normal developer would have in the course of their work)"

"Design this algorithm, but don't pull up the research paper that describes it (like a normal developer would do in the course of their work)"

You're testing a developer under constraints that nobody actually has to actually work under. It's like asking a prospective carpenter to build you a doghouse without using a tape measure.

[jacobyoder]

Take this online test in 30 minutes with awkwardly or ambiguously worded abstract problem. You don't get to ask anyone for clarification on anything like any normal developer would do in the course of their work.

I've never been in a situation where I could not ask for clarification on something except in interview situations. I asked an interviewer once "is this how people normally work here? they just get a few sentences and plow ahead, without being able to ask for more details, clarifications, or use cases?". "Well, no, but you have to use your best judgement here".

[jjav]

> Just like with a calculator - it's important for candidates to know _why_ something works and be able to demonstrate that as much as them knowing the solution.

And this is why I never give coding-puzzle interviews. I just have a chat about your past projects (based on resume). We'll go deep into the technical details and it is easy in such a conversation to get a feel for whether you actually contributed significantly to the things the resume says you did.

[jkaplowitz]

Only sometimes is your historical deep-dive approach going to give you the right signal.

I’ve been out of work for a couple of years due to complicated immigration reasons, and I was most recently a people manager (although with a few direct technical tasks still). I honestly don’t remember many of the deep technical details of things to which I genuinely contributed significantly as an individual contributor or tech lead, despite those being entirely real and despite me still being a capable hands-on technical person. I’ve had so many jobs recently reject me for reasons like this without giving me a chance to actually demonstrate what I can do.

Memory tests are biased toward people who did the work recently, and biased against people with ADHD (who often have worse long-term memory for such details without being worse hires).

The coding interview shouldn’t be just a blind submit and wait for feedback, nor a live rushed and high-pressure puzzle test (you’re quite right in that regard). Ideally it should be the candidate doing what’s expected to be 1-3 hours of work asynchronously at their convenience within a period of a few days, and then discussing (maybe even presenting/demoing) live in a way that shows deep technical understanding and good communication skills. That avoids conflating memory tests with technical tests. Certain live coding tests can also be okay, but I agree it’s easy to make them unnecessarily uncomfortable with a false signal either way.

[grapesodaaaaa]

This is the way.

[randomdata]

There is an interesting dichotomy in your interview process. You say you want someone who can solve problems, but then go on to say (perhaps unintentionally; communication is hard) that you only want someone who has already rote-memorized how to solve the particular problems you throw at them, not someone who can figure things out as the problems arise.

[Izkata]

> but then go on to say (perhaps unintentionally; communication is hard) that you only want someone who has already rote-memorized how to solve the particular problems you throw at them

They said the opposite of that. Unless you think it's not possible to figure out problems and you can only do them by rote memorization?

[randomdata]

> Unless you think it's not possible to figure out problems and you can only do them by rote memorization?

It is not possible to solve a problem from scratch. You must first invent the universe, as they say. Any solution you come up with for a new problem will build upon solutions others have made for earlier problems.

In the current age, under a real-world scenario, you are going to use AI to help discover those earlier solutions on which to build upon. Before AI you would have consulted a live human instead. But humans, while not what we consider artificial, are what we consider intelligent and therefore presumably fall under the same rule, so that distinction is moot anyway.

Which means that, without access to the necessary tools during the interview, any pre-existing solution you might need to build upon needs to be memorized beforehand. If you fail to remember, or didn't build up memories of the right thing, before going into the interview, then you can't possibly solve the problem, even if you are quite capable of problem solving. Thus, it ends up being a test of memory, not a test of problem solving ability.

And for what? AI fundamentally cannot solve new problems anyway. At best, it can repeat solutions to old problems already solved, but why on earth would you be trying to solve problems already solved in the first place? That is a pointless waste of time, and a severe economic drain for the business. Being able to repeat solutions to problems already solved is not a useful employment skill.

[squeaky-clean]

> you only want someone who has already rote-memorized how to solve the particular problems you throw at them, not someone who can figure things out as the problems arise

This is literally what AI is, and why they don't want it used in the interview.

[randomdata]

Literally someone (or, at least, some thing) that can figure things out as problems arise? That seems quite generous. Unless you're solving a "problem" that has already been solved a million times before, it won't have a clue. These so-called AIs are predictive text generators, not thinking machines. But there is no need to solve a problem that is already solved in the first place, so...

It is really good at being a "college professor" that you can bounce ideas off of, though. It is not going to give you the solution (it fundamentally can't), but it can serve to help guide you. Stuff like "A similar problem was solved with <insert research paper>, perhaps there is an adaptation there for you to consider?"

We're long past a world where one can solve problems in a vacuum. You haven't been able to do that for thousands, if not millions, of years. All new problems are solved by standing on the shoulders of problems that were solved previously. One needs resources to understand those older problems and their solutions to pave the way to solving the present problems. So... If you can't use the tools we have for that during the interview, all you can lean on is what you were able to memorize beforehand.

But that doesn't end up measuring problem solving ability, just your ability to memorize and your foresight in memorizing the right thing.

[Toorkit]

Oh, if you give it the old "pretty please" then of course no one is going to use AI.

[snapcaster]

>We pretty explicitly ask candidates to not use AI.

This doesn't work, because regardless of what the rules say if i think all my competitors are using AI (and you won't be able to reliably detect it) i'll feel pressured to use it as well. This is true of any advantage (spending extra time on 2 hour takehome assignment is the classic version of this)

[_heimdall]

To be fair, you don't have to fall into the Tragedy of the Commons trap. If everyone else chooses to use LLMs during an interview that's their choice. If you are asked not to and are uncomfortable using it anyway, just don't.

[snapcaster]

Of course, just like pro athletes don't have to do steroids but it's obviously a competitive disadvantage

[papichulo2023]

Prob everyone is usually AI at this point, only a few bother to make the solution mor human-made-like. Personally, there is not way I am writing boilerplate again unless you are paying me hourly for the test.

[_heimdall]

Well that could explain why I've personally had a hard time finding a job with around 15 years of experience - I don't use LLMs.

With that said, none of the interviews I've had over the last couple months included questions that could reasonably be done with an LLM. The context is usually wrong, technical challenges were done live on a video call and it would be horribly obvious if a candidate was just prompting an LLM for an answer.

[jp42]

I wonder how cheating problem could be solved?

A cheap multi camera system + software, that can be quickly installed at candidates location to watch interviewing candidate. This can be sent by employer before interviews. its cheap enough that it can be thrown away.

traditional way - A company that provides interviewing centers across major cities for software interview, the location will have cameras that will make sure candidates are not cheating.

[trentnix]

I’m not sure the bar has been raised. It’s been weirded, but not raised.

[briandear]

The bar has been lowered in many respects. 14 years experience, 5 of them at a FAANG. Successful startup exit for a small company I founded, and and endless array of India-based recruiters that, for example, want me to mention “Ruby 3.2” in my resume when the resume says I have 14 years of Ruby experience including using it daily in my present job. I could literally say “I invented Ruby and have worked with it daily for 20 years,” and they’d say, “but you don’t have 3.2 listed.”

I play the game then they pass me off to another Indian who is less understandable than the first guy and then they offer $45/hour. I say yeah sure, submit me to the potential client. Then I never hear anything back.

The Indian 3rd party recruiting industry is absolutely horrible. Another anecdote was spending 10 minutes explaining how Java and JavaScript aren’t the same thing. I am convinced there is rampant discrimination happening as well against non-Indians, and especially those who aren’t H1Bs. (H1B is a trap that makes it easy to hire people at lower wages and then also makes it harder for them to switch employers.)

I’m not well articulating the problem, but anyone who has done this dance knows exactly what I’m talking about.

By the way, I used to contract at $95/hour and now I can’t get calls back for $45/hour.

The outsourcing offshoring business needs to be significantly reformed. I had a gig at Best Buy ($70/hour) and I got to spend 3 months training some Accenture H1Bs to replace me. I thought H1B was to fill “critical shortages of highly skilled workers?” Best Buy didn’t have a shortage — they fired my entire team and replaced it with Accenture. Best Buy should be heavily taxed for that and Accenture et al should have their offshore labor tariffed into oblivion. (They typically have onshore H1Bs directing offshore teams.) The Best Buy CEO talks all sorts of DEI crap, while firing people to cut costs. Not very inclusive if you ask me.

[mathverse]

Indians,Brazilians,Portuguese,Ukrainians,Russians are possibly the worst clique of discriminative nationalities. You can be 100% assured that you will be driven out of a company/job if more of them take a hold and get into higher up positions. This is not racism. This is a pure fact based on statistical evidence.

You will be sold a dream of infinite scalability by hiring "talent" in those countries for cheap and what you will get is usually disfunctional teams riddled with incompetence and nepotism.

Even if a job/team is meant to be multicultural,diverse they will find a way how to hire more and more of their countrymen until knowing the language is basically a requirement for the job.

I am not even an american and i've seen this happen in Europe as well so I imagine in the US it must be 1000 times worse.

[jacobyoder]

Odd... you're not the first person I've heard this from, but have been hearing this particular process happening from multiple colleagues over the last 18 months. They are all out of work, all have had multiple interviews with various size companies, and they can never get past an Indian interviewer, and the teams seem to be growing in Indian folks, while non-Indians are let go or passed over for advancement, and eventually leave.

I was slightly skeptical when I heard of this the first time. It sounds a bit like some post hoc justification for why they didn't get hired. But nothing about it sounds far-fetched, really. It sounds more like a natural progression and part of human nature. But still stinks for a lot of my friends/colleagues who can't seem to get hired anywhere.

[snapcaster]

Can you link some of the facts/evidence?

[randomdata]

What are you offering in return?

[red-iron-pine]

credulity. extra-ordinary facts require extortionary evidence.

plus the above poster mentioned how it's well known, "based on statistical evidence". so show us.

[Discordian93]

Portuguese don't do that lol

[randunel]

You're describing the effects of normalising remote work. Employees now are able to work from anywhere in the world, so companies get employees from all over the world. Since we're already looking at employing anywhere, why not also contract from anywhere?

[raydev]

Normalizing remote work requires lowering standards for getting interviews and roles?

[mock-possum]

Yeah I feel like the recent application experience is almost coercing me into racism - I don’t actually believe in racial superiority, I’m not into any kind of bigotry or mistreating other people… buuuuuut I’ve noticed that I have this visceral reaction to seeing a typical Indian name on an email from a potential employer, or a thick Indian accent on a phone or zoom call. It always just seems like an indication that I don’t actually have a chance and am just wasting my time.

It’s awful catching myself in a “I’m not racist but” situation. It really worries me.

[randomdata]

On the bright side, racist thoughts creeping into classes who haven't been exposed to circumstances that lead to racist thoughts before might become more understanding of and helpful towards those who have contended with them for ages instead of simply dismissing them as people born with "incorrect thoughts". Racism is never actually about race.

[tharkun__]

[flagged]

[dang]

Please don't start flamewars on HN, and please avoid generic ideological tangents (and ideological battle generally). It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[_heimdall]

This has been my experience in the US as well, but I'm not so sure that this paradigm extends outside the US.

I lived in Europe for a few years and didn't feel that same context as well - it wasn't almost assumed that white people were racist and anyone might be seen as racist regardless of their skin color or heritage.

[defrost]

In your opinion.

Outside of that, examples abound of racist behaviour by non white peoples, often toward other non white people.

[nicbou]

India is a big place with the widest cultural and socioeconomic range I’ve ever witnessed. You might just be facing the less pleasant ends of those ranges.

I experience the other end of the spectrum. The skilled Indians that made it to Germany and write to me through my website are usually delightful people.

Consider just how different your experience of most countries would be if you just interacted with their people with the most imbalanced incentives. This is sort of what’s happening.

[fluorinerocket]

It's ok to notice

[fluorinerocket]

Had similar experiences a decade ago and now I hang up if the voice on the phone has an Indian accent and block all domains that send recruiting emails where the name is Indian sounding.

Don't give these people an inch.

[jp42]

anecdata - I am Indian and on h1b. Intel hired Accenture folks, they just put more people with no experience, it took more time to train them than doing stuff ourselves.

Another instance, Intel gave tens of millions to do something that few employees could have done in couple of months. Its basically creating two conda environments, one with intel optimized software stack & one with default and compare the results for 20 use cases.

Not sure its the case with all the contract companies, but this was my experience.

[em-bee]

i believe they are doing this because it gives them the ability to only pay people while they are working on that project, and then let them go because they are not employed by IBM. they think it is cheaper, or they just abhor the idea that the people they hire are not busy the whole time, even if that would be cheaper.

[realityfactchex]

Weirded how, if you don't mind elaborating slightly?

For example, does it mean: the actual skill level (e.g., smartness) people actually look for and hire hasn't changed, but the activities that hiring teams require candidates to have experience with are (seemingly weirdly) not a great thing to need anyway and therefore lots of great candidates end up twiddling their thumbs?

In that way, the "height" of the bar is the same, but it's a "weird" bar, in that one could have to accept it for what it is, or even stoop to it, or perhaps shift over to it, in order to pass it?

Or more that the overall interview experiences are weird caricatures in and of themselves?

Weird is a great word, but it can be a little non-specific, so I'm left curious about the intended usage/meaning.

[trentnix]

Many companies are filtering candidates in favor of mercenaries while pretending they are looking for dependable, committed professionals.

If you don’t have specific experience with some CTOs favorite esoteric API or don’t have experience in the same, specific corner of some insurance or usury industry, your ability to actually engineer solutions is considered irrelevant.

It’s as if the industry has forgotten that building software is about the application of algorithms to data structures to accomplish some user need. Instead, company after company wants to hot glue some service via some API using some framework on some cloud platform. And because the MBA decision-maker can write Excel macros with GPT, we don’t need programmers to build systems anymore. Just wire up foo SaaS to bar SaaS and MVPFailFastLeanAgile our way to success!

Sorry for the rant…

[svilen_dobrev]

> It’s as if the industry has forgotten that building software is about the application of algorithms to data structures to accomplish some user need

My 3 months experience searching - and getting only ~3-4 initial interviews - is the New-AI-Kids-on-Da-Block think software-engineering is just another plumbing for their Artificially Great Intelligence. One CEO even used the exact word.

waw. Plumbers make real good $$$..

[namaria]

They are just saying the quite part out loud now because they think they can finally get away with that.

Well when the discount plumbing they are getting put in starts to leak shit all over the place there will be a premium again in actually knowing how to do it properly.

[hombre_fatal]

Though getting a job at the fixer consultancies they might use isn't any easier. :P

[scott_w]

> It’s as if the industry has forgotten that building software is about...

This really isn't new. A look at Slashdot will give you similar complaints as far back as at least the 2000s. I'm sure someone older than me will dig up Usenet posts with exactly the same complaints and tell me to get off their lawn ;-)

[disgruntledphd2]

If we'd had software engineers in Sumeria, there'd be a bunch of tablets with the same complaints;)

[realityfactchex]

Thanks, much appreciated

[dartos]

Yeah well what do recruiters know about software development?

They just know the keywords the EMs and C suite sent them in the headcount request.

[trentnix]

That EMs and the C-suite think solving their engineering needs is to add "headcount" is the bigger problem.

[dartos]

That’s what they thought in 2021.

Now that money isn’t free, they think the problem is too many engineers.

[rachofsunshine]

For what it's worth, it is definitely thawing (at least if what we're seeing in our client base is anything to go by), it's just going to take some time for that to work its way through everyone looking for work.

[brailsafe]

Is that the reason you were rejected, or was that just an attribute of what you did && you were rejected? What stage of the interview, what level?

I truly don't doubt that's what happened, I've had it happen, but when it did their feedback was (insultingly) not up to their professional standard. I say insultingly because it was an amateurish evaluation of what I did, specifically because it was like the 5th god damn interview by that point and really they should have been looking for more than trivialities like the coding style I chose to use in HackerRank with a visible ticking clock.

The reason I ask is just for context; if people are interviewing for Senior roles and being rejected for code formatting problems, something is even more deeply wrong than it seems, since they probably shouldn't be concerning themselves with that _at_all_. If it's possible though that you were rejected for some other reason, but that your code style was the strongest negative apparent signal, that's also worth exploring. In my case, that's a possibility, that they were looking for just one more reason to narrow the funnel, but it can be hard to accept.

[ericmcer]

Anecdotal but I felt it was worst during the mass layoffs in late 2022/early 2023. It has been very slowly recovering since then.

The late 2020 period was the absolute best time though. I got multiple offers almost instantly, and after I signed on it felt like the org was bloated with engineers just fiddling away on meaningless projects.

[wyclif]

That's always the effect of free money.

[sertraline]

This is not surprising. The companies received grants during covid lockdowns, so they started listing a lot of fake jobs. When the money dried up the layoffs followed, which was an expected outcome. Media does not let people know about the grants and presents everything in such light that it seems like the market is getting absolutely destroyed, while in reality it only slightly declined.

The bigger problem are HRs employed by big companies who autoreject every application and take no responsibility for doing this.

[ziaowang]

Though FAANG offers are usually more attractive than startups (considering pay level and stability), some startups could be more selective since they couldn't afford to hire the wrong candidate.

[lumost]

It’s more about calibration. If you interview 100 people at a FAANG, you get an idea of where the bar is. This idea gets calibrated with a panel of interviewers, along with shadow interviewers.

At a startup… who knows? I had an interviewer burn up 25 minutes on a 45 minute coding question trying to “hint me” towards the solution I mentioned in the first 2 minutes.

[hnfong]

It's also a numbers thing. Startups generally hire a couple people, while FAANGs hire in the tens of thousands. (Used to, at least.)

[david-gpu]

> I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.

It sounds like they intentionally present a simple problem because they are not filtering by who can solve it, but by who writes clean maintainable code.

I wish I had thought of that when I was interviewing candidates, because it is a good criterium for a well established organization.

[dvsjr]

2009 recession no work for almost two years tough?

[randomdata]

Or 1930s Great Depression no work for almost five years tough?

I expect most people here won't have a good sense for 2009. While it wasn't great for many industries, for tech it was the "app" boom. You couldn't hardly go outside without someone throwing money at you.