[timeinput]

> They’re not the best candidate experience, but they work at Meta, Google scale, minimizing false positives better than most other formats.

Do they? That is an assertion with out any data. I've worked with F tier developers who worked at Facebook, and Google. They're trying to minimize their false positive rate, but they don't realistically publish it other than laying off large portions of their work force. Presumably because they weren't great, but passed the interview process. If you lay off 3-5% of your staff in a year you had a 3-5% false positive rate. Maybe it's minimized by these in person interviews, but that seems like an unacceptably high false positive rate given how much time the interviewers spend on the process.

3% is probably about as accurate as 'solve fizz buzz in python' prior to AI, and that's where they were in 2022.

[lubujackson]

It sure is easy to cover up bad hires when you print money. And "false positives" come in lots of different flavors. Are they an asshole? Do they add unnecessary complexity in everything they touch? Do they interrupt at meetings and interject their own pet ideas?

If you hire specifically on ability to invert btrees you will get precisely that. The question is how relevant that is to the various jobs being done there.

[Apocryphon]

How'd they get hired, in your opinion?

[timeinput]

At a FAANG company? A 5% or higher false positive rate in the FAANG hiring process. I feel like I specifically said that.

At the company I worked in at the time? An ineffectual hiring process for different reasons that was more on "feels", these folks probably would have been hired whether or not they worked for FAANG, but "they worked for FAANG" was always in the out brief. They seemed talented (I'm sure that's why they were hired at FAANG companes). I'm not proposing a solution, or saying that the company I worked for was perfect, but <worked for FAANG> means they made it through a 95%cutoff that is unreliable rather than they're a good SWE.

Additionally emulating FAANG hiring processes is probably not a great idea unless you can hire 1000 engineers and fifty of them as that is what FAANG does. If you can only hire 10 engineers you can not realistically mimic FAANG hiring processes.