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0 pointsJimboOmega7y ago0 comments

One of my recent FAANG interviews was ENTIRELY whiteboarding. It kind of shocked me.

It's weird that it's that skill, and only that skill, that gets evaluated. I did another interview at a different one where there was at least a design interview (though I flubbed it and wound up being incoherent).

It really feels like they aren't even trying to evaluate anything other than whiteboard coding. Accepting that it's not a great signal and yet fully investing in it.

It's such a weird skill and it's so easy to perform badly; I'd be kind of shocked if the test/retest validity wasn't very low.

Also... I mentioned that working on teams with other women was important to me... but every technical onsite I've had has been given by a man. They've pitched teams led by women, and my HR/recruiting contacts have been nearly all women. But for the interview itself? All men.

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ageek1237y ago

Trust me, companies would love to have at least one woman on every interview slate, and not just for women candidates. The problem is that the ratio of women engineers at the FAANG companies is such that this would put an incredibly unfair burden on women engineers. They would have to spend all of their time interviewing, or at the very least a disproportionate amount of time.

quanticle7y ago

>I'd be kind of shocked if the test/retest validity wasn't very low.

It's absolutely very low, and they're okay with that. One of the things recruiters at these companies will tell you if you get rejected is some variant of, "Don't worry, you can always try next year." These companies fully understand that they're rejecting good engineers. They don't care, because, historically, the number of engineers applying has been so high that they could reject 75% of the good engineers and still have enough to fill their headcount.

We'll see how that attitude towards interviewing changes when high Bay Area/Seattle housing prices make it more difficult for them to recruit.

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