Don't forget that they introduce market friction to reduce developer turnover and reduce salaries.
I suspect one of the reasons Google is so open about their process and the need to study is so that everyone follows suit. Thereby forcing people to take days off and do homework for even the most mediocre of positions, causing the switching costs of interviewing anywhere to become higher.
Interesting idea. I got an email from Facebook with invitations for the interview. Replied: “I can do it but i’m Letting you know, I will not spend a minute preparing for it. So, we can do it today”.
I never heard from this person again, which brings a question - is probability of passing it without putting personal time is so low it makes no point in even trying?
That's a nonsensical line of reasoning. Hard interviews don't reduce salaries, they increase them. Why do you think FAANG companies pay developers 300k+/year when there are so many lower-status companies who pay <100k/year and still manage to find hires? Because the latter are willing to hire candidates who have worse resumes and less impressive interview skills that the FAANG companies consider beneath them.
You might want to re-read your own post because whether 300k/year is a lot of money or not is a non sequitor. You claimed that companies ask hard interview questions to depress salaries, which is a trivially falsifiable claim when you note that companies that don't ask hard interview questions can get away with paying less money than companies that do because they are less picky about who they hire.
What do you mean by "than you need to"? I'm guessing for many companies (especially the ones with this kinds of interviews), the limit is the number of hires they can do, not the number of candidates that apply... So by definition, you need to reject all but n (the number of open jobs)... Why wouldn't you reject them based on performance on interviews (as opposed to, by their CV or luck or something)?
This might be true at Amazon, Google, or Netflix. But many companies have openings that sit vacant for months, even though perfectly great candidates applied for the job.
Months? Years :). Know couple of teams in my current place (very well known company) that couldn’t hire for a year... and lost position, as business argued - if you can’t hire for a whole year you don’t really need t
In many cases companies don't interview all the candidates before making a decision, it's more on a rolling basis. You consider each candidate separately - you interview a candidate and then decide whether to hire him/her or not.
In plenty of cases companies reject candidates who later perform successfully at similar roles, and this is the point of the parent comment. However this is kind of a desired effect, because not hiring a right candidate has lower cost than hiring a wrong candidate:
- if you skip good candidate, because you're not sure whether they'll perform well, you just wait for more candidates to apply, it just slows down the process
- if you hire wrong candidate, the candidate joins the team, underperforms and eventually is let go, but during the time that person works for you, you don't look for the right candidate for that role, which costs you more money and time
I did seven interviews for a top US bank. I didn't pass. They needed to fill dozens of positions. Two years later they opened the gates and hired a notorious complainer ex-coworker. That's the current state of affairs.
Think it’s more a by-product than by-design. At the risk of making a blanket statement, think it’s fair to say most software engineers have average-to-poor people skills, leading them to the fallacy that “logic tests” are a good way to evaluate people. That in turn leads to a bias you describe “did you see how badly the candidate failed the test!?!”
* Rejecting far more candidates than you need to -- so you can feel like you're hiring "the top 1 percent"
* Giving yourself the feeling that you have an objective hiring process (when really you don't)
* Making your own team members feel like they're super brilliant and special when really they're not
That's what the modern hiring process is designed to do. And in fact it works quite well, to serve this purpose.