Funniest thing is that the companies with the most extreme leetcode interviews, Facebook, roblox, etc also fell the hardest in the most recent sell off. There’s even a quote by kieth rabois, one one the top VCs, that FB hired and built their culture around optimization, which has failed. They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.
How many creative and truly innovative thinking people do you know that will spend hours studying for and partaking in such a ridiculous interview process? It’s easily one of the top turn offs for me when it comes to FAANG companies. Not because it’s difficult, but because it’s utterly boring, and useless.
It seems these companies are far more interested in hiring very intelligent and analytical type people, but those who have no sense of outside the box thinking. Which in theory makes sense at scale, but in tech your head start will eventually fade, and those same people you’ve hired likely can’t bring you back.
Here’s what’s funny, amazon and Microsoft are less about leetcode. Google has very hard questions but they are somewhat novel. Facebook has very tough questions but they are basically straight from the book, people getting hired there just need to memorize.
Smaller growth stock companies like coinbase or DoorDash tend towards the Facebook style of interviews.
If you look at stock prices, there’s a near direct correlation between difficulty of leetcode and stock price.
But that maybe because smaller growth oriented companies just need fast memorized results on the job, or it’s just discriminatory
My takeaway has been that the fastest growing (especially consumer-oriented) tech companies put up the highest bars to hiring, simply because they'll still get enough candidates to end up with enough people. IBM can't be as picky as Roblox.
I am not endorsing the innovation idea here. I'm just saying that a well known company that's expected to see a big jump in value in the short term will have too many applicants to reasonably sort through. They can put up arbitrary bars, and arbitrarily high ones, and still manage to hire. Coinbase could disqualify everyone born on Mondays and Tuesdays without seriously impacting their ability to hire, probably
No, because Facebook and IBM aren't the same in terms of culture. My impression of IBM is that you need to file reports in triplicate every time you use a paperclip.
I have worked with and met people from several smaller, freewheeling startups who were either ex-FB, or turned down an FB offer. In all cases the smaller company had a high initial offer that was lower than FB, but also had a more chilled out culture where promos didn't mean the dog-and-pony show it reportedly is at FB (I wonder if FB is, ironically, more bureaucratic than IBM in this regard?).
>How many creative and truly innovative thinking people do you know that will spend hours studying for and partaking in such a ridiculous interview process‽
I may be posting this defensively, since I practice leetcode to prepare for tech interviews. But I disagree with the assertion that creative and innovative people don't have to put up with process and procedure. Pretty much everyone has to do grunt work sometimes, and it's especially important to "prove your worth" when first meeting a new person or company. The leetcode problems are far from useless, speaking as someone who has given more than my fair share of different types of interview problems. And furthermore the fact that you're willing to put in hours on a skill you don't particularly care about carries valuable signal to employers.
Why are we assuming that short term changes in share price have anything to do with underlying fundamentals?
Meta prints money. They brought in $40B in net income off of $115B in revenue last year. Income attributable to Facebook + WhatsApp + Instagram doubled from 2019 to 2021. They spend more on research and development than they do on expenses attributable to their core business.
Yes, they're no longer growing. That was going to happen eventually. Yes, they're going to be targeted by extensive regulatory action. Yes, they're losing space - and users - to competitors.
It's going to take a lot to kill them off. The social media scene changes fast and they're going into decline, but it doesn't change the fact that Meta is an extremely large advertising company with a lot of money and talent. This isn't MySpace 2.0.
A $380B market valuation was likely unreasonable. A $200B market valuation for a company that earns $40B a year and is used by more than a third of the global population sounds very reasonable.
> Why are we assuming that short term changes in share price
I don't think the parent is making a strong claim in this direction, moreso that Facebook/Meta has very few new innovations and prefers to acquire them.
Other companies are also quite profitable or have strong market caps but are also not innovating and prefer to acquire new innovations (Oracle being a prime example).
> moreso that Facebook/Meta has very few new innovations and prefers to acquire them.
This isn't unique to facebook/Meta though: plenty of companies switch more toward the acquisition of innovation than the creation of it. Microsoft was like this for a long time. Apple, Google, and Amazon have also made their fair share of acquisitions over the years.
Introducing new products/value propositions is hard, even in adjacent markets, and most will fail. It's often easier to acquire something instead once you reach the point where you can afford to do so.
I read the comment as being critical of Facebook. "Not being able to innovate" seems like a critical statement, indicating a failure on their part. However, they are an incredibly successful company. If Facebook is successful not innovating, why would they want to hire innovators? Their hiring process should be specifically geared towards hiring the people that will execute the way Facebook wants to execute. Given that, they seem to have a successful hiring process.
> If Facebook is successful not innovating, why would they want to hire innovators?
There's a larger question that I'm still trying to work out.
Meta has something like 71K employees at this point and spends over $21B a year in research and development.
They don't give head counts for how many personnel are performing R&D work, but if you assume that most of their R&D costs go to employee salaries and that the mean salary at Meta is around 500K, it looks like at least half of their workforce is engaged in R&D.
What are they getting for this investment? Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus were all acquisitions. Facebook Messenger came out in 2008.
I get that some of them are working to optimize their advertising revenue stream. Does this require 20-30K+ highly qualified engineers and support FTEs?
Something else is going on. My guess is that it's a form of Parkinson's Law, only with IT engineers instead of British civil servants.
> I've been dabbling in AI recently, and I keep seeing FB's name appear all over the place. They were associated with some work that wrote human readable instructions on how to cook something- given only a list of ingredients. I have no idea why they are interested in cooking, but there logo was watermarked on every page of the deck. I've also read how they are building a really big and fast computer cluster to do ML. I don't know what they are doing on it, but they probably doing some R and some D. So, yeah, I have FB on my list of innovators.
Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of innovation going on at Facebook. That's guaranteed to happen when you have as much talent as they do.
Why isn't it translating over to their core business? Why do they have to continue to acquire companies (e.g., Oculus) to have potential areas for growth?
It doesn't make any sense. They would have more significantly success if they simply took half of their engineers, organized them into teams of 3-4 people, and gave each team $1-2M in startup capital VC style. Let's say they can create 2.5K teams. This would cost them $2.5B - $5B, or about than one tenth of what they spent last year in stock repurchases.
I've been dabbling in AI recently, and I keep seeing FB's name appear all over the place. They were associated with some work that wrote human readable instructions on how to cook something- given only a list of ingredients. I have no idea why they are interested in cooking, but there logo was watermarked on every page of the deck. I've also read how they are building a really big and fast computer cluster to do ML. I don't know what they are doing on it, but they probably doing some R and some D.
This isn't relevant to the question you raise - but as an accounting matter - plenty of "keep the lights on" type engineering work is almost certainly identified as R&D in those figures. I suspect there is much smaller amount going to what most people would consider more transformative innovation or basic/applied research.
This seems like the perennial HN "I could build this app with 5 engineers" comment. Every visible FB feature (NewsFeed ranking, ads, Marketplace, ...) has a team, as well as less visible ones like Infra and Trust & Safety. Multiply that by all the different apps you've mentioned, and add people working on the new Metaverse, and 20-30K doesn't seem unreasonable.
>>If Facebook is successful not innovating, why would they want to hire innovators?
These companies have one cash cow business, and they want to hire the best people they can to keep the lights on. These people tend to go around selling their skills to other places who want the same.
That's pretty much all there is to it. Innovation isn't even the goal of middle management in any large people operation. If anything its the opposite, no body wants disruption in established order of things.
> They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.
I am starting to think this is a broader trend in human societies and is probably the primary failure mode of human enterprise more broadly.
People who aren't inclined to creative rational problem solving must still produce labors for the masters if they do not want to starve in the street like the examples we leave there to suffer publicly as a reminder of the cost of disobedience.
So, they obfuscate and manipulate the perception of competence and disenfranchise the creative rationalists to survive in the forced competition for artificially scarce basic necessities.
This evolves incrementally until there is no remaining economic activity except theft and fraud, the creative rationalists evacuate to the frontier, everyone else follows as things start sucking less over there, and the cycle begins anew.
There was an academic, Mercur Olsen, who had a point that a lot of human ills, be it capitalism, race riots, instability in the Byzantine Empire (and feudalism in general), et al, were mostly due to rent seeking behavior.
> In "traditional" companies, developers get work items assigned to them - most often JIRA tickets. These tickets are vetted by the product - or project - manager, and they have most key details to do the work. And they're expected to do just that. There's little need for questions unless it's about clarifying a detail in the ticket.
> Join a "SV-like" company, and you'll see little of this. There are projects, and there are program managers and engineering managers. But for the most part, engineers are expected (and encouraged!) to figure out the "how" of the work, including making larger decisions. In some places, each project would have an engineer leading it, who facilitates breaking up the work. At other places, engineering managers or senior engineers could do this work. Regardless of how it's done, all engineers are incentivized to look at the big picture, to unblock themselves, and to solve any problem they see.
> Engineers taking initiative is something "SV-like" companies celebrate. It's common to see services and features built that engineers suggested or have teams spend dedicated time paying off tech debt that people on the team advocated for. And it is uncommon for managers to tell engineers what exactly to do, to break down their work into small chunks or to micromanage them. People self manage.
> The expectation from developers at traditional companies is to complete assigned work. At SV-like companies, it's to solve problems that the business has. This is a huge difference. It impacts the day-to-day life of any engineer.
> Sounds like you're working at a more traditional company then:
Yes and I apparently always have, despite working for tech startups in several cases. Never thought that they would be considered "traditional", but they evidently are.
I've worked at both types of companies, and it's funny: People who have only worked in one style are surprised to learn the other style exists. I actually made a career switch out of engineering because I wanted to have more input into the product, rather than just sit at my desk getting showered with JIRA tickets. Of course, I switched out of engineering, and moved into a company with the other style--where the features were engineering-led. Just my luck.
Of course, there's always the definitional question of "what is traditional?" because you can obviously 'go back' to different time periods, and perhaps in one of them what you're suggesting was true. But in this case, we're talking about cutting-edge/high-prestige tech companies vs 'traditional' non-tech companies in a modern context.
Same here, I resigned recently from a company (nominally a startup) that behaves like a traditional company described here. After working in SV-like companies for 20 years, it was very difficult to be a leader in that environment, with heavy micromanagement and information filtering.
Yes, at a lot of companies (anecdotally 3/3 for me including a FANG) the developers are the main driver of the product development. Product managers help guide the process and directors set the cardinal direction, but the product innovation comes from the developers.
This has not been my experience. Everywhere I've worked (a bunch of different kinds of places now) has been hungry for people who can help out with the broader more ambiguous direction-setting and decision-making needs of the company, but most developers I've worked with are not very energized by this kind of work.
Talents, like perfect spouses, are incredibly hard to find but they are there in plain sight.
The founder has to be dogged - in fact - dedicate his life and time to finding these individuals. But what would drive a founder like that if it is not in his nature?
> They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.
My personal experience is that there leetcode prep decreases as you go 1 std. deviation beyond the 'median FANG employee' level of talent. [footnote 1] This doesn't matter for the absolute best [footnote 3], who comfortably hop over any generic interview filter and tend to be heavily scouted even before they step into an interview.
The rub comes with the almost-best (think 1-4 percentile) candidates that that I know. (Many) Almost best candidates are busy working on their primary projects and end up insufficiently prepared for leetcode style interviews. A bunch of these brilliant engineers are falling through the cracks. (into slightly less prestigious jobs, but still)
This gets amplified once they join a job. They rise up the ranks fast, owing to their talent. But they're doing too much to find time for interview prep. 'Senior' interviews can be a difficult nut to crack, because they still use extreme leetcode style interviews when the interviewee has not used any of it in the last few years on the job. I find that such people only switch jobs when they are forced to; either by bad management or life circumstances.
Such people excel at projects, take-home assignments, system design interviews, SME domain interviews and any skill that is relevant to everyday job work. But, these are usually the final or pen-ultimate round. By that point, the decision is already made. Additionally, as long as leetcode interviews are the norm, there is no option between preparing for practical interviews vs leetcode interviews. So without consensus movement, the 'fix' would exacerbate the problem of time constrainted near-best performers vs stagnating [footnote 2] median performers.
[footnote 1] : I am beginning to see the utility in 'not so impressive 95th percentile' as a useful yardstick in discussions. Bugger, you got me.
[footnote 2] : That's not to say that those who excel at leetcode are stagnating median performers. Not a symmetric analogy.
[footnote 3] : think smartest kid in a top CS program, multiple standard deviations beyond
