It's true, but prepping for a typical senior+ onsite loop in big tech still requires weeks of grinding leetcode, re-learning the latest system interview questions and the system interview answer framework, refreshing and rehearsing STAR stories, studying the company and its unique quirks that you're expected to know to pass the culture filter, remembering how to do all of this speedrun-style since you only get 40ish minutes per session, etc.

While that knowledge is more reusable across onsites, it's likely even more work than doing real or pretend-work for the company for a couple of days.

> When candidates get to walk away with something of lasting value that they can keep forever

I'm curious why them getting rejected from the position, even with the work sample they can carry away with them, wouldn't be still interpreted as a negative from future employers. "The other co passed on them, am I the fool for thinking they're good?" type of herd mentality which is often unavoidable.

Won't that "work sample guest book" be treated as the list of all companies that rejected you, a net negative for your personal brand you're projecting?

> (Me paraphrasing what Steve was implying) Take-homes are impacted by AI one-shotting them for candidates

I've been pleasantly surprised by how much you can glean from having the candidate upload their conversation log with the coding agent for whatever take-home you give them.

You mention this approach gobbling up a bunch of extra disk space as a consequence of the tradeoffs. Have you considered using APFS cloning on macOS to reduce some of that burden, or is that too tiny of an optimization to be worth it at this point?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050911

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For example, if you're feeling comfortable and handsomely compensated at your current job, and you have the sense of security that you'll keep being hired forever, why would you burn the midnight oil and go the extra mile? Is your lifestyle going to change at all if you get to that next level? You might work longer hours, experience more anxiety and stress, and get barely any upside in return.

My hunch is that the human brain is efficient. It won't make you work any harder than you need to if you have obtained the thing you already want.

Maybe the real question here is whether you truly desire to be this aspirational high-performer, or if that's an idea you're romanticizing, something you feel you should aspire to, but you don't genuinely crave it. You end up fighting between the idealized you and the practical you. Which may explain why you're burning out and losing steam eventually, you can only force yourself to do something you don't feel like doing for so long before the body rebels.

I talk about that a bunch in https://www.kuril.in/blog/hiring-telling-your-companys-story... . I agree, finding your niche and doubling-down on it is a solid move.

At the same time, I think there's a limit to how great someone can get even with a lot of experience. We see that with sports, there's probably a similar limit to cognitive activities too.

You can probably get the average, already smart person, to be a pretty good 8/10 on just about anything, be that music, math, writing, coding. But there are levels beyond that may require natural wiring that most of us just aren't born with. An extreme example of course, but there's no amount of experience I can acquire to get to a von Neumann level of genius, but fortunately we don't need that to build business web apps.

And yes, many candidates struggle with performing under the totally unnatural pressure of an interview, so you can cater to them with something like the github project review. Then you end up potentially filtering out people without a rich body of work that can be easily reviewed, which is a trade-off. Actually something I've been meaning to write about, I always say that there's no way to please everybody with an interview funnel. Someone perfectly fine will be filtered out, or turned off, by any of the approaches you choose.

You just need to choose which false negatives you will be ok with.

Do you find that in the tarpit scenario they will typically have a work history hinting at these quirks?

1. Having FAANG-level budgets to hire vs three packs of ramen and a spool of string at the average startup makes it so that you have to learn how to spelunk through less obvious talent, you're looking at very different pools of potential hires.

2. This is written with the first-time YC-style startup CTO in mind who might be in their early 20s and might have never had to interview a single person until that point. I remember none of this being obvious to me the first time around, and I'm still refining my thinking all the time as the projects and markets change

I would extend that even further, I'm a fan of the idea that you should thoroughly vet the founders for excellence if you want to maximize your chances of ending up at a great startup. Not just your eng manager and peers.

Like with your "A player" engineers example, founders need to be exceptional if they want to attract great talent to work for them. So if you're pretty unimpressed with them as you're getting to know the company, the likelihood that the team they hired makes up for that deficiency is very low, and you'll end up around non-A players.

And yeah, high agency is really trendy at this moment in the startup sphere, but hunger is not talked about enough IMO. Maybe because it's too obvious to be even worth mentioning.