Programmer distillation. Companies need to admit that only trying to hire a single type of person is not going to work. It's just like with petroleum: there's nothing wrong with the other products you get from the mix. You just have to appreciate what there is and make the most of it.
I bet you're quite good at something (perhaps multiple things), but they don't value it. Their loss. I'm glad you found something that works for you.
> Companies need to admit that only trying to hire a single type of person is not going to work.
Why? It's not so clear to me that it's not working right now. These companies seem to be doing completely fine.
If hiring programmers who aren't good at programming puzzles is a competitive edge, I would expect to see other companies hiring these programmers and succeeding.
It seems more likely to me that there is (at most) a very marginal loss from hiring this way. It's not the fairest way to hire, it's not the most equitable way to hire but the evidence doesn't suggest to me that it's not working for these companies.
"If hiring programmers who aren't good at programming puzzles is a competitive edge, I would expect to see other companies hiring these programmers and succeeding."
You're begging the question. Other companies do hire people who are excluded by a certain class of employer, and that's exactly why some get outraged by the types of quizzes that are used. The difference between the standards creates cognitive dissonance over one's ability and status. It's effectively a caste system, and it involves persistent blind spots about discrimination, whether towards protected classes or not.
I can't pass an Amazon or Google phone screen - both of them invited me to try, and they then made me feel very out of place. I'm not a software engineer per se and I didn't get my CS degree from a top school. Yet I have worked for a company that Google outsources important work to, proving I can do useful things that Google needs done and maybe isn't even able to do in house.
I don't go around raging against Google hiring who they want, partly because I'm probably better off not working there anyway. But I understand where people are coming from when they do get angry, even if it is the sign of an imperfect character.
From an employers point of view, they just want to grab the employees that are suitable for their goals and jettison the others. But from a potential employee's perspective, it seems like if I'm not good for one job at a company, I should be good for another. Rejection seems unreasonably total. If, by analogy, you deal in second hand cars, it's a reasonable business model to buy virtually any car so long as the price is right and you know who to sell it to. But not all businesses are run like that of course. It aggravates people that there is a narrow vision for who is useful.
> If, by analogy, you deal in second hand cars, it's a reasonable business model to buy virtually any car so long as the price is right and you know who to sell it to.a
Very good analogy. And true. My dad used to own a used car dealership back in the day. He bought pretty much anything he could get for a good price that was in decent shape. If he only bought cars that were in perfect shape, he'd have pretty much no cars on his lot.
And I've worked for companies whose bosses are so damn picky about who they hire that they would go without hiring a single person even after conducting hundreds of interviews themselves over six months, as the rest of us were struggling to keep up with the workload.
It got so bad one time the higher ups eventually had a recruiter just pick a few people and said "Here, these are your new employees. Get them up to speed." and he just had to accept it.
Been there. At my actual job (a small IT firm in Europe), my boss spent almost half a year searching for somebody to hire. All the times it was like "they are too old", or "don't know enough", or just for a different POV.
In the meantime, collegues are leaving the gig, making my level of stress go up.
It's really hard to argue with money printing machines that anything they're doing now is wrong. I don't even want to bother much myself if I can help it... Sure, maybe if they changed some things they could print money a tiny bit faster, or set themselves up to survive the next phase of the economy in some years when it's no longer so easy to print money (lots of companies die over ~15 years, which also corresponds to the global economy's doubling rate...). But also any change has an element of risk, so the money printing could slow down or put it in a worse long-term position. When something is working great right now, you're reasonably going to be more risk-adverse about changing things.
We do see other companies hiring differently, and being rewarded in the market, in part, for it. Most of the time it's a marginal reward. Sometimes though we get a new FAANG, staffed by people who wouldn't have made it through FAANG's ringers.
What we're probably seeing is that the FAANG's have acquired so much fame and wealth that they can afford an enormous false negative rate in hiring that would sink a smaller company.
Its the difference between fracking the shale for every precious drop because that's all you've got where you are vs. being able to just sink a short pipe in the ground and stick the sweet crude that gushes out into barrels.
How many people have gone through the full regiment of training for interviews described by the original linked author and failed at every major tech company?
I bet you're quite good at something (perhaps multiple things), but they don't value it. Their loss. I'm glad you found something that works for you.