People are completing 500+ problems on leetcode before heading into interviews at google. Don't believe me? Go read the teamblind forums. People might spend six months studying, after which they pass a bunch of interviews and get good comp. Getting just one offer from a FAANG company often doesnt pay well enough, you need multiple competing ones.
If you think this has anything to do with incompetent people complaining, then you arent reading into the situation.
I will add that one can pass these interviews without extensive preparation, but it makes it alot harder when those around you are willing to spend ridiculous amounts of time studying.
Then its working. Big companies love it when people spend time studying for their interview process. It shows commitment and means that person will feel like they "earned" that job, and should stay longer.
This reduces churn, which is the thing they screening out the most.
To the big tech companies, this isnt a problem, its a sign of success.
Think how whiny this sounds to any law firm/medical practice. People spend years studying/preparing/working for free to get an internship. And yet, most software devs are still payed better.
Lol doctors change jobs and get jobs with relative ease compared to us software engineers. They go work part time at this clinic or that clinic quite frequently.
When I studied for my google interview back in 2011 I learned tons of new things which I used professionally at google and beyond. But I’ll concede that it was before leetcode (although i did casually compete on topcoder just for fun) so I mainly read up on areas where I knew I had blind spots.
I'm imagining it's going to bite these people on the backend later in life when they sacrificed everything for their careers and potentially missed other major life milestones: cultivating a relationship, starting a family, etc. I know not everyone spends 6 months getting into Google, but there are so many other companies that will take you without 6 months of preparation. If career is the only thing that gives you meaning in life, sure, but I'd rather not put all my eggs in one basket.
I used to think that until I heard of people with far less experience than me getting paid $400k total comp at these places because they can ace the interview and get competing options. That's worth putting 6 months of work in.
Yeah, once you're in, it's cushy, for sure. But that's not the full story. You're likely going to have to move to the bay area to make $400k kind of money. Are you willing to forego living near family, friends? Plenty of people do, but time gets more valuable when you have less of it left.
For one thing 6 months is definitely the high end of prep time. Even so, spending your evenings studying for one 6 month period in no way precludes you from ever dating or marrying or having children.
This is anecdotal, but most of the people I know at Google and other FAANGs did not spend that much time preparing for their interviews, if they even bothered to prepare at all...
Maybe some people do that - I didn't do a single interview question prepping for a Google interview; just read through the topics they suggested reviewing, looked up the concepts I hadn't seen before, and did the interviews.
having just recently (in the last 2 weeks) completed >100 problems on leetcode i can affirmatively tell you that it's not actually that difficult to game this system. i read elements of programming interviews (took about a month of a couple of hours a day) and then just blitzgrieged leetcode. this was all in prep for a FAANG internship tech screen i had yesterday. it went well (not perfect but well).
but it is true that these questions bear no resemblance to software engineering so it does feel silly going through the process.
The people complaining are usually the ones who can't just prep for algorithmic interviews with a couple hours a day of effort for a month.
Which makes the algorithmic interview a relatively good filter - ability to learn something difficult quickly is a very important skill at high performance software companies.
When you're paying someone to solve problems for 40 hours a week, assessing them based off if they're willing to do that in their free time seems naive. It's surely a safe option, but you'll miss a ton of qualified talent, and potentially not grow fast enough because of your hyper-idealistic expectations for what it means to be a software engineer.
Speaking as a parent, the idea of having “a couple hours of free time per day for a month” to learn difficult new material is laughable, and it has nothing to do with intellectual ability.
Then try 1 hour every day for 3 months, or 1 hour every 2 days for 6 months, or whatever you can fit into your schedule. Do you really have no time at all after your kid(s) go to sleep? I prepared and interviewed with a 1 year old at home, it was challenging but doable. Your situation might be more complex than mine though, I wouldn't know.
How about taking a few days off to prepare for interviews?
I mean, you're going to spend 4-5 hours per day for each of your onsite interviews (plus an hour or two each for recruiter calls, phone screens, etc.), so if you have zero free time, interview prep is probably the least of your problems...
If you think this has anything to do with incompetent people complaining, then you arent reading into the situation.
I will add that one can pass these interviews without extensive preparation, but it makes it alot harder when those around you are willing to spend ridiculous amounts of time studying.