In 2015, Max Howell, the mind behind Homebrew, a widely acclaimed package manager for macOS and Linux, faced rejection from Google during his job application. Google employees use MacBooks and Homebrew helps developers save hundreds of hours of time, besides boosting productivity.

However, despite Homebrew’s evident impact, Google’s rigorous interview process, known for its challenging data structures and algorithms problems, concluded that Howell, a highly skilled engineer, didn’t meet their standards.

On the other hand, according to recent reports, Meta has been adopting an unconventional hiring process to stay ahead in the AI race. The company has been hiring candidates without interviewing them while also increasing the compensation for employees who threaten to leave. 

A rush for hiring talent, but not without AI

According to internal reports, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has sent emails to Google DeepMind researchers in a bid to hire them. This is a result of the company’s push for generative AI, leading it to investing heavily in that direction. Many of the company’s researchers have left for rivals such as OpenAI and DeepMind, while some have started their own companies, such as Mistral. 

Zuckerberg is reportedly actively intervening in the hiring process for AI talent at the company, which according to employees is not something he usually does. However, Meta still faces hurdles in hiring as the salaries at the company are not as high as OpenAI, Microsoft, or Google. 

Meanwhile Nadella is playing Poke-AI-mon, and 5D chess and gathering the top AI talents in the world. After OpenAI and Sam Altman, he has roped in Mustafa Suleyman to lead Microsoft AI. Possibly, AI is changing how big-tech employees are getting hired. 

Simultaneously, Owen Rubel weighed in his thoughts about the hiring process at Google. Rubel said he is one of the original team members of the Amazon team who consulted AWS team for creating ‘API Chaining’ and Google has rejected him several times after calling for interview. “Google rejects a lot of people because they don’t fit into their ‘box’” he said. 

James Cook replied to this with “too big to fail”, a comment on Google’s rigorous hiring process. Bob Freitas, who applied for Google twice, said that they expect you to prepare for topics within a very tiny time frame, which he said is next to impossible. 

“In the interview process, it was really just a bunch of ‘toy’ problems that only tested your familiarity with those toy problems,” he explained. “But more importantly, the ‘problems’ had nothing to do with the actual job and were just speculative and academic.”

The need for mediocre talent in big-tech

The problem with the big-tech is they do not really want to hire real world business problem solvers, but instead people who have good memorisation skills and enjoy solving theoretical problems. But that too for a very short period of time.

The same is the case with Amazon. Another engineer says that Amazon intentionally pushes away engineers every two years. “Their philosophy is: if you’re smart, you’ll find another job in two years with Apple or Meta. If you’re mediocre you’ll just shrink due to over-the-top targets and leave on your own or you’ll eventually be laid off,” explained Wallace Ly. 

“The OG Amazon team is long gone I would think. Most young SWE or SDE there spend only two years there and then go join a startup or have a slower life at Meta,” he further explained. Once something is created by experts, these big-tech hire low- or mid-level developers just to support and maintain the architecture, which helps them in saving costs. 

When it comes to Microsoft, Oscar Itaba narrates his story of applying at the company three years ago with a five-stage interview process for a key role. “I solved the LeetCode algorithm…at the system design stage. I was asked to design a LinkedIn post and comment architecture,” he narrated how after the 5th stage they moved his resume to another team to start another interview afresh. 

This made him never apply for such job roles again. 

Alex Chiou, who shared Howell’s experience back from 2015, said that an engineer doesn’t need to put up with this big-tech hiring process anymore. There are a lot of smaller companies that require better talent to build from scratch, and also pay well. 

“Bad times for big tech is a great time for startups that you’ll hear about five years from now,” said Vinod Khosla. Though big tech is also allocating most of its funds for AI projects, employees want to get to it faster, and also get a bigger payout after they succeed – as opposed to mere salaries when the hiring process is this bad.

[Update 27th March, 2024: Designation of Owen Rubel has been updated]