Deep data dives

Does communication matter in technical interviews? We looked at over 100K interviews to find out.

By / May 20, 2022

The interviewing.io platform has hosted and collected feedback from over 100K technical interviews, split between mock interviews and real ones. It’s generally accepted that to pass a technical interview, you have to not only come up with a solution to the problem (or at least make good headway), but you also have to do a good job of articulating your thoughts, explaining to your interviewer what you’re doing as you’re doing it, and coherently discussing tradeoffs and concepts like time and space complexity. But how important is communication in technical interviews, really? We looked at the data, and it turns out that talk is cheap. Read on to find out how and why.

We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work. Here are the results.

By / March 31, 2022

At interviewing.io, we’ve hosted over 100K technical interviews, split between mock interviews and real ones. As it happens, we know where our users currently work – they tell us that when they sign up. Given that we have this data AND given that we know how well people do in their interviews, we thought it would be interesting to see which companies’ engineers are especially good at technical interviews. Our resulting top ten lists are in this post!

How do I know if I’m ready to interview at FAANG?

By / July 27, 2021

Recently, someone asked us how you know you’re ready to succeed in a Facebook/Amazon/Apple/Netflix/Google (FAANG) interview. It’s an interesting question, and one I’m sure many of you job seekers out there are wondering. Internally, we have our own beliefs, but we wanted to see if we could answer this question more objectively. So we set off on a journey to acquire data to try answering it.

The Eng Hiring Bar: What the hell is it?

By / January 14, 2021

Recursive Cactus has been working as a full-stack engineer at a well-known tech company for the past 5 years, but he’s now considering a career move. Over the past 6 months, Recursive Cactus (that’s his anonymous handle on interviewing.io) has been preparing himself to succeed in future interviews, dedicating as much as 20-30 hours/week plowing through LeetCode exercises, digesting algorithms textbooks, and of course, practicing interviews on our platform to benchmark his progress. Recursive Cactus’s typical weekday schedule Time Activity 6:30am – 7:00am Wake up 7:00am – 7:30am Meditate 7:30am – 9:30am Practice algorithmic questions 9:30am – 10:00am Commute to work 10:00am – 6:30pm Work 6:30pm – 7:00pm Commute from work 7:00pm – 7:30pm Hang …

The Eng Hiring Bar: What the hell is it? Read more »

No engineer has ever sued a company because of constructive post-interview feedback. So why don’t employers do it?

By / February 16, 2021

One of the things that sucks most about technical interviews is that they’re a black box—candidates (usually) get told whether they made it to the next round, but they’re rarely told why they got the outcome that they did. Lack of feedback, or feedback that doesn’t come right away, isn’t just frustrating to candidates. It’s bad for business. We did a whole study on this. It turns out that candidates chronically underrate and overrate their technical interview performance, like so: Where this finding starts to get actionable is that there’s a statistically significant relationship between whether people think they did well in an interview and whether they’d want to work with you. In other words, …

No engineer has ever sued a company because of constructive post-interview feedback. So why don’t employers do it? Read more »

We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in eng hiring.

By / February 25, 2021

If you say the words “there’s a pipeline problem” to explain why we’ve failed to make meaningful progress toward gender parity in software engineering, you probably won’t make many friends (or many hires). The pipeline problem argument goes something like this: “There aren’t enough qualified women out there, so it’s not our fault if we don’t hire them.” Many people don’t like this reductive line of thinking because it ignores the growing body of research that points to unwelcoming environments that drive underrepresented talent out of tech: STEM in early education being unfriendly to children from underrepresented backgrounds, lack of a level playing field and unequal access to quality STEM education (see this study on …

We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in eng hiring. Read more »

You probably don’t factor in engineering time when calculating cost per hire. Here’s why you really should.

By / January 14, 2021

Whether you’re a recruiter yourself or an engineer who’s involved in hiring, you’ve probably heard of the following two recruiting-related metrics: time to hire and cost per hire. Indeed, these are THE two metrics that any self-respecting recruiting team will track. Time to hire is important because it lets you plan — if a given role has historically taken 3 months to fill, you’re going to act differently when you need to fill it again than if it takes 2 weeks. And, traditionally, cost per hire has been a planning tool as well — if you’re setting recruiting budgets for next year and have a headcount in mind, seeing what recruiting spent last year is …

You probably don’t factor in engineering time when calculating cost per hire. Here’s why you really should. Read more »

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