I think the root of the problem is actually an org design problem.
Big companies want consistency in their process and their hires. There's a lot of benefits if you can create a Google type hiring pipeline you're just constantly interviewing candidates and you worry about where they go once they've passed the interview, like:
- Since all candidates at the same level are passing essentially the same interview you can move people from team to team easier. You reduce the risk of a team with lower standards causing you problems when their engineers are moved to other places in the company. You know that most of your hires have a certain consistency in their skills. This makes things like reorgs a lot easier.
- Your recruiters and hiring managers save time because in most cases they don't need to meet to set up unique hiring pipelines per team. You just have one big hiring pipeline and teams with open spots only step in at the last minute.
- You reduce the risk of being sued for bias or discrimination. If interviewers are just pulling from a bank of questions that are somewhat equal it's hard for a candidate to make a case that they were singled out and given a tougher question because of their identity.
The problem with that is that consistency breeds predictability. The only way to get a big pool of interview questions that are about the same difficulty is by repeating the same patterns between questions. Once candidates know those patterns, candidates can just focus their studying on that and the interview just boils down to pattern matching.
Big companies want consistency in their process and their hires. There's a lot of benefits if you can create a Google type hiring pipeline you're just constantly interviewing candidates and you worry about where they go once they've passed the interview, like:
- Since all candidates at the same level are passing essentially the same interview you can move people from team to team easier. You reduce the risk of a team with lower standards causing you problems when their engineers are moved to other places in the company. You know that most of your hires have a certain consistency in their skills. This makes things like reorgs a lot easier.
- Your recruiters and hiring managers save time because in most cases they don't need to meet to set up unique hiring pipelines per team. You just have one big hiring pipeline and teams with open spots only step in at the last minute.
- You reduce the risk of being sued for bias or discrimination. If interviewers are just pulling from a bank of questions that are somewhat equal it's hard for a candidate to make a case that they were singled out and given a tougher question because of their identity.
The problem with that is that consistency breeds predictability. The only way to get a big pool of interview questions that are about the same difficulty is by repeating the same patterns between questions. Once candidates know those patterns, candidates can just focus their studying on that and the interview just boils down to pattern matching.