Hiring at Big Tech (and elsewhere)

Current state of the interview bar, the cheating problem, and the formats that actually work at smaller scale.

The current bar

Junior-level big tech interviews are still mostly DSA. Anecdotally people say it's getting harder, but from those who pass, US difficulty is roughly unchanged 47:54
Difficulty varies strongly by country — in India it's "leak code hards and super hards" 48:18

5–6 years of mostly remote interviews spawned interview-cheating tools; Google has now pretty much returned to on-sites — whiteboard or laptop, but in person with someone watching, so "you're probably not going to be able to cheat your way through that" 48:37, 48:58

Any standardized, scalable process can be gamed; the best signal is watching someone actually work (like an internship) 49:18
Many small companies run trial periods — a few days to a couple of months — though that's infeasible for candidates who already have jobs 49:43, 50:03
Navi's own hiring: work samples similar to the real job plus conversation. "I don't even care about what answer they give me… I care about why did they say that" — can they defend trade-offs, or are they regurgitating a ChatGPT answer? 50:03, 50:27
This format doesn't scale to big tech size — which is why he doesn't expect big tech to adopt it 51:04
Open-source companies mostly skip the problem: they hire proven contributors (e.g. Dax DMing open-source contributors to work on opencode) — "if you're doing things in public people can get a pretty good understanding of how you work" 51:27, 51:50