Yes, it is silly that you have to train for an interview for months to land a SWE position at a top company. However, until someone comes up with a less gameable system or a magic wand that stack ranks applicants, then I don't see a viable alternative :\

As someone who gives a lot of interviews, I'd love a better way to assess a candidates ability that is less gameable, but we haven't found one yet.

Google is special in that they seem to have a generic SWE interview unrelated to the candidate's actual specialization. So everyone at Google must be algorithms/systems people, even if they focus on say, HCI or PL or whatever. For junior people, I guess that's fine, for senior people they are obviously going to bias the pool (which explains how Google in general can be so great at A and not so great at B).

Other companies are much more specific in their interviews...you actually get a specific JD with expected skills that you hope will form the basis of your interview, and not all JDs require you to be a distributed systems/algorithm wiz.

> until someone comes up with a less gameable system or a magic wand that stack ranks applicants, then I don't see a viable alternative

This is exactly the concept of an IQ test, right down to the stack ranking.

They're pretty well understood by now, and they take less than a day, which compares pretty favorably to "months".

Isn't it illegal to hire people based on IQ in the US?

It is presumptively discriminatory unless you do a formal study documenting that high-IQ employees perform better than low-IQ employees. PG&E and the NFL use IQ tests in hiring.

Low-effort correction: I may or may not have been thinking of GE when I said PG&E.

I just paid program with people on the actual work we have that day. The only way to game that is to become great at what you'd do once you got the job.