The asymmetric time investment required from candidates is what bothers me the most about these coding challenges.
My personal experience has been that it's a lopsided process with the candidate putting in hours of unpaid work and the company spending one, maybe two engineering hours if we're being generous, reviewing the submission.
If the reviewer decides to reject the challenge, the loop closes, HR sends a nice e-mail, and the candidate has nothing to show for it.
And my point is that behind what you think is an altruistic contribution to open source, there is almost always a company with an economic incentive funding the engineer working on the project.
I'm a maintainer for an Apache project. My company pays me to maintain the project because we use it internally. If they did not pay me to maintain it, I would not be doing it. I imagine I'm in a similar spot as many other open source maintainers.
Fairly recent PhD graduate here (graduated last year). My observations are that the skills required to do a PhD are orthogonal to the skills required to pass FAANG interviews and, more importantly, to being a good software engineer.
I don't dispute you can make a higher salary than a faculty member, even without working at a FAANG, but having a PhD won't automatically make you eligible to get such a job.
Interesting observation. I was under the impression that getting hired into research groups at a FAANG was a different process than getting hired as a SWE, and that you could bypass some of the whiteboard "find all sub matrices with matching determinants in an NxM matrix of arbitrary size" style questions.
Those jobs, the SWE jobs, there's really no degree that will allow you to skip that gauntlet. But I think there might be a different hiring process for PhDs or faculty leaving academia to work in research labs.
I don't really know, though, just something I heard/read somewhere.
Just one POV, but it does confirm that PhD graduates do have to go through the same kind of coding exercises (at google) as anyone else. It is worth noting that this is the case if you're applying for SWE positions, where a PhD might not really confer that much of an advantage. Again, I'm not sure if this would be the case if you were, say, getting hired as an AI researcher for a lab.
So, this link sheds some light, thought I still don't know about research positions specifically.
I do know someone who ended up at IBM Research from my lab. He was collaborating with them for his research before he graduated so I'm not sure if he even had to interview after finishing.
For what it's worth, though I've never particularly sought out a research position in industry, I haven't really come across too many listings which leads me to believe the positions are few and far in between.
There is some difference in research scientist hiring, both in the method & the criteria. But as I said, these roles are very competitive, and most PhD holders in FAANG companies will be in SWE roles.
I went to school at SUNY Binghamton which is right next door to Endicott, NY, founding place of IBM. Super interesting that your father was around there during the town's heyday.
After the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company and IBM packed up and left, the town collapsed on itself and hasn't been able to recover since. It's crazy to think years ago, people migrated from California to upstate NY to work. OP if he ever told you about his time there, I'd love to hear about it.
My personal experience has been that it's a lopsided process with the candidate putting in hours of unpaid work and the company spending one, maybe two engineering hours if we're being generous, reviewing the submission.
If the reviewer decides to reject the challenge, the loop closes, HR sends a nice e-mail, and the candidate has nothing to show for it.