rdelval's comments

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.

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.

According to Glassdoor, Facebook research candidates are given the typical interview questions as part of the process: https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Facebook-Research-Scient...

Same at Google: https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Research-Scientis...

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.

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.

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.