A dead silent office
Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?
121–130 of 133 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?
#122I'm adding to my list "using ancient tech". Not because I think that orgs should always be on the new shiny, but to me using old tech is a yard stick for uninteresting and low-growth culture WRT software engineering; is there an interest in technology? Do the people there like to code for fun? Are they open to improvements in the way things are done? If I know that you're happy still using TFS, jQuery, ASP.NET Razor,…
Usually the response is “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” but the change process for fixing anything that actually is broken is so onerous that no one bothers.
Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?
#123The ones that come to mind: * If they are a small company who outsources any step of their interview process to another company. If you're only interviewing for a couple positions—people you will work with every single day—take the time to do it yourself. * If they are a startup that says they are looking for people who are interested in solving exciting problems . For some people, this is going to be an enticement,…
Outsourcing any part of the interview process for a small company is definitely one for me. Any hire is going to be absolutely critical and you’re going to let someone else make this decision?
My experience this is common for specialty knowledge the founders might not possess. They know enough to know they cannot assess, say, AI/ML or infrastructure, and seek interview support from an advisor.
Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?
#124I had one where the TL was on their laptop the whole time. They were prompted by their manager to ask me a question. They asked and immediately went back to typing while I was responding they didn't even acknowledge my response. I was offered the role but turned it down. The manager was furious. Why would I want to work with/for someone who doesn't have enough time or desire to show basic respect? Another time went f…
That would be frustrating to tell them your preferences and then be completely ignored. On the flip-side, there are some interviews that are specifically testing how you are at familiarizing yourself with a new-to-you framework or codebase. It might not have been the case here, but for example you can learn a lot about how a person learns and works if you give a skilled React developer a project in a framework that they are unfamiliar with, like Angular. Of course, documentation and other resources should be available during that interview as well.
Again, not sure if that’s what was happening in your case, and giving someone a different OS would only hamper them if they were unfamiliar with the environment. Personally I like the challenge of learning a new framework, so long as that’s the intention of the interviewer.
Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?
#125Screening questions to them:
- how many hours a week does a typical dev work?
- what source control do you use
- what ticket system do you use
- how long does a typical, at-desk incremental dev build take?
- do you have automated builds (CICD, Jenkins, pipelines, nightly build system, etc)?
Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?
#126Red Flags:
When one or more people on the interview panel behaves extremely unprofessionally. ie, ridicules the interviewee, or makes inappropriately offensive comments.
When the interviewer decides to give an interviewee they particularly like a tour of the premise and introduce them to other staff before they've even offered the person a job.
When there are heaps of relatives, or best/close friends within the management structure of the company.
Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?
#127Lots of people without degrees in data science (or statistics, or even computer science) in supervisory positions. Silly interview questions like “define multivariate” or “write python code to find factors” or “write SQL code to join tables”
These are all signs of an immature data science function- which predicts working on ill posed problems and a problematic business justification. If the people already there are mediocre it’s not a great place to join. A strong sign of that is if the interviewers don’t know enough to construct thoughtful questions about real, non trivial, issues from their work. There are too many people in data science who, sadly, are at this level.
Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently interviewed people for a couple positions where I work. We had to ask questions that got at a bunch of different skills, and at the end we were supposed to score their responses in a spreadsheet. It quickly became obvious to me that there was a flaw in the method: If the candidate didn't get a chance to answer all the questions, their score would be really low. This is through no fault of their own: they d…
or, you know, just explain there are 12 questions at the start, and each one gets a couple of minutes only
I’ve found standardized questions to be useless. I’ve found the best people by reading their cvs carefully. Then reading whatever published work they have. Then asking them to talk about that. If that goes well then I describe the work the team is doing and ask them their thoughts. If I really need validation I have a data problem I send them and ask them to send it back. (I don’t ask people to code in front of me - that’s ridiculous and tells me nothing) The standard problem Id ask was to figure out how to calculate something I describe only conceptually, and then give them a data set to do it on. Most mediocre so called data scientists will throw a bunch of Python libraries at the data and not even think about what was asked. This, sadly, is the state of my profession after 10 years of “boot camps “ and incursions from other disciplines.
Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it's either or, and you are most likely losing the best people by insisting. Maybe that's fine for you, but maybe not.
Yeah I mean.. I have nearly hired people before who turned out to be scammers, no coding skills at all. I need some kind of signal before turning off the recruiting pipeline, emailing a bunch of people "no thanks," and making a commitment. Sometimes strong referrals work but that might unfairly advantage some, can be gamed, and doesn't work at all for most junior devs without a work history. Shoot, even a strong hist…
I hear that. But I’ve been burnt by people who “coded live” real well and then couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything for months at work. IMO - any one who is going to be good will be good at coding. It’s not rocket science. Haha. Been around long enough to see language du jour change too. Python also isn’t the end all of languages (we’ve moved on to Julia where I work).
Can you think? Are you curious? Those are hard to distill in an interview and harder still in formulaic interviews.
Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?
#130Outside of a couple of phrases I consider clear-cut red flags (such as "we're a family here", "we work hard and play hard", etc.), what I'm really looking for is a bit squishier and not tied to particular phrases and such. Things that I think indicate a poor fit for me include places where it's expected that people work more than 40 hours per week (I have no problem doing that in unusual circumstances, but if it's pa…
> Immediate showstoppers are having an open office plan or hot-desking. Yes. Not just because it's an unpleasant environment (though it is), but it's a sign of major management cluelessness. "Wait: you're hiring me to think, and putting me in an environment that makes it harder for me to think? Um...okay." The other side of the coin is that there needs to be somewhere to hang out when you do* want company. It doesn't…
Hear hear!