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Destroy all hiring processes

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81–90 of 104 posts

Re: Destroy all hiring processes

#81

Post by eveningcoffee »

plonh wrote: post #77
eveningcoffee wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Google asks questions like pots of gold[1] where it's really impossible to solve it on a whiteboard if it's your first time seeing the problem. * Ok, so here is an anecdotal sample. I have not seen this problem before. After reading the problem description I tried one round of the game on the paper (actually in the text editor) to get the feeling of the game play and then it took me about few minutes to come up wit…

Do you allow linear space?

Nope. Constant space.

But there is a catch that is very likely not obvious here. All the numbers in the array are (were) unique (and the zero was not present).

Re: Destroy all hiring processes

#82

Post by sokoloff »

1stranger wrote: post #55
thaumasiotes wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently interviewed with a company that had advertised (in my paraphrase) "we've noticed that a lot of perfectly good developers do poorly in interviews for reasons that appear to be unrelated to job performance. So you can now interview with us by completing a project on your own time, and during the interview we'll talk about that". My project was a regex matcher. I ended up getting the following feedback: > We…

Wow, that really sucks. So they basically took the old process and just added more to it.

Disagree (on the second part). Rather than giving you the equivalent of a walk-up pop quiz on a random topic, they are giving you followup questions and discussions on code that the candidate wrote recently.

That seems quite a bit more representative of regular work than a pop quiz. Yes, you still need to be able to talk live about code with other developers. That's unchanged and shouldn't change, IMO.

Re: Destroy all hiring processes

#83

Post by collyw »

davnicwil wrote: post #40
dx211 wrote: post #23

A couple of years back, I was hiring some vendor developers for my team, and since I had some flexibility in the interviews that wouldn't be allowed for full-time employees, I tried an experiment: For one of the vendor candidates, I told him a day ahead of time that I'd be asking him to implement System.Collections.Hashtable in C#, with behavior equivalent to the one in .Net. The day of the interview came, and he whi…

Brilliantly put. When I'm giving interviews I really like it when a candidate posed with a fairly complicated problem or design question pauses and actually thinks, then says something like "..well, I don't really know, I'd probably want to think about it more, but here's an idea" before putting forward their likely non-optimal but totally plausible and on-the-right-track design or solution that they thought of on th…

Just had an interview this morning. To almost all of the "how would you go about this" type questions, my answer was well, it depends on the data type / volume / customer needs.

Re: Destroy all hiring processes

#84

Post by MCRed »

xacaxulu wrote: post #48
Mithaldu wrote: post #2

> even if we don’t have a sense of ethics we do have a problem of numbers, and more desks and seats and spots than people to fill them I get this a lot, but it is amazingly self-inflicted. Almost all of the random job offers i seem to be getting from people i don't know are from clients who: - underpay - demand on-site only - don't even look at the copious provided code samples, only at the CV The reason for that is…

>> demand onsite only!! The companies making the most demands usually offer the least. My favorite new flavor is recruiters saying "well for remote the pay rate is lower" to which I answer, "will I be doing less work in that case?".

Interesting... as I have taken to giving the random LinkedIn recruiters two rates-- one an on site rate and one a remote rate. The remote rate is my normal rate, which is lower than the on-site rate which has a healthy have-to-go-into-an-office premium.

When you couple that with the higher productivity of remote work, the smart employer will let me work remotely (at least most of the time.)

Re: Destroy all hiring processes

#85

Post by Mithaldu »

MCRed wrote: post #84
xacaxulu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> demand onsite only!! The companies making the most demands usually offer the least. My favorite new flavor is recruiters saying "well for remote the pay rate is lower" to which I answer, "will I be doing less work in that case?".

Interesting... as I have taken to giving the random LinkedIn recruiters two rates-- one an on site rate and one a remote rate. The remote rate is my normal rate, which is lower than the on-site rate which has a healthy have-to-go-into-an-office premium. When you couple that with the higher productivity of remote work, the smart employer will let me work remotely (at least most of the time.)

Same here, i quote them my current rate for remote work, and for on-site work they get a markup.

Re: Destroy all hiring processes

#86

Post by Mithaldu »

plonh wrote: post #75
IndianAstronaut wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently interviewed at Facebook and they seem to want the shoot from the hip type person who is extremely confident (borderline arrogant) about their answers. Theh drill and drill amd expect rapid fire responses.

That may be true for the person who interviewed you, but that isn't any sort of official standard

Reviews at a company not following any kind of standard is a red flag in itself.

Re: Destroy all hiring processes

#87

Post by robodale »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #49
dx211 wrote: post #23

A couple of years back, I was hiring some vendor developers for my team, and since I had some flexibility in the interviews that wouldn't be allowed for full-time employees, I tried an experiment: For one of the vendor candidates, I told him a day ahead of time that I'd be asking him to implement System.Collections.Hashtable in C#, with behavior equivalent to the one in .Net. The day of the interview came, and he whi…

I recently interviewed with a company that had advertised (in my paraphrase) "we've noticed that a lot of perfectly good developers do poorly in interviews for reasons that appear to be unrelated to job performance. So you can now interview with us by completing a project on your own time, and during the interview we'll talk about that". My project was a regex matcher. I ended up getting the following feedback: > We…

Wow, what the f_ck kind of person do they want? You showed when you can code, build a complex application that actually does something valuable. You know, understand, and can use deeper level stuff.

I get that they and every other business wants to find a team of wunderkinds that can plug right into their repo and get to work. That's the ideal.

My advice - don't sweat it.

Re: Destroy all hiring processes

#88

Post by robodale »

collyw wrote: post #83
davnicwil wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brilliantly put. When I'm giving interviews I really like it when a candidate posed with a fairly complicated problem or design question pauses and actually thinks, then says something like "..well, I don't really know, I'd probably want to think about it more, but here's an idea" before putting forward their likely non-optimal but totally plausible and on-the-right-track design or solution that they thought of on th…

Just had an interview this morning. To almost all of the "how would you go about this" type questions, my answer was well, it depends on the data type / volume / customer needs.

Your response - totally. Similar experience: I was asked in a technical interview to use the "correct" collection class given the (very academic) sorting problem. I responded with "there is no right answer, so my answer will be the simplest one". According to them that was wrong. The "right" answer was the best performing scenario (although more complex of a solution).

So, again. "It depends".

Re: Destroy all hiring processes

#89

Post by [deleted] »

eveningcoffee wrote: post #70
msoad wrote: post #16

I'm working on open source stuff for two years now. Everything I do is public for everyone to see. Including my responses to bug reports and design documents. Yet I get the same algo/ds puzzle questions that you should've solved before in order to solve it in an interview setup. Google reached to me and said based on my profile I can skip the phone interview but I'm so afraid of the interview that I postponed it mult…

* Google asks questions like pots of gold[1] where it's really impossible to solve it on a whiteboard if it's your first time seeing the problem. * Ok, so here is an anecdotal sample. I have not seen this problem before. After reading the problem description I tried one round of the game on the paper (actually in the text editor) to get the feeling of the game play and then it took me about few minutes to come up wit…

[deleted]

Re: Destroy all hiring processes

#90

Post by d23 »

Mithaldu wrote: post #86
plonh wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be true for the person who interviewed you, but that isn't any sort of official standard

Reviews at a company not following any kind of standard is a red flag in itself.

And if they do follow too many standards, it's a red flag. Or if they follow a mix of standards and non-standards. Big red flag there. If the person is wearing nice shoes, definitely a red flag. But you don't want them to be too normal, because that could be a red flag also.

This hypersensitivity goes in both directions. One company may be worse than another at hiring, despite having an equal or better engineering department. Sometimes, you might just get bad luck. Your interviewer might not have had their coffee that day. Or their dog may have just died. Or you may get a guy who just proposed to his now-wife and is having the best day of his life. Giving a reasonable benefit-of-doubt mixed with a bit of critical thinking is probably the way to go, rather than resorting to hard and fast rules that will end up just making you conclude no company is good enough for you.

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