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For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

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Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#81

Post by dmoy »

ktRolster wrote: post #73
berdario wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting an interview is not all that hard these days, you can get an interview with google/facebook ect pretty easily. Maybe... I got contacted by 2 google recruiters in 2 separate instances. I replied to them, but I never heard back. I would've probably failed at the whiteboard, but I never even got a chance to attempt the interview.

Yeah, that just happened to me this week. I'm sitting here wondering what I said wrong in my reply email. Was I not enthusiastic enough? What was it?

You should get a reply; it is possible the recruiter is no longer working there, or something else. Or maybe they're just being slow.

Some more info: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Google-recruiting-take-as-lon...

Also down with kt, long live cj. :(

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#82

Post by sokoloff »

NTDF9 wrote: post #61
true_religion wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'excuse' that there are better or equally qualified candidates out there. Many companies hire to fill in expertise, so the person who you are interviewed by may be less experienced than you in a particular technology.

> The 'excuse' that there are better or equally qualified candidates out there. In that case, these companies should be ok with registering their names in an online registry saying they rejected a candidate for someone who is better qualified. For the following 6 months, they cannot complain that that cannot find qualified candidates. > Many companies hire to fill in expertise, so the person who you are interviewed b…

Suppose I have two technologies that are relevant, foo and bar and that I'm weak on bar, so seek to hire someone with bar expertise. If I'm constrained to hire the very first person with more bar expertise than my least bar-skilled interviewer, I probably won't make much progress towards my goal.

The goal is not to hire the first "not worst", but rather the reasonably best, where reasonable is a function of time and money, among others.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#83

Post by NTDF9 »

anonymoose123 wrote: post #79
NTDF9 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is: If the candidate asks a relevant question that the interviewer cannot solve in time, the company failed at its own game because the candidate proved that he/she is better qualified than the company's representative, given the rules of the game. What excuse does the company have for not hiring the candidate now?

What if the interviewer refuses to do it. You walk away? And remember, you're the one looking for a job and applied there (unless you're jeff dean, of course :)

When enough candidates walk away, it prevents the company from doing productive stuff. Not only did they not hire someone who could do something, they also wasted so much time interviewing instead of doing productive stuff.

They'll feel the heat and hire a reasonable candidate.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#84

Post by jacquesm »

sokoloff wrote: post #75
jacquesm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not looking for good people, they're looking for cheap people. 1 good person will cost as much or more than 5 bad ones and somehow it got into managements head that 5 'B' (or even 'C') players is better than one 'A' player for the same money. Which of course isn't true but good luck convincing people otherwise. (Source: regular clean up jobs after all the money has been spent and the company is on the skids a…

I think you got your second sentence a little twisted around. I've never seen an "A" player command a 5x multiple on a median or "B" player. I think "A" players are the best bargain in the software world...

> I think "A" players are the best bargain in the world...

They are, but try explaining to your average PHB who doesn't even begin to understand the complexities of the 'simple' piece of software they intend to write that Charles here can do the job in 3 months and will cost 50K and that the five guys over there in the corner will take the job for 30K and will take a month longer (or so they think). Then, after 30K becomes 90K and the company is slowly sliding downhill that original 3 months and 50K estimate starts to look pretty good, but then the sunk cost fallacy kicks in and for an additional 10K (over the 90K) this time they'll get it right. And then finally the time will be up, the money will be gone and they'll have to shop for someone who will take on the task to fix it on a contingency basis in the next month or so.

This plays out over and over again for some strange reason.

So yes, A players are a bargain, but only after the money to pay for them has been pissed out the window.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#85

Post by frcknfrckn »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #44

Any time a company asks me to do a HackerRank test, I immediately reject them. It's just not possible to have a quality engineering team and to also believe the results of HackerRank tests correspond to on-the-job success. HackerRank is an attempt to commoditize software labor (literally reducing evaluation of your labor fitness to standardized examples). It communicates immediately that creativity is valued less tha…

Ugh.

Using a coding test shouldn't be a red flag. They are an incredibly useful tool for weeding out the applicants who, quite frankly, don't know their ass from their keyboard.

I've done hiring at several companies over the years, and I can honestly say that the signal-to-noise ratio for programmers tends to be very low. Even eliminating the obviously unqualified resumes leaves us with dozens of supposedly 'qualified' developers. Further followup however in most cases (probably 60 to 80% of the time, depending on the seniority of the position) reveals that the applicant is all talk, and can't solve even the simplest of problems.

Eliminating that 60-80% of applicants is an issue. We could have, say, a brief phone interview with each applicant, trying to figure out which ones are garbage and which are good. But that would tie up actual employees for hours and hours, doing something that most of them would much rather not be doing. Instead, using a coding test to weed out the morons can work wonders. We set them all up with a simple problem set, and a day later it becomes very obvious which of the applicants are worth bringing in for a real interview.

Now don't get me wrong - if an employer rejects you because of a spelling mistake or judges you because they say you solved a problem 'wrong', then yeah, that employer likely sucks and you should be happy to have been passed over. But rejecting an employer simply because they asked you to do a test? The only one you're hurting is yourself.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#86

Post by draw_down »

EricScottTaylor wrote: post #10
exabrial wrote: post #3

Nearly every silicon valley interview is based on whether or not you are as hipster as the interviewer. Keep your head up and don't subscribe to the culture. You can be excellent and live as different as you want.

Full disclosure, I work for HackerRank, but I really wanted to comment for two reasons: (1) Reading this article and seeing the comments, really helps me see how my daily work helps level the playing field and as Alibek says, change people's lives. Very fulfilling and thankful for that. (2) Re: exabrial's comment above, where do you think culture fit should be evaluated in the process? Lots of interview processes tod…

As I mentioned to coworkers a while ago, at this point in my career I am extremely reluctant to reject a candidate for "culture" reasons. It's a nebulous and nearly completely meaningless term, which allows all sorts of terrible prejudice to sneak in under a guise of quasi-objectivity.

We have a job that needs doing, and we evaluate whether candidates can perform in that position. Period.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#87

Post by yitchelle »

busterarm wrote: post #37
craigyk wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Google interview in 2008, one guy asked me to write a binary tree structure and implementations of depth and breadth-first search (maybe also balanced insert?) on the whiteboard in C, which I blew through in no time. He then immediately said it was wrong and let me wither for a few minutes trying to figure out what the problem was before pointing out I forgot a semicolon.

I was given a brain teaser puzzle during my D.E. Shaw interview process in 2006. One of my interviewers told me that my answer was completely wrong just to see how I would take the criticism. I guess calmly evaluating my conclusions and approaching the problem with a third algorithm (I had already devised two and compared the answers) and then calmly asserting that my answer was in fact correct was the right move.

> One of my interviewers told me that my answer was completely wrong just to see how I would take the criticism.

I do this sometimes. A strong developer would have a good mix of defending the design decisions made and the acceptance of the errors made. This test should bring this characteristic to the forefront.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#88

Post by selimthegrim »

logfromblammo wrote: post #41
kafkaesq wrote: post #5

So, how did you get to where you are today? I’ve always been passionate about coding, starting from my early days at Olympiad teams in high school and ACM teams in college. Anyone who's made it onto an Olympiad team[1] of any significant geographical scale, in any category, shouldn't have to deal with this whiteboard nonsense. Maybe a few lightweight-to-medium rounds to verify that they are what they say they are. Bu…

If only that were true. I'm a U.S. national event champion in Div. C Science Olympiad (Road Scholar), and I not only have to deal with whiteboard nonsense all the time, but also, the spouse never really believes that I know how to get anywhere from anywhere else. (Sure, argue with Siri/Google, rather than allowing that I might possibly know which direction north is.) Credentials are only as good as the trust other pe…

Look basically none of the top tech schools or Ivies blink an eye at Science Olympiad especially in comparison to IMO or IOI or IPhO - besides the actual difficulty of the events you have to consider the relative sizes of the pool they are drawing from as well.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#89

Post by deftnerd »

The current state of the hiring process in tech companies has really affected me. I'm, by nature, a very shy person who doesn't deal with rejection very well.

Because of this, I tend to apply at jobs where my hiring is a slam-dunk because it's so routine and easily within my skill-set.

It results in jobs that aren't particularly fulfilling but gives me plenty of time to work on technology I'm interested in my spare time for personal projects.

In essence, a day job of simple Linux administration may pay the bills, while in my spare time I'm working on large infrastructure automation, deep learning, developing new blockchain technologies, etc.

I don't know how sustainable this is. I have three children and a wife, and I'm getting tired of only being paid for work I can do while asleep just because I'm afraid of rejection.

Any suggestions on how to "toughen up"?

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#90

Post by pklausler »

yitchelle wrote: post #87
busterarm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was given a brain teaser puzzle during my D.E. Shaw interview process in 2006. One of my interviewers told me that my answer was completely wrong just to see how I would take the criticism. I guess calmly evaluating my conclusions and approaching the problem with a third algorithm (I had already devised two and compared the answers) and then calmly asserting that my answer was in fact correct was the right move.

> One of my interviewers told me that my answer was completely wrong just to see how I would take the criticism. I do this sometimes. A strong developer would have a good mix of defending the design decisions made and the acceptance of the errors made. This test should bring this characteristic to the forefront.

I think that lying to a candidate is unethical and unfair.

You can get similar results without crossing that line by asking questions like "can this be made faster?" and "is this correct?", soliciting proofs of lower bounds on asymptotic complexity and loop invariants (respectively). But you shouldn't tell a candidate that their code is broken when it isn't. Interviewing is stressful and scary -- don't make it worse just because you can.

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