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Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

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Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#101

Post by p4wnc6 »

crdb wrote: post #100
p4wnc6 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is similar to "multicollinearity". I have two graduate degrees in applied statistics and machine learning, and did math as an undergrad, but I did not ever even hear the term "multicollinearity" until I got my first job after grad school in a place that used a lot of regression models. I had studied "spurious correlation" in some machine learning courses and in some research, but almost all of the methods I ever…

However, if you ping me on my profile email after I put up a job on Who's Hiring, and I send you back an email saying "hey, can you answer these few filter questions, take your time" and one of them is "what is multicollinearity", chances are you'll google it and tell me what you typed above and it will be fine. It's not like you can't use Google or take your time. What I'm dealing with is people who are dumping thei…

By way of example, I do not have a LinkedIn profile, and I left a Ph.D. program with a master's only. Though my degrees are from pestigious schools, I don't think school status should count for as much as it does.

I am lucky that the prestige of my schools is high, that you can easily Google some of the actual research work I did, and that I am very highly ranked on Stack Overflow.

If I didn't have those, I think more employers would simply reject me for not having a LinkedIn account, because employers use the dumbest shit (like LinkedIn) as hiring cues.

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#102

Post by p4wnc6 »

mooreds wrote: post #97
p4wnc6 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if they took the time to prepare for the interview and budget for an upper bound on the time range, then it is only professional and courteous of you to give them a full review. If you reject them based on their performance during hour 1, and you don't even give them the chance to show you more about themselves during hours 2, 3, and 4, it sounds like (a) your hiring process is kind of dumb and you're way too…

> Because if they took the time to prepare for the interview... That's very charitable of you. I dont know if it was my inability to phone screen properly, my inadequate job posting, my desperation to hire at the salary my boss allowed me, or my optimism, but I had far too many candidates that didn't pass even the above low bar. I don't even want to talk about the candidates that didn't make it through the phone scre…

I am not able to understand which parts of your comment are sarcastic and which aren't.

Are you saying you assume candidates did not prepare? If so, then I think you clearly have a problem with how you perceive candidates and you should work on that instead of dismissing candidates so quickly and believing it's their fault.

Even a candidate who performs badly in the interview may have spent a ton of time preparing. They may just honestly not be the right choice for the role, due to technical mismatch, even though they have an excellent work ethic, they studied, they had their friend come over and role play interview questions, they couldn't sleep the night before worrying if the cheap suit they borrowed from their uncle is going to make them look bad, etc. etc.

You should basically view literally every candidate as a person who is trying their best. If that turns out to be false, oh well -- it's not your business to care about forming opinions about candidates who you think weren't giving their best. Just assume they were, that it didn't work out, and move on.

Again, I may not be reading your comment right. But if you feel it's "charitable" to assume any given candidate sitting in front of you studied hard, cares about the job, works hard, and really wants to present themselves well, that's just nuts.

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#103

Post by abustamam »

kafkaesq wrote: post #89

A more helpful (accurate) description, for many startups, would probably go like this: Interview process: one 4-hour take-home assignment (which may or may not be properly articulated, and which, in any case, there's a fairly good chance we may never respond to); 3 on-site whiteboarding sessions (the first conducted by someone whose first words to you are "man, I'm hungover!"; the second, by a pair of disinterested d…

This eerily describes two Valley company start-ups I applied for.

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#104

Post by captaindiego »

thedufer wrote: post #61
salarynope wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my company, it's very rare that we'll have a need that's so specific that we could actually know the salary within $10k before we hire. It's far more common that we have openings for "Software Engineers", and we end up hiring one very junior, one very senior engineer, and some folks in between. Thus, from the same ad, compensation could range from $90k w/1,000 shares to $280k w/20,000 shares. And, frankly, saying…

>And, frankly, saying "salary is typically between $75k and $300k" isn't useful information. I disagree. That is absolutely better than not posting anything. Also, I suspect that ranges for most positions aren't that big - not everyone is lumping everything from the most junior to the most senior into one position.

Yes, I'd agree as well that knowing the low end is useful information. Having gone through interview processes, only to be given a very low-ball offer is annoying. Knowing how how the employer's expectations for salary compare to your own is quite useful to avoid wasting everyone's time.

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#105

Post by dexterdog »

smm2000 wrote: post #75
drdeadringer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> candidate throwing a miniature temper tantrum This happens?

In my previous company, one candidate became belligerent and physically pushed interviewer away from whiteboard after interviewer told him that his solution is not correct. Interviewer asked candidate to wait a few minutes, left room, called recruiter who in turn called security to escort candidate out. My desk was just outside interviewing room and I saw the long glance that the guy gave to interviewer - it was "if…

And the problem here is that there is no recourse for the company to help stop this individual from being the same problem for somebody else.

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#106

Post by dexterdog »

mooreds wrote: post #69
dexterdog wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they say 1-4 hours then 1 hour usually means you aren't getting the job. 3-4 hours means you are still in the running, but still probably won't get the job. I am with you on contract-to-hire. I get that companies are cautious because a bad hire can be tough to recover from, but the processes 99% of companies do are not conducive to good hires.

This. I hired a few times and rapidly learned not to promise the candidate a fixed amount of time. Why waste everyone's time doing more interviewing if the first interviewer finds out something that reveals the candidate is not a fit?

When I was on the company side of it we did 4 interviews. If The first two said no there was no point in wasting the time on the second two, but #1 would always be the 'handler' for the process so if his was a no and he got the signal from #2 that it was also a no he would tell the candidate that the process was over for today. If either voted yes it went to #3. You had to get 3/4 to continue to the offer phase.

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#107

Post by wutf »

crdb wrote: post #43
marmaduke wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have "actual machine learning" experience, no idea what "high leverage" means.

I'm referring to leverage in statistics [1], and particularly how high leverage observations may affect your model and how people deal with them. Clearer? For context: one of the candidates I interviewed told me that the best way to pick a model was to pick the model that would have the highest R squared when fitted to the whole dataset. I asked him about overfitting and he didn't know what I was talking about. Same…

There are an infinite number of such concepts in "machine learning." Just because you liked this one doesn't make it a good interview question. If anything, you are failing at theory of mind - as evidenced here, most people aren't making lots of use of the concept. When interviewing, don't be a dick. Test people for general ability and willingness to learn, not stupid questions you got out of a random textbook.

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#108

Post by dang »

delecti wrote: post #92
dang wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's an uncharitable way to describe the overwhelming majority of those posts. Let's get out of the habit of heaping snark on others in discussion threads. It feels amusing for a little while, but corrodes the qualities we most want here. Not a good trade.

You're right, I was unfairly snarky, but quite a few jobs on every month's post try and describe themselves with overly grandiose language without really saying what they do. I just think that job posts on this site reach a fairly narrow and high quality audience (certainly more so than most job sites), and in return it's not asking too much for a grounded, concrete description of what to expect both from the company…

What you say is surely true, but it's trumped by the more important concern of working together to make HN the kind of place we want it to be. That means turning ourselves into damping filters for annoyance, not amplifying ones. It doesn't mean that the inputs aren't annoying, just that when producing outputs we need to be less so.

Re: Ask HN: Can the “Who is Hiring?” post include a bit about the interview process?

#110

Post by aprdm »

I've interviewed at Intercom in Dublin and they gave their whole process upfront. Including the questions they made in two steps.

It's all in their website.

I didn't get the role, failed the last step but really enjoyed the interview process.

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