Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tech Interview Torture Chamber

mattfriz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 232 posts

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#4

Post by 0xdada »

> Everyone that interacts with the candidate must offer a beverage or a trip to the bathroom as many times as possible throughout the day. Bladder manipulation is a powerful interrogation tactic.

I used to do this, I guess it's time to stop

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#5

Post by spcelzrd »

We all agree the tech interviews are broken. I suspect that the next trend in tech interviews will be worse in just a slightly different way.

We got rid of the "Why are manholes round?" questions, now we have live coding tests.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#6

Post by ng12 »

> Speaks with an accent so thick you could spread it on toast

Oh god, this is giving me flashbacks. In college I phone screened twice with a certain Seattle megacorp and both times the interviewer was completely unintelligible. This was before the popularity of codepair so the interview was completely verbal. I specifically remember that during one interview it took at least 5 minutes for me to tease out that the interviewer was saying the word "millions". Not to mention I took the effort to find a quiet space and locate a headset while the best the interviewers could do was a speakerphone in a wind tunnel.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#7

Post by desireco42 »

This is awesome and true unfortunately.

Hey, but it doesn't end there. You spent all this money and time to hire someone, why treat them nice, give them a desk in a hallway and crappiest laptop you can find. Let's see how they work with that. :)

There are some nice places, thankfully, but this is fairly common theme unfortunately.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#9

Post by tetrep »

> Always start off by asking the candidate, "Is this still a good time?"

Is there a better way to ask this? It would be relatively awkward for the candidate to bring up on their own, so it seems like a good idea to make sure nothing unexpected has occurred since the call was planned.

> Alright, that's enough chit chat. Curtly prod them to submit to the interrogation.

Assuming it's still good to have the call, why would you not just jump in? The call can't last forever, and I'd rather have a solid ~40 minutes of technical content with time for questions than an opening of awkward forced small talk that, especially in the context of technical candidates, there's a good chance neither of us find pleasing.

Anecdotally, I've found that most good candidates will "small talk" about the technical subject matter that gets brought up during the call, if only to appear as a person familiar with it. (Although I do get a little lucky with security related things occurring pretty regularly in the news, so it's easy to reference.)

Post reply on HN