Tech Interview Torture Chamber

Having gone through about a hundred interviews on the employer side and a dozen on the employee side myself, I think I can drill down the essence of the problem to: "Everything that can be standardized is a bad predictor of hiring success."

In the end, I now have a continuously A/B-tested scheme that I'm pretty happy with, but still most of it is intuition.

Which is very applicable to the job itself: Intuition is nothing but unconcious and highly multidimensional optimization across the vast range of hard/soft skills required for the job by means of pattern recognition and heuristics.

Everything that has simple measures (automated coding tests, phone screens by nontechnical people,...) can be gamed and produce lots of false positives AND negatives (see the recent Google screening for the GWAN guy).

In the end, I can read much more real-world success from a quick coding challenge that shows me an applicants' thinking, craft, naming, library choice and so on.

I'd consider myself a top 5% interviewer by now, but I have no clue how to automate, scale or replicate this.

As a senior engineer who already has a good job, here's how I've adapted to the stupid tech interview and plan on doing for future jobs:

- Stay at my job longer and push for more raises/promotions. So far this has worked well. I may not get more in raw $ amount vs job hopping, but when risk adjusted (the risks of any new job such as bad manager, etc.) it's worked out ok so far. I think some job hopping is still good early career, but at this senior level, job hopping loses most of its advantages. Also, being senior at a company (not just in title, but also tenure), has other benefits such as more influence and connections within the company.

- For future job searches, companies that don't have the algorithm/data structures interview will get a big boost in my list. They will get first attention.

- If I find an interesting job that still has the bullshit process, then my investment in the process will be very low. Basically, one or two evenings refreshing my memory on basic algorithms/data structures and that's it. If the interviewer asks a question expecting me to know some exact algorithm or trick, then they are a very poor interviewer and the problem is them, not me.

Why so defensive? This is actually a very close representation of Google hiring funnel.

I don't think the point is the tests described into the article (which I found hilarious, btw). I think the point is about the amount of resources, perceived by the candidate, that the company pours into a totally jammed hiring process.

Heh I've been applying to some gigs recently and those job application pages! They can be infuriatinggggg.

Oh, upload the resume that you just spent 2 hours tweaking and feel great about? Simple enough you think. No, a parser tries to extract all of the relevant information from the PDF and place it in the appropriate fields with about a -50% success rate. Now it looks like you've had 5 jobs in the past 5 years.

Want to upload a cover letter? Not an option, but you can use this text box widget thing with some basic functionality. Of course, you just can't copy and paste the pre-written cover letter, because the widget completely screws up the formatting and now it's a jumbled mess with no structure between paragraphs. Easy to fix, but still.

I guess the worst part is, there is nothing to indicate that your perfectly formatted resume that you uploaded will ever been seen by someone.

My mistake, that's the second worst part. The worst part is having to create a new account for each of these career "portals".

As someone who only recently went through about 25 interviews this article gave me a bittersweet laugh. I wish more people understood how awful the torture chamber interview process is for everyone involved. Maybe the industry will catch up one day.