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Tech Interview Torture Chamber

mattfriz.com

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Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#51

Post by expertentipp »

My experience with initial stage of recruitment to Amazon, Google, and other "we can afford false negatives" jokers.

Write O(n) algorithm for bus ticket allocation. Use yellow unbalanced binary tree, you have 40 minutes. Then we will run it against exhaustive tests our engineers have been working on for the last couple of weeks. Uhhhh... what's that?... your algorithm melted down... We wish you good luck in your job search, thanks bye!

Luckily I approached these tests while still being employed, otherwise it would be quite soul-sucking experience. Now I just don't take them seriously anymore and feel an urge to troll them somehow.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#52

Post by ryandrake »

> "I see your background is in artificial intelligence, you've written your own compiler, and you maintain an open source project - how nice. Now implement radix sort using only red-black trees."

Sadly this quite could almost be pulled right out of a real tech interview we've all had.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#53

Post by jakebasile »

joezydeco wrote: post #34
amattn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't stop this. It's essentially harmless and in the case of certain people, welcome. You want your interviewers to think have empathy for your candidates. Interviewing is already stressful and a full bladder or dry throat makes it worse.

I like the bathroom break. I've been in a number of offices where the equipment on the desks is shiny, but the bathrooms look like they haven't been maintained or even received a coat of paint in a decade. Tells me a lot more about what goes on under the surface than people want to let on in an interview.

You can learn a lot about a company by the state of their bathrooms, and not just the ones out front for customers and visitors!

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#54

Post by amorphid »

zachsnow wrote: post #39
CriticalSection wrote: post #11

Surprised I don't see my main pet peeve - early reference check. Before I even talk to anyone I'm asked to provide three phone numbers of three former managers. So I have to call them up, make sure the number is still working, and ask for the favor that they can give me a reference in case anyone reads my application. All of these other things are on me. References I have to call two or three (or at one company, six)…

> go after normal business hours Realistically you will be asked to work after normal business hours now and then (and, in our industry, many times a year), so you'd think they wouldn't mind scheduling the one interview you'll do with them whenever the hell you can fit it in!

If you're working with a recruiter, those pre-interview references are also business leads for that recruiter.

Source: I'm a former recruiter

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#55

Post by jakebasile »

king_magic wrote: post #27

I read through maybe 10 paragraphs, but the author's toxic style was just too much for me. Spoiler alert: this person sounds like someone I would never hire on attitude alone, which reeks of "entitled, sarcastic brat".

It's plainly satire. It's in the style of a The Onion piece but with more depth, and probably personal experience.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#56

Post by m3kw9 »

These take home projects are a bit inconsiderate to a candidates time. I've done a few and if you don't watch your time. You could be spending 5-6 hours just trying to please people

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#57

Post by siliconc0w »

I've done a lot of interviewing and do hit a lot of these but it's kind of the unfortunate 'state of the art' for figuring out whether to hire someone. For example, phone screens are often less than a hour (because most applying to us are likely already working somewhere else) but we need as much data as possible. They're done from a script because we want a consistent metric to iterate on and it's really important we get a good read because on-site interviews are incredibly expensive, especially for a smaller company. It'd be great to just call up and chat about personal projects or whatever but it's just too inconsistent and subjective.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#58

Post by ssully »

snake_plissken wrote: post #48

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…

I really wish the standard was to just ask you to upload your resume and cover letter as a PDF. Dont have any auto extraction. Then have some forms to fill out for basic info that shouldn't take more then 5 minutes.

I loathe the processes that have you upload a resume and then take 30 minutes to fill out forms of information that asks questions that should already be on your resume. It's feels painfully redundant but also makes me worry that they will look at the form data, not my resume/cover letter that I uploaded.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#59

Post by ar15saveslives »

I would say that the alternative to that crappy process is something like "gradual hiring" (sorry, I'm the guy whose accent can be spread on bread) - you just start working with a guy, giving him basic isolated tasks, and as he successfully progresses with his work, task are getting more and more complicated (salary, permissions as well). After few months of such freelance-ish work you can know for sure that this dude is compatible with the team, able to solve problems, able to learn. And only then he becomes an employee with offer, benefits and SO.

I know a company (profitable, no-VC, small private hw/sw business) that has been practicing that for years. The scheme is quite simple: they "rent" people at bodyshops in Russia (it's relatively cheap there), work with them for some time and then offer them relocation to the HQ, paying some penalty to the bodyshop.

Another well-known company has different version of this: they just hire everyone after very basic sanity check. It's pretty easy to get in, but at the same time it's even easier to be fired. Turnover at the company is horrible, but there's very strong core of managers/designers/devs, that survived all battles.

My point is there's no way you can find out for sure the candidate is good for a) company b) project c) codebase d) team etc etc, unless he's clearly crazy/arrogant/stinks or whatever. So maybe that "gradual hire" is the answer.

P.S.: Being at the other side of hiring process sucks too. May be even worse.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#60

Post by imdumquestioner »

jakebasile wrote: post #50
mfrisbie wrote: post #37

Author here. I'm both pleased and dismayed to see this is as relevant as it was when I wrote it a year ago. Obviously, this piece is satire. When giving interviews, I do whatever I can to make the candidate walk out of there with a smile whether they did well or not. I stand by the idea that it should be possible to entirely assess someone's ability without ripping their guts out or making them sweat.

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.

25 onsites?
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