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Tech Interview Torture Chamber

mattfriz.com

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Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#201

Post by ryandrake »

skj wrote: post #165
ryandrake wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is, scheduling the in-person interview. If a company is flexible, I could take an extended lunch and have an interview (or better yet, go after normal business hours). Good point. Having to always blow a vacation day on an interview seriously limits the number you can do per month/year. Want to do 10 interviews a month? You've blown half the month right there.

I mean, the interview ER has to be there, too...

The interviewER take a half hour of his day (an hour tops, if she actually reads your resume). You're investing the at least 1/2 a day.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#202

Post by hackinthebochs »

throwaway9475 wrote: post #194
hackinthebochs wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always this "memorizing algorithms" strawman. If you can't code basic list/tree/graph algorithms on the fly then there are serious holes in your programming ability. This has nothing to do with memorization.

How often do you waltz into work and write list/tree/graph algorithms on a daily basis?

But its not about the list/tree/graph algorithms, its about having the mental flexibility to code the algorithms on the fly. If you can't do a depth-first search on a tree after being given the definition and time to think about it then you may lack the mental flexibility to do arbitrary algorithms in any domain. Intelligence is unspecific to domain, and so showing intelligence in one domain correlates with outcomes in other domains. The list/tree/graph algorithms are just a microcosm of programming skill in general.

Also, my codebase does have an honest to god tree traversal, on the front end no less. This stuff shouldn't be seen as esoteric trivia.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#203

Post by moftz »

lacampbell wrote: post #166
johnnyb9 wrote: post #87

I once had to do a take home project... the spec said I could write either a console application or a GUI. Fast forward to the in person meeting, they go through my solution and nitpick random things like "why use NuGet packages" or "why no test cases" (I had written them but they got mysteriously removed from the solution). Finally the CTO speaks up and asked why I didn't write a GUI, as many other candidates had (m…

CTO then snarkily asks me "do you always do the minimum"? I would have responded "Yes". The less we do, the less scope to go wrong, the less maintenance we have, etc etc. In fact I don't want to work with anyone who would answer "No" to that.

If it was a company that does a lot of contracting, then doing the minimum (to spec) is pretty much required. Do anything more than what the customer asked for and you are wasting resources.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#204

Post by moftz »

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 use two columns to list my duties and assignments at previous jobs to reduce page length as handing out a one sheet at job fairs works really nice. The parsers always end up collating the lines together into a jumbled mess. I just now keep a copy for humans to look at and a text file copy for me to copy text from.

The best company job site I've used would allow me to use my linkedin profile to log in then it would just pull all my resume data from my profile. The only thing I actually had to fill out was just a cover letter. I applied to a bunch of positions within a hour although I never got a call back from them.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#205

Post by pklausler »

yumaikas wrote: post #197
pklausler wrote: post #2

Damn, now I'm going to waste time today actually trying to figure out how to implement a radix sort with red-black trees, just in case.

My understanding (somewhat limited), is that you would never want to use a radix sort with red-black trees, as a tree should already have some sorting to it as is. Otherwise, why not just used a linked list? Besides, radix sorts are generally good for fixed-width data that has a known bound, like integers. Basically, this is made-up nonsense. It's good made-up nonsense though.

Whoosh.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#206

Post by moftz »

ssully wrote: post #58
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…

But then they can't just do a quick search for the specific skills or sort by years of experience, making the recruiter's job longer and more expensive. I keep a text only copy of my resume specifically for pasting into job applications since my resume never gets parsed correctly.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#207

Post by moftz »

jarsin wrote: post #160
namelezz wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL. You have to have guts, to ask such question.

One time i coxed the interviewer to show me the solution on the whiteboard when i could not figure it out. I kid you not he could not do it and got confused like i did. I caught the punk red handed asking a question he did not know very well.

Depending on how early into the interview process it was, that guy just might have been looking to see how you arrived at a solution no matter how correct it was. I would rather see someone's problem solving skills than how many whiteboard problem solutions they can memorize. Even in school, I've had plenty of professors that would give partial credit for exams that may not have the right answer but the steps to arriving at a solution or deriving a formula to come up with the solution were on track.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#208

Post by collyw »

jameshart wrote: post #159
CriticalSection wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Phone tech interviews are usually low level screens to see if the candidate has the minimum technical chops to come on board. Short and sweet is what I prefer, especially since I'm usually doing the phone interview on a lunch break and would like to have some time to actually wolf down my lunch. Collaborative code editors are an unpleasant modern addition to the interview process. Plus I'm usually writing th…

"I'm usually writing the code in another window before transcribing it to the collaborative window" Speaking from the other end of the phonescreen line and collab editing session, that behavior looks a lot like googling and pasting in the first answer you find on stackoverflow. We use a collaborative environment because I kind of want to see you typing, sorry. I know, it's degrading, but... it's a screen, it's not de…

Demonstrates why it is a crap way of testing people. (I often look up answers on Stack Overflow to save time/ thinking. I also answer a fair few questions on Stack overflow as well).

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#209

Post by collyw »

polishTar wrote: post #15
spcelzrd wrote: post #5

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.

Do we though? What if the current system is the least bad option out of a set of much worse alternatives?

The best interview I have had in recent times, I took my laptop along with me and showed some code I had been working on. The interviewer asked me questions about it, and I explained why I did it that way. He asked me to add a it of functionality to it and I did it there and then. That's real work that I had been doing, so I was familiar with it, he got to see me code. No stress for me, and I am pretty sure he god a better idea of my ability to code than any of the other nonsense methods described.

Re: Tech Interview Torture Chamber

#210

Post by GFischer »

WalterBright wrote: post #120
aphextron wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a symptom of a process that is completely broken. I have given up entirely on interviewing for SV companies, and work 100% remote now.

If there was a better process, companies would adopt it, as it would give them a major competitive advantage. They're not complete fools.

Unfortunately, the companies that DO have a better process maybe have better retention and thus don't need to hire so much?

The same logic that states that bad candidates are always floating around applies to companies... companies that always have open positions are not necessarily the best ones, those seem to fill their open positions faster.

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