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What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

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Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#11
post #7

Has any link ever been determined between interview performance and on-the-job performance? I've made the clichéd mistake mentioned in the article of wearing a suit to an interview where it wasn't appropriate, and felt the air being sucked out of the room. It strikes me as silly, but what do I know. Do these hiring practices result in a good cohort of employees?

they aren't necessarily trying to get the best employees but instead trying to avoid bad or mediocre ones. This means they sacrifice rejecting some smart people in order to gaurantee they don't have terrible people.

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#12
post #7

Has any link ever been determined between interview performance and on-the-job performance? I've made the clichéd mistake mentioned in the article of wearing a suit to an interview where it wasn't appropriate, and felt the air being sucked out of the room. It strikes me as silly, but what do I know. Do these hiring practices result in a good cohort of employees?

Google kinda-sorta did a study there, but the "study" was fundamentally flawed. They didn't look at people who didn't get hired (duh). So the most they could say is that once people passed the (very high, risk averse) bar, how much better they did beyond that didn't have a strong enough correlation with job performance to come out in a small-ish number of data points.

To me, it's pretty clear that it basically works. It's not perfect, but yeah it works. Virtually every top tech company has been formed with these practices. So unless you're going to argue that they could have hired random engineers, then it must be effective. (Note: this doesn't mean that it's perfect or that there's nothing better or that you can't improve it. It just means that it is reasonably effective.)

I [author here] have done a lot of interviews with companies going through acquisitions, and that's offered me the ability to talk with their managers about their job performance. My assessment is generally accurate. There are certain things it can't evaluate, of course, like work ethic. Work ethic is really important, but there's really no way to interview for that.

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#13
post #2

I'll try to stay active on this thread if anyone has any more specific questions. (Context: I'm the author of Cracking the Coding Interview)

I would love to know instead what companies and recruiters have learned from interviewing, hiring, and monitoring the performance of candidates at these companies. What productive trends have you seen in how these companies adjust their hiring process?

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#14
post #8

Oh we all value diversity so so much. Just fucking all dress alike, it's our culture, no diversity here. Hypocrisy.

While you sort of have a point there, there's much more diversity in how people dress at top tech companies than in, say, finance or consulting.

It seems you're upset that an interviewer might be biased against someone for wearing a suit. That's fair; an interviewer shouldn't be biased against a candidate for that. And most wouldn't be -- consciously. But subconscious bias can still exist. It's best to skip the suit, particularly for a very technical role.

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#15
post #2

I'll try to stay active on this thread if anyone has any more specific questions. (Context: I'm the author of Cracking the Coding Interview)

I enjoyed your article.

Does your book have more anecdotes of candidate "fails"?

Would you be willing to share some more stories?

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#16
Sure- you don't need a CS degree but you need to know everything taught in a CS degree regardless of it's applicability to real life software engineering.

You should also buy a bunch of books and section off at least a month to study. Especially if you don't have that CS degree. Hope you don't have other obligations like a family or a demanding job.

You should also spend a lot of time doing coding competitions even if you find them boring because you got into engineering to build cool stuff- not solve abstract academic CS puzzles.

You should also practice coding in environments you would never use in real life - like a whiteboard. Every single software engineer on the planet codes in an IDE - but no, you will use a whiteboard. You haven't written by hand since like 2012 so your writing looks like a child's scrawl - better work on that too.

Good luck!

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#17
post #2

I'll try to stay active on this thread if anyone has any more specific questions. (Context: I'm the author of Cracking the Coding Interview)

I would love to know instead what companies and recruiters have learned from interviewing, hiring, and monitoring the performance of candidates at these companies. What productive trends have you seen in how these companies adjust their hiring process?

It's very difficult to correlate interview performance and job performance. No one is willing to hire at random to really get the data. Companies only look at who got hired.

I've seen some companies decide "well, whiteboard interviews are flawed" and just scrap the whole thing and replace it with something else... that's much more flawed. They're really not being honest with themselves about what the flaws exactly were in whiteboard interviews and if those are fixable, or what the flaws are in their new process.

There's a lot that can be done to make whiteboard coding/algorithms interviews less flawed. - Be clear with candidates and interviewers about expectations. What knowledge is okay to assume? What knowledge is not? - Clear guidelines on what makes a good question. A lot of companies ask very simple or well-known questions but think they're emulating what Google does. They are not. - Good interview training. Most companies don't have interview training, beyond maybe basic legal stuff. Even the companies that do have training typically have crappy training. - Interviewers should candidates with certain things that might not be obvious. For example, writing examples of input and output on the whiteboard is helpful. Don't rush into coding.

There is A LOT that can be done to make whiteboard interviews more effective.

You can also replace them with some other things, but understand that those will come with their own flaws. Scrapping whiteboard interviews is not going to deliver you some perfect system.

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#18
post #7

Has any link ever been determined between interview performance and on-the-job performance? I've made the clichéd mistake mentioned in the article of wearing a suit to an interview where it wasn't appropriate, and felt the air being sucked out of the room. It strikes me as silly, but what do I know. Do these hiring practices result in a good cohort of employees?

Unfortunately, nobody has any data on the job performance of people who failed their interview.

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#19
post #2

I'll try to stay active on this thread if anyone has any more specific questions. (Context: I'm the author of Cracking the Coding Interview)

CTCI is a great book. Is it acceptable to ask an interviewer for a different question? For example, if you're really bad at chess algorithms and you get the N-Queens question?

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#20
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem I have with these companies is that they feel like a cult. And the people working there are doing a lot to keep that cult spirit alive. All of these companies want you too feel and act like they are the single best entity in the entire universe and you should be honored that they even acknowledged you. This works great for young graduates that are full of dreams and hopes but it discourages experi…

> I would rather make more money in a stupid corporate job than working on more aggressive ways of making people to click on ads. Could you name a few "stupid corporate jobs" that pay better than Google or Facebook (200k - 300k for a senior engineer) ?

Are you sure the majority of senior engineers earns 200 - 300k ?
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