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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

#101

Post by ldite »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #94
ldite wrote: post #87

Build something on your own. Nine-to-5 isn’t enough. Practice, Practice, Practice. Single parents or carers need not apply, eh? Diversity?

This is not related to diversity. Some companies want to attract people who spend 40 hours a week on their job and nothing more and that's OK. Other might be out of reach unless you spend many more hours learning every week and that's OK too. Whereas people are spending their free time with their kids or learning or watching television it's up to them.

I'm fairly confident that the distribution of single parents and people providing unpaid care is not uniform across gender, race or social background.

> Whereas people are spending their free time with their kids or learning or watching television it's up to them.

If you're a single parent then you don't necessarily get a choice about what to do with your "free" time.

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

#102

Post by metaphorm »

ldite wrote: post #87

Build something on your own. Nine-to-5 isn’t enough. Practice, Practice, Practice. Single parents or carers need not apply, eh? Diversity?

right? these are the same companies that are now implementing absurd Orwellian policies like "implicit bias training" and "external diversity auditing" because they're not even willing to confront the true cause of their lack of diversity: the working conditions imposed by management make the job almost impossible for anyone but young men.

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

#103

Post by jondubois »

bit_logic wrote: post #60

I think the tide is turning against this type of interview. The industry is starting to notice how ineffective and stupid it is. The big tech companies don't care and will continue doing it because success hides all failures. When there's an endless flood of new college graduate applicants and near-monopoly positions bringing in billions of revenue, nobody cares if the hiring process is bad. They will care someday if…

Yes, the only people/entities who benefit from this type of interview process are the interviewers themselves - They make the interview process needlessly complicated and pointless and then they sell books giving people specific instructions on how to pass those interviews.

They create the problem and then they sell the solution as a book or as an online self-help service.

All the interview questions do is demonstrate that you've bought the right books and spent hundreds of hours practising pointless coding problems because you have nothing better to do with your time.

Maybe big companies are only interested in hiring sheep-like engineers who have no side projects to maintain and no sense of pragmatism... But then why do such companies (e.g. Google) spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on acquiring startups full of ambitious and pragmatic (wolf-like) people (people who probably would not pass the technical tests).

With that strategy, over time, big companies just end up with a few pragmatic wolves at the top and a large number of sheep at the bottom. It's not natural and they're missing out on more balanced candidates who are neither sheep nor wolf but are excellent engineers nonetheless.

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

#104

Post by jerrylives »

bit_logic wrote: post #60

I think the tide is turning against this type of interview. The industry is starting to notice how ineffective and stupid it is. The big tech companies don't care and will continue doing it because success hides all failures. When there's an endless flood of new college graduate applicants and near-monopoly positions bringing in billions of revenue, nobody cares if the hiring process is bad. They will care someday if…

The tide is definitely turning. The last two interviews I've been to were nice casual affairs where me and another engineer had a technical discussion on how I'd approach various problems they were having (such as deployment woes, wonky network topology etc). The best part is that I feel like I learned something as well, rather than just being shown my failure because I didn't get the interviewer's "trick" to how to solve his convoluted non-practical coding puzzle.

Both of these companies I can gladly say are some of the best places I've ever worked with bright, motivated engineers and a great culture. I think part of it is that if you know your stuff, you'll be easily able to suss out who is bullshitting in a discussion / debate and who isn't. If you just recite problems from Cracking the Coding Interview, you have pretty limited insight into the candidate's abilities.

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

#105

Post by metaphorm »

strictnein wrote: post #71

> "One Google candidate asked his lunch interviewers where all the “hot chicks” were" It's shocking that people are this dumb, but sometimes brains just misfire in stressful interviews. Happens with the interviewer sometimes too. I was once asked, when an interviewer noticed my wedding ring, if I planned to have any kids soon and what my wife's career was, which is a definite no-no. I assumed he was joking, but he wa…

do you think he was asking in terms of a casual "get to know you" kind of question? or do you think it was more like he was trying to no-hire people with families?

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

#106

Post by Balgair »

sage76 wrote: post #91

I asked someone in the medical profession how he got his recent job. He said he called up someone at the hospital and asked if there was a position available. Got an interview the next day, and started the next monday. On the other hand, I asked a friend in the bay area about an engineering position he had applied for. 13 rounds, and he was finally told no.

Jesus! 13 rounds?! What was this for CTO? Nah, I know better, it was for a coffee fetcher.

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

#107

Post by Balgair »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #86
claudiulodro wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be super harsh, but this sounds awful. - First day is 4 interviews and a take-home project. - Second day is an interview in front of a panel followed by an indeterminate amount of further interviews. - Third day is a "culture fit" interview. 3 separate days of interviews and a take-home assignment? What professional has time for that?! EDIT: I guess it depends on the length of the interviews. Is the total inte…

So far the people who we've called have been ok with this process. I'm pretty flexible because I don't want to impose too much, so we have shortened it to two a couple of times. On the other hand, we need people who will stick around for a few years. Our tech is very domain specific and there are few candidates that can drop in and get to work. We have to spend a lot of time bringing them up to speed on the code base…

I'm curious, do you actually have people staying for years? If you have to be so cautious about working with someone, that may reflect more on you all/management and not the people coming in. All the same, this process is really deep and long, you guys better pay well.

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

#108

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

Balgair wrote: post #107
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far the people who we've called have been ok with this process. I'm pretty flexible because I don't want to impose too much, so we have shortened it to two a couple of times. On the other hand, we need people who will stick around for a few years. Our tech is very domain specific and there are few candidates that can drop in and get to work. We have to spend a lot of time bringing them up to speed on the code base…

I'm curious, do you actually have people staying for years? If you have to be so cautious about working with someone, that may reflect more on you all/management and not the people coming in. All the same, this process is really deep and long, you guys better pay well.

Average tenure of the SW team is >10 years.

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

#110

Post by sage76 »

Balgair wrote: post #106
sage76 wrote: post #91

I asked someone in the medical profession how he got his recent job. He said he called up someone at the hospital and asked if there was a position available. Got an interview the next day, and started the next monday. On the other hand, I asked a friend in the bay area about an engineering position he had applied for. 13 rounds, and he was finally told no.

Jesus! 13 rounds?! What was this for CTO? Nah, I know better, it was for a coffee fetcher.

I would be very surprised if senior leadership candidates tolerate this kind of nonsense. Someone who could be senior management at the big 5 will not put up with 6-10 (sometimes more) rounds of relentless grilling.

This kind of process is only reserved for us lowly engineers. Right from the get go, the power dynamics are clearly established. And this in a field where it is supposedly "hard" to hire people.

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