Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gaylemcd is just bringing the news. It's not her fault that it's bad.
She's profiting from it
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What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies
111–120 of 225 posts
Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies
#112I 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 big tech companies don't care and will continue doing it because success hides all failures. Cynically, big companies might be selecting for a modicum of technical expertise along with demonstrating capacity to put up with some amount of abusive processes.
I think Hanlon's Razor applies.
They have no impetus to change and think they have found an approach that works reasonable well when given absurd amounts of candidates. The problem is the ridiculous false negative rate.
I struggle to think of a better system. Using experience is unfair and misleading (I worked on awesome stuff... that I can tell you nothing about, I was totally the lead on this software, etc...). Take home stuff is fine with me but a lot of people have problems with it. Come in for a week type things are incredibly applicant hostile.
Sit down with me and lets try and fix this bug seems like a more reasonable solution to me. Dev environment has the most popular ide with their devs, the source for whatever, internet access, and a bug report. Person is there to assist.
Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies
#113Earlier 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) ?
It's almost like there are other things in life besides money
Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies
#114Candidates who know their worth should also have the confidence to grill interviewers. Including technical questions.
Yep. Here are a few things I always make sure to ask about asap:
* Version control - what kind do you use? Do you use it?
* Deploy process - how do you deploy? How often? Who can and can't deploy?
* Security - who has access to mission critical systems? how do you secure your apps and network assets? What do you use for secrets management?
* Problems - what is the burning technical problem you're having right now? If you needed something fixed immediately, what would it be?
Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh OK. You are offering a legitimate long-term career, so this makes more sense. It's worth putting up with an extra interview or two when you won't have to worry about them for 10+ years. :)
It's much more ridiculous when a web dev or phone app shop has hoops upon hoops to jump through.
Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies
#116I 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 demonstrat…
>Maybe big companies are only interested in hiring sheep-like engineers who have no side projects
But the article said that they are interested in people with side projects.
Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies
#117Earlier 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) ?
I make roughly 85% of that 200k figure (give-or-take, depending on stock option values), and my house cost $90 per square foot. If you're a good senior level engineer, you can make good money in far more than five or six companies in the world.
Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I would ask a single question that would take 30+ minutes to work through with no expectations that the candidate would ever get the answer" The major problem with this approach (unless you are very vocal about the process up front, but still even then I see it as problematic) is it flies in the face of most education at all levels, at least as practiced in the USA. This is fundamentally more an issue with the way w…
So I was always very upfront. I told the candidate you will not get the answer. This is so I can see how you attack a problem. All the candiates had a background in the subject matter. The question was not on subject matter not tied to the job. Overall we found that the way we did this interview was very successful. At one point we lowered the bar and hired a bunch of people and they were all gone in six months. On t…
"but when you go to collage for an STEM major there is a huge amount of critical thinking and problem solving involved"
I went to college for Computer Science and while there was definitely a larger emphasis on critical thinking and problem solving than in high school and grade school, testing (which is the closest to a school equivalent of a job interview) still ultimately boiled down to you either knew the material or you didn't. Testing was virtually never a conversational process during which I could ask the test-giver questions to get at a deeper problem, so ultimately very different than these problems where the "tester" (interviewer) doesn't actually expect you to solve them during the "test" (interview).
My comment has nothing to do with the experience of LEARNING in USA schools, but rather TESTING in USA schools (including the vast majority of colleges).
FWIW, as an older experienced software developer, I now excel at the sorts of interviews you are describing, but when I was younger and just out of school I was terrible at them. Not because I was a bad developer/engineer then, but because of anxiety brought about by being asked about things outside of my element, because I just wasn't used to that having never been exposed to it. Based on lots of conversations with other developers, I don't believe I am alone in having this difficult adjustment period with software interviews when first starting out as a professional.
It is entirely possible your process works fine for you because it is one of those ones that is unlikely to produce false positives, which is what you really want to avoid, but I'm sure there are also some great developers just out of school that totally bomb your interviews while they would do great at the actual job.
If you can hire enough developers to allow those false negatives to exist, then that's no skin off your back but your anecdote about having to lower standards suggests that maybe passing on some of those false negatives was detrimental at least in the short term.
Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is actually a really interesting point. (Context: In chess, a queen can move along a row, column, or diagonal to attack. The N Queens problem is to place N queens on an NxN chessboard such that no two queens can attack each other.) No one does poorly here because they are "bad at chess algorithms." They might do poorly because they think they're bad at chess algorithms. But this is not a "chess algorithm." It's…
Do you think it makes sense to ask interviewees to solve backtracking problems, given the fact that its mostly about already knowing the solution? Someone who's never come in contact with backtracking won't be able to solve n queens "in time", unless they pull a mathematics stunt, but those who do know backtracking won't struggle much. On a higher level - how much of an "already seen the algorithm" crapshot are tech…
When I do interview training, I strongly discourage memoization / dynamic programming question. It's not that you have to have practiced this to do well. It's that you can have an okay candidate who practices it and then does well.
A properly conducted technical interview will not be about having seen the algorithm before. Some companies screw it up though. But then, these same companies also screw up other parts of the interview process.
I disagree that using certain languages makes a lot of problems trivial. Maybe it makes certain problem trivial, but those tend to be easier ones anyway. They're already trivial. And even if your language has a function that performs the exact thing being asked, the interviewer can easily ask you to go implement that thing.
Java is fine for a whiteboard. So is python. So are most languages.
No, python has not become synonymous with pseudocode. I'm not sure what you mean by that.
Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think it makes sense to ask interviewees to solve backtracking problems, given the fact that its mostly about already knowing the solution? Someone who's never come in contact with backtracking won't be able to solve n queens "in time", unless they pull a mathematics stunt, but those who do know backtracking won't struggle much. On a higher level - how much of an "already seen the algorithm" crapshot are tech…
> On a higher level - how much of an "already seen the algorithm" crapshot are tech interviews? I'd say it is mostly that. Just do thirty to fifty leetcode medium problems (some of them on pen and paper), and you're good to go.
That is really, really not true. An unintelligent engineer will never be able to practice enough to do well on a well-conducted interview at Google. (They could in rare cases do well if all their interviewers pick common problem.)