The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework • Hacker News Board

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#881

Post by kerberos84 » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 1:48 PM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #334

ModernMech wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a PhD in Computer Science and 10 years in the industry, and I've never not been asked to do some trivial programming task in an interview. Thanks for showing some common sense, but most interviewers are just lazy. One time I couldn't implement a skiplist, and the feedback I got was "we were concerned about your problem solving skills".

Even recently, I've gone to job interview type situations and the interviewer has literally asked me "Do you understand what Object Oriented Programming is? Can you write good quality Object Oriented code?" This despite that my best known essay is titled "Object Oriented Programming Is An Expensive Disaster Which Must End" a fact the interviewer should know if they'd looked at my resume or spent 10 seconds looking up…

Maybe it is your essay why he asked you if you understand OOP.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#882

Post by ubermonkey » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 1:54 PM UTC

teachrdan wrote: post #265

reaperducer wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our industry's hiring practices are absolutely obnoxious. Agreed. The solution is to not work at a tech company, but instead work in a tech capacity at a real company. - No silly games (before or after hiring). - Better benefits (I'd rather have proper health coverage and a pension than a room full of toys and vaporware stock options). - Immensely more job security (Henry Ford didn't have an "exit strategy"). - Peo…

Real talk? I'd be concerned that, at a non-tech company, I'd be seen as a IT rather than a software engineer. And the conventional wisdom goes that IT is a cost center. Some of the best career advice I've ever gleaned is to work on something that visibly makes money for the company. I get to do that every day at my tech company. I don't know that I could say that if I worked in a technical capacity in another industr…

Yeah, NEVER be overhead if you can avoid it.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#883

Post by GordonS » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 1:55 PM UTC

regularfry wrote: post #812

monocasa wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a little more on the interview. I've got a laptop setup with eclipse, all rigged up with an integration test and filled out function signatures. I show the interviewee what to press to compile, and the subsequent failing tests. The code builds in it's initial state, but the tests fail. I also show them on the desktop that the original source is squirreled away in case they fat finger and erase everything (I've tot…

Pair. I do this. I drive, with my machine, on my setup that I'm comfortable with. They navigate, and tell me what to do. This gives me a pretty deep insight into how they approach a problem, but also how they interact with others. There's no adversarial element, and it gives them the chance to see me screw up to give them the mental space not to sorry about stupid errors. The one worry I have about this is that it's…

I find trying to describe what I want another person on a computer to do an incredibly frustrating experience. I can't imagine how awful it would be under interview conditions!

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#884

Post by pdonis » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 2:13 PM UTC

tytytytytytytyt wrote: post #720

pdonis wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lots of real world problems are troubleshooted in less than that time, under more pressure, and have far more variables to consider/are far more difficult, like build failures. Yes, and they're troubleshooted by people who are already intimately familiar with the systems they're troubleshooting. Nobody in the real world writes an app for a requirement they've never seen before from scratch in 45 minutes.

> Yes, and they're troubleshooted by people who are already intimately familiar with the systems they're troubleshooting. So you're asserting interviewees shouldn't already be familiar with simple problems like reversing a list? Come on, give me a break. > Nobody in the real world writes an app for a requirement they've never seen before from scratch in 45 minutes. Being asked to reverse a list in 15 minutes isn't ev…

> Being asked to reverse a list in 15 minutes isn't even close to "writing an app from scratch".

It also isn't even close to "solving a real-world problem". Wow, look, I reversed this list and the conversion rate on our sign-up page went up 200%!

> Could you try any harder to misrepresent things here?

It looks to me like you are the one misrepresenting things.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#885

Post by mywittyname » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 2:19 PM UTC

Clubber wrote: post #413

monocasa wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh totally. Fizz Buzz shouldn't take you the whole 45 minutes, so the remainder is just a conversation where I dig down in their experience on a hunt for bullshit.

I think FizzBuzz is about as hard as I would make a technical interview. Maybe some basic questions about database design; what's an index; what's an array, etc. The dig down and hunt for bullshit is the most effective way for a tech person to interview another tech person in my opinion.

This is always my approach too. Pick a few elementary questions about a technology and ask a developer how to do them. Simple stuff, like how to build an array with integers 0-5, or iterate over a map.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#886

Post by erichurkman » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 2:26 PM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #759

erichurkman wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a combinatorial sum-of-n problem. Given a sequence of integers, can you produce a target by summing N of the values. He used Excel to put the expected return value in column A, the target in B, and C+ were values. Saved as a CSV which his program ingested. It was neat, actually: the rationale he gave was that it made it easy for anyone to add test cases. (The candidate was previously in the accounting biz, so…

Sounds like you appreciated his solution, but your first post made it sound like he was incompetent. I’m confused.

Not incompetent. Doing it via screen share lets you see their approach to problems — sometimes those approaches are poor. Had it been a take home test, I would have never seen him do that, and never had the opportunity to discuss the approach.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#887

Post by Arzh » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 2:29 PM UTC

sampleinajar wrote: post #615

Arzh wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooks do a stage after a phone / in-person interview where they work in the restaurant for a day or so (multiple days if they are expected to work with different people). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage_(cooking)

Yes. As a former cook, it's only the high end jobs that do this, not the chain restaurants. I think that is some of the problem with our industry, imagine if Applebee's started doing this because The French Laundry does? But, I think that this example is a good one, because even a chef with 20+ years has to demonstrate their abilities in an interview. Where should that line be in our industry?

Sure but with what even a low end programming job pays I would put it in the "high end" job spectrum.

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#888

Post by Clubber » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 2:30 PM UTC

_pmf_ wrote: post #861

Clubber wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's anything like white boarding, then they would bring in a game of operation and have the surgeons pull out all the pieces. If the buzzer goes off, well they just aren't good surgeons.

Very apt. But I'd really like to know why a medical degree means "can perform real medical work" while we're OK with a CS degree meaning "well, she has successfully completed the degree requirements, but hey, actual software development is not part of it".

Unless things have changed drastically in the last 20+ years, CS degrees involve plenty of software development. I remember having to build a calculator in Pascal using queues in CS1. We'd have to code all the classic algorithms (Merge sorts, traveling salesman, shortest path, etc).

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#889

Post by sincerely » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 2:35 PM UTC

hansthehorse wrote: post #770

goatherders wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wore a tie to school every day in high school. Then I did it again at a well know startup. In both instances someone pulled me aside to tell me "keep dressing like that and you're going to stand out." Yes.

I attended catholic high school in nyc from 1965 to 69 and we wore a sport coat and tie with dress slacks. Hair length inspections were conducted. It didn't kill anyone as far as I know.

Well if you think about it in terms of the man-hours that must have been wasted doing "hair length inspections", it's probably equivalent to at least one person dying young :P

Re: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework

#890

Post by mywittyname » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 2:36 PM UTC

pnw_hazor wrote: post #631

BeetleB wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's probably much cheaper and more efficient to hire faster and fire faster. Reality is otherwise. Lots of paperwork involved (for both hiring and firing). And leads to a not-too-great work culture.

Firing duds is the best moral booster there is. There is very little paperwork required to fire someone. If the employee is still on contract (ala contract-to-perm) just collect their badge and be done with it. If they are a W-2 employee with benefits, you hand them a few benefits notice forms and send them on their way. If they apply for unemployment, the company will get a notice that the former employee has applie…

I agree with you, but in reality, a large enough company could face (and lose) a wrongful termination lawsuit if they do this too often. The burden of proof for this is surprisingly low and engineering pays well enough that many of them can afford good lawyers.

Plus there's the added risk of hiring "duds" that are also minorities. And letting too many of them go will make it look like formal discrimination. Which is a much, much more expensive mess.

And then there's this issue of finding the duds. Easy for the people on the ground to spot, but less so for management and HR, which will require some form of reasonably accurate performance evaluations.