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Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

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Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#201

Post by emidln »

justfor1comment wrote: post #199

To account for some interviewers being sadist in general, may be companies can implement a per interviewer rejection quota. For example, if you interview 10 candidates at max you can reject 7 candidates. You have to yes to 3 candidates or be removed from the interviewing committee. This will ensure that just one bitter person is not preventing good candidates from clearing the interview process.

I would never vote for a candidate I didn't believe in. If you want to remove qualified engineers from hiring decisions based on arbitrary metrics, I'd probably be looking for another job on the side.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#202

Post by stcredzero »

annywhey wrote: post #176
stcredzero wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard was being made to feel inferior. I had an interview experience, where the interviewer was looking for a particular answer. I give him 3 answers to his design issue. Then the interviewer says he was looking for the 2nd answer I gave him, as if I didn't just say it. It's one thing to reach and fail. It's another thing to be in a context where the truth of what you know doesn't even matter.

The pattern of "stay silent and look dubious to make the candidate feel dumb" is a really common interview hazing strategy in my experience. I think the next time I see it, I'm just going to question whether this is how they behave in their job too, even if it means ending the interview right there.

The pattern of "stay silent and look dubious to make the candidate feel dumb" is a really common interview hazing strategy in my experience.

How is this distinguishable from the interviewer hearing something from the candidate where an understandable reaction is to stay silent and look dubious? I've had candidates try to tell me something like: a null pointer member of a struct in C++ takes up no data. The first part of what you described was my natural reaction, not a hazing strategy. (I then went on to ask if they were sure about that.)

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#203

Post by bsder »

jfasi wrote: post #7

As someone who does both a lot of interviewing (at Google) and gives a lot of advice on interviewing to people just starting out, this rhymes with my intuition about why some people get into interviews: even without the use of brainteasers (which, for the record, are not used at Google), the interview process is hard . People rarely come out of it without at least a twinge of frustration of humiliation. I'm not immun…

> I have a pet theory that when people interview they bring this buried frustration into the room with them and use the interviewing process to play the part of the people they feel humiliated them.

That's a very rare individual. I've been on both sides of the desk a lot, and I don't think I've ever run into anybody like that.

The much simpler explanation is that being an interviewer is hard and takes work and practice like any other skill. The problem is that nobody ever applies actual work to interviewing.

Did somebody let you watch their interviews before letting you interview somebody else? Did somebody watch your interview to give you advice for what you did wrong and right? Did you ever role play being an interviewer? Do your interviewers occasionally try to calibrate themselves to other interviewers?

I can count the number of people who can answer "yes" to even one of those questions on one hand without using a majority of the fingers--and that's over my entire career.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#204

Post by mv4 »

vivekseth wrote: post #171
8_hours_ago wrote: post #123

I recently interviewed at Apple and one interviewer caused me to decide to never work there. I was put into a conference room and had 8 people over 6 hours come in and interview me one after another. Each person asked me about my background and then jumped into a whiteboard coding problem. Most of the interviewers were understanding of the fact that writing code on a whiteboard is nothing like writing code on a compu…

So you will never work at Apple because you had 1 bad interviewer out of a sample size of 8? That seems foolish.

Stay hungry, stay foolish. Someone said that.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#205

Post by 01100011 »

pmiller2 wrote: post #183
01100011 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm nitpicking, but yes sometimes you do have to code under pressure. Yes it can result in bad code but it can also save millions of dollars as production lines are allowed to run, ecommerce is allowed to happen, or important contractual obligations are met. That said, you generally do not write that code on a whiteboard with no access to the internet. It sounds like you just interviewed with a dick. That happens.

I don't believe your nitpick is valid here. True, sometimes one has to code under pressure, in the sense that money is lost (or, at least not made) while things are down, but there's almost never a situation where you can't stop and take an extra 20 or 30 minutes to check to see that your code would do what you expect it to do. In fact, if the worst consequence of waiting 30 minutes to deploy a temporary fix is that…

I suppose we've been exposed to different parts of the software elephant.

When I say money is lost... it can potentially be a lot of money. Can you imagine what 10 minutes of downtime could cost Amazon, for instance? What about streaming the superbowl? Credit card payment processors? Even something simple like the test harness for a production line may mean that an entire shift of assembly workers now has to stand idle or sweep the floor. When your company is losing thousands of dollars per minute you will understand what I'm talking about.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#206

Post by jancsika »

munchbunny wrote: post #175
jfasi wrote: post #7

As someone who does both a lot of interviewing (at Google) and gives a lot of advice on interviewing to people just starting out, this rhymes with my intuition about why some people get into interviews: even without the use of brainteasers (which, for the record, are not used at Google), the interview process is hard . People rarely come out of it without at least a twinge of frustration of humiliation. I'm not immun…

At risk of proposing a generalization, I think that this comes from the same place that other gatekeeping behaviors come from: you see yourself as the in-group's bouncer. That puts you in a mindset to run the interviewee through a gauntlet, partly as a ritual to show their desire to get in, and partly through a sense of duty to hire "only the best". But hiring is not a filtering problem. It's a matching problem. And…

Also keep in mind that inhumane interview processes necessarily filter out the candidates who refuse to put up with inhumane treatment.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#207

Post by pjlegato »

justfor1comment wrote: post #199

To account for some interviewers being sadist in general, may be companies can implement a per interviewer rejection quota. For example, if you interview 10 candidates at max you can reject 7 candidates. You have to yes to 3 candidates or be removed from the interviewing committee. This will ensure that just one bitter person is not preventing good candidates from clearing the interview process.

How about Olympics style scoring -- a panel of interviewers rate each candidate, then the highest and lowest individual scores are removed before averaging?

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#208

Post by trhway »

jfasi wrote: post #7

As someone who does both a lot of interviewing (at Google) and gives a lot of advice on interviewing to people just starting out, this rhymes with my intuition about why some people get into interviews: even without the use of brainteasers (which, for the record, are not used at Google), the interview process is hard . People rarely come out of it without at least a twinge of frustration of humiliation. I'm not immun…

>I have a pet theory that when people interview they bring this buried frustration into the room with them and use the interviewing process to play the part of the people they feel humiliated them. It's conceivable that people with latent meanness, or as this abstract calls it tendencies for "narcissism and sadism" who aren't aware enough of their biases to try to counteract them, will use these sorts of questions to make themselves feel better.

Also add another factor - Google's approach is (or at least was) in the words of Google's big HR guy: "A good rule of thumb is to hire only people who are better than you." (https://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-exceptional...) Such approach naturally brings out the worst in the people conducting the interview - their high opinion about themselves. Mix it in with the stuff you mentioned - buried frustration, latent meanness/"narcissism and sadism" - and you have the perfect "Google interview" :)

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#209

Post by groby_b »

jlarocco wrote: post #137
mgraczyk wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was 13 years ago, and Google has since had many "revelations" about its misuse of useless tools like brainteasers. The current process and interviewer training/selection process is nothing like the process in 2005.

Perhaps that true, but I think it's a recent change. I vaguely remember having a brain teaser question as recently as 6 years ago, but I concede it was a long time ago and I could be remembering wrong. BI had an article about it as recently as 2015. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-brain-teaser-intervie...

BI... is an interesting publication. With an interesting relationship to facts.

Re: Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions

#210

Post by Nimitz14 »

spitfire wrote: post #105

Hunter and Schmidt did a meta-study of 85 (now 100, with the follow up) years of research on hiring criteria. [1] There are three attributes you need to select for to identify performing employees in intellectual fields. - General mental ability (Are they generally smart) Use WAIS or if there are artifacts of GMA(Complex work they've done themselves) available use them as proxies. Using IQ is effectively illegal[2] i…

65% seems quite bad.
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