111–120 of 122 posts
And then you have the famous Liar’s Poker interview question: > Investment bankers had a technique known as the stress interview. If you were invited to Lehman’s New York offices, your first interview might begin with the interviewer asking you to open the window. You were on the forty-third floor overlooking Water Street. The window was sealed shut. That was, of course, the point. The interviewer just wanted to see…
There are very few rules in getting hired. A few are: 1. First class people hire first class people. 2. Second class people hire third class people. 3. People like to hire people similar to themselves. 4. Not getting a job does not really say anything about you, but the guy they hired says a lot about the company. PS: 5. Most companies, when offered unexperienced talent and an experienced idiot, will hire the experie…
6. People overestimate which category they fall in and everyone thinks they're an "A player."
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I'm a software engineer that's been involved in hiring decisions in the past. When we make a bad hire we do a post-mortem just like we would for a critical production bug. We adjust the interview process or evaluation criteria every time a bad hire is made. We also give the same interview for every role. We spend 80% of the time asking the same questions, and leave 20% of the time for the free flow conversation and i…
Aren't you afraid that you focus too much on avoiding the bad ones, and not on trying to hire the top ones? You cannot do a postmortem for failing to hire top talent, because you will never know. What I want to say is that a bad hire is probably less important than missing out on a top candidate. Because you can always fire as soon as you find out. The other error cannot be corrected.
How would I know that during a round of interviews I failed to give an offer to Top Talent? What can I do if someone I think is Top Talent gets another offer we cannot match?
Sure, I can try my best to work against those very costly situations, but I never know how good someone is going to be until they are hired, so I don't have enough data to determine if I'm failing to hire the best.
I can, and we do, determine which candidates we hired that we really like and talk to them about why they choose the company and try to appeal to and find more candidates like them.
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Yeah seriously. Almost every single American mispronounces my name even after I say it multiple times. Hell, they mispronounce common, one syllable American names like "Lou" more than half the time. When I tell them my name is like another name they can pronounce except without the "o" at the end, they still can't pronounce it despite being able to pronounce my name with an "o" at the end. After three decades of this…
Germans pronouncing my American first name is the same way. It's a boring common Old Testament name. German has all the phonemes they need to say it too, even if the vowel is off a bit. It's just something that happens, and I don't blame them for it after so long. I get the feeling that Anglicizing or Deutchifying names is universal.
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Names are important. It’s certainly understandable if someone makes a mistake the first time, though.
But some names are indeed impossible to pronounce for none-native speakers. In Flemish we have the name Geert, and I never heard any none-native speaker been able to properly say it. That 'G' sound that we make is not used anywhere else that I know of.
These "rules" miss the big picture. People react in certain ways for entirely different reasons. Example: Recruiter mispronounces my name. I don't say anything. This can be because: 1) I'm a coward. 2) I don't care. 3) I care and am not a coward, but think it would be petty to interrupt the conversation to point this out. 4) I'm overly practical and don't care about this kind of details. 5) I think the other person m…
Agree. People often 'mispronounce' my first name (can't even pronounce last name). Honestly, I don't care. I don't blame them because they pronounce it from English point of view which is obvious as they are native speakers. Some people ask me how would I say my name (I am Russian, but live in NZ), I tell them. Some people then try to say it that way, sometimes they 'forget' and fallback to English pronunciation. Wha…
"Offended" as in perceiving the speaker to be giving offense; that is, perceiving the speaker to be intentionally not respecting the listener. Being able to pick up on that is quite adult, and the exact opposite of childish.
> Why would people want to work in such a homogeneous culture? Why would they want to work for someone who couldn't even be bothered to search the web for "How to pronounce Nguyen"? Hilariously, I did a search for "How to pronounce $my_last_name" and each result I checked mispronounced it the same way English speakers always mispronounce it.
Probably because they insist upon using dictionary respelling schemes instead of IPA, so they can't even notate the phonemes English speakers have trouble with. Of course, trying to learn how to pronounce a phoneme your native language doesn't have without one-on-one instruction is a doomed endeavor for most people, and I daresay you likely mispronounce any number of English words, given how idiosyncratically large the English phonological inventory is.
> Why would people want to work in such a homogeneous culture? Why would they want to work for someone who couldn't even be bothered to search the web for "How to pronounce Nguyen"? Hilariously, I did a search for "How to pronounce $my_last_name" and each result I checked mispronounced it the same way English speakers always mispronounce it.
Yeah seriously. Almost every single American mispronounces my name even after I say it multiple times. Hell, they mispronounce common, one syllable American names like "Lou" more than half the time. When I tell them my name is like another name they can pronounce except without the "o" at the end, they still can't pronounce it despite being able to pronounce my name with an "o" at the end. After three decades of this…
That sounds like a dialect, not mispronunciation.
> Americans are simply incapable of pronouncing anything even remotely foreign even if I enunciate it for them.
Ditto every other nationality, naturally.
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After that, I quit playing the ultra polite send-a-thank-you for every single phone call or meeting I was graced with, and sure enough, I got a couple job offers after that. I wouldn't be surprised if deciding not to worry about details with unknowable significance and inconsistent response allowed you to relax a bit more in future interviews.
> I wouldn't be surprised if deciding not to worry about details with unknowable significance and inconsistent response allowed you to relax a bit more in future interviews. Oh, for sure. I hadn't interviewed for over a decade, and was super keyed up for the first few this time around. After my attitude changed to more of a "meh, I can take this or leave it" they got a whole lot easier.
I totally agree that these rules are absolute BS. The goal of a job interview for me used to be twofold: Can the candidate do the job? Would I want to work with the candidate? Unfortunately, I have got the second one wrong as often as not in the past, so now I just try to find anything that would mean that I wouldn't want to work with the candidate, in other words, are there any red flags? If there aren't then that's…
Could you share some typical red flags?
Another red flag for me is when candidates are asked about their level of expertise on a scale of 1 to 10 on a technology and they reply with anything above 7.
Statistically there are people that are going to be able to claim 8 or above out 10 on any technology, they just probably can command a higher salary that the company I work wishes to offer (we put salary ranges on our job ads), which means that they are exaggerating, can't judge their skills (either because of self delusion or because they just think the technology doesn't have that much more to offer) or worse lying.
The thing is we were asking this to be able to tailor the questions that we would ask. No point in asking somebody who says their skill level in sql is 2 about pivot tables.