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I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

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Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#171

Post by gwbas1c »

jordansmithnz wrote: post #39

This reminds me of a take home software engineering interview I was once given via email. Same deal, I was told about 5 hours. I’m an iOS developer, so I was expecting a pretty simple app. I opened the PDF to find not one, but three separate tasks. Completion of all three was expected, with an estimate of about two hours each. One of the tasks was to replicate Apple’s ‘Reminders’ app in its entirety, backend sync fun…

When I got something like that, I just ghosted. It's one of the very few times I ghosted an interview.

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#172

Post by ghaff »

macspoofing wrote: post #85
threwawasy1228 wrote: post #21

When people are turning their interview questions into successful companies, maybe it is time to start asking some easier interview questions. This is a visceral demonstration of how absolutely ridiculous interviews have gotten.

>maybe it is time to start asking some easier interview questions Why? The big tech companies offer high salaries and get lots of applicants. They can afford to be picky. And by the way, OP went above and beyond what they asked of him. In fact, there's a chance that this hurt his chances. >This is a visceral demonstration of how absolutely ridiculous interviews have gotten. This kind of format isn't standard across t…

I'm not a big fan of extended take home assignments but I can definitely see the logic of wanting to have some evidence that a candidate can do what the job requires.

I do a lot more writing than programming and, for someone for which that's one of their primary jobs, I would absolutely want to see writing samples--and, if they didn't have one they could share, they're going to need to write something custom.

I honestly don't get the max 1 hour interview process. You're probably not that special. I guess I did just have an interview over lunch once but I had known (and worked with in various capacities) the person making the hiring decision for years. Other than that, I've always had multiple interviews, if only so that multiple people could talk to me. As an interviewer, I really like having the perspective of multiple people precisely because it is a very imperfect process and people miss things.

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#173

Post by gowld »

dannyw wrote: post #14
hising wrote: post #12

Awesome to read about you turning this into your own startup. One thing I came to think about regarding the "4-5 hours" and throwing 5 working days on it, is that, maybe as an interviewer it is quite obvious that you put more than 4-5 hours into it and what they were "really" after were the trade-offs you would have made if you put 4-5 hours into it. Just a thought.

Not Google, but similar company and can confirm. If you spend 5x the amount of time we suggest, it’s obvious and the expectations scale a lot, lot higher than if you just spent 5 hours.

So I should spend a few more hours going back to add flaws to make it look like I spent less time?

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#174

Post by gowld »

yitchelle wrote: post #97
bitL wrote: post #17

Are you sure you didn't sign any NDA, preventing you from working on ideas you might get during interview? Google used to have pretty water-tight policy on outflow of ideas (but inflow was encouraged) during interviews.

An interesting aside is if the NDA is bidirectional? In most interviews, the candidate would discuss their past experiences and past projects, which could contain sensitive information via unintentional leaking. Perhaps even a side project that the candidate is working could be covered with NDA. Thoughts?

https://patentpandas.org/stories/company-patented-my-idea

Company Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#175

Post by gwbas1c »

comboy wrote: post #76
swish_bob wrote: post #47

I once completed the task sent to me by a prospective employer, and then thanked them and said I wouldn't be submitting it, as it told me enough about the way they worked to know I wouldn't enjoy it. Never forget that the interview process is two way ...

Those few big companies probably have more than enough candidates. If you have too many candidates you need to adjust interview difficulty to still hire only as much as you need. I don't think these companies care that the task is too difficult for 99% of people, or that there are smart people who are not motivated enough to complete it as long as they can get as many smart and motivated people as they want. That sai…

Never assume that a company with a bad interview process has more candidates than they can handle.

A company like that is probably wondering why they can't find the people they're looking for.

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#176

Post by eeZah7Ux »

gwbas1c wrote: post #168
rdez6173 wrote: post #104

I am a software engineer and I was once asked during an interview at a large hedge fund to pick a side and debate why war is justified. When I pressed them about the relevance, they indicated that they often have heated debates on all manner of topics, so they wanted to see my thought process. I enjoy solving complex problems, but socio-ethical problems are way outside of my wheelhouse. I politely indicated that I di…

I would think that's completely relevant for a hedge fund. They probably need to debate investments like this all the time.

debate investments in weapons manufacturers...

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#177

Post by allenu »

gowld wrote: post #169
allenu wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it may translate into, "well, if I work with this person, are they going to spend way too much on details that I don't need and burn themselves out just trying to please me?" Part of working is being able to be assertive and say "ok, for only 4-5 hours, here's what I was able to do for you, so now let's figure out next steps".

Yeah, I hate hiring people who are interested in what we are doing and are excited to work on it. It's one thing to accept that some people are busy and shouldn't be punished, a bout are we supposed to only hire people who have zero excitement for the industry and job?

That wasn't really my point. My point is that when you are working on a team, it's a collaborative experience and if your superior asks you to do a task a certain way, there may be a good reason why. The exercise here may have been to see what ideas you could generate about the user experience and less about aesthetic polish of a final product. I got the sense from the post that the author spent a lot of detail in making it look aesthetically pleasing, which is only one part of user experience design. A larger part of it is design something easy to use and understand.

Sure, feel free to spend extra time on the take-home assignment to signal to the potential employer you are passionate, but that's a different thing.

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#178

Post by ghaff »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #170
djhaskin987 wrote: post #140

Is HN truly this bad of a bubble that everyone thinks interview tests are normal? The last time I had to do a test it was on site and I was just out of college. Most interviews just talk about the challenges of the team, my past work on similar problems, and how I solved them. I've been on the other side of the table too. It's usually easy to tell if the applicant is a quack or if they are skilled by how they talk ab…

> It's usually easy to tell if the applicant is a quack or if they are skilled by how they talk about different technology: commiserating about familiar pain points, how they solved common problems. I almost feel at this point that it's unprofessional to hand out tests to people. The problem with what you're describing is that it's using a proxy (discussion) to vet a particular skill (ability to program). It's very e…

When I was an industry analyst, I did a lot of writing (and still do). We absolutely needed to see writing samples from job candidates. If they had articles and so forth that had been published, great. But there's no way we would have hired someone without evidence that they could write.

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#179

Post by asark »

overcast wrote: post #127
klyrs wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in 2000, I had an in-person interview at a very small b2b website. They'd been using overseas contractors (zero local technical people) and the founder/interviewer barely knew a thing about computers. He didn't know how to run a technical interview, so he sat me down at a computer, logged in as root on prod (lol the only server), and pointed me at a couple of bugs. I knocked them out lickety-split and was hired…

Nothing has really changed since then. That scenario still exists. We acquire tons of companies that have the equivalent of what you're describing.

Every company I see "really would like" to fully automate their build/test/deploy pipeline, to actually have automated tests for most new features, infra as code is a work in progress, et c. Basically most of the Joel-test or modern HN-bubble best practices are still on the wishlist or on a perpetual "we're trying to make that happen" an awful lot of places.

And they are all, all, "fixing their Jira workflows". Constantly. What a time-sink of a tool, as commonly used. I'm convinced at this point they'd be better off letting their dev teams use whatever, and just have human-driven processes for collecting all the (mostly meaningless) metrics they always seem to need to report upward, rather than trying to make one tool do everything automatically. Pretty sure Jira and other heavy PM tools are typically the sort of software/process that Graeber calls out in Bullshit Jobs: adding a ton of work out of proportion with any real benefit, to make everything fit in a computer and on a spreadsheet, rather than reducing work.

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