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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

#191

Post by tatami »

sethammons wrote: post #56

The rule of thumb I subscribed to: have the interviewer(s) do the interview. Give the candidate 3x time to do it that the in-house people took. Or, framed in reverse, if you want the assignment to take and n minutes or hours, give yourself n/3 to complete it, and however far you get is the bar for the assignment. Interviewees are stressed, maybe outside their domain, and other things. Make something that they can sho…

My high school physics teacher did the same. He would take the tests he prepared himself to check whether the scope was appropriate for the allocated time. The factor of 3 was spot on for this kind of estimation.

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

#192

Post by btbuildem »

People can tell whether you spent 5 hours or 5 days on a task.

I wonder whether that's the reason for him not getting the job. Likely, the interviewers wanted to see what this person is capable of doing in a short timeframe, how they'll prioritize and deliver under such constraints. This guy failed to do what they asked for.

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

#193

Post by nmcfarl »

nerdjon wrote: post #155

Some companies do technical interview great, but there are a couple things that I have noticed that always make me question if I actually want to work somewhere: - Being sent to a website to do a take home coding exercise, with a checkbox basically saying "I won't use the internet, stack overflow, or similar". I get that you need to test my knowledge, but shouldn't you care more that I know how to search for my probl…

Once I had a half day exercise that went even further - they provided the computer, removing the internet, but also removing all of the normal module documentation, and for good measure forbidding you from using any documentation from any source.

There were a lot of compilererrors on the way to a solution for that one.

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

#194

Post by ghaff »

xiphias2 wrote: post #123
irrational wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've joked about giving potential hires a challenge to fix a problem we are currently experiencing, but we wouldn't really do it. That takes some balls to ask interviewees to write or fix production code.

It's great if you do it as long as you pay for it. I was doing a 1 week payed interview at Coinbase. I was not hired, but my memories of the interview process are great.

This sort of thing mostly works fine for students and similar. (And internships are often great for everyone concerned.) But this doesn't really work for someone who already is working full-time. Some pay is fine but there's no way I'm taking a week of vacation to interview with you.

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

#195

Post by beersigns »

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…

I had a similar experience once but a little more extreme. On a take home interview test they were asking to build a full backend analytics setup plus a data viz UI. I called the recruiter back and told them an estimate to a problem like this was well beyond the ~4 hours they originally told me. Their response was to say "they were looking for people who would find a way to get it done no matter what". I immediately stopped the interview process without looking back.

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

#196

Post by geofft »

airstrike wrote: post #188
geofft wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misaligned incentives: the people doing interviews have such indirect financial incentive to hire the right people (only that a good/bad hire affects the company's profit, which affects their own salary/stock), almost no way of telling if they made a bad hire decision, and definitely no way of telling if they made a bad no-hire decision. Remember Alan Greenspan's story of finding a competitive advantage because every…

> Alan Greenspan's story of finding a competitive advantage because everyone else was happy to ignore half the population in hiring Maybe I'm living under a rock, but I've never heard of that. Would you mind sharing a link?

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/05/business/the-quiet-allure...

> Though David Rowe, a veteran architect of the Wharton forecasting model, has played a key role in developing the firm's econometric model, the senior staff, including Miss Eickhoff, Judith Mackey and Lucille Wu, is mostly female. Mr. Greenspan explains the gender bias with the free-market pragmatism that has become his hallmark: "I always valued men and women equally, and I found that because others did not, good women economists were cheaper than men. Hiring women does two things: It gives us better quality work for less money, and it raises the market value of women."

That is, just a few decades ago, the leading economic consulting firms in the world—economists!—were regularly overpaying men because they didn't want to hire equally capable women, such that Greenspan could find an obvious mispricing in the labor market.

Imagine how much more poorly people who are not economists and not owners of their firm must be making hiring decisions on much less blatant biases than gender.

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

#197

Post by dentemple »

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'm pretty sure they were to trying to get a sense of your political leanings, without actually saying so.

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

#198

Post by djsumdog »

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…

> you’re about to dedicate up to 5 working days on this task, with the potential for them to ghost you straight afterwards

I often give companies a list of open current open source tasks I'm working on. Pick one and I'll complete it for your interview. Every singe company turned me down, except one, who just accepted one of the tools I had on Github and examined that.

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

#199

Post by meddlepal »

toyg wrote: post #186
Loughla wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that even remotely related to the job at hand? Why would you sabotage possible good candidates just so you can get your needless debate rocks off?

> How is that even remotely related to the job at hand? It is not. But they cannot ask you "did you vote for party X? Because everyone here votes for party X and it would be awkward to have someone with Y sensibilities", that would be discriminating.

Political affiliation is not a protected class in federal law so you could ask that... though state law might prevent it.
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