281–290 of 615 posts
At that level, anyone who gets called to interview for Google is already qualified for the job. It really is a lottery at that point if you get the job.
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Non-baited statement (and I'm aware it's discussed a lot here), but my experience with people saying the candidate wouldn't be a good 'fit' was just a way to enforce bias either unconsciously or consciously. And led to problems with group-think and an inability to think in different ways. Now granted my hiring sample is less than 100, but that has been my experience so far.
As a serious question, why do you think that dissimilar groups product faster or higher quality work? How far can you take that concept? Should they even speak the same language?
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When interviewing execs who would be building new departments a few years ago, I would pose the question of "In the wake of Arab spring in Libya, the people decide that you are their next leader. What happens in your first 100 days?". The answers ran the gamut from lazy to fantastic to terrifying. A lot of answers where generic "coalition building" variety. The better answers identified key areas to focus on like inf…
It's a neat idea for the interview, but it could have caused problems, at least in the U.S., regarding labor law: Suppose the interviewee had answered, "I would work towards a proper implementation of Sharia law." or "I would start by building Christian churches and state-sponsored public preaching." or "I would start by replacing all mosques with science-and-technology museums." At that point any candidate who wasn'…
I mean in the US you can sue for whatever you want, but the likelihood of it happening or being an issue is quite small in this scenario.
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As a general rule when I'm given a programming task that takes 4 hours to do then - IF everything I will need for the task is already installed on my computer and all dependencies bugs and so forth have already been taken care of in these things - it will take 4 hours. Maybe the same situation applies in Design somehow? I mean yeah it takes 4 hours to make the product if you happen to have all the graphical elements…
Unfortunately not. Coding is like math homework. When your doing the math homework you know when your done, it's very obvious and anyone can check your work and clearly see it's either right or wrong. Design is like a book report for English class, it's bottomless and can always be improved given more time, albeit with diminishing returns. Design challenges are evil and bullshit, you can poor hundreds of hours into a…
Agreed, unless they want a good polished solutions, meaning it has been refactored, has decent comments, is well tested, etc.... then it becomes a lot like design where the sky is the limit.
My wife got her first job in the states because of a take home design challenge. Other companies were wary of her because of her foreign degree and no US experience, and she was able to show off in the design challenge they gave her (she spent more time than estimated, but not incredibly much more than that). In this case, it really worked out for her.
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Perhaps I'm in the minority here, but I don't like this question because you know there is a politically correct answer and then an actual course of action people would take. The proper answer is: introduce democratic government, clean up the country, introduce proper amenities (healthcare, etc) and spread the wealth for the benefit of the people. Fact of the matter is: absolute power corrupts, and plenty of people w…
Your "proper answer" is what the US tried to do in Iraq, which is now considered the perhaps biggest mistake in US history.
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Yeah, adding a button to a codebase is an awful test. If someone made it to an onsite and you don’t know whether they can add a button in swift, something failed in your screening process. If you’re testing how someone navigates a codebase, you can just look at it with them, and let them drive the chat. If you’re testing an engineer for a serious job, do an algorithms test. If you’re testing an engineer for a specifi…
Your odds go way up if you repeatedly fire at the guy to your left. Being a senior engineer is knowing the difference between doing what your told and figuring out what needs to be done to achieve project success. In this case, getting to the next round. Next question?
None of the places I've worked at had me do a coding challenge. Either they already knew who I was through networking or they asked me to show them a personal project and explain how it worked. Each job was a great opportunity. When I start looking for a new opportunity in a year or two, I may consider coding challenges to be a soft red flag in that I don't think they're worth wasting time over. I spent so many hours…
Refusing take-homes is a reasonable stance but refusing to whiteboard strikes me as overly critical. It's a pretty standard thing to do in an interview... while whiteboarding may be a little silly, walking out of an interview after someone's already blocked time for you because you think whiteboarding is silly is even more silly than whiteboarding is. If I were the interviewer I'd be concerned that you can't be even…
I'm not interested at working for standard companies. :) But everyone is different. If whiteboarding is someone's thing, the more power to them.
> walking out of an interview after someone's already blocked time for you because you think whiteboarding is silly is even more silly than whiteboarding is
If there was a misunderstanding where they blocked out time in an interview for whiteboarding, I wouldn't be rude and refuse in person.
What I do is ask in the phone screening or the first engineering interview about whether the technical interview would involve whiteboarding or brain teasers. If the answer is yes, I politely end the interview process. That way their time is wasted minimally.
However, I have no qualms about walking out of an interview that involves brain teasers.
> If I were the interviewer I'd be concerned that you can't be even a little bit flexible with things that you personally don't like.
Interviewing is a two-way street. How about you be a little bit flexible and not make me do something that you personally like? No? Yeah, I didn't think so. I'll just work for companies that don't do whiteboarding in interviews, which are a dime a dozen.
Yes, that was a bit crass, but it amazes me how people in the position of interviewing believe that interviewers should care about whether they're concerned over something.
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When interviewing execs who would be building new departments a few years ago, I would pose the question of "In the wake of Arab spring in Libya, the people decide that you are their next leader. What happens in your first 100 days?". The answers ran the gamut from lazy to fantastic to terrifying. A lot of answers where generic "coalition building" variety. The better answers identified key areas to focus on like inf…
>Bad answers had... Asking a politically charged question on statecraft and judging the answer based on your own personal ideas about how to run a state strikes me as a bizarre way to conduct an interview, even for an exec. >The worst answers had the exec killing people Play stupid games, win stupid prizes?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non-baited statement (and I'm aware it's discussed a lot here), but my experience with people saying the candidate wouldn't be a good 'fit' was just a way to enforce bias either unconsciously or consciously. And led to problems with group-think and an inability to think in different ways. Now granted my hiring sample is less than 100, but that has been my experience so far.
As a serious question, why do you think that dissimilar groups product faster or higher quality work? How far can you take that concept? Should they even speak the same language?
But the quality of the outcome, again in my experience, is higher for groups that are dissimilar overall in background and viewpoints. Teams structured in this way are able to view things from different angles. They are able to challenge each other in ways that groups from similar backgrounds with similar view are simply not able to even think of.
>How far can I take the concept?
What does that matter? Honestly?
>Should they even speak the same language?
It's helpful? What does this have to do with 'fit' actually being current business manager code for 'implicit bias'?
And my point wasn't that dissimilar groups work better; my point was that looking for 'fit' is just a way for groups to embrace their own biases about 'insert trait here' without feeling guilty, and leads, in my opinion and experience, to groupthink and circlejerky ideas.
My experience has taught me that any business more concerned with fit is not a place for me. I have yet to be challenged intellectually anywhere that 'fit' has been part of the interview process.
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I can't tell if this is brilliant or sadistic. On the one hand, it really tells you who's smart enough to realize the task can't be done in the allotted time. On the other hand, not being able to do something as simple as adding a button in 45 minutes has to screw with the candidate's mind. That sort of thing would shatter what little confidence I have. I'd probably tank the rest of the interview. > I learned a lot a…
Yeah, adding a button to a codebase is an awful test. If someone made it to an onsite and you don’t know whether they can add a button in swift, something failed in your screening process. If you’re testing how someone navigates a codebase, you can just look at it with them, and let them drive the chat. If you’re testing an engineer for a serious job, do an algorithms test. If you’re testing an engineer for a specifi…
Your description sounds close to the wikipedia description of the first round of that movie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_Tzameti), so hopefully it's not just the wrong probability to analyze, but naively, the setup sounds like it would have slightly above 5/6 probabilty of survival for the first round. But some aspects of the question setup also almost remind me of the classic networking algorithm of slotted Aloha, which does yield an optimal utilization (packet survival) rate of 1/e in each round (for an altered question setup).