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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

#501

Post by gedy »

distances wrote: post #335
thoreauway wrote: post #305

I interviewed at Uber before they launched. Their "take home" was to create... Uber. Here's the exact challenge: UberCab Coder Challenge 1) Write a program that determines the wait time, trip time, rating, and fare for a black car trip in San Francisco, given that the customer's pickup location and destination is randomly placed anywhere in San Francisco proper, and given that there are X number of cars all placed ra…

Having never worked in SV, are these home assignments common there? I know several engineers who would refuse to do any homework at all as a matter of principle, so a task of this magnitude without compensation sounds laughable on the face of it.

We've used them, but these huge examples give them a bad name. Some people (myself included) are terrible at whiteboarding and we'd have lost some great engineers in screening if we had only done CS quiz/whiteboard.

They are great for probing real-world development, (should) take less than an hour or two, and based on what the interviewee says they are skilled in.

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

#503

Post by BurningFrog »

max76 wrote: post #285
BurningFrog wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your "proper answer" is what the US tried to do in Iraq, which is now considered the perhaps biggest mistake in US history.

Iraq is in the running for the biggest mistake in US history? I have a one word rebuttal to that sentence. Slavery.

I'll agree that slavery was worse than the invasion of Iraq, but I wouldn't call it a "mistake".

Not quite sure why. Some tries:

1. A mistake implies a single decision.

2. Slavery worked as intended, right? It was more evil than mistaken.

Either way, you sure derailed my derailing of the topic, so I'll stop here :)

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

#504

Post by retiredcoder »

rifung wrote: post #486
gcheong wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's on par but still bullshit. I interviewed with Uber, got said phone screen, managed to solve the problem then was told Uber decided to "go in another direction" and would not be moving forward with my application. When I asked for clarification as to what that meant considering I solved the problem the recruiter called me and said some hand wavy stuff about how I didn't solve it "quickly" enough (I had plenty of…

> I interviewed with Uber, got said phone screen, managed to solve the problem then was told Uber decided to "go in another direction" and would not be moving forward with my application. When I asked for clarification as to what that meant considering I solved the problem I understand the frustration with interviews but your comment seems to show a lack of understanding in how interviews work. Interviews are a compe…

That’s the ideal scenario, normalization with recalibration. Even companies doing that as their main business fail to do so and evaluate people.

Now imagine engineers doing that, in a highly competitive landscape, with no motivation or second thoughts. It is a jungle out there.

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

#505

Post by nan0 »

thoreauway wrote: post #305

I interviewed at Uber before they launched. Their "take home" was to create... Uber. Here's the exact challenge: UberCab Coder Challenge 1) Write a program that determines the wait time, trip time, rating, and fare for a black car trip in San Francisco, given that the customer's pickup location and destination is randomly placed anywhere in San Francisco proper, and given that there are X number of cars all placed ra…

How long did Uber give you to do this?

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

#506

Post by ravenstine »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #476
ravenstine wrote: post #237

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…

This is ridiculous. There's nothing wrong with on-site coding challenges, white boarding, and a good chunk of brain teasers. Having people code a small problem might be by far the best way to understand how they can do the job. "If having years of experience and a GitHub don't demonstrate to you that I can write code, " Your Github code does not demonstrate what people are looking for.

> There's nothing wrong with on-site coding challenges, white boarding, and a good chunk of brain teasers.

If a company is looking for the kind of candidate that can and wants to work through those problems, then by all means they should do it. I personally don't recommend those kinds of companies because I'm unconvinced that on-side coding challenges and white boarding do much more than to weed out the really unqualified people and humiliate nervous but talented engineers.

Brain teasers don't measure anything other than that the candidate memorized the answers to common brain teasers, or as I've witnesses on more than one occasion, their ability to remember the answer given to them by a third party recruiter.

Maybe brain teasers are for you, and you can go work for companies that think brain teasers measure something. I'll go work for the majority of companies that don't fall for that idea.

> Having people code a small problem might be by far the best way to understand how they can do the job.

That can be, especially for junior engineers. If a company still wants to run aptitude tests on mid-level and senior engineers with years of experience, good references, and personnel projects, then they're being lazy. The fact that I don't want to burn myself out doing unpaid work at this point in my career isn't my problem.

Companies are free to not hire me. LOL

> Your Github code does not demonstrate what people are looking for.

And yet I've been explicitly hired because I had coded something relevant on my GitHub profile and could talk about it in detail in person. It sounds like you believe that a significant number of people with personal projects are really just bullshitters, and that making them write more code is going to tell you whether you want to work with that person.

No personal offense, but what you are suggesting represents exactly the type of company I want to avoid for good reason: Companies that think they can conveniently measure a candidate's aptitude through unproven metrics like brain teasers.

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

#507

Post by ravenstine »

binarytox1n wrote: post #489
ravenstine wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a pretty standard thing to do in an interview... 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…

As a hiring manager I would take a refusal to whiteboard or participate in an in-person coding problem as a sign that the candidate knew they were not qualified to write code and therefore declined so as not to waste anyone's time. I'm sure that doesn't matter to you as you don't want to work at standard companies anyway, but I have seen plenty of people fail to solve fizz buzz who had the nerve to show up for a Seni…

If all I had to do was a problem like fizz buzz, I'd probably go ahead and do it. In my experience, most coding challenges that are in-person or take-home are more involved than that Fizz buzz, taking an hour or more. I can't think of a single coding challenge I did in the last 6 months that didn't involve either building a full application or something with complicated or game-like logic. The closest thing to fizz buzz level of simplicity might have been the custom file/directory system I had to work on, but even that was more involved and nuanced than writing fizz buzz.

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

#508

Post by lhorie »

rifung wrote: post #486
gcheong wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's on par but still bullshit. I interviewed with Uber, got said phone screen, managed to solve the problem then was told Uber decided to "go in another direction" and would not be moving forward with my application. When I asked for clarification as to what that meant considering I solved the problem the recruiter called me and said some hand wavy stuff about how I didn't solve it "quickly" enough (I had plenty of…

> I interviewed with Uber, got said phone screen, managed to solve the problem then was told Uber decided to "go in another direction" and would not be moving forward with my application. When I asked for clarification as to what that meant considering I solved the problem I understand the frustration with interviews but your comment seems to show a lack of understanding in how interviews work. Interviews are a compe…

That's a great analogy. Just a small nitpick: While it's similar, in reality, interviews are not quite like being graded on a curve in school. The main point of a technical screener is to decrease the likelihood that a candidate will bomb the more demanding onsite interview loops. This is especially important because these loops typically take up most of a candidate's day, disrupt the day of a bunch of engineers, and might even cost the company hundreds or even thousands of dollars in plane tickets/accommodation costs if the candidate is flying in from out of state.

It's true that an interviewer might look at previous candidates to calibrate expectations, but they don't necessarily pit candidates for the same team against each other as would be the case in school curved grading. Usually what happens is a candidate just barely solves the technical exercise, but also raises a bunch of yellow/red flags. A common rule of thumb among tech interviewers is "if in doubt, reject". This is - in my experience - so common that a company will typically nab the first candidate that clears the expectation bar. It's actually rare that two or more candidates would be up for consideration at the same time because it's hard to even get a single one of high enough caliber in the first place, since good engineers are in extremely high demand and are almost never actively looking for jobs (recruiters reach out to them instead).

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

#509

Post by thrwaway190516 »

busterarm wrote: post #409
thrwaway190516 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike others relying, I think your interview question is good. Let's break down why. In your phrasing you asked "what happens". Did any candidates you thought were good give the actual answer: a disaster for Libya, and the person is removed from power? That is the actual answer. Of course not. All of your "passing" answers to "what happens" includes building up infrastructure, basic services, etc. In other words, wh…

> What actually happens of course is nothing good. It doesn't mean it's not a bad interview question, but a good answer is not the factually correct answer. OP is hiring executives, not yes-men. You want people who give you the factually correct answer, because you want people who will behave ethically. Execs have to worry about regulation and corporate risk and you do not want liars in those positions. That's why th…

most companies operate more along the model of:

"Execs have to worry about regulation, corporate risk, and managing perceptions both internally and externally. You do not want someone spouting the literal truth without a filter in those positions."

That's why it's a great question. It requires a filter.

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

#510

Post by zymhan »

Afton wrote: post #435
zymhan wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehh, only if there was a demonstrable pattern. You can't just sue an employer for not getting a job because you mentioned your religion as the basis for something. 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.

Reminder that you want to avoid the suing not just for the risk of actual loss, but for the cost of defense.

This is true. But in this specific case, it is unlikely a single person, especially one in the position of interviewing for a lower level job, would have enough money to rival the company in a lawsuit or cause them severe financial pain. Usually it's the opposite situation that is financially ruinous.
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