Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews” • Hacker News Board

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#151

Post by itronitron » Sat, Feb 22, 2020, 10:18 PM UTC

deanCommie wrote: post #132

throwawaytousan wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a former interviewer for a FAANG competitor that had a successful IPO. I had to do over 1,000 interviews in 5 years. The VP of Eng told me I was “highly accurate.” We used leetcode-like programming questions. I don’t think the FAANG-style coding puzzles have anything new to add to the conversation here. The reason big companies do that is because the questions are prompts are simple to write explain (hence interv…

> FAANG-style coding puzzles These are not "puzzles". That makes it seem like there is some trick or clever concept the candidate needs to grasp that show "lateral thinking". There isn't. These are (or supposed to be) fundamental problems of computer science that require good understanding of algorithms, data structures, code performance, and can be solved in Yes, these exist, and there are plenty of them. A pretty c…

I sincerely hope the codebase of your employers is littered with 30-minute solutions to puzzles such as the one you describe.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#152

Post by PragmaticPulp » Sat, Feb 22, 2020, 10:18 PM UTC

gavinray wrote: post #42

Is it really that rare that companies have legitimate hiring processes and realistic interviews? Take this with a grain of salt, because my experience may differ from many here (never worked at FAANG, I spent a lot of time at smaller startups in Boulder and am currently in Miami) but I have only been put in front of a whiteboard one time during many dozens of interviews and it was a generic logic puzzle to see how I…

> Is it really that rare that companies have legitimate hiring processes and realistic interviews?

In my experience, the gap between the HN comments section and the real world is massive when it comes to hiring practices.

In the world of HN comments, most people tend to identify with the candidate rather the interviewers. The interview candidate is the hero, the underdog, and the person we're supposed to root for. The interviewers are bumbling fools, drunk on power and dead set on abusing their power to find flimsy excuses to reject candidates.

In the real world, most of the senior engineers I know have spent considerable time on both sides of the interviewing table. At different points in their career, they've been the ones asking questions as well as the ones being interviewed. This leads to a lot of cross-pollination of interview techniques as well as different perspectives on what works vs. what doesn't.

We can all agree that interviewing and hiring practices aren't perfect, but it's much harder to suggest better alternatives. At one point, I tried directly asking candidates how they'd prefer to be interviewed in a way that best highlighted their talents. A surprising number of people defaulted back to standard interview practices, but I also had a number of "just trust me when I say that you should give me this job" type answers.

These online discussions inevitably skew one way, because no one wants to be the bad guy defending the current imperfect status quo. Even the author of this article artfully dodges any request to suggest alternatives, instead falling back on the safe and secure "we have a lot of work to do" response.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#153

Post by notabee » Sat, Feb 22, 2020, 10:19 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #30

rekabis wrote: post #23

The “hopeless list”, no. 3: “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.” This pretty much sums up my impression of these hiring managers that crank the bar sky-high: they are assholes through-and-through, and are full of shit to boot. If you crank the bar sky-high, all you will get are two kinds of people: those that interview/test well, b…

But while they are getting guidance and mentorship, they are not being a productive member of the team, taking time away from experienced developers and as soon as they level up they will change companies and the next company didn’t have to invest training time. I know everyone has to start somewhere but from the company’s perspective, hiring a junior developer doesn’t make sense.

If you consider a larger pool of available competent developers to hire as beneficial for companies (thus driving down wages), then it does make sense. But it requires long term planning and investment, which does not mesh with the short term profit over everything business model currently running the economy. Training is a cost that must be paid, and while both students and governments have been made to pay much of that cost for a while, that system may not function for much longer.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#154

Post by Apocryphon » Sat, Feb 22, 2020, 10:19 PM UTC

matz1 wrote: post #133

NoOneNew wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the entire point of these articles. The algorithms you're forced to memorize are, 99% of the time, useless. Instead of hiring someone by their track record, managers are choosing to hire those capable of memorizing trivia. Part 2, paying someone on trivia instead of capabilities is not sustainable. The company ends up suffering in the long term. Other engineers that are actually capable have to pic…

I think you missed the point of this interview style. This style of interview is scalable, predictable, efficient and effective. It is useful in that way.

It's scalable all right, but the other points- especially the latter two- are being debated in this thread.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#155

Post by choppaface » Sat, Feb 22, 2020, 10:19 PM UTC

marvin wrote: post #114

choppaface wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the huge gap between supply and demand with respect to CS graduates and jobs. It’s really frustrating to hear so many new grads are struggling to get hired despite the gigantic investment in CSE. Articles like these point to the failure of the evaluation process as a bottleneck versus the common understanding that supply is limited.

New graduates don't get hired? That's the first I hear about this (recently) anywhere in the world. What's changed?

If you search the article for the string "New college grads" the author indicates he received multiple emails from new grads claiming they couldn't find jobs. Personally I've seen lots of new grads with 4-5 offers and many who were unable to find jobs out of college despite tons of interviewing.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#156

Post by deanCommie » Sat, Feb 22, 2020, 10:19 PM UTC

protonfish wrote: post #64

deanCommie wrote: post #35

I got to the last thread too late for a comment to make a difference, but I'm exactly the person most of you want to talk to or hate. I'm an interviewer at a FAANG company with >500 interviews in the last 5 years, I teach multiple internal courses on interviewing, and I think the system makes a lot of sense for companies at our scale. Ask Me Anything :) I currently have a toddler on my lap, but I'll edit this post la…

It seems to me that it should be straightforward to objectively measure hiring practices by correlating different interview questions and techniques with subsequent job performance (compared to a control.) Has this been done? If so, I'd love to see the studies, if not, then it would be hard to argue that current techniques aren't voodoo.

The short answer is yes, but those studies are kept internal to the companies.

The longer answer is we can only study the people that joined the company and failed to perform rather than those that COULD have been outstanding but our interview process selected them out. So there are flaws, of course.

I'm not sure how you could do the latter unless the biggest companies shared their data and compared scenarios of "Candidate X failed an Company Y interview, but then later got a job at Company Z, and thrived".

Also you'd be working against the bias of "Well, that just means that the Company Z is easier to work at".

There are just too many variables, team to team.

Part of the problem is even within these massive companies there is a huge diversity of types of jobs, and an engineer who thrives on working on Google AdWords might fail on the SpannerDB team (to pick two random examples from not my company)

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#157

Post by banner2018 » Sat, Feb 22, 2020, 10:20 PM UTC

choppaface wrote: post #73

ipnon wrote: post #66

What is tragic here is the amount of effort that is now expended by young computer scientists into the game of algorithms. Whereas a young programmer in the past may have spent their extra days writing games in Basic or static web pages, hackers these days seem to do Leetcode until the wheels come off. We are failing to bring certain softwares into existence by effectively requiring programmers to their effort into t…

Not to mention the huge gap between supply and demand with respect to CS graduates and jobs. It’s really frustrating to hear so many new grads are struggling to get hired despite the gigantic investment in CSE. Articles like these point to the failure of the evaluation process as a bottleneck versus the common understanding that supply is limited.

While domestic CS grads can't find jobs , my current manager and other managers who are naturalized citizen want to prefer H1 candidate who are either ethnically alligned or speaking one of their languages. People make fun of having rejected non H1 candidate. Being a naturalized citizen I was hired so I will keep quite with the discrimination and sympathize with H1 as getting job else where is difficult for H1. I did finally file a EEOC case in MD (531-2019-01105) to document the discrimination done by Naturalized citizens. Hopefully when our kids go look for jobs, they don't have to be party to discrimination. If you feel this needs support call a Congress man or senator to take look.

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#158

Post by watwut » Sat, Feb 22, 2020, 10:20 PM UTC

karatestomp wrote: post #141

wutbrodo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems implausible. It's counter-intuitive. But the idea seems pretty persistent. Some of us have direct experience with exactly this situation (see my previous comment). Hell, Jeff Atwood wrote a whole piece on it a long time ago.

As a programmer who is for-sure well past "fizzbuzz" quality and has been for a while now, I can just about guarantee I've left interviewers with the impression they dodged a can't-actually-program bullet when they rejected me, a couple times.

How it happened?

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#159

Post by deanCommie » Sat, Feb 22, 2020, 10:20 PM UTC

itronitron wrote: post #151

deanCommie wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FAANG-style coding puzzles These are not "puzzles". That makes it seem like there is some trick or clever concept the candidate needs to grasp that show "lateral thinking". There isn't. These are (or supposed to be) fundamental problems of computer science that require good understanding of algorithms, data structures, code performance, and can be solved in Yes, these exist, and there are plenty of them. A pretty c…

I sincerely hope the codebase of your employers is littered with 30-minute solutions to puzzles such as the one you describe.

see my edit for why it doesn't matter that these 30 minute algorithmic questions do not need to be directly applicable to day-to-day job tasks

Re: Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

#160

Post by Apocryphon » Sat, Feb 22, 2020, 10:20 PM UTC

matz1 wrote: post #146

andrewflnr wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article to which this is a follow-up answered your questions fairly comprehensively. Among other concerns: no, it's actually not that easy to predict what questions you'll get.

Doesn't leetcode pretty much cover most of the question?

There are thousands of questions on Leetcode.