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

jarednelsen.dev

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

#171
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except programming and engineering is about overcoming the unexpected. Adapt and improvise. Not everything is textbook and, at least this is my opinion, the better engineer is the one that can solve unexpected problems. You can really only judge that utilizing past experience. Canned, standardized questions similar to Mensa intelligence questions or any type of "brain-twister" puzzle are pretty crappy. Once you know…

Ok, but why is that a bad thing for engineers that are interviewing? If the interview process is largely memorizing 200 or so commonly asked algorithm questions and that is the gateway to a $200k+ job then it's a good thing for applicants, not "dystopian" at all. Again, it would be much, much more painful and time consuming for the interviewee if they were asked to code up some fullstack project for every interview.…

> the gateway to a $200k+ job then it's a good thing for applicants,

For most of us outside the Bay Area and NYC, it's quite unlikely that we'll secure a $200k/year job unless we go into management.

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

#172
post #144

I don't know, hiring seems inherently broken. Not just the algorithmic part, even the part leading up to it. You have to impress a recruiter or an HR drone by listing all the buzzwords that are currently trendy. Then, even after the algorithmic questions and interviews where you prove you can DO the job, you get rejected. Every company I've worked for had trouble hiring. I'm working for a company that also has troubl…

Sounds like the problem is low trust. It's a marketplace (for labour) where no transactions are taking place, because the buyers and sellers are afraid to come out to the town square. What do your counterparts at the company think the source of their hiring difficulties is? If not flawed process?

It's almost always attributed to the lack of quality candidates.

But when you reach the final stage with 3 people who you know can pretty much do the job, who you know have successful careers working in successful companies, and you drop them because they didn't exactly behave the way you would prefer them to in a high stress scenario, and keep looking, I think you effectively forfeit the right to claim that's your problem with hiring.

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

#173
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are thousands of questions on Leetcode.

Yes, which is not impossible to tackle. There is structured and systematic way to attack it. Tons of study guide and materials on the net to help you. Not to mention tons of people successfully get hired.

As mentioned elsewhere, this is discriminatory against people with families and and commitments that prevent them from spending hundreds of hours in prep. Not to mention it affirms Goodhart’s Law, where a single metric- the ability to answer DS&A questions- overrules qualified applicants from becoming hired.

Not to mention such interview styles can be gamed. Suppose a Flatiron bootcamp for DS&A questions becomes big in response. What then? An arms race for more and more difficult weeder questions?

Such questions aren’t necessarily bad, but focusing on them to the exclusion of all other skills is becoming an anti-pattern.

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

#174
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…

the discovery age is what makes new tech so fun and exciting. I loved the 90s internet because i was a young kid making all kinds of stuff online. very trivial by today's standard but it served it purpose of exploration and creativity. Today's kids are getting creative with the use of snap and tiktok. i guess i cant judge much

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

#175

There is no other sane and effective way to filter the insane amount of FAANG applicants, only DS&A. Other non FAANG/Unicorns that don’t pay as well as FAANG can drop the practice of asking DS&A questions. But for those companies that pay really really well, there will be insane amount of people that are willing to get a job there, and DS&A is a “May the strongest win” filter (although luck play a very strong role as…

> There is no other sane and effective way to filter the insane amount of FAANG applicants, only DS&A.

Then why do they also apply this to candidates they reach out to? I've never applied to FAANG, only interviewed after (in-house) recruiters or internal referrals. It always seems to be the same bullshit.

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

#176
post #27

> I am completely depressed because I can’t get a job”, “I will never succeed in this industry I thought there was a shortage of software engineers right now? Although I just got an email from Glassdoor with estimated salary (in the Bay Area) being 5-10k lower than the last email, so who knows.

A lot of misinformation is pumped out at the cost of those being misinformed for the benefit of those pumping out misinformation. All of this is well orchestrated by large tech companies in an effort to drive down labor costs. The problem is, there's an assumption that the current labor market is just asking too much . I think looking at the current labor market landscape, practices in place industry wide (e.g., agil…

In my opinion it isn’t wishful thinking at all. Software is getting more complex each year, yet the time to build complex software decreases due to existence of better libraries/tools/knowledge-base.

So at the end of the day you can build more complex software with lesser amount of developers but there is a catch, and that is developers now need to be much more talented.

Right now a good developer can easily develop what a team of 10 average developers could build 10 years ago. This is especially true in GameDev field. Right now there is a silent revolution going on with procedural art-work so that a good programmer/artist can create huge amount of content in very short-time but procedural art generation is really complicated.

So if you are a talented developer you can compete with mid-sized companies right now!

I believe it will get to a point in future that even a small team of talented developers will be able to out-compete companies with 100s of average developer.

Large companies will have no option but to scale back and change their HR practices but large companies, like large ships, are harder to turn, hence some of them will definitely go bankrupt in near future.

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

#177
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I tend to basically forget how to use a computer when people are watching. To prep for interviewing I also have to try to memorize a bunch of stuff about some relevant language because otherwise, without surrounding stuff to crib from, I'll straight-up forget basic shit about it, and that doesn't always stick. I'm talking like "what does method invocation look like in this language?" Under pressure it can and does happen for languages I've been working in 5 days a week for the last year. And I guaranfuckingtee if I write more than a few lines I'll end up using the wrong name for some standard library function I don't use daily—again, I drill these around interview time just in case, but it doesn't always stick. I'll also get really timid about using editor features, if I'm using a real computer and not whiteboarding, because I start second guessing every keystroke.

Further, most interviews I encounter don't do this and the ones that do tend to be all goddamn cagey about what to expect so I never know in advance, so I don't have a home whiteboard to spend hours and hours practicing on and if I did I wouldn't know which interviews need such prep and which don't so I'd probably end up not bothering, since it's just a few that do it.

I don't even have significant social anxiety or anything, and I have been told I come off as very confident and competent—unless the whiteboarding algo shit comes out, at which point there's a 50/50 chance I'll look like a total dunce (Nb. I can and do get The Actual Work done, no problem, once hired—that part's easy)

Since I only interview every few years and, again, this problem hasn't stopped me from landing jobs at about the same pay rate as the other ones that rake me over the coals (though not FAANG or near it) I've not spent the significant time it'd take to fix this. We'd be talking lots of hours to prep for FAANG tier, and probably a year. Don't care enough to do that. I did spend the time & effort to improve how I come off in more conversational parts, gradually, over the years, but that was relatively easy and doesn't rust as fast (since, you know, I don't get to practice interview-type coding on the job, but I do frequently have opportunities to practice relating to people).

[EDIT] I don't mean to be whiny or call the grapes sour—I simply haven't put the work in to (as I posted elsewhere in the thread) turn my efforts at leetcode from practice to performance. And again, for the roles I'm applying for I'm not losing any money by occasionally being rejected because they decided to give me a puzzle expecting a recursive & memoized (DP) solution rather than ask me whether I know WTF recursion and DP are and when they're usually useful, so the worst they do is waste a day of my time (honestly, why the hell are places so secretive about what's going to happen on interview day? Fucking Google's not, Jim Bob's Software Widget factory can afford to tell applicants the sorts of things they'll be talking about and the kinds of exercises that may come up)

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

#178

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…

The questions are indeed puzzles; that's why Gayle Laakmann and others have made a living publishing books of the questions themselves. And the puzzles are distinctly different from the content in the majority of CSE curricula.

What's more is problematic is that the construction and evaluation of the puzzles is highly subjective and nearly everywhere lacks rigor. Completion time is a key metric while quality of communication is most commonly either ignored or not assessed at all uniformly among interviews.

(Aside: what's frustrating is that companies make candidates sign NDAs for on-sites; these prevent candidates for disclosing or _selling_ the information they might glean in the process, which very rarely happens. In actuality, it's the former interviewers who violate protections for "confidential info" and copyright when they go and monetize their experience post-job, or even on-the-job e.g. Rooftop Slushie).

> Most of us are not interested in ruining the day of someone who is unhappy with the hiring process

That's only true in so far as you, as an employee, are paid to achieve positive sentiment among candidates, no matter how shallow that sentiment may be. That's indeed cruel, and it's well-established that interviewers are widely unaware of the consequences of the current hiring process. That's why we get articles like those from the OP.

A true interest in improving the hiring process includes: * Making prep materials and courses freely available (helps industry candidates) * Committing time to CSE outreach to better integrate company needs to CSE (helps new grads) * Finding questions that reflect real tasks on the job (helps the evaluation have a chance of being predictive) * Closing the information gap between hiring managers and candidates: disclosure (in aggregate) of hiring rates, salaries, etc.

Playing along and doing hundreds of coding puzzle interviews is a waste of time for all involved.

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

#179
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, which is not impossible to tackle. There is structured and systematic way to attack it. Tons of study guide and materials on the net to help you. Not to mention tons of people successfully get hired.

As mentioned elsewhere, this is discriminatory against people with families and and commitments that prevent them from spending hundreds of hours in prep. Not to mention it affirms Goodhart’s Law, where a single metric- the ability to answer DS&A questions- overrules qualified applicants from becoming hired. Not to mention such interview styles can be gamed. Suppose a Flatiron bootcamp for DS&A questions becomes big…

> this is discriminatory against people with families and and commitments that prevent them from spending hundreds of hours in prep

Maybe but its not the purpose to select people with families or commitment. You choose to have families or commitment, you have to deal with the trade off.

>An arms race for more and more difficult weeder questions?

Its always be an arm race. Why to expect otherwise ?

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

#180

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. Th…

> At one point, I tried directly asking candidates how they'd prefer to be interviewed in a way that best highlighted their talents.

This is really cool to hear from someone else. I've done a similar thing, asking "What do you think you could do during a technical interview to best showcase your skills?"

I too got a surprising number of terrible/generic answers, though it very likely could have been nerves in the moment.

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