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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”

#191

Post by matz1 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #182
matz1 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ?

Because hiring doesn’t have to be this adversarial process. And work doesn’t have to be this dehumanizing race to the bottom that excludes qualified people who are being excluded by bad metrics.

bad metrics ? maybe according to you but I doubt it according to the person who do the hiring.

The people who do the hiring get to the decide what the metrics is and what they considered good/qualified.

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

#192

Post by cryptozeus »

monoideism wrote: post #169
sjc33 wrote: post #17

Honestly having an interview process that is highly standardized and teachable + learnable is a good thing, so I'm not sure why people complain. You know exactly what sort of questions you will be asked from company to company, and can spend nights and weekends over a couple weeks studying for it. Most jobs are not like that, and then you get extreme variance in expectation with little communication on how to prepare…

The problem is twofold: 1. False positives: you get folks who do really well at DS&A yet who are really bad developers. I mean really bad. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen their interviews and then subsequent performance. I'd wildly guess that it's about 20-30%. 2. False negatives: you get folks who are really good developers, and yet for whatever reason, perform badly on DS&A algorithms despite practici…

Is it really true though? FAANG seem to be doing just fine and innovating new products year after year. Obviously the developers are performing amazingly.

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

#193

Post by PragmaticPulp »

camgunz wrote: post #111

There's significant ladder pulling. Tons of engineers work at places with interview processes they could never pass.

> There's significant ladder pulling. Tons of engineers work at places with interview processes they could never pass.

One person's "ladder pulling" is another person's "raising the bar".

Over time, companies should continue to raise the bar for both candidates and existing employees. As your company grows, you can and should become better at attracting more talented and ambitious employees. You tend to have more resources to compensate new hires better, allowing for more selective hiring practices. Growth means you've learned how to more effectively identify the best candidates.

Companies aren't being vindictive or selfish. If they can't hire enough people, they'll dwindle and die. The bar should be set just low enough to keep enough talent coming in the door, but no lower.

Companies aren't obligated to hire talent at the same levels they did in the past. It's not ladder pulling, it's just business.

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

#194

Post by biztos »

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…

Many years ago I interviewed at a FAANG and the VP who interviewed me over a (fairly crappy, 30-minute) lunch was really a pain, enough so I didn't want to work for him. The feeling was mutual.

Turned out he did 500 interviews a year. Five hundred. Unless that's your entire job, I don't see how you could come out of that without becoming an asshole.

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

#195

Post by PragmaticPulp »

ChasingReturns wrote: post #62

Not a single person out of several thousand emails and messages came out in defense of the current state of interviewing processes That's largely due to the position taken up in "The dystopian world of software engineering interviews". Had the article been a defense of current interview practices, you would have received sentiments to the opposite effect. Here's a comment on the original thread doing what you said "n…

> Not a single person out of several thousand emails and messages came out in defense of the current state of interviewing processes

I agree that this was a cheap shot from the author.

The current zeitgeist of hiring practices is that we're all obligated to chant "interviews are broken" without ever suggesting alternatives. Suggesting alternatives is dangerous because someone, somewhere will come up with a reason why your suggested practice is bad. Even the author of the article avoids suggesting any alternatives.

It's the equivalent of politicians saying that they're "deeply troubled" by something, and then proceeding to do nothing because they are secretly okay with the status quo.

No one is dumb enough to go out of their way to publicly argue in favor of the current hiring practices in this atmosphere. Yet when we're put in the hot seat on a hiring committee, we all fall back on the tried and true methods of interviewing for a reason.

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

#196

Post by dpbriggs »

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…

Hey, those people still exist. Myself and a few other people I know got their start making terrible games in python.

Heck I was too young when I started learning lisp (clojure). Took a long time to get used to non-functional constructs.

Things definitely changed once I got to university though. Competition for internships meant I had to get good at interviewing. The CS program I am in encourages the career focused so grinding leetcode is popular. One of my interviewers asked me a number, and used that to retrieve the n'th leetcode question from memory.

There does exist a small cadre of people, myself included, who find leetcode and similar interview grinds unethical. I'd rather spend my time having a life or learning/building interesting tech. Interviews are then less of a performance art and instead a genuine 1-1 to work through a problem.

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

#198

Post by Apocryphon »

matz1 wrote: post #191
Apocryphon wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because hiring doesn’t have to be this adversarial process. And work doesn’t have to be this dehumanizing race to the bottom that excludes qualified people who are being excluded by bad metrics.

bad metrics ? maybe according to you but I doubt it according to the person who do the hiring. The people who do the hiring get to the decide what the metrics is and what they considered good/qualified.

Not according to me, according to many in this thread, in dozens of articles posted on this site, and many more across the industry. There are all sorts of management principles and truisms people take for granted, and this is one of them that’s being called into question.

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

#199

Post by matz1 »

andrewflnr wrote: post #189
matz1 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ?

At a certain scale, intent stops mattering. You need to take responsibility for the incentives in the systems you create. To do otherwise is just negligence. Families are kind of important. They're usually a large part of the reason people have a job to begin with. To callously disregard the impact of a system on families is exceptionally appalling. You should not do that.

I didn't say families are not important, to some people they are important but you can't use that as an excuse.

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

#200

Post by PragmaticPulp »

biztos wrote: post #187
inertiatic wrote: post #128

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…

I worked at a company where the interview process was basically "ask them about their experience, successes, and failures, and do whatever technical screen you feel works." Other than asking about failures (not everyone does) it was just "eh, wing it, tell us what you think." The hiring manager had to then weigh the responses and convince his/her manager if it was a go (we once rejected someone on ethical grounds aft…

> I worked at a company where the interview process was basically "ask them about their experience, successes, and failures, and do whatever technical screen you feel works."

I'm part of another online community that has a strong emphasize on social justice issues. These "just wing it" hiring practices are one of their biggest complaints about tech companies. There's a perception that the less well-defined and structured your interview process, the more likely it is to produce vaguely biased results.

Whether that's true or not, it would be a tough sell to implement a "just use your gut" style hiring process at a major company in 2020. There is a strong push for standardized and repeatable interviewing processes, complete with sufficient documentation to support hiring decisions.

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