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

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

#301

Post by dahfizz » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 2:19 AM UTC

wbl wrote: post #217

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't have a better way of doing things This is my least favorite part about discussing interview techniques. It's taboo to say anything other than "interviews are broken", as if there is some alternative perfect practice that companies are voluntarily choosing not to use. If no one, including the author of the linked article, can think of anything better, doesn't that mean that companies are already using optima…

You can test skills relevant to the job. If you're mostly doing js /css do that, not algorithms questions.

The idea that JS developers don't do anything that needs algorithm knowledge is funny to me.

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

#302

Post by blastonico » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 2:19 AM UTC

trashface wrote: post #295

Hiring is broken, but so is all of software as a profession: 1) Terrible Algorithmic interviews, AI-based evaluations, whiteboard coding. 2) Hey you are hired! Now move to $BigCity, with expensive real estate, schools, transit and everything else. 3) So, welcome to the job. You'll be maintaining this shitty old python 2.4 CRUD app that multiple people have tried and failed to upgrade. And one of the web guys wrote hi…

Hahaha, your comment made my day. Very funny because this is the truth.

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

#303

Post by ntsplnkv2 » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 2:19 AM UTC

hanswesterbeek wrote: post #40

sombremesa wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should probably be glad they didn't ask you to center something. From my experiences interviewing at Google, the engineers there usually have one and only one answer they are looking for. Used flex box? Too bad, we were looking for margin 0 auto.

Haha yes, at that point, nailing the interview will just come down to how well you are able to gauge what the person at the other side of the table wants to hear. "Hmm, is this a tabs or a spaces guy?"

I'm not a developer, I can do some light code and make changes to existing code, but I am just not a developer. It isn't my particular skillset.

However, I am in consulting, and was on the bench. My manager forced me to do an interview for coding. The questions were absurd. Literally reading vocabulary terms and looking for exact definitions to things.

I continually asked what their problem was, what they were trying to solve, what steps they faced, etc. They just kept asking questions like above. And every time I'd get it "wrong" they'd say "we were looking for... .

Honestly what is the point? I feel really bad for kids today. I get all my jobs through word of mouth and networking now. Why? Because it's much easier and those ways almost always have better outcomes.

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

#304

Post by wutbrodo » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 2:22 AM 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.

Yea, I sympathize with the idea that some people freeze up really badly during whiteboard interviews, which is why I'm usually testing competency far below what I need out of the job. On top of that, the signal is richer than binary; it's possible to fail to solve the question posed and still give an example of how you think.

Interviewing is attempting the ridiculous feat of predicting years of job performance on the basis of a few short conversations, so there are going to be false negatives in every interviewing technique. The things I describe above lower FNs to the point that whiteboarding is a very useful tool for assessing candidates.

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

#305

Post by wutbrodo » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 2:25 AM UTC

karatestomp wrote: post #177

watwut wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

> 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

Anyone who cares about using the wrong stdlib function is bad at whiteboard interviewing. That's exactly the kind of thing that's easy to mess up in an interview, as well as completely irrelevant to job performance.

I've been writing in C++ for the last couple years, and I'd probably screw up writing a new class from memory 50% of the time.

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

#306

Post by pmiller2 » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 2:31 AM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #280

pmiller2 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I notice that you mention "computer scientists," "programmers," and "hackers" in your comment. Those are all different types of people, and generally not the kind companies are looking to hire. Most companies are hiring "software engineers." That is, they want people to build stuff in a team with other software engineers, things that are well designed and stand up to the various forces that software systems are subje…

"Most companies are hiring "software engineers."" What's your reason for thinking there are more "software engineers" than "programmers"?

Where did I say that?

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

#307

Post by wutbrodo » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 2:34 AM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #143

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.

Then perhaps it's not just interviewing that's broken, but the industry as a whole. At least, software engineering education and training.

Everything is broken. To crib from George Carlin, think about how incredibly stupid the average person is, and then realize that people run _everything_. Almost every industry/system/institution/company of a non-trivial size is staffed primarily by deeply stupid people. Practically the whole challenge of an economy is figuring out how to organize these people towards productive ends.

"Dumb people work in software eng" is true, but it isn't a novel or useful insight; you may as well complain that cloudy days exist or that closed systems tend towards entropy. It's the reality that every industry and business operates within, and the claim that it's unique to software is wrong-headed.

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

#308

Post by bambataa » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 2:35 AM UTC

giovannibonetti wrote: post #297

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally find some of the current (if I can call them) standards of tech hiring to be very narrow in which skills and capabilities they test. What would you propose as an alternative? I’ve been involved in training new engineering managers how to hire and interview. Everyone starts with the best intentions, but reality quickly forces some compromises. The bottom line is that you only have a number of hours in w…

> What would you propose as an alternative? In my company (totally remote) we decided to automate hiring (also remote) as most as possible and we are happy with the results. We also value the candidate's time very much so we made the hiring process very straightforward. It works like this: - First the candidates must do some online tests, which are mostly multiple choice questions. The subjects are logic, english and…

If you’re so confident about your challenge app why do you first make everyone do a 2hr online test?

How many hours do you spend assessing each candidate and how does that compare to how many hours you make them spend jumping through your hoops?

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

#309

Post by wutbrodo » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 2:37 AM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #130

wutbrodo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This whole 'whiteboarding' thing has degenerated into 100% pointless trivia, with many elements of a popularity contest - I just don't see any reason why we should trust this to yield 'safe' candidates. People blindly and dumbly implementing any practice is going to yield bad results. I've interviewed for Google, for a small company with a crappy pipeline and a low need for talent, and for my current job, which nee…

> I also rejected a candidate on the basis of failing the simple whiteboard problems OK, but this topic is not about "simple" whiteboard problems. (People can of course disagree wrt. what's 'simple', but a rule of thumb is that anything where the average dev would need to train and memorize whiteboard trivia for an extended period in order to perform satisfactorily is far from simple.)

Sure, I don't disagree that it's possible to do whiteboard interviews badly, but it's possible to do bad interviews of _any_ form. My comment is pretty explicit about the fact that I'm pushing back the popular opinion hereabouts that whiteboarding itself is useless, on the basis of these poor implementations.

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

#310

Post by Wowfunhappy » Sun, Feb 23, 2020, 2:37 AM UTC

missosoup wrote: post #296

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a very simple solution to this problem. It frequently evokes an instinctual negative reaction, for understandable reasons, but I truly believe it would be both equitable and effective. Ready? You want your company to be 50% women? Tell your teams that at least 50% of their hires must be women. That's it. To me, formalizing the quota but keeping the overall hiring process looser makes a lot more sense than the…

> If there are legal issues with a quota (I'm legitimately not sure whether there are), then the law ought to be changed. That would be quite literally destroying the anti-discrimination laws which safeguard the exact thing that you think you're arguing in favour of. Quotas implemented the way you describe are the antithesis of equal opportunity. That 'instinctual negative reaction' you come across is people seeing t…

I don't think we need to have the same rules for well-represented and underrepresented groups. A reasonable person is fully capable of determining which is which. "Reverse racism" is not a real phenomenon in 99% of cases.