201–210 of 1001 posts
I conducted a couple hundred interviews for my first FAANG employer, and I was constantly amazed at the percentage of candidates with years of Microsoft or Facebook experience on the resumes who apparently did not know how to program. I always thought, 'huh, guess I know why they quit after 3 years, amazing that they all lasted this long." Then I interviewed for another company and utterly bombed. It became suddenly…
It's ironic that people who want the job will be nervous and might interview poorly but people that are only interviewing for experience or just don't care will do better.
It seems pretty obvious to me that this kind of interviews are simply there to assess how much you want to work for a certain company. As in: would you be willing to study for months, go through mock interviews, read books, test your skills etc. to have a shot at working for us? Even though the majority of that stuff will likely have zero impact on your day to day work? That's all there is, really. I've had no proble…
>If there was a perfect correlation between pre and post entrance test performance there wouldn't be PIPs, performance based layoffs etc.
Nothing is perfect, saying it's useless because it's not perfect is a silly argument.
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Stress when interviewing is similar, but not the same as on the job stress. One major factor, with a job: you're still getting paid. I think the economic anxiety one faces is pretty stark, if you fail a job interview you're going to be unemployed until you can pass the next one.
Yes, interview stress is completely different. You have to commit a pretty egregious offense on the job to get fired on the spot, but literally anything you do during a job interview can cause you to lose the job.
It's extremely common for people to be nervous when meeting strangers but fine among associates. This is such a blatantly obvious empirical fact, it mystifies me how the tech industry can act as if this phenomenon does not or should not exist.
Tinder generation, swipe next.
Huh, the only successful interviews I have are the ones where I'm burned out after a long, fruitless, frustrating job search. And so I walk in assuming the interview will be a waste of time and just not caring anymore. That's when I get an offer.
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Eh, I got my job at a very early stage startup through a friend I met on Twitter. The "interview" was a chat with the (reasonably technical) CEO, where we talked about political philosophy for 45 minutes, then I said something about "oh, I should probably tell you about my experience and resume," so we went over that briefly. No coding challenge or anything. I assume my case is an extreme outlier, though. But yeah. "…
Startups and smaller companies are a different story. One of my friends got a job at a startup by virtue of standing in line at a cafe holding a programming book, and the (non-technical) founder standing behind him hired him after a quick chat. Bigger companies often don't let you through like that though. My friends are constantly offering to refer me to roles at their companies, but every one of them would still in…
Another time, apparently saying the phrase "binary tree" was enough to clear the whiteboard and move along to the next question with a gold star.
Another time I was hired after doing zero programming exercises and just telling the company that I had a competing offer (which I did).
I've had some baffling rejections as well.
* Resumes can be exaggerated, falsified, or perhaps more often often leave out important details or relevant experience. Reviewers often also put unconscious emphasis on formatting or style (I had one colleague that I swear would accept anything in Computer Modern). * Take-home projects (if not carefully designed) can be a considerable time sink and reviewers may be biased toward particular coding styles or languages. * Prior employers are often not allowed to provide meaningful references, and even when able to, won't often have the time or motive to do so. * Referrals will be biased towards the friends of your current workforce, making it hard to improve the diversity of your workforce, and are a pool that will become exhausted as you scale or if your employees stick around. * Behavioral interview questions are biased towards candidates that know to prepare for an even more contrived corpus of questions with even less bearing on day-to-day job performance. * Candidates may not have prior code that their are able to share; certainly most employers make that difficult or impossible. Expecting side projects or open source contributions biases towards candidates that have means or desire to program outside of work.
I think it's ridiculous to think that a programmer should be hired without any part of the process evaluating their programming ability. The key is to do this while minimizing stress for the candidate. Explain the format of the interviews up front. Tell them about the people they are interviewing with. Let them have breaks. Help them through tricky parts if you have to. Avoid things that aren't realistic (whiteboard coding) but don't shy away from things that are (whiteboard a system design). If leetcode doesn't represent what you do at work, don't make them do it.
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Agreed. Connections at best let me skip the phone screen and do the onsite leetcode at FAANG. Maybe I just don't have friends at the >= VP level?
Would VP level help? Not a close friend, but do have a close associate who was VP level at Google. We were having coffee and he offered to refer me, but said I'd still have to go through the whole standard interview loop - even the phone screen in fact.
Huh, the only successful interviews I have are the ones where I'm burned out after a long, fruitless, frustrating job search. And so I walk in assuming the interview will be a waste of time and just not caring anymore. That's when I get an offer.
That can help a lot with anxiety. If you think it's pointless and you'll never get the job, you have a chance to just have fun with it and do what you can do. My first time interviewing with Google (in 2008), the press was reporting that they were in a hiring freeze, I had no big names on my resume, so I figured it was basically hopeless and I'd just do the best I could and enjoy my trip to Silicon Valley. After my i…
lol this industry is hopeless