291–300 of 1001 posts
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Tech seems to be the only field that does these dumb types of interviews. Accounting, law, medicine etc seems to work well without these filters. Why are tech interviews so stupid?
So you're advocating a license to practice software development? Because the three fields you mention are all licensed.
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I feel in the tech industry, networking and knowing people only gets you so far - typically just to the whiteboard interview. Then you have to solve the leetcode problems just like everyone else. Especially so in larger companies. FWIW, all of my friends who somehow managed to get into FAANG or other top tech companies swear that were they to go through the interview again, odds are they would fail. This despite all…
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?
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I appreciate their effort to use science to support the narrative that tech interviews suck, because I do think they suck and need to change, but isn't N=48 a little small? Also, if it was only undergraduates or graduates, who's to say their performance is indicative of the rest of the tech workforce?
The small N is addressed by the authors. To acquire a larger N would mean recruiting more participants, which would require either compensation/extra credit or rely on people volunteering ~1 hour of their time. Likewise, collecting that data would require time and money. It is an time/resource issue with human research. You can require a small N and get some results or require a large N and not have enough funding to…
I remember talking to a Google interviewer and I came up with a better solution than they expected. Since my solution was non-standard for online median finding-they wanted a unbalanced binary tree where I wanted a tree with the values at the leaves and using a fixed height, in this manner you could easily find successor and predecessor and I'd have actually found a better solution than their expected solution. They wanted the standard binary tree solution with predecessor and insertion, where I failed.
Everything will still jovial, until I mentioned that I consider the tools I use and how to operate them as part of my skill-set. Apparently this is false.
This was me interviewing at Google for a potential job using computer graphics or computer vision. I wouldn't even be working with problems anywhere close to this.
I've found that everyone is just copying Google's process because of all of Google's cash and success, but don't realize that most of Google's success is not due to any investment but rather just one solid team doing search well.
Anyways, I'm glad I didn't get hired, I have a better job (pay and work). Both of the projects I would have worked on have already failed or nearing failure already, it's been like 3 months.
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> That and debate gave me the ability to just start a sentence without knowing where it will end ... it sounds like I've been thinking sensibly about it. I've always structured my interviews to weed that kind of thing out.
I'd be interested to hear more about how you do that, and what you try to select for instead.
To summarize, I try and get the candidate to discuss tradeoffs between different approaches to common situations that the candidate should be familiar with.
For example:
Should GetUserById(int userId) return a null, or throw an exception, when there is no user with the ID? Explain the tradeoffs; or explain why each approach is better in different situations.
Should you deserialize (xml or JSON) to a dictionary or a strongly-typed object? What if you need to manipulate the document while preserving fields that you didn't know about at compile time?
Assuming you have the experience I'm screening for, you either know the tradeoffs or you don't.
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In my experience, certainly no interviewers think that they're screening for "ability to study and dedicate yourself to a task." In being on both sides of the table for more than thirty years, I have never heard an interviewer mention that.
Companies encourage you to study for the interview, providing you with links to books, guides and preparation material. They'll delay the interview to give you time to study more. So it seems pretty clear to me that corporate management sees it as a test of study skills even if interviewers don't. edit: I'm talking about large tech companies, not the startups blindly copying their policies with little thought or cons…
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…
The interviewers didn’t know I’d gotten a call from my cat sitter that morning and one of my cats had to go in for an emergency check up. (He ended up being fine but didn’t know that at the time).
Later that week I got the rejection from FB and then, 15 minutes later the positive response from Google. Really made me realize how much impact the day has on an interview outcome.
It was made the clearest to me when I interviewed a colleague who had left to another company and two years later was interviewing to return. I knew he knew everything and had the skills for the job because, well, I know him, I’d worked with him before. He’d done this very job previously. Yet he still performed terribly in the interview and (rightly or wrongly) I had to base my evaluation on my knowledge of him rathe…
At my company we interviewed two people. Both did fairly poorly in different ways. One we hired because he was a referral and came highly recommended despite a not great interview. He's been great. The second guy was rejected but later hired as a contractor and he's worked out well as well and now we're looking at offering him a full-time position. My conclusion is that our interview process isn't good at determining…
You are asking them to do some work.
Interesting. I usually do pretty well in interviews and I've always attributed that to my four years on the debate team in high school. This tells me it might be even more true than I previously thought. Even when I'm nervous as hell, when you put me in front of a judge (interviewer), I click into "performance mode" where I project confidence even if I know what I'm saying is BS, let alone just a bit unsure. This is…
That sounds like a good skill to have in marketing, sales or politics. It sounds like a bad skill to have for engineering.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, certainly no interviewers think that they're screening for "ability to study and dedicate yourself to a task." In being on both sides of the table for more than thirty years, I have never heard an interviewer mention that.
Companies encourage you to study for the interview, providing you with links to books, guides and preparation material. They'll delay the interview to give you time to study more. So it seems pretty clear to me that corporate management sees it as a test of study skills even if interviewers don't. edit: I'm talking about large tech companies, not the startups blindly copying their policies with little thought or cons…