431–440 of 1001 posts
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I've been told to reject a candidate because "he didn't seem that excited to work here"
As someone who loathes any kind of drama and deliberately stuffs down my own emotional reactions as a result, this would screw me every time. My natural response is to avoid getting outwardly excited.
My biggest problem with algo interviews is most of them are trying to determine if you happen to be familiar with one particular algorithmic solution to something - if you don't happen to know that one algorithm, you fail. In the real world, you have to learn as you go. You never know the solution to every problem in advance.
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If I’m in the room, I will steer them away from dead ends and ask leading questions when they get stuck. The point of the interview is to give the interviewee as much of a chance as possible to demonstrate their skills. I’ll say for sure, not everyone interviews this way. A lot of devs running interviews think of it as a “test” with pass/fail. I’d say the better interviewers see it as an opportunity to dig around and…
The problem is that there's lack of transparency in the process. Candidates don't know the "real" rubric that interviewers use, so anxiety could make the situation far more antagonistic than it is. And to some point, it is inherently antagonistic; the interviewee is being judged, vulnerable to being rejected, by someone who may or may not be unfair. So the anxiety ratchets up. This can lead to all sorts of bad behavi…
From my direct knowledge of some “top firms”, if you only cared about correctness then you wouldn’t be able to fill out the interview feedback form.
Transparency may help, but in my experience, that’s what recruiters actually do and some of them are fairly good at it. The recruiter has a strong incentive to get you hired (they get bonuses for hiring people!) and will explain as much of the process as they can, if you are willing to listen.
That said, there seems to be a fair bit of turnover in tech recruiting.
And, as you said, every interviewer will be different. But I don’t see a way to fix that without eliminating technical interviews altogether. You are being judged, the interviewers are subjective, they do disagree about the rubric, and a bunch of money is on the line. It’s completely reasonable to be anxious. I don’t really see a way out.
I hire for industrial IT, and being able to handle the anxiety of a high-pressure situation with grace (e.g. mill down, losing tens of thousands of dollars a minute) is an important factor. No one expects miracles, but you need to be able to keep your cool and work the problem, not waste time fighting with your own rising anxiety. Seeing how they deal with a stressful situation is an integral part of the interview in…
This is certainly the most common rationalization. But the reality is that the situations are very different and elicit very different responses.
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…
I'm pretty angry with the person that you were. I'm frustrated with the people who look up a question, see the exact solution and walk through and then expect the candidate seeing the problem statement for the first time to walk through it in the same way. There are questions being asked that full academic papers have been written on. What's even worse is typically I get interviewers that are not experienced+prepared…
How is any of that supposed to be part of a good interview process? My only solace here is that those things are red flags on the company side, so I might have dodged some bullets.
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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…
wait so Google did the entire red black tree interview thing again, even though you already worked for them for 6 years? lol this industry is hopeless
The panel was different, too - my first time around I had 2 algorithm, 2 UI (Javascript), and 1 system design interviews, while the second time was 2 algorithm, 1 behavioral/leadership, and 2 system design interviews. This is probably reflective of the differing role and higher level.
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You've been arrogant for years and you know what? So have I. I and many, many people in this industry have been doing this for years. What's different from you and many other people is that you admit and face your bias rather than justify it. I'm seriously curious what google interview board members have to say about this study. People like Gayle Laakmaan have been saying things to justify the whole process for years…
She will just say that the process is designed to minimize false positives and the expense of more false negatives. A bad hire is more expensive than a no hire. The problem is this isn't what gets you the smartest people on the planet. A small number might be interested in DS&A to that level, but most are not. They will learn enough to know how to google what they need and move on to what they are interested in. Smar…
At Google I've worked with some very humble but also super intelligent awesome engineers, people much smarter than I. Definitely the majority of my interactions. But I've also worked with people who clearly took the "Google hires the smartest people" company line, and their own success at it, a little too personally.
I don't think it's a good message to send. Although to be fair I haven't heard internally in a while.
Also I don't know if it's really a gold sticker anymmore. Nor do I think it's true that the smart people leave. Some do, but honestly, there are some damn brilliant people at Google who have found their brilliant corner and produce brilliance there.
Or some people here who are just brilliant at playing Big Company. Unfortunately there's more of that all the time.
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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 The vast majority of people who work at FAANG type companies do not do any of this.
I think you are very wrong. Every single software person I know at a FAANG spend multiple weeks studying leetcode style questions. Think about it: you are passing an exam. Why wouldn't you study the questions that you know are going to get asked? It got even worse lately since every candidate does this, it raises the bar for the expected solution.
I hire for industrial IT, and being able to handle the anxiety of a high-pressure situation with grace (e.g. mill down, losing tens of thousands of dollars a minute) is an important factor. No one expects miracles, but you need to be able to keep your cool and work the problem, not waste time fighting with your own rising anxiety. Seeing how they deal with a stressful situation is an integral part of the interview in…
Yeah, devs that work for me also work in a critical environment such as yours. As soon as an issue is raised by our clients, they immediately kick off a 40 minute long timer and put a physical whiteboard in front of us asking us to solve the whiteboard problem in front of them in under an hour. All the while the client is physically behind us commenting on our code and watching our every move as we paint the whiteboa…