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It's like that parable.
2 students approached the master, wanting to become swordsmen.
'I want to reach your level in 10 days', said a student. Master replied 'It will take you 10 months'. The other student said 'I don't care if it takes 10 years, Master'. The Master said 'and you will learn in 10 days'.
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…
You can feel the pressure mount - any algorithm that doesn't run on the first try or second (with a couple of quick fixes) and you're being mentally discounted.
The same for silence - if you're thinking through something, take abnormally too long, you're discounted.
The Perfect Dismount. A 10.0 is what's needed to land a FAANG job.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hopping aboard your train of thought here... I've never been asked to whiteboard anything truly heinous, and I absolutely despise interviews that are set up as a gauntlet to be ran. But if I'm interviewing you for a senior SQL engineer position, and you can't talk me through whiteboarding a simple query with one join and one aggregate function... you're not senior material. I'm sorry. We need people that can communic…
Well, I can communicate and explain things reasonably well to a room full of people. I ran a side business doing that for about seven or eight years. And I can ship products. I've done that a bunch of times--in several cases I've written most or all of the code in the shipping product. I can't interview all that well, though, and I'm absolutely terrible at whiteboard coding, or pretty much any kind of problem-solving…
From my experience companies are very flexible and open minded - mostly they care about just not hiring someone that they will have to fire later.
Had to go through half the article before this showed up. You could be learning something new and useful rather than spend so many cycles trying to master trick problems.
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 call these high stakes interviews "the perfect dismount". You can feel the pressure mount - any algorithm that doesn't run on the first try or second (with a couple of quick fixes) and you're being mentally discounted. The same for silence - if you're thinking through something, take abnormally too long, you're discounted. The Perfect Dismount. A 10.0 is what's needed to land a FAANG job.
These are nothing but shit test.
What are shit tests? When somebody fucks with your head to see how you will react, what you are experiencing is typically a (series of) shit test(s). Everyone has been shit tested, gets shit tested and will continue to be shit tested; We use shit tests to make value judgements about people, likewise they can be used to determine how people cope under pressure. The underlying mechanism of shit tests is to test your mettle.
That experiment assumes that SWE job is exclusively about solving technical problems, so we can just "lock the candidate in a private room and let them solve it". In reality human to human interactions, sometimes stressful, are part of the job. Customer & PM requirements, technical debates, giving feedback, explaining your technical solutions, etc. are common. Maybe part of the problem is the education that does not…
Yes, but real-life situations are rarely as high stakes as interviews, on the individual level. Sure - you can find yourself in very stressful situations at work, but I have never in my life been in a situation where you're given 45 mins (or hours, for that mater) to solve some problem, or you get fired. Simply but, there's an incredible discrepancy between the stakes at play, between interviews and work. To put it a…
Taking it all too personally is a big mistake. Sometimes even candidates that did really well don't get a job offer for weird reasons, etc.
It's very similar to dating. Desperation ruins everything.
I think that might be a reason why a lot of people report getting a job after they stopped carrying anymore.
Here's the study: http://chrisparnin.me/pdf/stress_FSE_20.pdf They asked students to find the "Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters". For the formats: "We created two interview settings: public setting and private setting (see Figure 1). In the public setting, wearing an eye-tracker, participants solved the technical interview problem in the presence of an experimenter. The participant was instructed to tal…
Being ask to solve a problem without your typical tools does as well.
I assume these tests don't actually get to the root of the issue but only represent a portion of behaviour.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One trend I've noticed that is markedly different from when I started programming in 1998, is how dependent we've become to program via Google/StackExchange searches. I'm not sure I know how to write anything from scratch anymore, because I just search/read/alter/test. The breadth of what I work on is 100x wider than it used to be, and so I've become absolutely dependent on quickly reading docs, copying code found on…
I've been doing this for a LOOONG time. Early on, the core skill for a programmer was intensive in-depth knowledge of the language being used. We all talked a good game about what we called "reusable software," but yeah. Talk. Now things are TOTALLY different. Doing a good job requires extensive, encyclopedic, knowledge of what's out there, how well it works, and how to integrate it. npm, nuget, maven, anaconda, we a…
It's scary how true this is. I know one manager who routinely rejects perfectly good candidates for making negligible mistakes in the interview. All on the grounds of "We have high standards!"
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 gives so many advantages: - people will have some fun trying to solve a real issue / build a little software - they will show how good they are at stack overflow, general methodology, cleanliness, test coverage, deployment and even git (how many we see who can't even gitignore their project files, make a build script that works, or test for real) - horrible candidates who can't even cheat will not be able to lie their way around a fake resume, cheaters will bomb the code review quite fast - candidate will also discover their future team mates general work attitude during the review and if the reviewer is good, will lock the candidate faster than "how many billard balls can you put in a Boeing 747" type of interview. - candidate will even LEARN during the code review => you get away with something out of the interview even if you fail
Since I've been interviewed that way, doing my little project on my wife's pregnancy bed smiling like an idiot at solving the challenge, then fell in love with my manager showing me new tricks during the review, I'll never do any other kind of interviews myself.