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Hiring Without Whiteboards

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Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#351

Post by bananaface »

twic wrote: post #321
bob1029 wrote: post #292

I am starting to think the interview is a waste of time. Sure, you want to make sure the person is more-or-less who they claim to be on the surface, but you will never really understand their capability for reasoning with your problems until they are working in your process. One of my earlier jobs dealing with code involved a very brief interview (no whiteboard involved) followed by a 6 month contract offer. The deal…

> The deal was that I basically had 6 months to prove myself, and if everyone felt like it was working out (myself included) this would be bumped into full-time with benefits. In the UK, we sort of have this in the form of probation - in most permanent jobs, you don't gain full employment rights until you've done a probationary period, which is usually six months. You get full salary and benefits during that period,…

This seems kinda nuts to me. I don't think I would leave a stable position for a probationary position, or accept one if I had more stable offers. "It's ok, we probably won't use it" - uhh, what? No, that's what legal protection is for.

Is it really that common? I'm sure many companies try to hoist this on propsective employees but I'm surprised people accept it.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#352

Post by slymon99 »

mountainboot wrote: post #323
rainyMammoth wrote: post #86

The issue with LeetCode style interview is that almost EVERYONE can solve those questions after studying a couple weeks/months. The only thing that LeetCode questions predict is if the candidate has been training for LeetCode questions. The fact that Google, Facebook etc still use it as a gatekeeping mechanism makes me believe they want to find cogs that will specifically spend hours studying for it. Making sure that…

Maybe I am just extremely dumb, but the "hard" questions are actually very hard for me. The medium questions sure.

Nah, some LC hards are extremely hard. Most FAANG interviews don't use hards

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#353

Post by [deleted] »

kanobo wrote: post #137
dabockster wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My city considers 1099s as businesses due to some shady contractors in the past. So my local government would try to collect a chunk of any contractor earnings (with that chunk getting huge if you didn't register with them first).

What city do you live in? I've never heard of 1099 tax collection on a city level before, is that common?

[deleted]

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#354

Post by [deleted] »

swsieber wrote: post #330
awhitby wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't opinions something an employer should want in developers? And not just opinions on tech stack but all the way up to requirements etc. If I hire a developer "to build X," I would rather work with the developer who explains that X is the wrong thing and we should actually build Y, than the one who shrugs, asks no more questions, and builds a really excellent X - that later turns out to be the wrong thing to have…

There's a difference between opinionated and having an opinion. I think Rust is much more pleasant to work with (an opinion), but I'm not going to let it stop me from using other things (not opinionated)

[deleted]

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#355

Post by malechimp »

farcaster wrote: post #343

I once applied for a company here in São Paulo where after the technical interview (no whiteboard) I talked on-site with the CTO and he passively-agressively asked a bunch of random questions and tried very hard to be a dick about it ("oh, you consider yourself a good self-learner? French? I bet you couldn't read some news in French if I opened any here right now. JUST KIDDING") At the end of this 40 minute nightmare…

IMO you should have ended the interview the moment you detected that you were being treated poorly. Let alone not doing the homework.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#356

Post by madamelic »

_qulr wrote: post #274
WesternStar wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also people act as though software is a job without anxiety. There is plenty of anxiety in this job. Sometimes under pressure you really do have to perform or push back and its good to know if people can do it.

> Also people act as though software is a job without anxiety. Not. All. Anxiety. Is. The. Same. Ask a firefighter to give a speech in front of 1000 people. This is an entirely different kind of anxiety than running into a burning building. Ironically, it may be the former rather than the latter that makes the firefighter sweat. Writing code is generally not a performance art. We're not stage performers. Interviews a…

Also stress on the job isn't the same as stress getting a job.

One you are getting paid no matter what, the other you aren't and are 'performing' in the hopes of getting paid.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#357

Post by NikolaNovak »

perl4ever wrote: post #114
NikolaNovak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure - That would neatly eliminate majority of qualified candidates :-) Very few people who are successfully employed would take a risk / have a luxury to forsake their certain employment for an extremely short term contract (with all the registration, taxation, regulation etc headache this implies!) and extremely limited chance of gainful employment. (it's perspectives like these that make me realize how much of a g…

You are making a point that many others have made, and it makes me unhappy to see it yet again. What you are saying in effect, is that hiring regimes can't be (or ought not to be) designed to include a group that is (commonly) discriminated against, if that discriminates against anyone, particularly the majority. Implicitly, I see you defining the optimum as where everyone uses the same criteria that are as inclusive…

Hmmm; I feel you are making some interesting and valid points, and I would like to engage in a conversation; but I am (genuinely) having trouble articulating/parsing what they are. I don't know if you are trying to be diplomatic if the message may not be politically correct, or are the key points very generalized and lean more toward implication/insinuation; or whether it's a philosophy-textbook-style language and I just lack experience in it to parse generically-sounding words in a specific-context-meaning.

My best effort:

* Who/what is the group you feel is a "commonly discriminated group", that would benefit from "contract first" hiring practices?

* If a company uses a practice that "discriminates against a majority", is that a practically beneficial funnel/sieve/practice for the company? Alternatively, if we are discussing companies which are making a stand / moral decision through hiring practices, I feel that's a very different discussion than what I interpreted original poster to posit as "best hiring practice for everybody in all situations / everybody should do THIS".

* I feel your last sentence is proposing each employer using different criteria in hope that cumulatively they'd create an overlapping and comprehensive venn diagram. My response to that notion would be a) I don't trust either free markets or regulation to make that venn diagram complete and b) that kind of stratification of the market sounds horrible... no matter what, I can only go to specific companies who have specific hiring practices that happen to match me? (I fully understand the irony in that this may in fact be the underlying unspoken reality of the market! my point is that it should be something we move away from, not explicitly design as a goal).

But again, I may be misinterpreting your argument and inadvertently taking discussion in the wrong direction...

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#358

Post by kelvin0 »

mountainboot wrote: post #335

I interviewed with one of the companies on that list a few years back (noredink). They gave a timed hackerrank style coding question as round one (so I guess technically not a whiteboard). I passed that, then I had an interview with an actual person. He asked me vague question, like what is architecture, I started to reply with what design tradeoffs I made on the app I was working on. He literally laughed at me, and…

I've had one such interview go really bad. I am normally a very trusting and confident person, but that interview destroyed me for days. This was for an internship on my first year of uni when I just started learning to code C and C++. The position was for a Junior programmer (which I was).

At some point the interviewer asks which I would choose in a project, C or C++ and reasons why. Basically answered that it depends on the project, but that both languages had their pros and cons, and it all depends. I told him I did not that many projects under my belt at the time.

Interviewer got somewhat pissed off and kept asking me about specific languages constructs which I was not yet familiar with. In a way felt like he was trying to ambush me and make me feel incompetent. I mentioned to him that I was not yet experienced enough to answer these questions, but was eager to learn. Well he did NOT like that either and ended the interview promptly.

It seems like the guy really did not like me (which is fine), but also wanted to turn this interview into some type of power trip ....

Had this been today, I would have politely declined and left. But I was a young and eager cub. Live and learn!

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#359

Post by bananaface »

danjac wrote: post #318
mbil wrote: post #45

This is a great list. Thanks for sharing it. I actually had the pleasure of interviewing at one of these companies before. They had a take-home project, which was to choose and implement and couple enhancements to a toy app. In the subsequent conversations, we discussed how I approached the problem, details of my design, technical tradeoffs, etc -- all the sorts of things you would expect a professional sw engineer t…

Take-home tests are fine in isolation, but if every company does that you'd pretty much be spending all your time doing take-home projects and nothing else. Also many companies will insist on a take home project in addition to everything else, including a whiteboard interview. So you can pour time and effort into this project only to be eliminated further down the line (or just ghosted). It's like they assume applica…

Just look at their GitHub and if it looks good, dive in at the interview to make sure they actually wrote the code. Isolated take-home tests seem ridiculous to me if the candidate has public code available. You're filtering out anyone who likes to avoid duplicated effort.

Re: Hiring Without Whiteboards

#360

Post by braythwayt »

nikon wrote: post #344
mountainboot wrote: post #335

I interviewed with one of the companies on that list a few years back (noredink). They gave a timed hackerrank style coding question as round one (so I guess technically not a whiteboard). I passed that, then I had an interview with an actual person. He asked me vague question, like what is architecture, I started to reply with what design tradeoffs I made on the app I was working on. He literally laughed at me, and…

I had the same experience on some vague Postgres question for a Rails job when I was junior. I asked a similar question along the lines of: how often do you use this day to day here? Similar response.

For many engineering candidates, we ask them to design the data schema for a calendar. I’m sure my employer and the question are not a secret. We have various follow-ons, like handling the wild number of ways meetings can be periodic, exceptions, and so on.

Nobody has ever asked me how often we need to build calendaring software, because I explain right up front that while this is a “toy” question, our core product functionality schedules people, and nearly every feature from a calendar app has some analogue to things we either do, or are asked to do but haven’t prioritized yet.

I think it’s ok to ask “toy” questions, but I also think that there should be a ready answer to the question “Does this have anything at all to do with the job?”

p.s. We don’t ask a question directly about scheduling, for a simple reason: Almost everybody understands the basic idea of a calendar, so it’s a more “level playing field” for candidates to think about calendars than schedules.

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