Is it already that time of the week again?
We should just have a template to fill out for these posts
I'm smelling a great "Show HN: Using GPT-2 to create comments for a post about tech interviews" submission :)
The technical interview is an ego trip
21–30 of 206 posts
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#22> My golden rule for technical interviews is that, "Every step, conversation and question must be pertinent to the day-to-day of the role." While this may be obvious, I am sure that many hiring managers are still expecting candidates to arrive at technical interviews with Computer Science books memorized. This form of technical interviews should be made obsolete.
Here's the core of the article right here. The "regurgitate LeetCode-style problems" interview fails to be relevant to the day to day of pretty much any SWE job (unless, maybe, you're applying to work for LeetCode, and one of the duties is to create solutions to problems in under 40 minutes, without outside resources).
Take the author's golden rule and layer on a structured interview process, and now you've got an interview process that will be more predictive of whether a candidate is a good hire than any "throw a random engineer in a room with the candidate and have them answer random algorithm problems" type interview. Even better, since you have an actual process, you can tweak it to be even more predictive of a good hire.
Why don't companies understand this?
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#23There's so much hate for "whiteboard interviews" and "interviewers focusing on themselves rather than the candidate" and all that on HN, but what if...this is actually what works for some companies?
Some people want to work on super challenging problems with technically brilliant coworkers. Some people treat a poor performance not as a humiliation, but as an opportunity to understand how much they do not yet know.
What if you want to attract candidates like that? Ask them tough questions, don't tailor the questions to their strengths, and have the interviewers show off how smart they are (even if they're not, it's easy to appear smart when you have all the answers). Pay good money and have high prestige so that you get plenty of quality applicants for every role, because you're going to miss out on many of the good ones, but you will attract some of the brightest and most driven people.
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#24Articles like this always underestimate how many bullshit artists there are out there. The technical interview is not perfect but it is still far more meritocratic than many fields.
This, so much this!
If it sounds crazy, it is because you're not a BS artist yourself, so it is hard to put yourself in that mindset. I have friends who fall into this category, and they would be the first to admit they bullshited their way into FANG
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#25Is it already that time of the week again?
We should just have a template to fill out for these posts
I want a GPT-3 trained on HN - if it can look at your title and generate basically your content/comment, don’t post it. Similarly, if it can look at the comment you’re replying to and generate essentially your reply (let’s say in top-5 most probable), don’t post it.
Edit, love the irony that both responses are about GPT. Point proven?
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#26I agree. We recently got rid of our more traditional "tech screen" and replaced it with a 90 minute realistic programming interview.
We have 3 tests we give depending on the role (game dev, backend, or SRE). The tests replicate typical work the engineer would be doing, such as adding functionality to a 2D game, developing out a web service for a given API, or debugging and optimizing a linux server. We provide a development environment remotely, or the engineer can use their own. They code/work on their own, without needing to share their screen, though we're on the line if they have questions or just want to chat. The interview itself takes about an hour and we schedule in buffer time before/after to setup and to debrief.
We've designed the problems to be (a) relative, (b) scalable and (c) fun. By scalable, I mean that the problem should have a simple, naive solution that most engineers who work in that space should be able to solve quickly and easily, while also having enough space for more advanced engineers to extend the problem and show off a bit.
So far we've gotten good feedback from this approach, even for candidates who haven't passed. I know 90 minutes is a long time, we but feel that with this test, we get a good, realistic work sample, and we can forgo a lot of the other less effective interviews.
(plug: we're still hiring [1])
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#27Can we also add to the list of things that we don't need 8 interviews AND a tech screen to figure out whether a person can code?
I don't think I've ever done more than 5 interviews plus a phone screen in a single loop. Who tried to put you through 8 hours of on-site interviews?
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#28This was my take on interviewing with Amazon at one point a long while ago. The initial interview itself was pretty straight forward, but it seemed like every answer I gave was "wrong" because the interviewer was looking for key phrases instead of understanding of the concepts. We talked about hashing, and when he asked if I knew what hashing was I said sure, its a one-way function to create a unique identifier. He a…
Sounds like my Google interview. By the end I had absolutely no interest in working there. Such a toxic environment. The guy they had take me to lunch also seemed completely miserable.
Dunno if that was representative of Google or big companies in general but it turned me off forever.
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#29I had the strangest technical interview recently. I didn't get an offer, but in every case where that's happened before it's been obvious to me where my deficiencies lie (which I then use to improve in that area). This time I learnt nothing.
It was six individual one-to-one interviews, back to back. The first five were an ego trip for me. I was able to do everything perfectly it seems: read code, write code, talk about code. Then the sixth was this synthetic problem involving nested boxes. I figured out it was a tree problem and started writing code to build the tree. I had an approach in mind and asked the interviewer if he thought that was a good approach (given that there was only enough time for one attempt). He said no, he didn't think it would work. That completely threw me off. Later I realised me approach would have worked anyway.
I didn't get an offer, but what in the ever-loving fuck was the point of putting me through 5 technical interviews only to fail the sixth? It really felt like they were looking for that ego boost but didn't get it from me. It's hard not to sound arrogant in this situation, but I've been humbled in the past. This time I was just confused.
Re: The technical interview is an ego trip
#30This was my take on interviewing with Amazon at one point a long while ago. The initial interview itself was pretty straight forward, but it seemed like every answer I gave was "wrong" because the interviewer was looking for key phrases instead of understanding of the concepts. We talked about hashing, and when he asked if I knew what hashing was I said sure, its a one-way function to create a unique identifier. He a…
Sorry about that bad experience. It sounds like the interviewer wasn't good at communicating.
To be fair, it also sounds like you were conflating popular hash functions like md5 with the general concept of a hashing data structure and underlying function. Knowing that modulus operation is one approach and knowing common approaches for dealing with collisions are part of that. See: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/hashing-data-structure/