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The technical interview is an ego trip

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Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#81

Post by paxys »

ian-g wrote: post #76
ng12 wrote: post #16

Articles 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.

If you want to test somebody's ability to think a problem and not just bullshit 100%, why not ask them questions like "Given two integer variables x and y, write a function to swap their values without using a third variable"? It's a pretty small problem, but it's still one that needs some thought to get. Also doesn't weed out people who don't know technical details of a red-black binary tree (for example) without ne…

The vast majority of interviews ask coding questions somewhere in between the difficultly level of swapping two integers and red-black trees. I have interviewed at pretty much every mid-large tech company over the years, and have never once been asked anything involving more than array manipulation, linked lists, binary trees, hash tables and BFS/DFS traversal. And this includes senior+ roles at Google, Facebook etc.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#82

Post by FireBeyond »

ng12 wrote: post #34
TheCapn wrote: post #10

This 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…

I had a similar experience with Amazon many years ago but my takeaway was "don't work at Amazon" not "don't do technical interviews". I've had great technical interviews (Google, Square) and terrible ones (Amazon, Stripe). Companies you want to work for are cognizant of this and spend time developing their process and training their interviewers to make sure their experience is one of the good ones.

Certainly. I had a really good interview recently that was entirely technical, but none of this. It was a "this service is down, walk me through your process of isolating and debugging". If I said "I'd check these logs or services" then I'd get answers. And I'd get architecture described. Was more a technical problem solving and thought process exercise than "prove you know the same technical trivia I do".

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#83

Post by roflc0ptic »

x87678r wrote: post #69
roflc0ptic wrote: post #56

Man. I interviewed somewhere last week for a Scala position, advertising myself as a functional programmer. In the interview, they asked me, "What's the difference between fold left and fold right?" I said "Um, one of them starts on the left side of the data structure, one of them starts on the right. I never remember which is which." They said essentially: "okay. The answer I was looking for was that fold right is n…

I hate that post interview ghosting too. Is super inconsiderate.

I’ve never experienced it before now - how common is this? Is it a west coast thing? This was my first interview with a west coast shop. I don’t need an essay on why they thought it wasn’t a good fit, but radio silence seems eminently unprofessional.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#84

Post by nefitty »

roflc0ptic wrote: post #83
x87678r wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate that post interview ghosting too. Is super inconsiderate.

I’ve never experienced it before now - how common is this? Is it a west coast thing? This was my first interview with a west coast shop. I don’t need an essay on why they thought it wasn’t a good fit, but radio silence seems eminently unprofessional.

Not sure how common but this has happened to me as well. Coding challenge complete, follow-up interview scheduled... then cancelled. Rescheduled... then ghosted.

It was a cheap way of figuring out I shouldn’t even consider working there.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#85

Post by nilkn »

sushisource wrote: post #65
globular-toast wrote: post #29

I 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 ab…

I'd say this happens semi consistently to me when I get rejected. I did a tech screen (of which this is the first I've ever failed). I chose to do it in Rust as that's my main language these days. I probably should've reconsidered that decision as Rust is notoriously difficult when it comes to dealing with trees and I spend most of my time managing pointers. I described a solution to the tree problem quickly, impleme…

This is why Python is my dedicated coding interview language. You could do something far more impressive in C++ or Rust, but if you don't quite finish the full implementation it's an automatic fail with some interviewers even if you had to take into account many nuances that a Python solution wouldn't.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#87

Post by nogabebop23 »

roflc0ptic wrote: post #56

Man. I interviewed somewhere last week for a Scala position, advertising myself as a functional programmer. In the interview, they asked me, "What's the difference between fold left and fold right?" I said "Um, one of them starts on the left side of the data structure, one of them starts on the right. I never remember which is which." They said essentially: "okay. The answer I was looking for was that fold right is n…

you can often give a company a pass for a shitty interview, but you should name & out them for ghosting you as that is a far more systemic problem indicator. When I'm interviewing I want the poeple we don't hire to go away and have good things to say about us because they will tell many people about their experience. Companies that are disrespectful and inconsiderate to the point of just cutting off contact should pay the price.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#88

Post by nogabebop23 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #57
ng12 wrote: post #16

Articles 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.

Not only that, but the only concrete example the author gives is that they asked him about red-black trees. Probing knowledge of data structures is very relevant to day-to-day software development work: even if you don't actually implement them (or haven't since college), having a good knowledge of how they work is the only way to make intelligent decisions about tradeoffs involving them.

NOT knowing the internal implementation details of everthing is what has gotten us this far in the first place. You just don't evaluate candidate data structures that often in the vast majority of programming work.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#90

Post by roflc0ptic »

nogabebop23 wrote: post #87
roflc0ptic wrote: post #56

Man. I interviewed somewhere last week for a Scala position, advertising myself as a functional programmer. In the interview, they asked me, "What's the difference between fold left and fold right?" I said "Um, one of them starts on the left side of the data structure, one of them starts on the right. I never remember which is which." They said essentially: "okay. The answer I was looking for was that fold right is n…

you can often give a company a pass for a shitty interview, but you should name & out them for ghosting you as that is a far more systemic problem indicator. When I'm interviewing I want the poeple we don't hire to go away and have good things to say about us because they will tell many people about their experience. Companies that are disrespectful and inconsiderate to the point of just cutting off contact should pa…

Yeah, I'm ambivalent about that. From a purely theoretical standpoint, sure, bad actors should be punished. There's also slim but non-zero chance that they'll reciprocate and attempt to harm my reputation, and we'd end up in some dumb internecine conflict. It's good for bad actors to be punished, but usually irrational to be the one doing the punishing.
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