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The technical interview is an ego trip

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Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#91

Post by johnbcoughlin »

dastbe wrote: post #50
emerged wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it says a lot more about the individual interviewer than anything about the company. I've had great interviews with a company, and then I've had one where the person was looking for me to say 'base64" (which I wasn't actually aware of at the time!) even though I was explaining the same exact concept from the same company. The whole process is capricious.

If the whole process is capricious, it says a lot more about the company than about any individual interviewer.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#92

Post by reader_mode »

aeternum wrote: post #55
umvi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't take crap like this from interviewers. One time an interviewer asked me "how would you go about counting the ridges of a US quarter?" I rattled off some ideas about counting the ridges in an arc and then multiplying to get total ridges but the interviewer kept prodding and eventually ended the question and said he was looking for me to say "google it" (I didn't realize it was a known, fixed number). I just ro…

When he inevitably asked you to code an algorithm as the next question I hope he also accepted using Google for the answer.

I see nothing wrong with this, why would I write algorithm X from memory or taking my best guess at it on the spot, isn't the whole point of learning them recognising when are they applicable and how to find them quickly ?

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#93

Post by c1ccccc1 »

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…

Nice puzzle. Snarky python solution:

    x, y = y, x
Legit solution (I think):

    x = x + y
    y = x - y
    x = x - y
Actually, using bitwise xor would be even easier:

    x = x ^ y
    y = x ^ y
    x = x ^ y

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#94

Post by nefitty »

minimaxir wrote: post #45
minimaxir wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Following the other comments, I gave GPT-3 the prompt: A post titled "The Technical Interview Is an Ego Trip" was submitted to tech forum Hacker News. Here are the comments on that submission: Here are the unedited/uncurated results: --- "The interview process is really more of an ego trip for the interviewer, and the interviewee is just the means of satisfying that need." "The most common reason I see people getting…

A variant: A blog post titled "The Technical Interview Is an Ego Trip" was submitted to tech forum Hacker News. Here are the top-rated comments on that submission: Here are some more unedited, longer outputs: --- "This is a very accurate and useful description of the process of interviewing at most companies. I have seen this for over a decade. The interview is almost always a complete failure from the point of view…

Awesome prompt idea! These are amazing.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#95

Post by ricardobeat »

Sadly there is another side to this - by not doing any kind of technical assessment you expose yourself to fraud. I would have never expected that in the past, but after nearing a hundred interviews I saw a few cases of a candidate's skills as judged by code samples looking completely different once they were writing code on the spot. The exercises were all related to real tasks. I don't think we'd have caught on through product or problem-solving questions.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#96

Post by wolco »

roflc0ptic wrote: post #90
nogabebop23 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you come back in a year and share?

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#98

Post by takeda »

pmiller2 wrote: post #70
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tradeoff with this approach, if you fail to build a good rapport with the interviewer, you'll get labeled as not a good culture fit. Calling them out for a dumb question or critiquing the expectation of an 'expected answer' is not going to get you the job.

That doesn't sound like a tradeoff per se to me. Chances are that if the interviewer gets offended by a candidate turning a question back at them, that candidate may not actually be a cultural fit. It's much lower cost for both the company and the candidate to find this out earlier rather than later, so I'd actually call it a win-win.

Speaking of wasted time, this reminded me.

I was interviewing during the time covid started and everyone started working from home. I was interviewing with a company. I had a call with recruiter then with a hiring manager. I also got a project to work on over weekend.

Then got response something like, we really like you, but currently our hiring is suspended, we will let you know when it is back up.

Like, why did you wasted my time if you knew that I can't proceed to the on-site interview and you won't do it remotely?

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#99

Post by wwarner »

Look, you have to do technical interviews. You don't have to be a bully, but you have to find a way to probe the candidate's ability to solve technical problems and code.

Pick a question that tests the skills you're looking for, but not too closely related to the problems you encounter every day, as that will introduce really strong bias. Pick a question that can be answered in 10 or 20 minutes on a white board. The question should seem really easy, so prepare a follow up question (or two) that adds difficulty for the candidate that needs the challenge.

But here's the most important part: use the same question in at least 10 interviews. Test your questions by using them on many candidates. Don't introduce uncertainty by playing a different role in every interview. You'll get much better results.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#100

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

hanoz wrote: post #33

So I've always wondered about these leetcode interviews, having never suffered one myself, if you're given one you've seen before, are you still supposed to pretend you're working it out from first principles?

The standard practice is for the interviewer to explicitly ask the candidate whether or not they have seen the question before.

More frequently than one would expect, the candidate will deny having seen the question before, zip through the solution, and then completely stall-out when they are asked to revise their solution to accommodate a very small alteration is made to the problem parameters.

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