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The technical interview is an ego trip

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Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#121

Post by leafboi »

ricardobeat wrote: post #95

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 thr…

There's a real performance downgrade when performing in front of people. To add more accuracy to your assessment I would give these people the opportunity to perform in a room without someone watching.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#122

Post by mhh__ »

billforsternz wrote: post #103
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.

Google had a guy take me to lunch as well. I suppose this is part of their process. I was surprised it was a random developer (a quiet, uninterested, also slightly miserable young guy), rather than someone who was otherwise involved in my (potential) recruitment. It seemed like a lost opportunity for them to get to know something about me other than whether I could do simple coding exercises quickly and accurately un…

> but at no stage showed the slightest interest in me personally or anything I had ever done.

At least based on what I read about them (and their approach to their customers) google does seem slightly autistic (in a sense) as a company.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#123

Post by [deleted] »

jaaron wrote: post #26

I 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 deve…

[deleted]

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#124

Post by cottonseed »

leafboi wrote: post #115
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…

Assuming the data structure is a singly linked list than yes it's not stack safe. At a high level foldLeft and foldRight represent abstraction leakage. The Domain and Codomain for both functions are exactly the same. If there is no performance difference or side effects to consider then there is almost no point in having two fold functions as a plain fold has the exact same inputs and outputs as foldLeft or foldRight…

> The Domain and Codomain for both functions are exactly the same.

This is not true.

> def List[A].foldLeft[B](z: B)(op: (B, A) => B): B

> def List[A].foldRight[B](z: B)(op: (A, B) => B): B

Notice the signature of the fold op: the arguments types are swapped. This is because fold left and right on a list [a, b], say, is the difference between:

(z op a) op b

and

a op (b op z)

(If this isn't compelling enough, consider [a, b, c].) Not all functions are associative. For example, consider a cryptographic hash function.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#125

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

jonfw wrote: post #7
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #5

Of course it is, it's a way to gauge whether "someone is dedicated to the job by cramming the algorithms section they haven't touched in years" I've done dozens of interviews and after all of it, I realized there are only four qualities we quantify as useful: caring, ability to listen, ability to learn.

That's only 3

There are only two types of people: those who can derive a set from missing data.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#126

Post by bradlys »

nefitty wrote: post #84
roflc0ptic wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I mean - all you're experiencing is the HR/recruitment side of the pipeline at that point. You can't really say that an entire company is shit just because some subset of its HR/recruiters do shitty things. How many CTO's actually give a shit about IC interviewing experience and dig into the entire methodology that recruiters use when interacting with candidates? (And actually keep track of what their recruiters do) I'm gonna give a wild guess and put 0 out there.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#127

Post by mhh__ »

jameshush wrote: post #21
aphextron wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Wouldn't really surprise me at all. 90% of everything is crap, HN submissions are no different - the comments are the site.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#128

Post by sigstoat »

bsder wrote: post #63
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…

> 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. One thing that shocked me in discussions is that apparently interviewing incoming candidates at FAANGs has now become a mandatory performance review objective . This is going to produce a lot of interviewers who rea…

when i interviewed at google a few years ago the guy told me they were starting to require everyone who’d taken the relevant training to interview candidates.

unsurprisingly, he didn’t seem enthusiastic, couldn’t manage to say “yes” when i asked if he liked google, and didn’t know python.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#129

Post by emerged »

cbsks wrote: post #106
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.

At the ~500 person tech company I work for, the first goal of the recruitment and interview process is to decide if the candidate would be a good fit for the role, and the second goal is to convince the candidate that they should accept the job if offered. I recently interviewed at both Apple and Amazon. None of the interviewers or recruiters at either company tried to sell me on the job and I left both interviews no…

My impression was they expect you to desperately want to work there and be willing to submissively beg to be accepted. That's not how my mind works so it just seemed repulsive.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#130

Post by leafboi »

cottonseed wrote: post #124
leafboi wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming the data structure is a singly linked list than yes it's not stack safe. At a high level foldLeft and foldRight represent abstraction leakage. The Domain and Codomain for both functions are exactly the same. If there is no performance difference or side effects to consider then there is almost no point in having two fold functions as a plain fold has the exact same inputs and outputs as foldLeft or foldRight…

> The Domain and Codomain for both functions are exactly the same. This is not true. > def List[A].foldLeft[B](z: B)(op: (B, A) => B): B > def List[A].foldRight[B](z: B)(op: (A, B) => B): B Notice the signature of the fold op: the arguments types are swapped. This is because fold left and right on a list [a, b], say, is the difference between: (z op a) op b and a op (b op z) (If this isn't compelling enough, consider…

Elements in sets are not ordinal. In principle they are the same as the set (B, A) is the same set as (A, B).

If you're saying that foldRight in scala exists aesthetic reasons... well can't argue with that. I figured it was more for legacy reasons as the original poster said that there use to be a performance difference.

As for the associative thing I mentioned side effects. Function composition is always associative. Unless you have side effects. See: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Function_composition (search for associative)

I don't know much about crypto but I'm assuming you're referring to things that aren't side effect free. In general though a hash function should be associative under function composition as it is just a surjective mapping from domain to codomain.

Also can't exactly read that syntax nor the stuff below it. Not a scala dude. Maybe a more traditional map implementation in like python or JS pseudo code would make more sense to me, but that may be too much to ask.

edit:

I think you actually may be right. We're both a little wrong with our reasoning though. Function composition is not commutative. And FoldRight and FoldLeft reverses the order of composition which has an effect on operations that are not commutative.

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