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The technical interview is an ego trip

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Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#161

Post by monkeycantype »

umvi wrote: post #35
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 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…

I hope his google doesn't land on this thread: The US 25 cent denomination coin or 'Quarter' has eleven ridges

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#162

Post by sg47 »

wwarner wrote: post #99

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…

45 minutes - write a simple API matching the spec in one of the 3 languages on your/our laptop. Use Google if you have to. Someone will be in the room to help answer questions. API should be functional. Returning fake data is fine (or provide data in a sqlite db)

45 minutes - do code review of this extremely buggy code like you'd review a coworker's code

45 minutes - presentation on a technical topic to one or more members

45 minutes - behavioral. Let's talk about failures, conflicts in your career. Who are your role models? What do they do well? Leadership abilities, career progression

45 minutes - troubleshooting. Here's a docker container. Make this thing work.

Rate all these on a scale of 1 to 10. Sum up the scores. Keep calibrating across all your candidates.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#163

Post by leafboi »

cottonseed wrote: post #154
leafboi wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Function composition is always associative. You're still confused. There is no function composition here. op in the example above is just some other function, like +. The associativity of + and function composition are true for totally unrelated reasons. Associativity of plus is an inductive argument that follows from the Peano axioms. Function composition says: (f o g) o h = f o (g o h) as functions. It is true be…

It's a higher order composition of functors. Lack of Commutativity still applies and is the factor for why the codomains aren't equal not associativity. It's all pedantry though. Overall you're right.

Intuitively the composition is similar enough to function composition that is has the same basic ruleset and is how I'm working out the logic in my head. Think of the functor as a tuple of the accumulator and the value: (acc, x), and the function is just an op that takes in this tuple as a parameter and spits out a new tuple (acc, z) with the next value in the list.

I addressed it earlier here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24449271

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#165

Post by janee »

takeda wrote: post #98
pmiller2 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've witnessed this a few times. Usually because you actually passed the current hurdle, but the company got cold feet because the next step requires more effort from them and they can't make up their mind...eitherway as irritating as it is you probably dodged a bullet

Its sort of like companies doing subconscious window shopping...absolutely infuriating stuff

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#166

Post by hashkb »

minot wrote: post #144
hashkb wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of like knowing multiplication tables, or intervals in music. There's some stuff you just gotta know.

Knowing the multiplication table is such steaming nonsense. I know 7x10 is 70 so half of that, 7x5 is 35. I can add seven to 35 fast enough that I don't have to memorize 7x6 is 42. Memorizing is not knowing.

How did you divide 70 in half and get 35?

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#168

Post by vasu_man »

"Every step, conversation and question must be pertinent to the day-to-day of the role"

While I agree with the author's 'golden rule', I believe the complex data structure questions are just a way to filter interviewing candidates in a highly competitive job market. It's akin to the highly competitive Indian Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) where hundreds of thousands of students solve complex problems in Math, Physics, and Chemistry to get into premiere institutions with few thousand seats, most of whom do not pursue a career in sciences.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#169

Post by jaaron »

scollet wrote: post #155
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…

Are all the roles strictly senior?

Not strictly.

At this stage of the studio, we are orienting to a more "senior" team, but that basically means senior+. We're not particular about titles as it's still a small, flat team. As the team grows, we'll gain the mentoring capacity for more junior talent, but for now, we're focused on an experienced team.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#170

Post by wyclif »

daniellarusso wrote: post #152
pkaye wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long time ago I go the "Why is a manhole cover round?" at an interview. I prefaced that I heard this question before and followed up with 3-4 possible answers. The interviewer was still impressed.

I have started asking this, since I have not heard it asked in awhile (like almost 2 decades), and it is interesting to hear the responses.

It's clichéd question, but in my opinion it's a very good one and would still be useful if it wasn't so overused. The reason why is because there's one big reason why manhole covers are round and maybe 3-4 subsidiary and less important reasons why. A person who can 1/ identify that there's more than one reason, name them all and 2/ sort and rank the reasons correctly in order of importance reveals a person's clarity of thought and reasoning process.
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