The technical interview is an ego trip • Hacker News Board

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#191

Post by m463 » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 4:49 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #60

jbay808 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think googling is even a valid answer. If he asked "how would you find out how many ridges are on a quarter" then yes (and I think Google it would be everyone's first answer). But counting, as a verb implies the act of measurement, not just obtaining the final number. Assuming that he used that word, it sounds like a trick question.

I was once asked how many golfballs could fit in a school bus. I blathered on about measurements of the bus, volume of a ball, the average due to gaps between balls, are the seats still there, etc... bottom line we could spend a lot of time getting an ever more precise estimate. The guy seemed satisfied. Later at home I realised that my test engineer friend may have suggested doing an actual experiment - rent a bus a…

They are black-box testing your mind.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#192

Post by elmersglue » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 5:04 PM UTC

hashkb wrote: post #109

Impossible wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that his expected answer was "Google it". In most cases when people answer with that (it could be the answer for any tech interview question...) you get encouraged to actually do the problem, so it's a time waster. For the interviewer it gives them no signal outside of you having the ability and awareness of the existence of search engines, although there could be some vague behavioral signal that shows yo…

False. We want you to be confident and admit you Google all day every day. Simple as that. You seriously would have done all that before Googling it?

People assume interviews are to prove technical competence. Answering with “Google it” is more of a test of someone’s humour. While in practice it might be true that you’d Google it, most people have been conditioned by the education system to answer with something more substantive and demonstrative of their technical thinking ability.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#193

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#194

Post by erikpukinskis » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 6:19 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #184

ng12 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I cannot relate to, after two miserable phone interviews with Google I told them on their third request, that if my CV looks so great (by their own words why they were reaching out to me) and yet I had to deal with such interview processes better not bother me ever again.

It’s a stochastic process. Some percentage of Google interviews are bad. As a job-seeker you are drawing a few samples from each company and you make a judgement.

The bigger the company the more variability in experiences.

So you make a decision with imperfect information. But it doesn’t really matter because even if you have perfect information through the interview that’s still an imperfect measure of how the job will be.

It’s all stochastic so the only way to get a good outcome is to iterate—guess, evaluate, try again until you find something you like.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#195

Post by nojvek » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 7:47 PM UTC

Ha! Zoox (the self driving car company) out of the 5 hours, 2 hours were math problems. Couldn’t google. Couldn’t use a calculator. No notepad. Had to use a zoom virtual whiteboard.

What’s the area of an equilateral triangle ? Volume of a sphere? Sorry. Haven’t needed to use that in eons. I usually just google it.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#196

Post by mixmastamyk » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 8:46 PM UTC

maxlamb wrote: post #138

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…

Had the exact same experience interviewing for Amazon way back in 2005. I was still in college, and the answer he was looking for involved some obscure Linux/Unix command. I really felt defeated and thought “well I guess I’m just not enough of a hard core coder.” I still remember his smug attitude as well. Looking back it seems ridiculous, deciding a college student was not fit for a software engineer position becaus…

Much less demand, way back in the olden days of… 2005? Just after the horse and buggy. :-D

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#197

Post by mixmastamyk » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

catchmeifyoucan wrote: post #18

This is super true. I was interviewing with a Startup once, and we had an initial screening, and they had a lot of work to be done with AWS, some APIs and data pipelines. My area of work. When we had a "technical" interview, it was completely algorithms focused. And the interviewer dropped a few anchors, which restricted my thinking, and caught me cycling. It was super obvious the call wasn't going great. Odd enough,…

Reminds me of an interview a friend got me at a Spring Boot shop. Make sure you know SB, he said. I normally do Python, so I brushed up on Java and Spring for a month beforehand and was impressed with my progress.

Well, final technical interview wasn't done by him and was instead 100% SQL and database theory instead. I did decently, I got about 85% of the questions right off the top of my head. Pretty decent result for zero preparation. Well, guess what another SQL-head did better. Was a total disaster because I was unemployed at the time and staring down financial ruin.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#198

Post by mixmastamyk » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 9:22 PM UTC

fatjokes wrote: post #183

Unpopular opinion: I like technical interviews. They at least enforce some form of a standard hiring bar. I feel this way because I've seen hiring for non-technical roles, e.g., project management, etc. They basically end up being friends hiring friends, with minimal domain expertise.

A bad hiring bar can be worse than random for hiring good candidates.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#199

Post by umvi » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

pkaye wrote: post #71

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?

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.

> Why is a manhole cover round?

Easy, manholes covers are round for the same reason JavaScript is the most popular language.

Answer: once round manholes became ubiquitous it became extremely difficult to make anything other than round manholes covers.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#200

Post by billforsternz » Sun, Sep 13, 2020, 6:03 AM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #158

billforsternz wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> " It seemed like a lost opportunity for them to get to know something about me " Don't know the policy at Google but lunch is usually intentionally supposed to be a break from the interview process. Having somebody grilling the candidate while they are trying to eat defeats that purpose. > " I am 59 years old, I've been working with code since I was 21 and worked out how to program a significant embedded applicatio…

I don't doubt that the Google people were very accomplished, but it still seems logical for them to find out something about where my skills and strengths lie. I didn't want to be grilled at lunch. Normal practice in my experience is to make lunch a pleasant experience for all involved at the same time providing an opportunity for both sides to check for cultural fit etc. etc. A win win basically.