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The technical interview is an ego trip

blog.kowsheek.com

201–206 of 206 posts

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this mean it's also time for another "you don't have to program as a hobby" post again?

We're overdue for "tests don't measure intelligence, they just measure test-taking skills".

And maybe a "look at this woman who did something" post thrown in for good measure.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#202
post #175
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interviewers who want to make sure you don't think Googling is shameful.

Every interview is different. You're asking people to read your mind: https://hiringfor.tech/2020/03/02/are-you-asking-candidates-...

That article doesn't seem to contain a point relevant to this particular issue.

If I ask you "How can you attempt to get the answer to this in under a minute" or "what's the first thing you would do" and you don't say "search for existing solution" (it doesn't have to be Google), you fail. You don't have to read my mind; I want to know where YOUR mind goes first. And if it goes to anything more complicated than "I'll try to look it up" you just simply fail; I can't afford to have you wasting any more of my business' time.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#203
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not responsible for your conditioning. I want you to tell me the truth. If you're playing a game in your mind that causes you to give me a more complex answer than you need because you think that's what I want to hear, you're going to have similar pathology as an employee and IMO this is a great screen for exactly that!

Edit: doing any "technical" work prior to doing research is a display of technical INcompetence.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#204
Most technical interviews aren't technical. You are expected to know irrelevant trivia like which port does ICMP use? There's literally no job on earth where that matters.

So when I did technical interviews; I had a demo domain controller vm. I printed out 5 steps they need to do. dcpromo, slave domain.local to the dc, install wsus. pretty boring stuff that much candidates know how to do. My trick, there's lots of tiny details like did you get the server's name instead of SERVER-1897237534

Oh and I'll be talking about video games, tv and movies distracting you as much as possible during the testing. I just sit there asking them question after question about hobbies. Really really distracting.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#205
post #195

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.

I'm guessing they were looking for game engine developers or 3D modelling engine developers, which probably know those by heart.

Re: The technical interview is an ego trip

#206

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…

I appreciate whenever I see people in your position get angry about ghosting, but in my experience, for positions that I’ve interviewed for and didn’t get, I think only one ever let me know.

I’ve come to rationalize this as a risk-avoidance tactic, and I think the negative effects of reputations damage to the company are mostly unaccounted for.

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