Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#111

Post by zafka » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 4:54 PM UTC

pmichaud wrote: post #74

duxup wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it's not really 'not important' as much as 'not honest'. Someone, somewhere at that company chose to hire someone... and they know what they want them to do. Why aren't they telling me? Here I am sitting down expecting to divulge all sorts of things / do a dance, but they can't tell me what they want... There's all sorts of reasons to not tell anyone / corporate circumstances, but it's a really bad foot to start…

You're probably right that sometimes people are hiding something from you. But I think a lot of the time it's more like "I have 10 people doing a bunch of things that vary over time and on a day to day basis, and what each of them does specifically really depends on what they are good at and what comes up. I really want those 10 people to be able to do 10% more of that confusing mix of activities than they are curren…

This definitely describes our R&D group.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#112

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 4:54 PM UTC

redisman wrote: post #96

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #66

As someone with 20+ years in the experience, red flag #1 for me is being expected to go through a skill-testing technical whiteboard (or similar) coding exercise before even having a deeper discussion about the role and whether there's a fit, etc. I've seen this many times and I find it baffling: I already have a very high paying high quality job, I want you to sell _me_ on the position before demanding I do stressfu…

One thing that's funny is when the internal recruiter for company X (that I had to google) reaches out to me and sets up a call. Then their question is why did you choose this company specifically? And I'm like dude, you called me!

Classic. I had a similar thing happen a while ago. US based company - not named to protect the guilty - wanted me to move to the United States to do some pretty specific work for them. I'm not open to such offers but they went out of their way to make the invitation, offered to fly me out there and a whole pile of other buttering up bits and pieces. So I said if they wanted me that badly, could we do this remote?

You can guess where that ended. In case you can't: "Who did I think I was to refuse their offer to come to America to partake in this great opportunity?".

Interesting attitude change, turning on a dime they went from all smooth and friendly to outright hostile, and that on a track that they initiated. Very weird.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#113

Post by vkou » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

noodle wrote: post #103

StillBored wrote: post #23

Role clarity is a huge one in my book. I've turned down numerous offers because when I asked what the specifics of my day to day job were going to be, the answers weren't clear. From the secret FAANG that likes to pretend what they are doing is defense contractor level top secret, and even after your hired you might not know what your actually working on, to the big companies where its clear the hiring manager only h…

> I've turned down numerous offers because when I asked what the specifics of my day to day job were going to be, the answers weren't clear. Same, from FAANG companies. The feel that I get is more like, FAANG companies don't even know what you're going to do. They just want to hire top talent and figure out what you're working on later. They want someone "smart" who can ultimately work on any team, since whatever tea…

That's because FAANG has a hiring department, that's responsible for hiring. They also each have ~2,000 engineering teams, some of which may or may not have headcount. And once someone is accepted, teams with open headcount look at that person, and make an offer.

The shortens the time that it takes to fill headcount, because there is a constant pipeline of ready candidates.

This also means that you won't get yanked around at the eleventh hour of the interview process with a "Sorry, we know you did great on all your interviews, but the headcount for the one team you were interviewing for filled/canceled earlier today, don't let the door hit you on the way out."

You get 1-5 different team offers if you pass the interview. You can speak to the managers of those teams, prior to saying yes. Those managers, if they are any good, should have a pretty good idea of what you'll be doing. If you don't like any of those teams (or their managers), you can tell your recruiter that (I said no to all 5 of my initial offers, and got 2 counter-offers), and they'll come back to you with different interested teams.

Your recruiter gets paid if you get hired. If you don't care what team you get slotted in, they'll slot you into whatever's available first. If you've passed your interviews, but do care what team you're gong to work with, they are financially incentivised to work with you.

Or you could just switch teams after 12 months, if you don't like the one you were hired into.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#114

Post by cmrdporcupine » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

Galanwe wrote: post #107

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #66

As someone with 20+ years in the experience, red flag #1 for me is being expected to go through a skill-testing technical whiteboard (or similar) coding exercise before even having a deeper discussion about the role and whether there's a fit, etc. I've seen this many times and I find it baffling: I already have a very high paying high quality job, I want you to sell _me_ on the position before demanding I do stressfu…

After being on both sides of the interview situation for quite a while now, my feeling on this is more nuanced. The thing is, when you look for a job, you will often go for 5 to 10 interviews. On the other end, when I'm looking for someone to fill a position in my team, I will interview at the very least 50 candidates. That is to say, all things equal, the interviewer has most likely more incentive than the interview…

Honestly, I question most interviewers ability to evaluate someone as low or high skill. I honestly don't think the testing works most of the time.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#115

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #70

vlovich123 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of the big tech companies, I've worked at Facebook, Google, & Apple. I've still not quite cracked what's different about Apple culturally that they seem to be more immune to this problem. The only main difference I can spot is I don't recall ever encountering a PM at Apple. To do planning engineers would propose improvements, new features, etc. These were bubbled up. Then executives would be responsible for building…

The way Apple manages to do this is that, to a larger degree than others , the company is run as a collection of different companies. This has pros AND cons but one of the pros in this context is that their hiring is less "work at Apple", and more "work for THIS team at Apple". Hands-down unbeatable for the specific question of role clarity, but it's naive to pretend there aren't downsides to the practice.

[deleted]

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#116

Post by cmrdporcupine » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

Throysksk282 wrote: post #102

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #66

As someone with 20+ years in the experience, red flag #1 for me is being expected to go through a skill-testing technical whiteboard (or similar) coding exercise before even having a deeper discussion about the role and whether there's a fit, etc. I've seen this many times and I find it baffling: I already have a very high paying high quality job, I want you to sell _me_ on the position before demanding I do stressfu…

On the flip side, I've been interviewing people with supposedly 15+ years of experience using simple whiteboard questions for a while and I've seen too many people fail miserably at writing basic for loops (a very slightly more involved problem than fizzbuzz, really) for me to simply trust that spending time selling you on the company is useful. Lying on a resume is easy, and even truthful resumes can be misleading.…

I'd fail fizzbuzz on your whiteboard. And I'd be proud of it. Working in this industry for 25 years and almost 10 at Google has not trained me to write fizzbuzz.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#117

Post by dddbbb » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #54

compiler-guy wrote: post #24

The "Not Enough Clarity about your Role" issue has killed Google with so many potentially outstanding employees. For years and years you wouldn't interview with your team, or even be told what team you would be joining. It is slightly better now, but you still don't interview with your specific team until very, very late in the process, if you even do. One of the worst things about interviewing at the big G.

Part of that is because of the expectation at Google that you will just move around. You don't really hire specifically into a given team, and that could be disconcerting, for sure. But you are also given enough respect by the company to assume that as a competent SWE you should be able to move around fairly easily to almost any team in the company. When I started (9 years ago) it was stated during onboarding that yo…

Doesn't that put off a lot of very high-quality candidates though? If someone joins because they want to work in an interesting machine learning team, they probably don't want to be potentially moved on to a legacy Java CRUD app. Or is transferring determined more by what the employee wants?

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#118

Post by sdfhbdf » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

dkarp wrote: post #98

Tech interviewing articles seem to do well on HN. I'm guessing because it's something most of us can relate to and that's what made me click on it. But I feel like I've read this same content in different articles, that I've found on HN, multiple times.

I like to think that it's one of the few factors that really unite the whole HN community - most of us lurkers here have gone through or will go through a tech interview at some point. So it's universally educational for the HN audience and it's not a polarizing topic.

It's also kind of like somebody posting true life pro tips because it's useful for most of us hence why it gathers so mony upvotes probably.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#119

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 4:56 PM UTC

subsubzero wrote: post #109

Some of my hall of shame interviewers: - Everyone I interviewed on my would-be team felt like they were attending a funeral, never met a more depressed unenthusiastic bunch. - One of the interviewers wondering why I wanted this job as it was terrible, he stated he was looking to leave and warned me about the company. - Meeting room of interview room(conference room) reeked of sweat(when no one was there), it was disg…

These are all very good reasons why you want to talk to your future team mates, rather than to HR and some manager. The team mates are the ones that you will be working with every day, the manager you will likely see once or twice a year and HR you will only see when there is a problem (or when they perceive you are a problem).

The lower on the totem pole you go, the better the information about what it is to actually work for a particular company. The people at that level are more honest , more plain spoken and generally simply nicer and will look at you as a partner rather than as a resource.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#120

Post by Jach » Tue, Sep 15, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #66

As someone with 20+ years in the experience, red flag #1 for me is being expected to go through a skill-testing technical whiteboard (or similar) coding exercise before even having a deeper discussion about the role and whether there's a fit, etc. I've seen this many times and I find it baffling: I already have a very high paying high quality job, I want you to sell _me_ on the position before demanding I do stressfu…

I suspect the reason they get away with it is because for most of us it's not that stressful, especially if we already have a reasonable job. For some it can even be fun, a diversion from the usual day to day. The companies that want you to spend 8 hours doing a side project for them, though, yeah that's going to be a no for a lot of non-desperate people...