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Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#141

Post by greyhair »

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.

This is how Bell Labs was back prior to divestiture, up until the mid 1990s.

There really wasn't one huge Bell Labs, there were literally hundreds of hundred person teams run as if they were little companies, but with a huge bureaucracy providing funding, guidance, and all sharing a knowledge pool.

If you changed teams, you could find a completely different team culture using completely different tools. And like biology, some teams thrived, and some failed.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#142

Post by cmrdporcupine »

monocasa wrote: post #135
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which part of fizzbuzz would be an issue for you?

Writing code on a whiteboard like it's a test or a competition, without being able to sit down in my editor of choice and calmly think it through and trial and error.

Programming is not sports. I'm not a coding athlete. Maybe it is for some people, but not for me. That's not what the job I've held for all this time has ever been about.

Plus you get to a certain age and experience and the thought of "proving myself" to some 25 year old is just... Really?

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#144

Post by Throysksk282 »

gedy wrote: post #108
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…

"But! But! Our 24yo interviewer has gotta check if you know the _fundamentals_ ... You might have been coasting for 20 years." Agreed, I'm totally confused and put off by this as well.

I've seen too many people who clearly have been coasting for 20 years (or people who are simply applying to a position that's not actually aligned with those 20 years of experience).

Those 24 year old interviewers are the ones you'll have to train, so you need to, at minimum, be able to do their jobs.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#145

Post by munchbunny »

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 sounds about right. FAANG companies usually need generalists because teams are so big and scopes shift often enough that the ability to pinch hit becomes an important trait. Or if they need specialists, they usually need [company]-flavored specialists, which you can't be if you didn't come from internally.

In my experience the managers usually have a pretty good idea of what work they need filled, but because the hiring pipeline produces generalists, there's some after the fact matching of interest and experience to the available list of projects.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#146

Post by dominotw »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #116
Throysksk282 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought google does leetcode/whiteboard questions . How did you get in without being able to write fizzbuzz.

Not sure if you are trolling.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#147

Post by dkarp »

sdfhbdf wrote: post #118
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.

That's a nice way of seeing it and there's definitely good information being shared in these comments, which may help many people.

Maybe these transparent content marketing articles ignite my skepticism

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#148

Post by kevinmchugh »

matsemann wrote: post #89
lgleason wrote: post #6

I can identify with the red flag where they try to pressure you to accept the offer in a short period. This is also called an exploding offer. I had a place do that to me and I ended up turning the opportunity down.

I have done the same when I was about to graduate and started looking. One company started the process long before the others (which all basically followed the same schedule), and gave me an offer before I even had applied to anyone else. At the time I was very afraid of missing out, but the way they gave me only a few days to think about moving to a different city almost a year ahead left a sour taste in my mouth an…

My spouse works as a career counselor at a university and students often end up with exactly this problem. Many of them come to the solution of accepting the less favored offer and continuing to interview, and then reneging on the company that made the exploding offer.

Sometimes, employers will call my spouse up and complain that students have reneged and she shouldn't have allowed them to do so!

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#149

Post by cmrdporcupine »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #140
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you really believe so, then I think you are failing to grasp how low "low skill" truly happens to be.

Nope, I think lots of people perform 'low skill' in a whiteboard scenario that are not. And the arrogance of their interviewers gets them on HN making very bold claims about other people's skill levels without consideration for the scenarios involved.

Don't get me wrong-- I've worked with very incompetent people. Many of them would have passed a coding interview though.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#150

Post by greyhair »

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…

The empire building thing is the worst.

"We don't actually have anything for you to do, we just have funding for three more people, and we need to hire people for those slots or we'll lose our funding. And our team size is in the second quintile for headcount, so we need to grow a little."

So basically hiring bench warmers. I actually encountered that once in my so far 37 years. It was a total wtf moment for me.

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