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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

#181

Post by C1sc0cat »

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…

I am reading this correctly a short list of 50 for a single role?

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#182

Post by NationalPark »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #149
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I felt this way too until I was made to start giving interviews. However low a bar you're imagining, I assure you I've seen "strong on paper" candidates who failed to meet a lower one. I don't know if people are lying, or people cheated through school, or talked other people into doing their work at the jobs they claim to have had, but it's really astonishing how unable to write code they can be.

However, the particularly insidious candidates are the ones who have developed a skill for talking about software/programming but can't actually write code no matter how much help or prodding they are given. As soon as you accidentally hire one of those, the case for technical interviews becomes a lot stronger.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#183

Post by ufmace »

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 have a feeling that most positions like that are filled through networking and word-of-mouth if not from internal promotion. Not many companies who want somebody like that are confident that they can determine if they really are that skilled in an interview. And not many people who have jobs at that level already have much interest in the usual rigamarole of most technical interviews.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#184

Post by ghaff »

MereInterest wrote: post #29
whatshisface wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only applies when the company needs to fill a specific position. Specific positions that need a particular person are a minority of SWE roles. In fact it is bad management to let your team get in a situation where there are individual hyper-specialized roles with no knowledge shared.

I think it also depends on the size of the company/department. A company with 4 people might be looking to bring on a 5th to fill some specific role. In that case, the offer to the second choice depends on the response to the first. On the other hand, a department with 300 people might be looking to increase head count by 10-20%, in which case the offers to each person are quite independent.

Although the reality is that a lot of hires will still be hired by a manager targeting a specific need.

When I was hired the job description was even written for me.

I'm in more of a marketing organization but if I look around me, there are positions for vastly different skill sets, backgrounds, and preferences. Most of the people in the larger team couldn't do my job well and I couldn't do theirs.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#185

Post by xtracto »

> Your interviewer is only open to solving the problem ONE way

Haha, I've happily been in the "interviewer" side of this two times:

One time, as part of a DevOps interview I asked the candidate to run something in a POSIX OS every 15 seconds using a cronjob (that was the general idea). Crontab granularity is only in minutes, so you have to use your head or Google to get a Cronjob answer. The interviewee however told me about the 1 minute granularity of CronJob, and offered instead to create a small service on init.d. with a while/sleep 15. I loved his response :-)

The other was someone who, while solving a binary search problem without a ceiling integer value, used the fact that his language of choice C++ has an INT_MAX macro defined to set the limit of the search... TOUCHE.

As an interviewer I personally love when these sort of things happen because it shown the interviewee is really thinking about the problem.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#186

Post by Balgair »

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…

Had one where they did a bunch of interviews with me in the same conference room. The job was in Foster City , so a pretty high CoL area. Whiteboarding, bit of code, etc. My manager-to-be then left me in the room for a phone call with HR about salary. The guy on the other end said that the salary was $50k, no negotiating. I turned then down, of course, but then was left alone in the conference room. I wandered about until security came and found me when I got stuck in an elevator with no RFID pass to let me out.

The other bad one was a smaller firm that decided they were going to do a 'super hard' Google c. 2005 interview, in 2018. But they didn't know the answers to the questions either. Lots of 'how many piano tuners...' style questions they were looking for exact numbers with. Tried to have me debug code they had printed out. Turns out I should have known that their Python 2.7 functions wouldn't run on the 3.2 version they compile with. Yes, from a code print-out. Half way through a few just bail to go surf reddit, with me in full view of their monitors. The remaining people just start answering emails and aren't listening to me anymore, but still are asking questions. The snide remarks were the cherry on top.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#187

Post by xtracto »

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…

>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.

I'll give you a pro-tip: Candidate Interview Packs. Cook up some Google Slides with the main info about the position, the company, the team, what you expect from the person, what you are looking for, the interview process, etc; beyond the dry JD that HR shares. Give it the personality of your (Engineering) team and generate a PDF that you can share with the 50+ candidates.

It has worked for me in the past.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#188

Post by claudeganon »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #181
Galanwe wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am reading this correctly a short list of 50 for a single role?

It’s completely insane if they’re interviewing 50 people per role. The filtering process is entirely broken if they’re doing that many. The most people I’ve ever interviewed for a job is 7.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#189

Post by ghaff »

naberhausj wrote: post #180
opportune wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a lot of people who have “accepted” exploding offers but then just keep interviewing and will try to renegotiate or just reneg if they get a better one.

"Let your 'yes' be 'yes' and your 'no' be 'no'" I would personally feel uncomfortable doing this as would a lot of the people I know.

I know you sometimes gotta do what you gotta do. But word of reneging will get around and it could come back to bite you some day.

I likely wouldn't unless the company was really being unreasonable and wouldn't budge (and that should probably give you second thoughts) and you have another hot lead that you'd really prefer if it came through.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#190

Post by noodle »

vkou wrote: post #172
noodle wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I mean, I get the reasoning/justification behind it. But I'm generally not interested in jumping through all of the toxic tech interview process hoops without first knowing what's at the other side; I've learned that lesson the hard way. And I think that probably filters a certain type of talent away from FAANG companies.

What's on the other side is generally above average pay, and access to ~2,000 teams, many of whom are doing very different things, that you can make a lateral transfer to relatively easily.

Yeah and that is what I mean when I say that the company is pushed forward not the work. You're buying in to the idea that you'll be paid well and that you'll probably find something you're interested in. My personal preference is to find something I'm interested in first, and join it. I'm more motivated by the team, work, problem, impact potential, etc..
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