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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

#311

Post by confidantlake »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #52
x87678r wrote: post #2

I was hoping this was red flags from the interviewer side. Yeah I'm hoping a blog will give me some feedback.

Aren't "red flags" from the interviewer side pretty obvious? Most interviews are just noise with very little signal. Some basic red flags: * Poor ability to self-reflect or demonstrate that they've learned things from their experiences * Lack of or otherwise poor critical thinking * Inability to communicate * Inability to display core competency in the skills required for the job, especially when challenged (I don't…

Different interviewers look for different things. Just watched moneyball, one thing the scouts looked at was the attractiveness of the candidates girlfriend. Low attractiveness equals low confidence and was a mark against the player. If the movie is to be believed, such inane metrics were used be people whose entire job was scouting candidates. I would not be shocked if there are similar dumb metrics used by a hiring manager when hiring candidates may just be one of many roles they perform.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#312

Post by monadic2 »

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…

> That is to say, all things equal, the interviewer has most likely more incentive than the interviewee to go straight to the point, and thus perform a technical check early in the process.

I would think that any "straight to the point" hiring process would be "straight to the point" because it avoided the technical interview process:

A) there's not much you can do to entirely avoid problems with work performance and B) technical knowledge can only be sussed out so far in an interview, period, before actual work performance in the context you're hiring the person for can be evaluated.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#313

Post by justinlloyd »

GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #205
umeshunni wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These guys are hiring "top talent" only as a defensive measure, so that upstart competitors don't get them. It's not expected for "top talent" to actually contribute to something useful. Citation needed

Anec-data: Turned down an $800k Principal ML Scientist job at a FANG. Interviewed with a director who couldn't answer what I would be doing / working on. Facebook is notorious for this, lots of friends get absolutely eye-watering salaries to sit around and provide 1% lifts on click-through-rates. Most fortunately leave after the 1-yr vest.

In the early part of this year, whilst on the hunt for a new job, I had the fortune(?) to interview with a FANG company (the company in question was towards the start of the acronym). They approached me, badgering for a CV (three times) and an interview, not me chasing them. And I didn't use a headhunter/outside recruiter.

Sidenote: I had taught dozens of week-long corporate training classes in software development (specifically native iOS development, Android device driver development and some ReactNative classes) to their senior staff through my training agency at this company several years prior.

I wasn't terribly interested in working at the company, because I had seen inside the machine from my earlier teaching experience and wasn't too thrilled about being a part of it, but thought the interview itself would be a valuable experience and good practice. I also expected to bomb out of the interview process early because I have heard that their algorithmic questions are notoriously hard and I consider myself a below-average developer.

I tried to get the salary expectation -- the expectation, not the negotiation -- out of the way early in the interview process but unfortunately they wouldn't come to the table so early and wouldn't even have a conversation about it.

I seemed to have done well enough during the technical part of the interview that a tentative offer was extended for a Principal role, "doing ML or something like that" was the pitch from the one wrangling the interviews. A grand but ill-defined picture was painted of roles I would be ideal for based on my years of experience and reasonably solid education (MSc CompSci, MS ML, MBA, MBA Entrepreneurship/Marketing, MA Project Management)

Towards the end of the interview process we did the usual dance around compensation and I said "$150K base and you start to have my attention, and we negotiate from there." I stated the opening figure because I was getting tired of the hemming and hawing from the other guy. I had heard of this famed, well-greased hiring pipeline but I wasn't experiencing it.

"That sounds do-able." said the person handling everything. We wrapped up quickly and then the weekend happened.

Early the next week I got an offer. I was excited! I most likely wasn't going to take the job because there were a few red flags during the interview that made me think it wasn't a company I'd be interested in working at. But to have passed the technical interview and all the other hoops! Okay! That's a small ego-boost for me even if I probably couldn't do it a second time with a different part of the FANG.

I opened up the email, and read through the offer, and read through the offer a second time to make sure I understood.

The $110K base (there was zero mention of TCO or bonuses or options or RSUs or anything else) was a significant drop from what I currently get paid (and I don't consider myself well compensated) to work on-site in the Bay area. I'm in L.A.. This was just prior to full WFH/lockdown so there wasn't even the excuse of "well you're WFH so we offer less for that."

I pinged the company back and said "That's an interesting opening offer, it's much lower than I expected for relocating to that geographic area and the position I would take, how firm are you on that number?"

"Take it or leave it." came back the one-line response a few hours later.

I didn't even bother responding.

I have heard of other people's eyes watering at their salary offers. Mine have yet to shed a single, salty tear.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#314

Post by boring_twenties »

xtracto wrote: post #185

> 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…

INT_MAX is from C and so not the best answer in C++, the ideal candidate would use std::numeric_limits::max(), or choose C instead of C++ in the first place :)

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#315

Post by username90 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #110
mywittyname wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could be a side-effect of how separations of concerns are handled vis-a-vis interviews at the company. I do technical interviews for other teams within my company. I may not know much detail about the role, beyond just generally knowing with the team in question is responsible for and the topics they asked me to cover during the interview. I wouldn't ever think to ask for more details about the role because I as…

If companies want to hire experienced senior talent, then streamlining isn't going to be a good idea. They need to recruit them, and that means not alienating them right away. The process for new grads and interns should be different from senior talent. I don't care about the division of labour. Want to hire people away from Google? Don't be a pain in the ass. People expect pain in the interview process, but not befo…

> If companies want to hire experienced senior talent, then streamlining isn't going to be a good idea. They need to recruit them, and that means not alienating them right away.

Why would you want to work for a company which has such a hard time recruiting and retaining senior talent that they need to pander to them?

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#316

Post by EVdotIO »

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…

Nothing like the emotional appeal of invoking Godwin, but here we go. Wernher von Braun was a literal Nazi of the brutal kind, but when you are in a race to develop ICBMs, things like "culture fit" are suddenly irreverent.

There is no shortage of labor in the market, and I would say that has been the case for the past 10 years and it has been progressively accumulating a glut. I can ask a senior programmer to complete a multi hour at home task after a brief call, and they will expect nothing in return. When I DJed at strip clubs, I would be payed to try out. Both have similar situations of a position staying open for months on end, large pools of people applying, and the need for selecting a candidate based on skill. The difference is incentive from the other DJs to fill in a Tuesday shift is way higher than a team to sign off on a DevOps engineer. Other people just aren't directly impacted by your marginal value and the selection process is going be for other qualities that are. As for the company's perspective, these engineers still cumulatively provide tremendous value and everything is stilling humming along more or less fine.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#318

Post by heavenlyblue »

joezydeco wrote: post #269
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've seen the same thing. I hire a lot of embedded engineers and when I need someone that has solid experience with drivers and bit-level work, I'll ask a simple question to start off. In the past I've never disclosed the question, but why the hell not now. I didn't write it anyway: Given a 32-bit unsigned integer, return true if the binary representation has two consecutive ones in it. And...that's it. And people th…

What is a single inline math statement?

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#319

Post by grumple »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #293
grumple wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're interviewing 50 candidates, your process is horrifically broken. As soon as you find an acceptable candidate, hire them. They don't have to be perfect; no hire will be, no matter how much time you spend. You're wasting company time and money.

In case you're interested, there's a bit of mathematics related to this. It's called "The secretary problem" [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

Thanks! I've seen this before but forgot what it was called.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#320

Post by amurthy1 »

user5994461 wrote: post #177
munchbunny wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

FAANG companies need specialists not generalists. Being large companies, they have groups of people to work on dedicated aspects and technologies. Employees can have a very narrow and specialized focus.

The product they're working on might be super specialized, but oftentimes the skills needed to do the work might not be.
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