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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

#321

Post by howlgarnish »

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.

You're both correct! A company like Google hires both generic SWEs, who are hired without a specific project in mind, and super specialized roles like (say) wearable hardware integration engineer, who are hired to fill a very specific niche.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#322

Post by shard »

jacquesm wrote: post #112
redisman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There might be legal reasons (taxes, employment laws) that are too much of a hurdle for them to allow remote work from another country. I've heard estimates of 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars to set up the necessary structure, not to mention the months that the process will take.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#323

Post by HenryBemis »

user5994461 wrote: post #155
LoSboccacc wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

project manager are there to free devs mind from various distractions. I'm glad I can delegate them the reasoning about which task is more urgent, and them acting as buffer to clients frees me from a lot of time trying to understand what they want, how they want it and all the back and forth about how much they want to pay for it. good project managers, that aren't just bossing internal people around but working with…

Project managers are very useful when there are clients and budgets to deal with, as in outsourcing and contracting shops. The role is not as useful in tech companies where developers are working permanently. It's actually hurting collaboration across teams if you start budgeting projects and people tightly.

The definition of PMI on what is a project: A project can be defined as a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service.

The Devs who are permanent employees and maintain a set codebase/application/etc do not fall into that. They know what to do, they have a defined Change Management/SDLC abd they are challenged into finding the technical solutio. The project management includes tracking the requirements, sequencing events, getting resources/contractors, etc.. A dev should be spending '8h' per day coding, not figuring out budgets and interviewing contractors. Of course different companies have different approaches, but ballpark and from experience I think my above writings are pretty valid.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#324

Post by sn9 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #224
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.

I work at Google, and don't know anyone who'd struggle with Fizzbuzz. That's an extraordinarily simple coding problem, and the usual ones you have to pass to get into Google are much harder.

You'd struggle to find anyone in a freshman CS class a few weeks in who'd fail Fizzbuzz, excepting those who weren't going to last more than a year or two before switching majors and never coding again.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#325

Post by rxsel »

site-packages1 wrote: post #299
sumtechguy wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really why I use the 'easy' type questions (some variation of fizbuzz or something simple). A senior guy will crank it out in 5-10 mins. I then ask a question or two on how to improve it and a mini walk through of what they did and why. I also make it clear I sometimes get people who just can not do it but have the resume chops for it. I then usually spend the rest of the time digging on previous techs they h…

This is true. I interviewed someone for a senior eng role the other day and when asked a couple basic CS questions that were not simply trivia, the candidate fell apart totally. Like asking basic DB questions to a DBA candidate, or asking basic web/css/html questions to a frontend developer. They immediately went to the back of the line.

Please share the questions. I always find it amusing that tech types seem to believe their idea of “basic X knowledge” translates across the board. I think it’s this attitude of “oh you don’t know what I think you should know” that proliferates the industry that is a major part of the problem. How do you handle folks that don’t have even the most basic form of formal “CS knowledge” but can still ship product? Do you just dismiss them completely over being able to have a water cooler talk about O(...) and some algorithm someone would never have to implement in that specific context? Seems like a premature optimization to me.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#326

Post by addaon »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #318
joezydeco wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

!!(n & (n >> 1)), I assume.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#327

Post by p1esk »

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!

I get 2-3 recruiter emails per week. That's ~10/mo or ~100/year. I respond to 5-10 emails like this in a year. Out of these 10 only 1-2 will result in an actual call. So they would be completely justified in asking me why I chose their company out of 100 that wanted me.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#328

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

Multi-divisional form (MDF / M-form).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-divisional_form

Usually contrasted with unitary form (U-form).

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#329

Post by jjav »

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 will interview at the very least 50 candidates.

Why? IMO this is about an order of magnitude too many. I typically interview about 3-4 people, on rare occasions a few more. I've been interviewing candidates for about 25 years now.

If your recruiter is sending you 50+ mismatched resumes for a role, get a better recruiter. But even in that case, you should notice and weed these out while reviewing the resumes yourself, before getting to the interview stage.

I literally cannot imagine any scenario where I'd interview over 50 people for a role. Or even ten people.

A few startups ago we had to grow the team from 20 people to ~120 in a year. Your approach would result in interviewing well over 5000 people in a year. That would be over 20 people a day, every single day, zero work getting done meanwhile! I suggest a re-think of your hiring strategy.

> being obviously unfit after the first 10 minutes of a technical interview

Which one is more likely:

1. Senior people who have built many successful products don't actually know how to do what they've done.

or

2. Interview techniques that focus on skills unrelated to the job (e.g. whiteboard puzzles, algorithm trivial pursuit) have an inordinately high false negative rate.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#330

Post by jjav »

site-packages1 wrote: post #299
sumtechguy wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really why I use the 'easy' type questions (some variation of fizbuzz or something simple). A senior guy will crank it out in 5-10 mins. I then ask a question or two on how to improve it and a mini walk through of what they did and why. I also make it clear I sometimes get people who just can not do it but have the resume chops for it. I then usually spend the rest of the time digging on previous techs they h…

This is true. I interviewed someone for a senior eng role the other day and when asked a couple basic CS questions that were not simply trivia, the candidate fell apart totally. Like asking basic DB questions to a DBA candidate, or asking basic web/css/html questions to a frontend developer. They immediately went to the back of the line.

Yes, please share the questions.
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