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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

#331

Post by jjav »

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.

> 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.

This is it, in a nutshell.

In all my years of interviewing candidates, I've never run into the mythical experienced developer who doesn't know anything about programming. Yet according to HN lore, there are hordes of them out there.

My theory is that the only thing there are indeed hordes of, is experienced developers who can be made to look dumb by subjecting them to whiteboard puzzles, algorithm trivia and other such questions which are completely unrelated to the job performance.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#333

Post by nunez »

I’ll add one more red flag: your team is comprised mostly of contractors [1]. This is a common occurrence in big-co corporate engineering. Often times, this indicates that tech comes third fiddle to sales and accounting and that you will not only work with every enterprise-y tool you can think of, but you’ll work crap hours with little time for learning.

[1] This doesn’t apply for those new to tech or, well, contractors!

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#334

Post by Serious_Cheese »

rxsel wrote: post #325
site-packages1 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

+1 Very well said. I've actually experience this first hand while interviewing for one of the FAANGs. I have a background with embedded software engineering, working with C/C++, and working with low level I/O and bare-metal + using RTOS, and also Unix/Linux, and the position I was being interviewed for was for an "Embedded Developer." The job description described the role working on their RTOS. During the phone interview, the interviewer asked a question that (later I found out) can only be solved optimally using splay trees or red-black trees.

I have worked in the embedded industry for 6 years, and have worked on a wide variety of projects (from WiFi to drones/airplanes to medical devices), and have never needed to use this, yet the interviewer expected me to know this.

Anecdotally speaking, when recruiters throw this kind of curve balls, it's because they already have someone in mind for that position and are interviewing candidates just to fill paperwork.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#335

Post by jjav »

freeqaz wrote: post #156
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.

There is a reason that "FizzBuzz" is a meme! I love the expression, "Job candidates who can't seem to program their way out of a wet paper bag." It's too true. A quick search found the source article that I read years ago here[0]. :) 0: http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest

> http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest

From that page:

> We can't understand why so many people "fail" the Fizz-Buzz test unless we understand why it is "hard" (for them).

But the article doesn't even talk about the environment, which is what it's all about.

It's hard "for them" because they're being asked to write the code on a whiteboard, with a job/income on the line, with stress and anxiety dialed up to 11, with someone breathing down their neck watching, while expected to simultaneously provide cheerful ongoing commentary to "show how they think".

Under those conditions, I totally believe close to 100% perfectly competent developers will fail at it. But of course it has nothing to do with the programming part.

Most of us have heard of FizzBuzz while chillin at home reading articles and immediately thought "that can't be hard" and tried it and indeed it is laughably easy. So we can't understand how "they" could fail at it because we didn't experience it under interview hazing conditions.

So the "them" is actually all of us.

To me that is the key takeaway of FizzBuzz.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#336

Post by nunez »

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.

Like, on purpose? If you know what fizzbuzz is, then you can probably whiteboard it. It’s literally:

``` case $input when $input % 3 == 0: “Fizz” when $input % 5 == 0: “Buzz” when ($input % 3 == 0 && $input % 5 == 0): “Fizzbuzz” end ```

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#337

Post by joezydeco »

addaon wrote: post #326
heavenlyblue wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a single inline math statement?

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

Bonus points for the boolean sanitation!

Now let me tell you about the candidate that wanted to turn the integer into a character string and then search the string for “11”...

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#338

Post by cloverich »

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…

Offices that lead with (or even only use) algorithmic questions are either places you know the name of, or they aren't high quality places. That's my rubric.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#340

Post by JimTheMan »

starfallg wrote: post #157
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…

Why hall of shame? 2 and 4 are top mates.

I once had a manager try to hire me back from another position:

'Look you will be overworked and underpaid, but you will get to do really cool hands on things here.."

I appreciated the honesty.

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