Earlier quoted context omitted.
You usually have to be the first mover and be willing to give them a number you’re looking for.
Never give the first number https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24588379
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Interview advice that got me offers
121–130 of 372 posts
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#122One important thing I want to note for chronic "interview preppers":
The interviewer wants to get to know you, not the interview you! They want to understand what it would be like to work with you and how you tackle new problems. It is therefore of very little use to them if you just have boilerplate answers to throw back at behavioral questions and/or if you already know the answer to every technical problem off-hand. Assuming your job will involve creative problem solving struggle, displaying some of that in the interview is a bonus (although it's of course up to the interviewer to tailor the problems accordingly). You probably won't be rejected for doing too well on the technical part, but don't hide your personality and technical aptitude behind walls of preparation.
> "Remember, never let them see you sweat" Vince told me. But when the stakes are low and you’re having fun, who sweats?
This can backfire. It's great if you enjoy tackling the interview problems, and sincerity is great, but indifference is not a good look.
> And as an interviewer, I can attest: sincere interest is always a good sign.
Fully agreed.
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here. Some of my goto questions are questions I don't expect a solution to. I'll tell people that - I know some people use similar questions without telling candidates that, but I don't think the extra pressure is necessary. I also explicitly explain to people that what I want to see is how they think, more so than the final solution. It tells me a lot about how a candidate will work within a team if they're cap…
Huge +1 on explicitly setting expectations. I've written on this topic[0], and there are a lot of different ways interviewers don't set expectations: - Is the interviewer looking for syntactically correct code, or general algorithmic skills? - For a warmup, is the interviewer looking for a basic solution, or an optimal solution? - For architecture walkthroughs, what level of detail is expected? The extra pressure is…
I've found you can somewhat mitigate it by asking questions yourself. For example in one tech screen once I had the algorithm pretty much done I asked if I should look to optimize and to add test cases/handle odd input and the interviewer said it's fine as is and let's talk more about other topics like architecture in the real world.
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#124The hardest part about interviewing is that there is no feedback loop; I once interviewed at 10 companies within 2 weeks and got rejected from all of them, but to this day I still don't know what part I need to improve upon.
From the article:
If you think you flubbed an answer, ask during the interview for what they were looking for! Or, I've had success framing that up at the end of the interview as:
"Is there anything I didn't say today you hoped I would; anything that I said you hoped I wouldn't; anything I said that you've got questions about?"
Nothing can save you from getting ghosted, but you definitely should utilize the face time you have to ASK questions, too.
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#125> Your mad technical skills no longer matter to them. If anything, humility and an openness to learning will show you in the best light.
Your technical skills no longer matter? So someone without technical skills, but the humility and willingness to learn is what they are looking for? Is that why these companies want CS graduates? Is that why they run interviewees through technical quizzes?
How about technical skills are just as important, but also are humility and willingness to learn? How about they were always important? Since when were humility and willingness to learn not important in the tech industry? The guy just rehashed industry interview talking points that have been around forever. The only thing new in the articl is "technical skills no longer matter. Which is nonsense.
Also, nothing more humble than bragging about getting offers from google, microsoft and stripe. That headline screams humility.
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#126Tip 3 is huge. I ask hard questions during interviews, and I don’t expect a perfect answer. What I do want is the interviewee to handle failure without being defensive, and to ask probing questions.
Heh, I once was introduced to a particular interview question. It has a solution that is hugely better than the best naive solution, but is basically a giant gotcha that seems obvious in retrospect. I couldn't find it myself even though I was stumbling around in its neighborhood. Obviously I gave this question informally to a ton of people as entertainment (Bay Area techies in various companies), and most couldn't find it either.
However, one guy told me he now uses the question as his actual interview question because he thinks the way people suffer thru a seemingly impossible problem reveals how good of an engineer they are :D
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#127One additional tip on recruiters: have a cheat sheet ready (web page or public Google doc) that answers the basic questions they'll have for you and makes clear your expectations. Here's the info I ask them to provide: - Job Title and Salary - Job Description - Company Overview and Location - Steps in Hiring Process Whenever I'm emailed by a recruiter, I politely thank them for reaching out, paste the link to the che…
Do you find that recruiters will typically give you a salary range beyond "competitive" before you've started the interview process?
The serious ones do.
There are a lot of recruiters on the market. But it's really no different than the market for lawyers; the median lawyer is a very poor man but the average lawyer is rich.
If they can't put a number on the table, they are probably one of those that tries to run a volume game, which I think is a bad approach for engineering. Basically spamming and not giving any info until they get their quotas.
The good ones want you to get hired at a good price because they are often paid a commission on your salary. And the great ones want to keep in touch so they can cash out again once you get bored with your current job. But the spammy one will have moved on to selling used cars at this point.
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#128> Keeping those skills sharp even when you’re not job hunting. Can I just add "Leetcoder" as a part time job on my resume? It is amusing how in this industry, your ability to interview will not at all be improved by spending time doing your job unless it is algo heavy. It is a separate job entirely.
I've had this discussion during interviews as a disarming technique. Candidates will sometimes express nervousness at the beginning and say stuff like "I'm terrible at interviews" or "it's been a while since I've had to do this kind of programming," and I try to respond by making it clear that I understand that the whiteboard coding has very little in common with the actual job and that I'm not judging them, so when…
> I'm not judging them
I don't understand - what is the point of you interviewing them if you aren't there to judge them? What are you doing it for then?
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had this discussion during interviews as a disarming technique. Candidates will sometimes express nervousness at the beginning and say stuff like "I'm terrible at interviews" or "it's been a while since I've had to do this kind of programming," and I try to respond by making it clear that I understand that the whiteboard coding has very little in common with the actual job and that I'm not judging them, so when…
> I'm honestly not sure what I'd replace it with if I were. Just to theorize: how about having the interviewee write a narrowly scoped toy project that's relevant to the position? (Edit: On site, as a replacement for white boarding.) A JS to-do app for a front-end engineer, for instance. Just a short thing you and the candidate can attack together in a couple hours. The candidate can write "normal" code, google thing…
> Just a short thing you and the candidate can attack together in a couple hours
Unless your hiring pipeline is absolutely perfect (you pretty much get great candidates all the time and almost no bad ones) this doesn't scale at all.
Re: Interview advice that got me offers
#130> Keeping those skills sharp even when you’re not job hunting. Can I just add "Leetcoder" as a part time job on my resume? It is amusing how in this industry, your ability to interview will not at all be improved by spending time doing your job unless it is algo heavy. It is a separate job entirely.
We need to band together and stop rewarding companies who pull this shit in interviews. Leetcode problems are not applicable to 99% of the actual work in most software engineering roles. There are other, gentler ways to find out if someone knows what binary trees, dynamic programming, sorting, and big O notation are.