Interview advice that got me offers • Hacker News Board

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#211

Post by biztos » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 10:40 PM UTC

dcolkitt wrote: post #159

MattGaiser wrote: post #28

> 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.

The reality is that industrial psychology has consistently found that fluid intelligence is the best predictor of job performance. Even more so than experience.[0] Whiteboard interviews are used, not because they have a lot of relevance to the job, but because they're a hard-to-fake indicator of high intelligence. Somebody who shows a lot of mental fluidity with complex data structures, almost assuredly can quickly m…

Doesn’t that require a lot of interpretive skill on the part of the interviewer?

And for the interviewer to not arrive with the expectation that you will pass the same hazing ritual they passed to deserve that big paycheck?

It’s been a long time since I interviewed at a FAANG but I don’t think my whiteboard mojo played much of a role. It was more down to my personality fit with the interviewers, and the correctness of my algo answers. Which were still pretty softball way back then.

Everything I’ve read and heard since then makes me think it’s much more about those things now, and even less about general mental agility.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#212

Post by interviewer0000 » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 10:40 PM UTC

saberdancer wrote: post #111

mgh2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never give the first number https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24588379

Honestly I tried this every time I was interviewed. Never could get them to give the first number. I probably should have been firmer but usually the pressure of the situation led to me giving a number I would be happy with.

> I tried this every time I was interviewed. Never could get them to give the first number.

"I've actually done a few of these calls at this point and i know what the best practice / right move / way to play this is, so instead of me telling you what i'm looking for i'd like you to tell me the range on your hiring document:)" and just be totally silent.

Worked twice for me now.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#213

Post by valarauko » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 10:40 PM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #194

valarauko wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play Devil's Advocate, and I ask as someone not in the industry (I'm in academia) - is the difference between expectations really that large? I would imagine (perhaps unreasonably) that a relatively seasoned person on the job market would have a reasonable understanding of their market value within a few percentage points - so the recruiter might be willing to pay up to $105/hour, while you low balled it at $100/h…

The difference between expectations can be more than 100% of the lower number.

That is surprising to me, but more pertinently, how often is this the case? Even if expectations don't match, how often do you actually undercut the recruiter's expectations? I would think most people would have a reasonable ballpark idea of what the recruiter has in mind - so just overshoot and then get negotiated down from there. The suggested tactic only really makes sense to me if you frequently expect to be undercutting what the recruiter's got in mind, and even then by a lot.

To my layman understanding, the larger the difference between expectations, the lower the value in this tactic of not revealing your expectations.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#214

Post by pointyfence » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 10:41 PM UTC

tmakks wrote: post #15

Extremely well written title, content so-so though. It's simple: Make the funnel full that you don't feel any pressure, anxiety or whatever because you have options. No need for some voodoo advice from OP.

That's the general route that I took. As an applicant or hiring manager, I view the interview as a meeting between two equal sides looking for a mutually beneficial fit. If there isn't a fit, it's ok. Onto the next interview. It makes interviews a lot less stressful and more engaging to me. But to go down that route as an applicant, it helps a lot to think about what's needed to have those options.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#215

Post by jt2190 » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 10:42 PM UTC

steverb wrote: post #202

random5634 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do hiring (not recruiting). I generally want to understand what someone's ask is first. After that I'm usually very upfront (ie, immediate verbal feedback) on how that falls into the position vs their apparent skill set etc. If they have come in low (not uncommon for non bay area folks) I'll let them know that there are opportunities for growth beyond where they would start at. If they are someone we want we'll gen…

"If they are too high I'm usually upfront that at that rate they'd be flat compensation wise for a number of years" I've heard that once before and it always puzzled me. Basically you're telling the candidate that you want to underpay them now, so you can eventually pay them what they are worth. The math is in their favor even if they don't get a raise next year. And of course, next year they will be worth more anywa…

I’m unable to parse the sentence you quoted and get the same meaning.

The quote is saying that the employee will be at the top of the budgeted pay range for that position, so their salary won’t grow much at all year over year.

I’m unclear on where you’re getting “underpay” from. Perhaps you’re assuming that the budgeted salary is below fair market value, and there’s a vague promise to increase the budget/salary in the future? Not sure why anyone would take the position in that case.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#216

Post by biztos » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

drchopchop wrote: post #130

MattGaiser wrote: post #28

> 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.

One tried and true way to “band together” is to form a union, but somehow I don’t think I’ll see that in my lifetime for my industry.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#217

Post by joncrocks » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 10:49 PM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #206

mdorazio wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is terrible, outdated advice for anyone with more than a couple years experience. The value you get out of it is not wasting everyone's time when the salary available isn't even close to high enough. Decide what your minimum compensation requirement is, increase this by some percentage that would make you happy, and give that to recruiters. You will get far more out of avoiding bullshit than you will potentially…

I am an old guy who is a better-than-average negotiator (top 20%, not top 1%) and I’d like to hear more about that. In my view, it is never advantageous to come up with the first number in any kind of business negotiation and I have done tens of millions of dollars in negotiations for myself over the last couple of decades. But I haven’t interviewed for a job in 20 years. I would like to hear more about why that conc…

The issue (I think) is that what one company and another might consider 'competitive' might vary wildly depending on the candidates they are used to and the space in which they work.

If you don't set some kind of expectations with a recruiter then you might end up in processes where the 'negotiation' happens at the back-end, when you've been through the hoops, and the company has no chance in meeting what you're looking for.

This can waste a large amount of your time. Which is probably valuable if this is a situation you're concerned about :-)

It's not so much that as a negotiation technique it's outdated, it's more that you need to pre-select positions in some manner so you don't waste your time. If you are being paid X and a company pays their best employee X/2, but think they are paying 'really well', you're never going to not be wasting your time.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#218

Post by _qulr » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

xyzelement wrote: post #192

deedubaya wrote: post #189

I wonder how many, if any, great software engineers simply let their careers stall out because they don't want to deal with the ceremony around tech hiring.

Same kind of person who never finds a partner because of the "ceremony around" dating, I guess? In both situations, it's not like you're adding a commodity product to your Amazon shopping card. The matching is non-trivial and both parties have to recognize and commit to the effort-full process. To abstract your comment all the way out - how many people live well below their potential because they are too lazy or afra…

> Same kind of person who never finds a partner because of the "ceremony around" dating, I guess?

If dates were conducted like coding interviews — assuming the candidate is a liar and forcing them to prove in detail why they're not — you'd never get a second date. A job is supposed to be a voluntary, mutually advantageous relationship between two parties. So interviews ought to be kind of like dating, where you're trying to be as nice as possible and make a good impression. You don't give tests to a date, you just talk to them, get to know them.

Employers too often assume that interviews are a one-way street, where the candidate wants the job no matter what and will do anything to get it. On the contrary, the candidate can walk away at any time, and the employer needs to woo the candidate just as much as the candidate needs to woo the employer.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#219

Post by deckard1 » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 11:06 PM UTC

st1x7 wrote: post #182

speedgoose wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but the algorithms challenges are not very representative of the actual work we do in our industry. They are a nice way to filter people who are not willing to spend a lot of time studying challenges to have job interviews though.

> They are a nice way to filter people who are not willing to spend a lot of time studying challenges to have job interviews though. They filter for general problem solving skills. Whether you acquired those skills through a degree, self-study, a week of leetcode or 3 months of leetcode will be up to your individual background and aptitude. It's a hiring process - filtering for something is the whole point. Personall…

They filter for memorization. Most leetcode problems you will not be able to solve in the allotted time without first being familiar with the problem or one very similar to it. Because most of those problems (and many CS algorithms) hinge on a certain "trick" to solving them.

The way to pass a leetcode interview is to know exactly what the interviewer is asking and then pretend like you've never seen this problem before. Then you amaze them by pulling a rabbit out of a hat. We are all a bit dumber for putting up with this charade.

Re: Interview advice that got me offers

#220

Post by Smaug123 » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 11:21 PM UTC

akdas wrote: post #63

vidarh wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

On the other hand, I go through months where half my job is devising ways to extract requirements from users who just want me to "make this problem go away"! I consider it very reasonable to test someone's ability to work out what problem they're meant to be solving.