71–80 of 583 posts
> The general rudeness is ridiculous. I once had an interviewer ask me if I was a wizard with GO, C++, Rust, and C over the phone. Then when I said I had some experience with rust, he immediately cursed at me and hung up. > This experience is fairly common. Is it? I've done a fair bit of interviewing on both sides of the table, and can say with complete honesty I've never heard a curse said in anger in any of them. I…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I moved from a 2/5 to a 4.5/5. Doesn't mean it was necessarily a satisfying move. There's 6 - great mission and product, which the first one had and the new job is weak in, but it factors for a lot more than the other 5 in attractiveness of the job, at least for me
Yes! But that isn't something that all (or even most?) companies have full control over. Most people aren't going to be passionate about building, oh, I dunno, software for insurance companies, but it still needs to get done. There might be a handful of "disruptive" companies doing something in the space, but 99% aren't. There's a lot more "boring" software (even in the startup world) that needs to be built than anyt…
> The general rudeness is ridiculous. I once had an interviewer ask me if I was a wizard with GO, C++, Rust, and C over the phone. Then when I said I had some experience with rust, he immediately cursed at me and hung up. > This experience is fairly common. Is it? I've done a fair bit of interviewing on both sides of the table, and can say with complete honesty I've never heard a curse said in anger in any of them. I…
I assume it was not, in fact, good work, as I did not progress to the next interview.
I think a phrase like "typical" would be inaccurate; possibly "common" as well. But, I think, most people who have interviewed a decent amount have at least one story like this. Cursing is another step beyond, but its not insane; many of the people on the other end simply get drafted, they don't want to be there, and in some companies even see you as a threat to their career advancement.
This person sounded really experienced, so I looked them up on LinkedIn. 7 months at their first company. 9 months at their current company. That's it, aside from non-programming jobs before their bootcamp. The whole thing reads like inventing scenarios that didn't happen or embellishing them. > A bad interview is when you ask them the definition of some specific thing in some specific framework like “Tell me what a…
Another broken thing is LeetCode style of programming exercises asked for a job asking 15+ yrs of experience. Not saying we do not solve complex stuff on a day to day basis, but foundational problems are already solved & we have patterns/solutions/libraries available. We do not do DFS/BFS on a day to day. We do have Stackoverflow, Google to figure things out. FAANG companies - filtering candidates by asking tough Lee…
[0] on the level of "here's a list of strings that are names in Lastname, Firstname format, turn them into a list of Firstname Lastname", or something dead simple that's designed to definitively rule candidates out
> Furthermore, if you really want a C++ developer you can just expect a developer to learn C++ on the job if they have any adjacent experience with any other language. Is this really accurate? C++ is a very different language than even Java, not to mention Python or JS. Languages have their own quirks and attributes that often matter at some point. Especially C++. I am on a team where we are constantly building stuff…
Yes and no. A good programmer could learn it, but it exposes concepts that python and java abstracts from the programmer. C++ requires you to think quite a bit about memory. Modern C++ not so much. However the kind of job that requires C++ will probably require you to know some hardware / embedded which is a completely different domain than web devs and could make java / python transitions even more difficult.
""" You should not be testing people’s ability to recall some obscure definition in an interview. You should be testing people’s ability to tackle something they can’t recall off the top of their head. And, you should allow them every tool they have available. If they’re totally unfamiliar with the problem, and yet they make significant progress in just one hour that should be interpreted as a good sign this person w…
I’m not really interested in whether or not they know this. I’m more interested in whether they can explain it to me.
In tech we do not have a shortage of developers but an excess of dispensable jobs.
I literally can’t relate to this on any level. I’m an HM at a company that pays on the order of a FANG and at best matches one of these credentialist barriers and yet we can’t come close to hiring targets on devs. I don’t get how people can see the plethora of individuals under 10yrs experience in SWE and other tech roles in SV/NYC/SEA with incomes of $250-600k/yr and think this happens without a “shortage” of talent…
Some of them are actually legitimately senior, despite short tenures on paper - but many are barely entry level qualified.
""" You should not be testing people’s ability to recall some obscure definition in an interview. You should be testing people’s ability to tackle something they can’t recall off the top of their head. And, you should allow them every tool they have available. If they’re totally unfamiliar with the problem, and yet they make significant progress in just one hour that should be interpreted as a good sign this person w…
I mean, this is the whole point of the dreaded coding whiteboard interview, no? You can't memorize your way out of it, and with any luck the interviewer will be looking at the big picture of how you tackle the problem and what headway you make, instead of sniping at syntax or the names of library calls.