It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate • Hacker News Board

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#121

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 5:17 AM UTC

eru wrote: post #103

sudeepj wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bad. I based on the tweet from the author himself [1] May be he meant to use "invert binary tree" as a representative example of questions that typically asked. [1] https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

No worries. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27927159 for some more. > May be he meant to use "invert binary tree" as a representative example of questions that typically asked. Yes, that's a charitable and believable interpretation of his tweet. (Though I don't know where he got that 90% figure from. Probably made up, like 85.12% of statistics.)

It’s a charitable interpretation, but seems super reasonable. Around that time, I think “inverting a binary tree” was a bit of a meme/shorthand about software interviewing.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#122

Post by ornornor » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 5:19 AM UTC

jdenning wrote: post #118

jameshush wrote: post #27

In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I had credits at large companies, posted talks online (interviewers rarely looked at them), but if I forgot how to write binary search in 10 minutes in an interview it didn’t matter. This actually made me realize being just an IC wasn’t actually my goal though. Once I started interviewing for management and sales, all of those things _really_ matter…

Definitely. I use a link shortener to track visits to my portfolio links. (Almost) Nobody looks at your public work.

Same experience here. Everyone says you should spend your nights and weekends building a portfolio on top of your day job, but no one looks at it when you apply. And then you get put aside because you didn’t know for sure in an instant what is the result of `‘1’ + 1` in JavaScript.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#123

Post by brailsafe » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 5:23 AM UTC

ganafagol wrote: post #113

> Build a small personal project and put the code on GitHub. This has lost its effect and partially turned it upside down. In school people seem to be instructed "have a github with personal project" to improve hiring chances so now everybody an their mother has an account with a bunch of meaningless crap projects that they have 0 intetest in but put it there to try to boost interview chances. Don't. Whenever I scree…

Why would you give people negative points for trying anything they can do to compete in a fucking ridiculous job market? I mean, suggest alternatives if your genuine intention is to help people find work, rather than just saying that you actively look down on people for trying something.

You get negative points for being a dick. Of course, I'm making assumptions, which you should never do.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#124

Post by benrbray » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 5:24 AM UTC

harvey9 wrote: post #117

barbarbar wrote: post #106

Is a doctor also going to publish achievements? A construction engineer should he/she publish calc of beam dimensions? A carpenter how should he/her show creations. If it was doors or windows installed in people's houses. Something is wrong here in this industry.

Some Doctors publish research, and put that on their resumes.

Doctors are also licensed for their specialty by a medical board.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#125

Post by thereare5lights » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 5:25 AM UTC

This is wholly irrelevant at any tech company that uses leetcode style interviews, which is most companies in the bay area.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#126

Post by Jach » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 5:26 AM UTC

Zababa wrote: post #43

I had a few jobs interview recently. Here's what I got out of it: If you have something you want to promote (or is on your CV in general), be ready to talk about it. I'm very lucky because I can talk about things on the spot very easily. If that's not you, make a list of the few main points that you want to talk about and try to memorize it. If you always get the same questions, it may be a good idea to address them…

Yup, I've always believed anything on my resume is fair game for someone to ask about, so I should be able to talk about each thing to some extent. As you accumulate more things it can be a useful filtering tool too as you just leave stuff off you don't want to talk about or where your recollection is too hazy.

Getting into a conversation can be stress reducing for both parties (interviewers can get stressed too) though if the interviewee comes off as trying to control the discussion, interviewers pick up on that (even if they're new and bad at driving things themselves like they're supposed to) and will consider it a red flag...

I hope after a while you get to experience the other side being one of the ~6 people interviewing someone for joining your team/the company, it's pretty eye opening too. Judging someone in such a short time period given at these bigger companies is tough, and when you actually want the candidate to join you don't want them to turn down an offer because of a bad interview experience with you. If you ever get involved I'd only encourage you try to improve things -- some ideas include trying to lower stress levels of candidates, or having more reasonable/useful and typing-instead-of-whiteboarding tests of "can you even program?", but there's many possible improvements, the goal of improving on what you have is what's important. (And there does sadly need to be some sort of "can you even program?" test in the pipeline, at least at the sort of companies that do the multiple-people-all-day interviews, because the input stages are even more broken than the interviews.) Even if there are many corporate constraints on what you can do, and even if you can't get management or other interviewers on board with your proposals, you can at least make your section the best it can be.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#127

Post by unishark » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 5:29 AM UTC

the_af wrote: post #73

maxk42 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really underestimate the amount of stress that can be felt when you're alone facing 6 people for a job that you want. Practice. Go on interviews even when you don't need a job. Get that practice in and get comfortable with it. I went on 18 - 30 interviews a year for many years when I was a contractor and got very good at interviewing over time. I still get a bit tense when the job is particularly appealing, but w…

> "Practice. Go on interviews even when you don't need a job." I'm ambivalent about this kind of advice. On the surface it seems right, and I've never been more comfortable in interviews than when I was thinking "I don't need this job", at the same time interviews are incredibly stressful time wasters. For a lot of people, interviewing is one of the most stressful situations they are going to be in, barring life or d…

> Just the thought of 18 to 30 interviews a year makes me anxious and I don't even need to interview now.

That was their life as a contractor. I think the advice was just to do more than zero, not necessarily go to such an extreme. You can't really hold a full-time job and do that much interviewing unless it's just tiny screening interviews.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#128

Post by azinman2 » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 5:31 AM UTC

EvilEy3 wrote: post #108

azinman2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it gives you a more rounded sense of the individual. Other passions. Other ideas. Areas they’ve worked in unrelated to your problem. Job/coding interviews are very difficult to do well, and many people such as myself tend to perform poorly due to the stress of the interview (so much that I’d rather stay in a mediocre position than go through the agony of interviewing — I hate it with every fiber of by being,…

> it correlates 0% to my in-job performance False. It correlates directly to your job performance, unless you're YAML developer.

My ability to solve an artificial problem on a whiteboard time limited with a gun to my head correlates directly to my job performance?

Not only does it not in my case, I don’t know how you could even make such a claim without knowing me, my work, and how I perform in such interviews… and that’s just me. Much has been written on this subject with similar anecdotes as well as quantitative research done by Google’s HR department. Clearly 0% is an exaggeration at large, but it’s well documented to be a poor correlate.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#129

Post by andyxor » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 5:32 AM UTC

eru wrote: post #101

cableshaft wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so you admit he claims it did happen, but you say it didn't without supporting that claim at all. Do you have a source we can verify?

I was working for Google at the time, and saw an internal post by the guy who interviewed the candidate. I'm not sure if there's anything public (and what I am even allowed to say.) See https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... where he (at least partially) admits that he was bullshitting: > I want to defend Google, for one I wasn't even inverting a binary tree, I wasn’t very clear what a binary…

he wasn't "bullshitting", you didn't get the point of his tweet and quora post and I think you're kinda proving his point.

Re: It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

#130

Post by fsociety » Fri, Jul 23, 2021, 5:32 AM UTC

rachelbythebay wrote: post #119

tdeck wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if the extra work is rewarded as much as you might think. For example, I was shocked to see a prominent open-source contributor hired into Google as an L5. Without going into detail, this person built projects used by many people reading this comment. Granted, I don't know what their comp or interview process was like, but 5 is basically an ordinary senior engineer level at Google.

Google hired me in 2006 (then 11 years of experience) as a 3. I didn't know any better at the time, partly because I was coming into the valley from the rest of the world. I didn't find out just how screwed up this was until becoming part of the hiring process at Facebook... some seven or eight years later. So... yeah. What you said is totally a thing.

Wow Google tried a lot of mental gymnastics to down level me. Trying to convince me that higher levels at FB or other companies is equivalent.

That’s a whole other level though. Not surprising and it is hard when it’s a coveted company. I would’ve taken the down level if I didn’t have a better offer at another company.