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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#181

Post by bikson »

Nition wrote: post #150
silisili wrote: post #119

My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances. My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again. I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm…

And yet if they ask you for an answer to a quirky question like "why are manhole covers round?", they expect a clever answer like "they can't fall in", rather than a pedestrian answer like "well, probably they just started making them that shape for some simple production reason, and then everyone else just kinda of did the same thing because it worked."

I had same question, i was pissed because that was another stiupid question. My answer was: Because its easier for ninja turtles to jump on.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#182

Post by SCUSKU »

billytetrud wrote: post #133
Analemma_ wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is infamous for jerking people around in the interview process. I had a very similar experience, as did several people I know. They do it because they know they can get away with it, but I do wonder if they have a backup plan if the lustre of working for Google ever fades, because it's an open secret that their interview process is a fucking nightmare for no reason.

That lustre has faded already.

Mine (and the public's) growing awareness of surveillance adtech really has taken away from my desire to apply to Google or Facebook.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#183

Post by bfung »

billytetrud wrote: post #137
echelon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's advocate. Every bad hire costs the company $50,000 - 200,000. Sometimes more. They can also sink or demoralize teams. Many of the people conducting interviews are new to the process and don't know how to extract signal. Sometimes scales don't line up. When you have a revolving door of employees (because that's the way things are these days), have trouble scheduling interviews (busy engineers trying to get the…

Yes, every bad hire is really bad. However, companies generally don't put in any effort into seriously evaluating your publicly available work. I have reams and reams of open source code companies can take a look at, and I've never seen any evidence that any company I've ever interviewed at has looked at that work. That's a result of companies being completely incompetent at evaluation and disrespecting their candida…

Being on the hiring end, it’s less out of incompetence and more of not enough time, and open source code is low signal that the candidate can actually solve problems.

If I submit some “open source” code as some proof that I can code, how do you know I didn’t copy the code from somewhere?

Also, writing code for the sake of writing code doesn’t tell a hiring manager if the person can take requirements and translate that to an automated process. It just say that person isn’t that busy and can, excuse my language, shit out code for the sake of appearing productive.

Writing code can be a hobby, sure, but that’s only a small part of a software job and no amount of open source code can tell a company if the candidate can work with others and solve problems.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#184

Post by MattGaiser »

rgbrenner wrote: post #142
echelon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devil's advocate. Every bad hire costs the company $50,000 - 200,000. Sometimes more. They can also sink or demoralize teams. Many of the people conducting interviews are new to the process and don't know how to extract signal. Sometimes scales don't line up. When you have a revolving door of employees (because that's the way things are these days), have trouble scheduling interviews (busy engineers trying to get the…

This is mostly management speak for: don't blame us, we're just incompetent . If you run a company and you have a "revolving door of employees" (ie: we can't retain talent), your managers "are new to the process" and don't know what they're looking for (ie: we hire inexperienced managers), and you "can't get enough skilled interviewers on a panel" (ie: "we don't hire enough engineers and we're too cheap and shortsigh…

Are there companies that don't have a revolving door? Talent retention seems to be solidly tagged #wontfix.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#185

Post by dredmorbius »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #111
dredmorbius wrote: post #46

In domains in which the underlying domain is complex, with an irreducible informational complexity, as well as rich and frequently highly significant interactions, there's a frequent emergence of faddish, or ritual-driven, behaviours. Both seek to reduce risks and accountability, as well as to increase credible signalling of traits. Both sides of the technical recruiting transaction (job-seeking and recruiting) exhib…

> I've speculated that one of the justifications for the ancient Egyptians to build pyramids was as a combination of a skills-development, skills-retention, skills-demonstration, and brain-drain-mitigation programme. From what I've read there's at least some independent informed speculation along similar lines. Brain drain mitigation? Brain drain just wasn't a possibility 4400 years ago.

If you're living in a domain in which your core competency is in constructing complex stone structures, then leaking that capacity to another kingdom or empire would be a risk.

Pharonic Egypt circa 2580 was not without neighbours and there was both trade and warfare in North Africa and across the Levant and Mediterranian, notably with Syria, Canaan, Lebanon ("cedars of Lebanon" are a significant reference, as Egypt had virtually no timber), Ethiopia, and Nubia, amongst others. There's also the prospect of defection to internal factions. The Old Kingdom seems to have been generally peaceful with little internal or foreign warfare, at least until the First Intermediate Period, which was largely an internal rivalry. But it wasn't entirely without defence concerns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_trade

https://www.worldhistory.org/Egyptian_Warfare/

I'm very happy to admit that my hypothesis is just that, and that there's no evidence and only a very little external support, though there is some. But if you're going to develop an advanced skill that would be of use throughout the region, it might be advisable to find ways to hold on to it, and as a pragmatic explanation for what was an absolutely immense effort ... there's some sense in the concept.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#186

Post by strenholme »

I’ve interviewed with Google twice. It’s not that many separate rounds: You have the recruiter sell Google to you, then there are two phone screens, then it’s the all day interview (with multiple people). Which is reasonable. I didn’t get the Google job, but, looking back, my life is better because I didn’t relocate back to Silicon Valley to work for Google.

I’ve never had a company string me along. Four separate phone screens or interviews seems to be the limit. I’ve even been hired after one video conference interview.

I once was given a “we want to hire you, but we need to get the funds together before we can give you the offer” spiel during the great post-mortgage economic recession, but they did hire me after about a month.

After five separate rounds (again, talking to multiple teams on the same day after one or two technical phone screens and one recruiter call doesn’t count; that’s standard practice with many companies), I would tell a company they need to either, as my father put it, “shit or get off the pot”.

In terms of take home assignments, I have no problem doing them, as long as the employer has no problem having me put my answers on a public GitHub repo. I will not do Codility tests, because my experience is that employers who do those kinds of tests are Unicorn hunters.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#187

Post by anchpop »

MattGaiser wrote: post #63
LAC-Tech wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a hundred times over. I still remember in 2020 multiple places asking me "I see you've used .NET core, what *version* have you used?". I had a kind of career crisis/breakdown, where I realised no one gave a shit about anything except my utility as a walking set of tech keywords. Accepting that it wasn't working for me was one of the best things I've done for my career.

> where I realised no one gave a shit about anything except my utility as a walking set of tech keywords. I am genuinely asking. Why is this objectionable? Why do people find it so horrible that their labour is a commodity? To me that just tells me I should treat my labour like a merchant treats his goods. Always be checking the market to ensure you have something worth selling and while you might sign long term deal…

I guess this is how I think of it. I enjoy the fruits of modern society, the airplanes and fast food and nice phones. But to make that happen, you need specialization, you need people know get really good at flying planes then just do that, and people who get good at making fast food and iphones and everything else. And inside that, you need people who specialize at every part of the supply chain, and what you end up with is people who have spent basically their whole lives fixing bugs in webservers used to sell analytics software to businesses etc. etc. and it becomes so abstract and you’re so disconnected from the feeling that you’re actually helping anyone or worth anything to society that it doesn’t really matter that intellectually you know the whole system would collapse if you don’t have people doing jobs like yours. And you should have friends outside of work, but many of us don’t really, at least not to the extent that way like, and even then work is literally most of your waking day most days of the week, and the knowledge that not even your coworkers or superiors or anyone else really cares about you in this grand societal project called modern civilization that you’re basically dedicating your life to maintaining, I can see how that would get to someone.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#188

Post by gffrd »

yarky wrote: post #172
axaxs wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL. He was obviously way smarter than me. He probably told his colleagues about how some dummy was talking about dinosaurs in an inode. I feel the smartass part of my brain eternally dooms me...

This makes me thing of the time I was interviewed by three bankers. I'd probably be rich and miserable had I answered non sarcastically :/

The suspense is killing me. What was the question, and how did you answer?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#190

Post by bryanrasmussen »

vishnugupta wrote: post #176
whatshisface wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manhole covers are round because they minimize the circumference per area that must be cut to make the cover fall in.

Obligatory https://sellsbrothers.com/12395

Ok but consider - is there any department at Microsoft other than marketing that Richard Feynman would have been suited for?
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