Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Restoring my faith in humanity ^^^
The rise of never-ending job interviews
241–250 of 1001 posts
Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews
#242Recently hired for director level at big startup. 11 interviews.
Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews
#243If your application process starts with a human being—even better a technical human being—reaching out to me, followed by 2-3 interviews, followed by an offer, I am already on your side. If your application process starts with a HackerRank, followed by 2 phone interviews followed by on-site, followed by team matching, I will not be on your side. Oh and if there's random month long gaps in between stages, I will espec…
I don’t think there is such a thing as a junior compiler job?
Considering I've worked on a compiler as an intern and know plenty of people who have done the same, I politely disagree :D
Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
That lustre has faded already.
Yeah... reminds me of a past coworker. He spent weeks writing weird comments in code, then writing weird code to read comments. From the actual source files. Then when deployments didn't work, he said they worked on his machine the deployment must be broke. He was hired by FAANG less than a month later.
To solve the hiring problem that seems rampant in the industry, I propose for all resumes that get past the auto-filter, we just implement a lottery system. Maybe it'll be even more effective than the current method!
Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews
#245My 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…
I had a similarly bad Google experience that I've talked about before[0] but will copy here: I was asked to do a task that eventually boiled down to a topological sort, and I thought the question consisted of recognizing that the answer was a topological sort and moving on because it was over the phone. However, that was not the case. The interviewer wanted me to code it all out over Google Docs, but I didn't remembe…
A friend encountered this with Amazon, although their tool at least has some code help (at least when I tried a year ago). The interviewer tried to compile his code.
Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies don't want to do job training anymore. Instead of a general background and attitude check, they need to know if the candidate has all of the individual skills that will be used on the job.
Job training is not as much worth it for companies when employees can switch jobs at the drop of a hat.
Yep. Apprenticeships solved this problem in the past (and of course created many others). Actually it’s almost a fun little exercise in economics.
Basically there’s two types of efficiency, investment efficiency and allocative efficiency. (There may also be other types I don’t know about.)
Investment efficiency means people are incentivized to make positive-expected-value investments. Think about how people are incentivized to invest in their house, e.g. preventative maintenance, because if the expected value is positive then they will recoup that value when they sell the house. If you’re renting you don’t have this with respect to where you live - water damage or no, not really the renter’s problem. Investment efficiency is maximized by private property, where you know that no one will take your property without your consent.
Allocative efficiency means things go to whoever is willing/able to pay the most for them. Renting does have this property - if both of us want to rent a house, and I’m willing to pay more, in most cases I’ll end up getting the house. This is why gentrification can cause displacement - when wealthier people come into a city and are able to outbid the current renters, they win and the current renters lose. Allocative efficiency is maximized by auctions and things like them, where the good goes to whoever is willing to pay the most.
Bringing it back to your comment, job training isn’t worth it because our careers as programmers are dominated by allocative efficiency, not investment efficiency. If you can train a programmer create $50,000/year more value in general (i.e. it’s not training that would only be useful to your company), they can now get paid about that much more from any of your competitors, and you will have to pay them about that much more to stop them from leaving. So you gain nothing from giving them general-skills training.
Another way of solving this problem is with sectoral bargaining. If you have a sector-wide union, they can make all companies start training simultaneously, or assume some of the costs themselves. It’s a win-win for the industry and for the programmers, but it doesn’t happen nearly as much as it could because of that coordination problem.
Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews
#247I recently agreed to go through a 5-round process which totaled to about 6 hours. I'm the first person to bitch about the ineffectiveness of leetcode/hackerrank bullshit for people with 10+ of verifiable experience, but I went through this one because it was a field I had never worked in before, and the personnel I was speaking with were truly interesting. Sans all of those qualifiers, anything more than 3 rounds is…
I wonder if this is a way to crowd out competitors. Take up so much of a candidate's time that they can only interview at a handful of places successfully. Either the candidate goes all in on you or they pass without using your resources. Kinda the grocery store shelving model of competition.
And it’s to weed out people who value their own time and who won’t take part in pointless company mandated bullshit.
If someone sits though 6 hours of interviews and pointless exercises that should instead be solved by consulting the documentation, they will probably just do what they are told without fuss, will work overtime for free and will let the company walk all over them with regards to sick pay, holidays, etc.
Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews
#248If your application process starts with a human being—even better a technical human being—reaching out to me, followed by 2-3 interviews, followed by an offer, I am already on your side. If your application process starts with a HackerRank, followed by 2 phone interviews followed by on-site, followed by team matching, I will not be on your side. Oh and if there's random month long gaps in between stages, I will espec…
Is HackerRank so bad? If one does "whiteboard problems", HackerRank says, "boo, whiteboard interviews, just let me code and be able to search on Google, whiteboard is unrealistic!". Now if the company starts with a HackerRank test, that's also bad? I don't get it. Look, a lot of people have good-looking CVs and can't code shit. I don't know about you but my experience was that one really can't hire based on CV alone.…
If there are teams interviewing candidates that are surprised to find that some applicants can't write basic code, then there must also be candidates that are surprised by that as well.
The longer a candidate has worked on very capable teams the more surprised they will be to have those problems presented in a job interview.
Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews
#249My 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…
It's so stupid, all of it. They try to come up with random questions that doesn't mean anything if the candidate remembers the answer at that point in time. I've read about Linux inodes. I know what they do. In fact I even have had Linux systems where I get inode related error messages because the partition had too many small files on it. But given that question, in that situation, I would likely not know what they e…
In terms of topical content it's a good question. The idea that the name is a link stored in a directory entry is a key part of filesystem architecture and anyone familiar with unix filesystems should be able to immediately talk about why.
The problem here is that what could be an invitation to showcase knowledge is reduced to a vague, one-dimensional and non-obvious trivia question. There are a ton of valid answers to this question, like:
* The file data
* Extended attributes (ACLs, etc)
The topic is fine, but the framing of the question is terrible.
If I wanted to test a candidate's knowledge in this area I would probably ask: "Why isn't the filename stored in the inode?" -- this initiates an architectural discussion, rather than a poorly designed guessing game.
Guessing games in general are a red flag for the employer. They tend to indicate the interviewer isn't competent freely discussing the subjects at hand.
Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews
#250Earlier 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…
"revolving door of employees (because that's the way things are these days)" 2 things that line hits me. 1. Remuneration. If I can jump ship and come back later to much more money, why not? 2. I work to make myself replaceable. This is what good documentation, code comments, architecture is for!
So what I get is, write shitty confusing code and don't document it. Job security, got it!