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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#261

Post by tcmart14 »

dcolkitt wrote: post #115
MattGaiser wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Because selecting candidates based on tech stack is almost universally the sign of incompetent tech management. Anybody who understands software, knows that intelligence and master of fundamentals trumps tech stack experience without exception. Linus Torvalds would unquestionably become a better Ruby on Rails developer within four weeks than 90% of people with 10 YoE in it. Good organizations hire talented and bright…

This makes a lot of sense. If a person has good fundamentals and understanding of engineering and CS, then they should be able to master any tech stack. I think in software development, we are in a weird position. In other engineering fields, it is expected to have a base line knowledge and the ability to learn into new processes. Most software companies seem to not want hire engineers who can do that.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#262

Post by bb88 »

ladberg wrote: post #226
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…

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…

Back when I wanted to interview at google, I sensed some frustration between HR and the engineering. Some engineers just didn't make good interviewers.

HR wished I had gotten a different interviewer.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#263

Post by MarkSweep »

xyst wrote: post #19

Interviewing these days is not a technical challenge. It’s a fraternity/sorority rushing week. Technically I was qualified and able to answer their questions. But ultimately was turned down after 6 rounds of interviewing. I think I was heavily dinged because I wasn’t entirely familiar with their product in the wild, and was never given any hint as to what product I would be working on.

At one startup I did a couple rounds of phone interviews and a full day of in person interviews. Lastly I got to chatting with the co-founder. I can't remember the precise question I asked about how they were building out the team, but I clearly remember the answer. They made the interview process longer and more involved in an effort to narrow the field of candidates.

I understand the reasoning: if you think you have a special mission and want people dedicated to that mission, filter by dedication. But I'm not really sure there is a way for any one candidate to consume as much time interviewing for a role as that company could consume out of a pool of candidates. And that includes my smart-ass idea of trying to interview at Pinterest and stopping in the middle of the interview saying "please sign up to see the rest of this whiteboard solution".

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#264

Post by XorNot »

ladberg wrote: post #226
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…

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…

At this point I'm pretty sure FAANG hiring is just a random walk. Every now again someone happens to have looked at all the questions they ask recently for that particular interview cycle (or avoid the trap ones like that) and that person gets hired (and then put on the ad targeting team or whatever).

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#265

Post by that_guy_iain »

onion2k wrote: post #236
hardwaregeek wrote: post #10

If 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 applied to a company recently whose first interview was a tech test. I turned them down before I even spoke to a human. I don't want to work for any company that puts so little value on people.

Honestly, I understand the whole send the tech test first. Having wasted time on talking to people who clearly weren't able to do the job I would rather waste their time than mines. For me, it's when I talk to their developers and it's clear they know I know what I'm talking about and they then try to tech test me. At that point, no. I just impressed the hell out of some of the people you consider to be your best and you think I can't code? Nah.

The tech test seems often like it's cargo cult. It's on Joel's list so everyone thinks it is a must do. Instead of realising that the entire point of the tech test was to make sure people could actually code. With some of the original tech tests being do FizzBuzz or do something really simple in a short amount of time. Not, build me a production ready toy project using techincal DDD aspects.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#266

Post by arp242 »

virgilp wrote: post #202
hardwaregeek wrote: post #10

If 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.…

The main problem with some of these things is that:

1) you're expected to spend 3 or 4 hours on some HackerRank test before you've even spoken to anyone. Some of these tests (outside HackerRank) can actually be projects that take a day or more to get right. The issue is that at this point I don't know if the attitude is "hey, this seems like it might be a good hire, let's check if he can actually code" or if it's "let's send anyone this test and discard anyone who doesn't pass". I suspect that in a lot of cases it's the latter. I'm not opposed to investing time, but it quickly becomes unmanageable if everyone just asks you to pass their several-hour tests just to be considered for application. There is very little time investment from the company, and it feels almost like a dDoS attack on my time.

and 2), that a lot of these tests are asking you to solve some hard problem that you will rarely face in real life and where people have quite literally won Turing awards for finding solutions to them. Many previous discussions about this on HN in the past.

I don't think it's even all that much more effective at actually weeding out bad programmers than a simple test. We used to ask people to write a CSV address book importer with some very basic requirements; nothing fancy, you could do it in 30 minutes. It worked well enough, and a lot of the results we got back were horrible.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#267

Post by hef19898 »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #256
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…

This sounds dreadful, on the positive side I had very enjoyable interview rounds in places like Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers (obviously this was a few years ago), 3 or 4 interviews hour long plus depending on if they were before or after work. These tested what I new, how I would approach things, and giving me a very good view of the people that worked there from more junior devs, architects and management in th…

Quite honestly, I am torn. The best jobs I had so far involved multiple interviews (Amazon with a total of 6 one hour interviews and my current employer with 7, the jury is still out on my current job one month in), the worst involved either one or two interviews or multiple, but very easy and yet unpleasant ones. Scripted questions suck, Amazon in my case was good, as there was only on scripted logical question and the rest was STAR-style leadership principles centered questions.

Multiple rounds give you more opportunities to ask questions to multiple people and get a better idea of the company. They can also be a pain in the ass.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#268

Post by izgzhen »

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…

There is no need to "respect" the process, but just to be more thoughtful:

> What's not in a Linux inode? > My answer was: Lots of things...dinosaurs, the moon...

You can answer that you want more clarification, or even answer that "we can google this".

The "dinosaurs" thing might make the interviewer feel that you are being unprofessional since the interview is to test one's ability to perform in a professional environment. You don't help your colleagues by answering in this way when asked similar questions in work...

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#269

Post by wyclif »

pinewurst wrote: post #163
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…

I remember getting one like that - Googler demanded some random value from a system .h file. Easy enough to grep if necessary, but _no_ it had to be from memory to make one Googley.

Google interviewers must hate Einstein. He said, "Never memorize something that you can look up."

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#270

Post by z77dj3kl »

nosianu wrote: post #240
snissn wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i can't imagine a real world scenario where knowing that helps you.. especially when you.. can.. just.. google it

Maybe these firms prepare for the apocalypse when all technology fails and has to be recreated from scratch, with only a few half-burned books around. Of course, if that were true there should be some blacksmithing and basic herbology questions in the interviews.

Or the case where you work google which goes down and then you can't possibly duckduckgo it, that'd be too humiliating.
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