The rise of never-ending job interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#271

Post by golemiprague » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:45 AM UTC

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…

Usually a language is not only a language, it is tools, paradigms, frameworks, libraries, conventions and many other bits and pieces one needs to know. So while there is some commonalities it usually takes time to get to a certain level of productivity, which is sometimes required sooner rather than later.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#272

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:46 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #209

dredmorbius wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> 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. How? The only military use of large stone structures is as fortifications; their primary feature is that they can never move. And Egypt isn't even known for its city walls. That's the other civilization of the time, ancient Mesopotamia. But…

Building pyramids isn't simply piling rocks on top of one another.

There's mathematics, surveying, architectural design, measuring, logistics, labour organisation, planning, transport, engineering, and a whole mess of related skills. If not kept in practice, they are lost (you're focusing strongly on the "brain-drain" element at the expense of "skills retention" and "skills development bits).

Too: once you've got those capabilities, there are numerous other abilities which derive from them. Large structures means civil engineering, construction, grain storage facilities, and quite probably some degree of metalworking and related crafts, again, which can prove useful in either foreign or civil war.

Take some time to think through possiblities, consequences, options, risks, and opportunities here.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#273

Post by sz4kerto » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:46 AM UTC

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 don't think this was scripted; it's a typical sign of bad interviewers when they think that

1) they are smart

2) therefore if you're smart you have the same way of thinking

3) also you have the same knowledge (and gaps!) about irrelevant details

Therefore instead of checking your knowledge they check whether you're like them.

It's just amateurish.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#274

Post by silon42 » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:47 AM UTC

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 think this is not a bad question...

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#275

Post by sdoering » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:47 AM UTC

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…

Exactly that. I often interview people as part of the team. We have normally one HR person, the team lead and one of the team present.

More often than not I give my spot to a more junior team member if they are available. So that they learn something from watching the interview as well as "just" see if the person interviewed would be a cultural fit. If they could imagine working with them.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#276

Post by atomlib » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:48 AM UTC

vmception wrote: post #174

kxrm wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but I can say that I am over 40 and I can tell when the enthusiasm for my candidacy dies after they see my face that it's not due to anything but ageism.

and I'm in an underrepresented group, we all have the ability to conform our experiences to the reason that matches what other people say will limit our opportunities. It is equally important to weigh each experience against the similar experiences. I've seen plenty of linkedin posts and blogs about people bragging about their quests to get competing offers in tech, some interviewed at 60 companies and did 100 interv…

What's stopping you from claiming you spent 700 hours on Leetcode?

(Not everything people say online is true.)

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#277

Post by cubano » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:48 AM UTC

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…

Well the obvious issue here is...how do they truly know you wrote the code? Its pretty much impossible to source where OS code comes from, and it sure wouldn't be hard to find an obscure OS project and pass off the code as yours, if you were that sort of person.

And this takes me to my 2nd point, and that is they current hiring model totally leads to companies hiring people who are good at interviewing not necessarily people who are good at doing the work required. There is no doubt t that interviewing for a job is a skill that can be learned and improved upon, and lots of crappy programmers have learned to be damn good at being I interviewed.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#278

Post by stacker8888 » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:48 AM UTC

Thanks God it isn't just me!

When I lost my job during the pandemic, I had multiple jobs I was interviewing for, each took maybe a month to get through all of the interviews. Do they really expect unemployed people to suffer through a month of interviews? Some people actually need a job fairly urgently!

And these companies I was interviewing with, they all had a fake air of superiority, like they were the next Google. This interview culture needs to change back to how it was.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#279

Post by Rapzid » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:48 AM UTC

duped wrote: post #175

Rapzid wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fire fast. Use that 90 day try out period. Contract-to-hire. In the past I would never have been interested in a contract-to-hire. These days though if the company and role is right, and this an option to short-cut a ridiculous interview process, I might spring for it.

Just personally I would never accept an offer that was contract for hire and think it's downright insulting a suggestion. My family needs health insurance and the market has never been so cold that I'd be desperate enough to take such a garbage offer.

Nothing about contracting precludes having health insurance though? For the roles and situations I'm talking about this would all just be factored into the rates.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#280

Post by virgilp » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:49 AM UTC

hardwaregeek wrote: post #255

virgilp wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I agree it's subjective. Some people may prefer HackerRanks because it lets them do the work on their own time without someone watching them. For me, HackerRank problems almost always have nothing to do with my work, require passing an arbitrary test suite, and provide the interviewer with no insight into my problem solving ability. Who would you rather hire, someone who reasoned through the solution on their own, th…

> almost always have nothing to do with my work

TBH that's another argument I don't really get. Almost everyone agrees that basic CS knowledge trumps specific technology knowledge (I'd rather hire someone with strong CS fundamentals that didn't use Java before than someone who is a "Spring Boot expert" but lacks basic CS knowledge, even if I actually use Spring Boot right now).

But then, why complain that you don't do that in your work? Surely you need to traverse data structures from time to time, yeah it won't be the exotic tree traversal that I'd ask you to write but that's exactly the point - to test that you can be put in a novel situation that can't be directly-pasted from StackOverflow and you're able to write a recursive function that takes _a little bit_ of skill).

The hidden test case is opportunity for discussion during actual interview. And this answers your "what's stopping them" question, too - regardless of problem, I can tweak the input slightly so that your solution doesn't work - and more often than not, I don't even tweak the input, I just provide an additional testcase where your solution doesn't work. If you can quickly fix it ("oh, yeah, I forgot that URLs may have a fragment appended to it, let me quickly adjust my log-parsing condition") then it's awesome, it's exactly the signal I'm looking for, and we can go on to discuss system design and your relevant experience (but honestly, at that point my mind is likely ~80% made up, from CV + how you explain/modify your hackerrank solution).