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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#311

Post by atoav »

throwaway09223 wrote: post #249
peakaboo wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If your question has that "gotcha there is just one right answer"-feel to it, you are doing it wrong.

I had a teacher once who constantly asked questions like these in such an imprecise fashion there was no way anybody could have guessed how the question was even meant to be answered. I still cringe when I think about it, because the only purpose of these questions was to show us that he is really clever and we don't know shit — and it didn't work at all.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#312

Post by slickrick216 »

vegetablepotpie wrote: post #2

What’s happening is that companies want to completely remove risk from the hiring process. In the real world, you cannot remove risk. You can manage it, but you cannot remove it. Asking candidates to go through 6 interviews before making a decision and not telling them when a decision will be made signals a risk adverse culture that cannot make decisions.

Salesforce have ever green roles which they casually do interviews for but never actually act on. The roles can be easily spotted as they’ll be posted and reposted on job boards like LinkedIn every 4 days.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#313

Post by trinovantes »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #305
trinovantes wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once had an in-person interview where they gave me a sheet of printed code and asked me to point out the syntax errors. Some interviewers are absolutely insane.

Actually this one might make sense, depending on the code and the position you applied for.

It was for a junior c# position so I doubt it's applicable considering Visual Studio will point out the problems.

But I'm curious what position would this question make sense?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#314

Post by MisterBastahrd »

echelon wrote: post #122
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone is new to the interviewing process, then they shouldn't be doing interviews alone. If they don't know how to gather information from a resume, then they shouldn't be reading resumes alone. You say that a bad hire is worth tens of thousands of dollars, but if that's the case, then most of what you said is irrelevant because a company that is smart enough to recognize this would be smart enough to never put…

> If they don't know how to gather information from a resume, then they shouldn't be reading resumes alone. You would be shocked how many people blatantly lie or overstate their roles on resumes. Senior, junior, it happens all over. A good practice is to ask candidates to go in depth about recent resume items and explain the technicals, business needs, etc. > If someone is new to the interviewing process, then they s…

It's either important and expensive or it isn't. I wouldn't be "shocked" by anything. I used to be a recruiter. In my current dev position, I have absolutely nuked candidates by asking basic questions that the managers (who were eager to hire someone to fill a spot) and other devs (who would feel uncomfortable if they asked the question and hence didn't) failed to ask. A candidate who will try to bullshit me about something he doesn't actually know is someone who will waste time on projects by not using all the resources available to him to find the correct solution (this usually involves being brave enough to ask questions if you don't understand something). If my future depends on your success, then I'm going to ask questions that will make me feel like I can trust my future in your hands.

If a manager is getting paid $150K a year and it costs $200K to fire a bad employee, then "when they're ready" is the correct metric to use.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#315

Post by nextlevelwizard »

I think there should be initial round with HR just to see that you aren't out right lying on your application and/or CV. Then you should have at home coding exam (still time limited to an hour or two) and if your code looks good then there should be the final interview with the team/manager where you are going to work.

EDIT: now that I think about it there probably needs to be one more where you can negotiate the sallary and benefits and actually sign the contract.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#316

Post by smcl »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #33
sp332 wrote: post #18

Earlier 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.

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.

Yeah it could be a lazy way for an interviewer to check a requirements box that says ".NET Core 3.1 experience". But there is a chance that this is a way to determine whether any upcoming questions are relevant - like if you haven't used .NET Core 3.x, it's probably pointless to ask a question relating to some feature introduced in C# 8.0.

It's a contrived example of course (particularly if the end goal was just to check the "knows feature X from C# 8" box!) and I wasn't at those interviews so I've no way to know what their intent was. I'm occasionally on the other side of the interviewing table though so I'm just trying to reason through why this might come up. FWIW I hate the "what isn't in a linux inode" type questions, or situations designed to fuck with the interviewees.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#317

Post by Faaak »

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 similar experience with Proton's recruitment. They sent me a dumb IQ test with stupid questions like (how many triangles are in this triangle). I answered with "Way too many", and that was the end for me

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#318

Post by atoav »

bschwindHN wrote: post #124
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…

But think of how smart he felt after telling you the answer! That confidence boost alone was probably worth their time to interview you, mission accomplished.

IMO asking gotcha questions like that to make yourself feel smart is just cringeworthy and silly.

Your goal when interviewing people should be to find things out about them — with gotcha questions you don't find out anything about them, but they find out something negative about you.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#319

Post by MisterBastahrd »

gentleman11 wrote: post #138
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone is new to the interviewing process, then they shouldn't be doing interviews alone. If they don't know how to gather information from a resume, then they shouldn't be reading resumes alone. You say that a bad hire is worth tens of thousands of dollars, but if that's the case, then most of what you said is irrelevant because a company that is smart enough to recognize this would be smart enough to never put…

So they can learn from experienced interviewers who just make you leetcode and answer dumb stock questions (my biggest weakness is…)? What we need is for people to interview with zero experience and figure out a better way on their own, not copy a bunch of bad processes out of insecurity

If you've surrounded yourself with incompetent people, then you still shouldn't assume that everyone else is equally incompetent. Cynicism isn't wisdom.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#320

Post by jcelerier »

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…

Isn't the question nonsensical ? inodes are a property of some filesystems like ext, xfs..., that you can happen to use on Linux. If you installed Linux, say, on an NTFS partition there would be no inode anywhere, no ?
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