Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The rise of never-ending job interviews

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 1001 posts

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#381

Post by Yacoby »

ellenhp wrote: post #357
biztos wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it… troubling? That a technical interviewer can’t tell for herself whether your code will work. Wouldn’t you ideally want people who actually understand code to be giving the coding questions?

Are you saying that because this interviewer needs to run code to find logic errors, she's somehow not a competent engineer? Because I usually need to run code to find logic errors. Sometimes I use formal verification instead but that's pretty rare. Am I also not a competent engineer?

Maybe they are a bad interviewer?

In my view, if the answer involves a topological sort the interviewer should know how to solve it and be able to follow and find errors in the candidates code. If the interviewer, knowing the answer, cannot find any issues then surely the code is fine (for code written in an interview)

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#382

Post by [deleted] »

peakaboo wrote: post #221
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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#383

Post by qubyte »

I once interviewed for a large game company. Their main office in Europe is in Dublin, but at the time they were opening an outpost in Brighton, UK (where I am) and were hiring a server engineer for their e-sports division.

There were a lot of interviews. For the fourth or fifth they flew me out for a whole day of interviews in Dublin. These included at least three different departments that I remember with separate coding interviews, and I had to give an hour long presentation.

I didn't get the role, and shortly after the Brighton outpost was axed. In hindsight I'm pretty sure that I didn't get the role because someone high up didn't want the outpost office to exist (it was only there because someone important they wanted was determined to live here).

I'm not sore though. Not long after the company hit the news for having a toxic culture (amongst other issues), particularly toward women.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#384

Post by gregsadetsky »

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…

I absolutely agree with your take.

Case in point: a Stripe job listing I picked at random

https://stripe.com/jobs/listing/backend-api-engineer-core-mo...

No single language is named! And this specific sentence is a really great sign (unsurprisingly)

“Languages can be learned: we care much more about your general engineering skill than knowledge of a particular language or framework.”

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#385

Post by andix »

Decision fatigue, one of the biggest problem of this century.

There is a lot of pressure, if you hire the wrong person, someone has to be responsible. That's why they developed a lot of processes. So if the person turns out to be the wrong person for the job, you can tell everyone you thoroughly vetted them, and it's not your fault.

From my perspective the only way is: Interview people once or twice, hire them as quickly as possible, work with them for a few days/weeks and make a quick decision (together with the person) if it is going to work out.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#386

Post by andix »

sp332 wrote: post #18
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.

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.

In reality nobody knows what skills will be needed for the position. Quite often not even the people who do the job. You can let them write down what skills are needed for the job, hire somebody who checks all boxes, and it could still be a catastrophic failure.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#387

Post by jonathankoren »

mrb wrote: post #303
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…

As an ex-Googler who interviewed 100+ candidates (mix of phone & onsite interviews) I can tell you that there is a great variance across the company groups in the quality of questions we ask. And the reason is simple: it's up to the interviewer to choose his questions. Questions aren't standardized. I took great pride in the fact that my questions were unique. I designed them myself, about 30: some quick knowledge te…

Given that you probably had 60 minutes tops, you expected a candidate to answer each question in nine minutes at most? If you left time for candidate questions (I’m assuming you didn’t), there’d only be 7 minutes a question.

I don’t think you learned this style of questioning in interview training. Going off script like this uncallibrates the entire system. In fact, if I was your coworker, let alone manager, I’d recommend you for remedial interview training. This is not how you conduct an interview for any role.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#388

Post by danielmarkbruce »

neilv wrote: post #323
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…

> the entire question was: What's not in a Linux inode? Were they considering you as an experienced developer of a Unix/Posix filesystem, who would almost certainly know what an inode is? Or were they considering you as someone who had been using a Unix so long and extensively that you had a chance of once having had to configure an older filesystem for huge numbers of inodes. Or a chance that, for some rare reason,…

It was probably an opener for discussion. Assume the best about the interviewer for a minute. What is the best possible interpretation of where they wanted to go with the question?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#389

Post by qubyte »

qubyte wrote: post #383

I once interviewed for a large game company. Their main office in Europe is in Dublin, but at the time they were opening an outpost in Brighton, UK (where I am) and were hiring a server engineer for their e-sports division. There were a lot of interviews. For the fourth or fifth they flew me out for a whole day of interviews in Dublin. These included at least three different departments that I remember with separate…

I should add, this was several years ago. I'd never put up with that sort of crap now.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#390

Post by Clewza313 »

I had fourteen (14) interviews at my current employer, with a similar "how about this position instead?" switch in the middle, including redoing a whiteboard coding interview.

I've been there 8 years and counting now, and my current job bears virtually no resemblance to what I was hired to do.

Post reply on HN