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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#391

Post by ryanbrunner »

konschubert wrote: post #325
raffraffraff wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Help the person you're interviewing. You'll both get more out of it, you'll both enjoy it. If you're in a company that is expanding, you'll be interviewing a lot, so it's really important that it doesn't depress the shit out of you.

There is a risk that you accidentally do the thinking for them and give the answers for them without noticing. Doing a collaborative interview requires careful attention by the interviewer, but I agree it’s worth it.

So factor that into your judgement. If you needed to help them constantly, you still know they're a bad candidate. Nothing is gained by stonewalling them other than potentially getting someone who's going to badmouth you to everyone.

I've definitely had interviews with solid candidates who just faced an early roadblock, but were brilliant after I gave them an early push. Sometimes that's more of a sign of communicating a question poorly or nerves than genuine lack of knowledge on the candidates part.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#392

Post by hiyer »

sokoloff wrote: post #356
hiyer wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where the distinction lies - both seem same to me :-)

To me, rounds imply a decision point (and delay) in between. If I talk to HR on Monday, take a phone screen with an engineer on Wednesday, and come on-site (or Zoom now) with 4 engineers next Monday, that’s 2 rounds and 5 interviews (or 3 and 6 if you count HR)

> To me, rounds imply a decision point (and delay) in between.

My experience has been that if you clear the engineering phone screen the company asks you to go through all the rest of the (4-6) interviews, even if your performance in one or more of them has been sub-par. And at least here in India the post-screen interviews are spread out over several days to 2-3 weeks - there is no "onsite" as such, even over Zoom.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#393

Post by andix »

Ntrails wrote: post #377
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.

Github PRs also lack syntax checking etc - so it isn't something you'll never see at work right? (Admittedly if the PR doesn't build why are you reviewing it but whatever)

That's why you are reviewing a pull request in your IDE.

And you are having a CI build and unit tests in place. If it doesn't compile or a lot of tests are failing, a sane person won't even bother to review a pull request.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#394

Post by napolux »

I once had a 3 hours live coding session (without any previous warning it was a live coding session) on a problem described by some examples, while the 3 interviewers were clearly watching me and commenting my code or what I said in their chat.

The expectation was that I made the example exercise + tests.

Fu*k them.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#395

Post by nmstoker »

This is a major red flag that the firm isn't sufficiently serious about hiring and I would always walk away from a firm without a clear idea of their needs and the number of rounds.

My experience with a firm that started with three, then paused, had an "open evening" for interviews and then wanted more (which I politely declined and privately blacklisted them) reminds me of the lucky escape I had: the firm went through this mess only to uncover (a little later) an operational error that left them refunding several billion to clients, trundling on as a zombie firm!

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#397

Post by janoc »

sz4kerto wrote: post #273
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.

It is also scripted. Google used to use internal people do to the screening but not anymore, they have outsourced it to agencies. And a random recruiting agency drone on the phone, paid minimal wage, can't be expected to ask sensible questions, so they get a script to choose questions from, along with expected answers.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#398

Post by tragomaskhalos »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #378
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…

You have to understand the context of the interviewers. The person may not have really cared. They probably weren't interviewing for their own team. They may have their head in the middle of some problem they are thinking about. Google is hiring 10's of thousands of engineers a year. It's really hard to do well. Most of the questions are deliberately scripted because they are known to be good questions on some dimens…

In which case they should have teams dedicated purely to technical interviewing, with members regularly rotated in and out to keep them fresh.

When I did technical interviewing for my company for a period, granted it was still on top of my 'day job ' but I had the scope to get really invested in the process, and wrote guidelines for other reviewers. Treat technical interviewing as a respected role in its own right and not as a chore that interferes with 'real' work and it's a better outcome for all parties

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#399

Post by jcelerier »

pjerem wrote: post #364
jcelerier wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

I'd be curious if you already saw / read about a working Linux installation on NTFS. IIRC, even WSL works with an EXT4 layer.

https://github.com/nikp123/ntfs-rootfs/blob/master/guide_in_...

does not seem trivial given the differing permission model, but not impossible either. for fat32 I wonder though if the total absence of permissions allows for that.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#400

Post by ellenhp »

Yacoby wrote: post #381
ellenhp wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

It's also possible that she hadn't seen the particular algorithm used before, or that she was having an off day or stressing about a meeting immediately after the interview, or that there were errors that she did see and she didn't want to say "yeah there are errors here" because doing so could affect the candidate's confidence in the interviews after hers. I could imagine any of these being true. Or she could just be a bad interviewer.
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