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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#431

Post by dijit »

dexen wrote: post #420

Two months ago there was a news that raised some eye-brows, "Amazon has a quota for the number of employees it would be happy to see leave (businessinsider.com)" [1]. Some of the comments were quite negative, reading it as a dehumanizing practice with no clear upsides. Re-upping my reply [2]: The article paints a needlessly bleak picture. The neutral reading of the practice is, "managers are able to take riskier hiri…

The issue is with setting a quota as “must” vs “acceptable”

If you “must” find a way to pick fault with your employees because you can only give out 1 “exceeds expectations” and at least 1 “meets most” then you’re likely creating a toxic environment from that.

Similar to telling managers that they “probably should” thin the herd.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#432

Post by mihaaly »

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…

Most processes are flawed I found, in most companies, especially bigger ones. They try to come up so arbitrary methods to differentiate between candidates that it has little to do about the position in subject, a persons ability to fulfill that position successfully throughout a prolonged period. What they test if one candidate is better answering a specific question or not. Some random question - usually relevant to the subject. Impossible to cover all the knowledge is necessary for that position, especially the adaptability, capacity to learn (essential), accuracy, work ethics, all much more important than if a specific fact is readily available in the head of the candidate. Testing how good someone is in tests. Or if the candidate can perform well while people are watching and judging (very rare circumstance during the workdays, except for actors or performing artists).

Based on perhaps a dozen intervies here and there I had the conclusion that recruiters have no idea who they are going to employ but practically draw a name from a hat (after filtering out obvious incompetents, if at all). This includes the position I won, and those I did not.

In one occasion I refused a fairly well paid and interesting job because they tried to measure my competence by performing quick basic calculations (related to financial topics), giving impossible amount and urging as many answers as possible. Being an engineering development position it was hopelessly incompetent way to test, which they intended to be the base of future promotions and assignments of roles too. They claimed it is for the sake of fairness, testing every employee equally, regardless of the role. How supid is this for god's sake?! Roles and expectations of the roles are different and cannot be tested the same way. It was just lazyness from the HR, pure lazyness to rely on robotic methods. Robots from the HR (ironic calling themselves !human! resources) pushed through incompetent methods. Destroying fairness under the flag of fairness, crazy. I considered better not be engaged with such an organization.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#433

Post by rwmj »

ladberg wrote: post #329
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Design mistakes maybe, but syntax errors are just not representative of any real debugging experience IMO.

I think some of this is filtering out bullshitters. In a previous job I used to interview a lot of unfiltered candidates. What we did was sit them down at a Linux command line and ask them to show us the files in the directory, open a file for editing and that kind of thing. A surprising number of people who claimed years of Linux experience had clearly never used the command line at all.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#434

Post by lrem »

janoc wrote: post #404
lrem wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, the inode question is part of the pre-screen. That's normally _before_ you get put on phone with any engineers. How the heck did you get it in "round 3 or 4"? Was your process started from scratch for some reason? The question is meant to be asked by a sourcer - a contractor whose list of requirements does not include being answer themselves any of the questions they ask. Famously even if you know the answer pre…

>Famously even if you know the answer pretty well, say because you were the original creator of the thing, but answer in a way that they can't link to the answer key, you still fail. Which is the most ridiculous part of it. You are being examined and evaluated over trivia in a subject that the examiner likely has no idea about and where there are only 1-2 possible "correct" answers. That's like sending a janitor to "…

What alternative would be more efficient and acceptable? A typical team of 6-8 replaces two persons per year. The number of resumes per opening is measured in thousands.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#435

Post by peoplefromibiza »

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 interviewer told me very matter of factly that it was in fact, the filename.

which is not even true in some file systems that can inline data directly into the inode, if the data is small enough.

for the downvoter(s):

> If the data of a file fits in the space allocated for pointers to the data, this space can conveniently be used. For example, ext2 and its successors store the data of symlinks (typically file names) in this way if the data is no more than 60 bytes ("fast symbolic links")

> Ext4 has a file system option called inline_data that allows ext4 to perform inlining if enabled during file system creation. Because an inode's size is limited, this only works for very small files

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#436

Post by tomcooks »

Currently investing 2 hours of my time per job offer:

- investigating the role, the company, their stupid website, their made up culture

- doing the unpaid take home tests (currently investing 8 hours doing a technical test for yet another stupid startup)

- answering dumb questions ("why do you want to work for $neverheardofstartup?") on fancy js forms

- having to register to their stupid career backend, thanks for yet another chance of having my inbox filled with spam because you don't know how to encrypt data

- uploading hours and hours of video presentations (as if cover letters weren't dumb enough)

only to be canned with a copy-paste "due to the amount of curricula we received unfortunately we cannot provide feedback - good luck with your job search" nonsense.

And if I'm lucky enough not to be weeded out by a bored-to-death HR person with the attention span of a starving kitten, this was just interview step 1/5

Fuck you, from the bottom of my heart.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#437

Post by danielmarkbruce »

tragomaskhalos wrote: post #398
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

That might well be a good idea. I can imagine downsides to it, but it might work.

The long and short of it is though - one has to face the reality of the situation they are in. If you go interview at Google (or any FAANG I would guess), you have to understand what you are in for and do your best to get through. Or, just don't interview there.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#438

Post by pjmlp »

bb88 wrote: post #282
XorNot wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

What's funny is that I specifically remember a conference where some library that a google employee wrote was terrible. The one google developer talking about it, disavowed any responsibility of it. Whatever metrics that google is using in their interviews have probably become worthless in the past decade as people game the system.

Just check the Android code, specially the early versions looked like "C dev (not even C++) tries to create a Java based framework".

And the NDK clearly is anything but modern C or C++.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#439

Post by maharajatever »

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…

That's nerds for you - making sure any kind of personality is kept well away...

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#440

Post by onion2k »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #348
onion2k wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having wasted time on talking to people who clearly weren't able to do the job I would rather waste their time than mines. Of course. But consider how that attitude looks from the perspective of a candidate - you'd rather waste my time that yours is a really good reason for me to drop out of the interview process. This is essentially what's wrong with hiring right now. Companies don't want to have anyone "waste their…

Well, being the candidate I would rather they did a tech test first than talk to me and then do a tech test. Actually, if someone technical has spoken to me and then they ask me to do a tech test. I'm very likely to say no because they've already got a feel for my abilities and that is the point of a tech test. I think sometimes people forget people working at these companies are people too and noone wants to have th…

To be honest, I think I'd agree with you if job adverts included all the information necessary. Doing a tech test for a job when you don't even know the salary range, or what the role consists of, or what the company really even does ... that's what annoys me. If companies wrote transparent, clear job adverts I'd be a lot happier with their interview processes.
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