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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#461

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

pjmlp wrote: post #438
bb88 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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++.

Google is famous for having a C++ implementation that eschews a lot of what makes C++ powerful.

I’ve heard it referred to as “C+-“.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#462

Post by vidarh »

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…

My experience with Google (in the UK) was an interviewer who asked a very similar question, among a number where he was clearly unprepared to deal with answers that weren't 100% as expected, and asked questions that had basically no relevance to the role.

The experience was so bad that afterward I sent a lengthy email to the recruiter thanking her but pointing out I expected to fail the interview because the interviewer insisted on things that were wrong or irrelevant and set out why as a courtesy so they could address it for the future.

I was rung up and was told the recruiter had gotten the interview set aside, and offered to just have me bypass the technical interview and wanted to move on to an interview with the hiring manager.

In the end I declined, as the first interviewer would have been one of the people I'd have managed, and I just did not want to deal with a team with a person like that, and the whole process was just excruciatingly slow to the point I had offers on the table before they could line up an interview.

It seemed to be a process optimised for people who either desperately want to work specifically at Google, or doesn't have alternatives.

I kept getting calls from Google recruiters for years after that and kept recounting my past experience and asking if they could provide a better experience this time around.

I have had worse interview experiences than Google, including one where I halted a phone interview halfway through and told them they'd shown me I didn't want to work there, but Google is pretty high on my list of places I'm not particularly interested in interviewing.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#463

Post by xvector »

killtimeatwork wrote: post #460
xvector wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The software industry interview process is such a disaster. The worst part of every job I've ever had (including FAANG) is hitting the LeetCode grind when I want to leave. It's so fucking worthless. Just a giant waste of time. This entire fucking industry has its head up its ass. I can't think of a single other high-paying profession that pulls this shit.

It's not that stupid from company's point of view - they're preselecting for people who really want the job, and have enough energy to pursue it. These are the people you want to for your company.

Strange that this only seems to be necessary in the software industry while literally every other industry seems to be getting along fine without these dehumanizing interview processes.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#464

Post by planet-and-halo »

coffeefirst wrote: post #58
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Job training is not as much worth it for companies when employees can switch jobs at the drop of a hat.

I have no idea why people think this. I've trained all sorts of people on all sorts of new things and it was always worth it. Sometimes they leave. By that time they've used what they've learned and passed some of it on to the next person.

Incredible that you're the first person I've seen mention a second-order effect in this conversation.

I don't know what it is but I feel like people have forgotten just like basic truths about how humans work. Maybe it's because managerialism has infected everything.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#465

Post by FinanceAnon »

All you complaining about the length of FAANG interviews... One of my family members was recently applying for a job to stack shelves in a supermarket. They had to do a tricky 3-hours long multiple choice questions test. After that, they got an email asking to record a video about themselves. No idea what would come after that, but they gave up at this point. All this is also very difficult to go through if you are older and not technologically well-versed.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#466

Post by anchpop »

sokoloff wrote: post #344
anchpop wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Apprenticeships solved this problem in the past (and of course created many others). Actually it’s almost a fun little exercise in economics. Basically there’s two types of efficiency, investment efficiency and allocative efficiency. (There may also be other types I don’t know about.) Investment efficiency means people are incentivized to make positive-expected-value investments. Think about how people are incen…

So, in this hypothetical, the sector-wide union is preventing individuals who learn to create an additional $50K/yr in value from realizing the increase in pay which would otherwise accrue to them?

Yeah, or at least they aren’t able to capture the entire $50k/year in value. It kind of sounds bad but it’s a trade and there has to be something in it for both sides for it to happen.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#467

Post by lrem »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #446
lrem wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you saying a company with the resources of Google, which expects all of its employees to answer trivia and whiteboard answers in interviews - all of that brainpower and money can't invent a better process?

I don't think it's a matter of impossibility. The current process is simply a local optimum. Most practicing software engineers can pass the trivia quiz. Most time wasters can't, unless they googled for the answer key. The result is a pool of candidates that usually can understand a real interview question an engineer will ask. The system works, at the price of being annoying.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#468

Post by lysecret »

So, I have been hiring a lot for 2 startups i was involved one was a kind of bootcamp which involved basically a never ending hiring process.

I learned a lot about hiring there and how incredibly stupid and broken the standard hiring process is of big comps.

If anyone tells me to invert a binary tree now i just get up an leave haha.

But my main takeaway there was that this is actually a huuuge competitive edge Startups have. They dont have to adhere to the BS standard process and can snatch up a lot of good talent which falls out of the standard metrics.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#469

Post by AJRF »

XorNot wrote: post #264
ladberg wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similarly bad Google experience that I've talked about before[0] but will copy here: I was asked to do a task that eventually boiled down to a topological sort, and I thought the question consisted of recognizing that the answer was a topological sort and moving on because it was over the phone. However, that was not the case. The interviewer wanted me to code it all out over Google Docs, but I didn't remembe…

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).

Geohotz had a good rant about this once - the kind of people who need to cram leetcodes and memorize algorithms are not the kinds of people who Google wants to pass these interviews.

Makes a lot of sense, you could solve all these questions without knowing specific algorithms as long as you are good at problem solving - which is, I assume, the intent of the process.

Obviously it doesn't always work like that.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#470

Post by fsloth »

MattGaiser wrote: post #63
LAC-Tech wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

"I am genuinely asking. Why is this objectionable?"

Software engineering is at a schizophrenic point where it is very hard to categorize in either of traditional "blue collar" vocational job (given people seem to be employed close to very little formal schooling) or as a "white collar" professional job (given some roles need a CS degree level understanding of the fundamentals).

Some roles are more the other than the other.

I'd say listing a very specific tech stack signals the employer is looking for "blue collar" "commoditized" labour.

White collar "professional" types probably feel treating their contribution as "commoditized labour" is a category error.

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