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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.kalibrr.com/sites/default/files/featured_images/... Every year, Google receives over one million resumes and applications. Only 4,000-6000 applicants will actually be hired — that's less than a 1% hiring rate. Given those odds it's not worth it.

These numbers are misleading af. Most of those applications are just spam, not really relevant and never get read by any human. I’ve done ~150 interviews for backend roles at google and based on my experience 4 years ago if you make it to onsite you have 5-10% of getting an offer

It’s true, and the end result is you probably consider 90-95% of the people you interview to be morons right?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#472
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your IDE can check your syntax. For people who have to switch between languages regularly, precise syntax memorization is difficult and a waste of time.

While I understand where you are coming from, I disagree.

IDE tools are great performance enhancers, but they can also be crutches.

I would always expect a professional software developer to be able to parse some code on a page and point out its syntax errors (as well as suggest edits).

edit; here I am thinking about something more substancial then just a missing ';' or a lack of a closing "

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#474
Once you realise that they are trying to leverage the 'sunk cost fallacy' to try and get cheaper staff, you tend to bin these earlier.

This is nothing to do with removing risk from hiring processes. It's to filter for those who want to be in the fraternity so much they will do anything to get there - including being chronically underpaid and badly treated.

There is still a shortage of good people. Let these companies have the less good people.

Good employers know talent is in short supply.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#475
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fucking nightmare for no reason Absolutely! To add, the amount of nit-picking that happens is staggering. I was downgraded from strong-hire to lean-hire because: 1. I did not use classes in Python. That problem could easily be solved using simple functions. The feedback I got was "candidate does not know idiomatic use of modules & classes" 2. I did not use one of python's standard lib functions and instead I coded…

> I could not spot a scenario in the first 5-7 min of interview. This is endemic and part of a much wider malignancy in the tech interviews. Cram two medium-to-high difficulty questions in the span of 45 minutes and require the candidates to solve them both on the spot. In other words, you have at most 20 minutes to work out a complete solution to any given problem. In practice that means that you need to come up wit…

They’re IQ tests, it’s that simple.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#476
post #264

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).

You don't pass a FAANG interview by looking up all the questions and memorizing them, you just get a feel for what they'd ask you and learn how to respond with what they want.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#477
post #262

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…

Back when I wanted to interview at google, I sensed some frustration between HR and the engineering. Some engineers just didn't make good interviewers. HR wished I had gotten a different interviewer.

I had a recruiter obtain approval to have my technical review ignored because I pointed out so many flaws in it. At that point I had too much of a distaste for the process to continue.

But I kept being approached by Google recruiters, kept recounting what had happened last time and asked if I could expect better this time. None could promise things had improved, and a few did express that kind of frustration.

This was years ago now. Could have changed of course. But I started telling them to go away.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#478

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…

>What's not in a Linux inode?

Wow, even if you were hiring filesystem experts to write filesystems I think there are a million better ways to ask that question.

e.g.: "Hey, talk me through the design of a really basic filesystem, it needs to support hardlinks, symlinks, files and directories."

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#479
post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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+-“.

Yes and apparently clang is now suffering from Google not caring about latest C++ compliance.

Apple mostly cares about LLVM based tooling in the context of Objective-C and Swift, Metal is C++14 dialect, and IO/Driver Kit require only a subset similar in goals to Embedded C++, so that leaves the remaing of the clang community to actually provide the efforts for ISO C++20 compliancy.

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support/20

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#480
> Research shows that if interview processes drag on, good candidates lose interest - and go elsewhere

I certainly would! More than one hour of interviewing is a sure sign of a diseased company that probably suffers from massive management overhead, internal conflict resulting in inability to make decisions or someone's complete paralysis out of fear of making wrong decisions.

You'd have to be pretty desperate wanting to start work at such a place. If not, better to keep looking and not waste your time.

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