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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#511

Post by mongol »

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 inode question is tricky. It is certainly not something an employer should take for granted you have memorized. But the answer can be reached by reasoning, at least if you know something about filesystems and the concept of hard links. Which you probably do if you have read the "ln" man page.

It is still a pretty poor question, I remember getting a similar kind of question when I passed through the (at the time, in Sweden) mandatory conscription testing, where you are tested for which role you best fit as a military conscript.

One question on the intelligence test was: "What is heaviest, gasoline or water?". I did not know how to approach the question, I had not memorized the density of gasoline and I didn't think an intelligence test could have assumed that either. I was stumped. How could that be an intelligence test question? Only afterwards did I realize that the test creators probably assumed that knowing that gasoline floats on water as common knowledge, and if you were intelligent enough you should be able to derive the answer from that. I think the inode question is similar.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#512

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

torginus wrote: post #441
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 cruel and inhuman, but if you're Google, there's some cold rationality behind this. I think the process goes for them like this: There's 100 people applying for any given position, 10 of which might be good hires. It's reasonable from their point of view to subject the interviewees to a process that culls 83 bad ones, and 7 good ones so that only 10 people need to be interviewed by expensive on-staff engineers,…

The rationality doesn't reflect the reality of Google being unable to innovate and continually competing with itself. Will another engineer from the same cohort who knows the same trivia and has the same education be able to shake things up?

What happens to the 3 that get rejected, do they try again later and filter through? Or do they tire of the process, give up, and work for competitors?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#513

Post by DougBTX »

smt88 wrote: post #327
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #305

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.

I don't buy that argument, as a programmer you have to write out code following a precise syntax all the time. Programming would be insanely tedious without knowing correct syntax.

Having said that, if someone came up with an interview test which used especially esoteric parts of the language in unconventional ways and then asked to spot the errors, the could be a dubious question.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#514

Post by grumple »

rejectedandsad wrote: post #475
bostik wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They are memorization tests at best. At worst they test which candidates have been unemployed most recently so they can cram leetcode study.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#515

Post by devnull3 »

rejectedandsad wrote: post #475
bostik wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> correct base solution in the first 2-3 minutes

Not only correct solution but also generate alternatives to showcase what other things you know to get strong-hire.

Example:

This problem was asked in Google: https://leetcode.com/problems/cat-and-mouse/

It is actually based on a paper [1]. Plus it seems it is expected that one needs to know about 'alpha-beta' pruning algos for such problems.

If you solve this using dfs ... its basically gtfo

[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Undirected-Cat-and-Mou...

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#516

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

catgary wrote: post #253
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 hiring process is like, 80% about marketing hype, right? Like you have to manufacture consent for the public to just accept that a private institution has a monopoly on search and browsers. It's pretty clever, I'm surprised Microsoft didn't try it (or maybe I was just too young to remember).

I believe Microsoft were the first to do it.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#517

Post by fredgrott »

mongol wrote: post #511
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 inode question is tricky. It is certainly not something an employer should take for granted you have memorized. But the answer can be reached by reasoning, at least if you know something about filesystems and the concept of hard links. Which you probably do if you have read the "ln" man page. It is still a pretty poor question, I remember getting a similar kind of question when I passed through the (at the time,…

mote not a good example as oil which is also hydrocarbon based does in fact float for awhile but not due to density

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#518

Post by jd115 »

jd115 wrote: post #424
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 interviewed for a software engineering position with Goldman once (in London). The process spanned several weeks of phone interviews with people in the UK and US (I lost track of the count), followed by a full day of back-to-back interviews on-site with 12 different people - some via video conference with New York. Questions were extremely diverse, both wide and deep. Early on in the process I decided to look at th…

Hey! Did I just get some downvotes from Goldman junkies? Ahahahaha That's adorable.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#519

Post by bborud »

TGImemegen wrote: post #503
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…

Googler here. At some stage of the interview process, we have to check whether you're able to code, there's no way around it if you're applying for a coding position. So yes, we'll have you code the solution to a problem. Of course in the real world we'd use a library or look up the algorithm on stack overflow like everyone else. Good for you if you came up with a workable algorithm for the problem quickly. But that'…

Well, in real life this varies. I've seen interviewers from among the first 200 Google employees, nitpick their way through someone's whiteboard code, obsessing over every comma and semicolon. It was embarrassing. And I have to say that while shadowing these interviews I couldn't help but think "I've seen your code - you have bigger problems than getting the syntax perfect, mate" (about the interviewer).

It depends on who you get as your interviewers, so generalizing isn't really useful. Some interviewers can't relate the interview to what it is supposed to tell you. I've seen that in inexperienced interviewers and I've seen that in very experienced interviewers who had enough GOOG stock to buy a small country.

If the interviewer can't think of a better way to test candidates, that's on the interviewer. Not the candidate.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#520

Post by tchalla »

AJRF wrote: post #469
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).

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.

> 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.

And yet, they routinely do pass these interviews.

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