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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#611

Post by tnecio »

radiator wrote: post #500
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.

If the applicant has graduated from a university, technical school, whatever, then look at the records from their exams there. Also taking into account the average level of the university, technical school in question.

That'd be really unfair on people who were busy e.g. gaining actual work experience

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#612

Post by smt88 »

DougBTX wrote: post #513
smt88 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> as a programmer you have to write out code following a precise syntax all the time

When did I claim that the IDE absolves you of needing to know the syntax?

It doesn't. But between autocomplete, hinting, linting, and any other static analysis, it makes it close to painless to switch between languages without making horrifying mistakes. The top-tier JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ and Rider come to mind) will even tell you ways to make your code more efficient or modern, like changing a bunch of if/else to pattern matching.

Why should I have to remember the full truthiness table of JavaScript? Why should I have to remember what all the different string delimiters do in every language? It's not important. My IDE can (and does) know that I'm trying to do some kind of string interpolation and will just fix it for me.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#613

Post by binarymax »

If you can’t make a decision after 3 rounds then you have no business recruiting anyone and should just give up. You’ll not only irritate and push away all your good candidates, but you’ll also make your staff angry that they’re always wasting time interviewing people.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#614

Post by xorcist »

lrem wrote: post #299
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…

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,

Everything above would make sense if the question was "what is an inode?". But it was "what is an inode not?". That wording doesn't make much sense to ask anyone, no matter how you spin it.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#615

Post by ivanche »

GistNoesis wrote: post #284
Nition wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet if they ask you for an answer to a quirky question like "why are manhole covers round?", they expect a clever answer like "they can't fall in", rather than a pedestrian answer like "well, probably they just started making them that shape for some simple production reason, and then everyone else just kinda of did the same thing because it worked."

It's just an invitation to discuss curves of constant width, like the Reuleaux triangle, that has indeed been made into a man-hole cover.

Ah the famous Reuleaux triangle, something which 99% of software developers around the world deal with every day!

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#616

Post by ryeguy_24 »

I work for a big 4 consulting firm and I think our process works well and is extremely short. We hire financial engineers (quants) and data scientists. I’ve lived through working with hundreds of hires and can say from actual experience it works quite well. This is our process:

1. Review resumes to see who meets the criteria based on credentials.

2. Recruiter phone screen to screen for any glaring issues

3. We conduct an interview day and the candidate interviews with 3-4 people (30 minutes each). We have a mix of levels conducting interviews but make sure to have at least 2 leaders from our practice. We try to make sure we collectively poke around all areas (technical, cultural, communication).

4. That same day or the following day (want to make sure candidate is fresh in our heads) we discuss candidate.

5. Each interviewer (starting with the most junior) has to speak about candidate and rate them from 1-3. It can be any decimal rating but cannot be a 1.5 (an “I don’t know” answer).

6. Interestingly, we are mostly in the same ballpark on these calls and when we move forward, we are generally happy with that person.

I can’t speak for the candidate who may have to wait a bit between application, recruiter conversation, and interviews. But at the very least, the interview to decision process is pretty painless and you’ll have a decision within 2 days max.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#617

Post by Macha »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #461
pjmlp wrote: 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+-“.

Go is also an outgrowth of the Google idea that was first expressed in their style guide of basically "engineers are too dumb for harder features, let's ban them in the style guide (for C++) or just not have them (for Go)"

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#618

Post by lumost »

mattkrause wrote: post #604
laurent92 wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my startup I interviewed a 48 years old senior Java programmer with excellent resume, who took 1hr to write a String.contains(), it only worked for the requested 4 letters, didn’t work if a letter was repeated twice, and didn’t work with Chinese characters. At least it had the JUnit. I asked an employee to do it too and he made his code pass the JUnit in 6 minutes. The candidate hated the interview, claiming it wa…

But which is more likely? 1. The candidate was a complete and utter fraud and their previous (and apparently well-regarded) employers were too stupid or negligent to notice this, wasting literally millions of dollars (48-21 * $100,000+). 2. Something about the interview failed to let this person demonstrate the skills that had kept them employed for two decades. Maybe their mind went blank under pressure, or at the e…

To add to this, I’ve found engineers more likely to hang on time series and string manipulation problems. Likely due to a combination of not having to code low level functions in these areas, as well as infrequently encountering the problem.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#619

Post by eplanit »

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 lose respect for their engineers, if that one was typical.

Egos are the worst parts of humans. A lack of sense of humor is a personality or character flaw.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#620

Post by ljm »

manish_gill wrote: post #347
mrb wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an ex-Googler who interviewed 100+ candidates (mix of phone & onsite interviews) I can tell you that there is a great variance across the company groups in the quality of questions we ask. And the reason is simple: it's up to the interviewer to choose his questions. Questions aren't standardized. I took great pride in the fact that my questions were unique. I designed them myself, about 30: some quick knowledge te…

Unique questions? What's there to be so proud of in selecting questions? Are you playing jeopardy with the candidates careers? Enticing the candidates to moving on and not answering questions in what is probably the biggest interview in their life? "Quickly!"? > Some candidates make it hard because they want to keep persevering, keep thinking Yeah, amazing that some candidates want to demonstrate their perseverance e…

I'm wary of pushing people to move on to something else because I know that if I was on the receiving end, I would think that I fucked up and the interviewer is trying to get the interview done early.

A candidate who spends far too long on a part of the problem without getting anywhere will get some guidance and nudging. If they take that on board and get back on track then that's great - they're responding to feedback and correcting course. If they remain too committed to their chosen approach and continue to struggle, then we've seen it with our own eyes.

At the end of the day, we're giving candidates the benefit of the doubt and recognising that, a lot of the time, it's their nerves that are doing the talking and you need to work with that.

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