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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#621

Post by xorcist »

trinovantes wrote: post #301
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…

I once had an in-person interview where they gave me a sheet of printed code and asked me to point out the syntax errors. Some interviewers are absolutely insane.

I have done this. Is it really such an insane idea? Makes for a nice break from "what does this code do"? You need some technical "anchor" to make for more concrete discussion points.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#622

Post by nuclearnice1 »

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…

I would say 1 is possible enough that it’s worth checking for. Remember that insanely too hard programming detail is a reaction against a situation where 99% of candidates couldn’t program at all.[1]

[1] https://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#623

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#624

Post by abledon »

jiggawatts wrote: post #577
keyb0ardninja wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You could solve all these questions as long as you are good at problem solving, *given enough time*. However, with tight time constraints and perfomance pressure, the only way you could solve all these questions is memorizing and pr…

There was a hilarious rant about a FAANG hiring question that was something like: "Write an algorithm for detecting if a linked list has any loops in it, in linear time, using a constant amount of memory." Apparently the correct answer is to use "Robert W. Floyd's tortoise and hare algorithm", which is trivial to explain and code. The catch? It took a decade of computer science research between the original statement…

ya its dumb, but also CTCI question 4 or something or linkedlist chapter

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#625

Post by Waterluvian »

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).

It may be a random walk but I think the goal is to convince whoever gets hired that they’re special and talented and elite members of their discipline.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#626

Post by deepGem »

keyb0ardninja wrote: post #557
AJRF wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. You could solve all these questions as long as you are good at problem solving, *given enough time*. However, with tight time constraints and perfomance pressure, the only way you could solve all these questions is memorizing and pr…

It's funny you put it this way. I actually did a couple of hard level Leetcode problems and I thought they would help me immensely in my day to day life in addition to helping me get better at interviews.

No such avail. In fact, unless these algorithms and problem solving methodologies are baked into your memory there's no way you are white boarding a Leetcode hard level problem in an interview.

What I was impressed at an Uber interview was their system design interview process - which basically boiled down to 'how do I abstract retrying a 429 - rate limit exceeded.

What I take is that - the interviewer is expecting a very specific solution even in an open ended system design question. It's like throwing a needle in a haystack at you and expect you to get to the needle in like an hour :).

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#627

Post by Bodell »

lordnacho wrote: post #569
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).

> 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). This might actually be part of the retention strategy. If everyone who works at FAANG knows that they're somewhat l…

Sometimes I see articles about a wrongfully convicted man being let out of prison. This usually comes with a cash payment of some sort. The whole we took 20 years of your life, oops, here’s a million dollars. Every time I see this though I think ‘no, no way does money replace my time.’ That’s simply not good enough. And not because the payments are usually ludicrously low, but because there is no amount of money that would buy off my life.

Same as there is no amount of money you could give me to end my life, a position which I assume is shared by a vast majority of humans.

Time is not money. It’s not even close as an exchange rate. I would never put myself through these types of interview processes (not to mention that I would assume that sort of thing to be indicative of the job itself and company as a whole) because I value my actual life and dignity far and above what I value as an upper middle class income.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#628

Post by crispyambulance »

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).

The experiences that people describe here just confirm something that many of us has learned a long time ago:

NOBODY HAS "FIGURED OUT" HIRING !

Not Google, not Apple, no one. Sure, some places (and individual interviewers) are better at it than others. But at the end of the day, hiring is a deeply subjective process with lots of error and uncertainty built into it's nature. The subjectivity is intrinsic.

Places like Google can afford to be nonsensically picky and not suffer drastic consequences from it. They have a thick, never-ending stream of highly qualified candidates. At their volume of hiring, it doesn't matter to them if they screen out some folks that would have been brilliant hires, nor does it matter if they hire some promising but ultimately disappointing duds. All of that is OK.

Sadly, however, it seems that small shops are trying to cargo-cult Google's hiring practices. That IS harmful to the company and the candidates, IMHO. I think folks in these non-FAANG companies should get trained on how to conduct interviews, especially if they're interviewing non-senior candidates. Interviewing is a skill in itself. It's not something that comes automatically with expertise nor is it something that can be left entirely to HR drones.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#629

Post by amalcon »

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+-“.

This one is extra weird to me because I've written a lot of C++. I don't think I've ever committed a bug related to dynamic dispatch, templates, or some other "fancy" features. Not that I haven't committed bugs, but they're mostly either language agnostic logic issues or things one could have written just as easily in C.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#630

Post by amitport »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #33
sp332 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies don't want to do job training anymore. Instead of a general background and attitude check, they need to know if the candidate has all of the individual skills that will be used on the job.

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.

The fact that they ask this question does show some bias but it may not be as much as you think. I can interview a person and be interested in finding out how much he/she fits like a glove for the tech stack and still put more focus on other qualities. Moreover, I expect a capable dev to not be too judgmental/unconfident and just answer something along the lines:

"No, I'm not familiar with this, but I have done [market themselves, mention relevant experience, ask relevant questions] and I'm confident I can get the job done"

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