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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#761

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

janoc wrote: post #380
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…

Google is notorious for this. I have been headhunted by them multiple times in the past. The last time their recruiter called me and explained me that after the usual screening and HR calls I would need to pass multiple increasingly complex technical interview rounds - and then THEY will decide on the role and project I am best suited for (if at all). I have flatly asked the guy whether they are being serious and tur…

>credentials can't be trusted

As much as I dislike interviewing I totally agree with this statement. Almost none of my graduating classmates could write a fizz buzz and I wish I were kidding.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#762

Post by krab »

gorpomon wrote: post #608

On my team, I inherited an interview process with 7 steps. It's a long one for sure, and it's not a process I can change. But as a hiring manager I mitigate issues brought up in this article by doing a few really easy things: 1. On my first chat with a candidate, I layout the entire interview process. I acknowledge that it is long and I preemptively thank them for going through the process and say that we value their…

I like your approach and I think it really makes the process much better. However, this one thing stands out to me:

> I acknowledge that it is long [...] and say that we value their time.

I dislike this communication style. Maybe it's a cultural difference. I've heard several times from an American speaker that they "value my time/comfort/satisfaction". At the same time their act clearly showed that they valued something else much more.

For me, your sentence would sound much more personal if you just omitted this last part and kept only the explanation.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#763

Post by Macha »

kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #750
sdevonoes wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I thought it was exactly those who Google wants to pass. Anecdote: ex-colleague of mine who is not specially bright studied 3 months how to "crack the coding interview" and got a job at Google. His knowledge about algorithms and data structures was like mine: I know what a tre…

I’m trying to think of how many tree structures I’ve encountered in all the projects I’ve ever programmed on, in my entire career. Maybe one or two?

A tree for performance? I've used a rope once or twice.

Plenty of times where I've used trees because they're the logical representation of the problem (ever had a field called "children" in your code? HN comments are a tree. Etc.)

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#764

Post by konschubert »

janoc wrote: post #397
sz4kerto wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this was scripted; it's a typical sign of bad interviewers when they think that 1) they are smart 2) therefore if you're smart you have the same way of thinking 3) also you have the same knowledge (and gaps!) about irrelevant details Therefore instead of checking your knowledge they check whether you're like them. It's just amateurish.

It is also scripted. Google used to use internal people do to the screening but not anymore, they have outsourced it to agencies. And a random recruiting agency drone on the phone, paid minimal wage, can't be expected to ask sensible questions, so they get a script to choose questions from, along with expected answers.

I can't believe that Google would outsource their hiring process, do they think they can keep their quality this way?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#765

Post by actually_a_dog »

rubicon33 wrote: post #695
throwawayboise wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never written a sort from scratch since my college days, over 30 years ago. Also never had a job interview that asked me do to so, or any other coding questions. I'm planning more for retirement than a next job at this point, but I shake my head at what my younger colleagues need to go through these days for the opportunity to write JavaScript with IDEs that do most of the work for you.

I liken it to what lawyers go through with the bar here in CA. It's gatekeeping. Just like I don't think the CA bar should have a pass rate in the 20% range, I don't think coding interviews should ask riddles that are nearly impossible to solve on the fly unless you get lucky and memorized THAT riddle in your studying.

Except that lawyers have to pass the California bar once in order to get licensed; we SWEs have to pass the "bar" every time we look for a new job.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#766

Post by nobleach »

crispyambulance wrote: post #628
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).

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…

I think you've hit the nail on the head. I've been on both sides of the desk so many times. When I'm hiring, I'm trying so hard to recognize the person is nervous, probably interviewing at multiple places, and they don't want to be asked to solve stupid algorithmic puzzles that will never come up in their daily work. While interviewing, I try to recognize that they NEED to ascertain whether I can actually solve problems performantly and quickly. They also need to quickly decide if I'm worth the high dollars they're about to offer me.

Because of this, I often hire people I've already worked with. I'm also often hired by people who've already worked with me. I hate that this leads to a very homogeneous experience... or even what might seem like gatekeeping. I've just found that the best indicator of how a person will perform, is already being familiar with their work.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#767

Post by mLuby »

biztos wrote: post #340
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 find it… troubling? That a technical interviewer can’t tell for herself whether your code will work. Wouldn’t you ideally want people who actually understand code to be giving the coding questions?

Funny and illuminating examples of this are the excellent "hexing the technical interview" series (read in any order): https://aphyr.com/tags/interviews

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#768

Post by nobleach »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #714
woofie11 wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretend there's a Programming Quotient (PQ) which is like IQ. Let's say Google would like candidates with PQ>130 with 95% confidence. Google has an error with std. div. of 15 points in measurement of PQ in jobs interviews. Google then needs to set the hiring bar at 160 PQ in order to get those candidates. This: - screens most qualified candidates out; but - most candidates who do screen in are qualified Statistics wo…

I’ve used Google’s software. I’m not sure they’re all that great. Someone just released a product that offloads Chrome to the cloud. Gmail has a very long loading screen. Hangouts was replaced by something like 4 incompatible apps. Android phones are significantly less power efficient than iPhones. YouTube copyright notices are trivial to game. Etc

The number of things Google farms out to "the contractors" is crazy. I've talked to a few folks that got to work in the big beautiful facility but, the code they were writing was the worst, "pound it out, who cares how it looks or how well it performs" quality.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#770

Post by konschubert »

thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #512
torginus wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Have you seen their earnings, they're in a monopoly position, none of this matters any more.
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