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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#871

Post by azemetre »

cubano wrote: post #277
billytetrud wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, every bad hire is really bad. However, companies generally don't put in any effort into seriously evaluating your publicly available work. I have reams and reams of open source code companies can take a look at, and I've never seen any evidence that any company I've ever interviewed at has looked at that work. That's a result of companies being completely incompetent at evaluation and disrespecting their candida…

Well the obvious issue here is...how do they truly know you wrote the code? Its pretty much impossible to source where OS code comes from, and it sure wouldn't be hard to find an obscure OS project and pass off the code as yours, if you were that sort of person. And this takes me to my 2nd point, and that is they current hiring model totally leads to companies hiring people who are good at interviewing not necessaril…

If a person has a history of giving talks, writing books, or creating content around code they've written there's probably a high likely hood they are capable workers and can code.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#872

Post by fidesomnes »

mrb wrote: post #303
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…

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…

You were really terrible at these and everyone thought so.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#873

Post by mildweed »

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…

Maybe even lay out the interview process IN the job post?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#874

Post by mrb »

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…

Well, as evidenced by this thread, candidates are frustrated by the interviewing process at Google, in particular by poor/generic/boring questions that test a narrow/irrelevant topic. So, yes, I took pride in selecting questions that aren't like this in order to find what the candidate is good at, not what they don't know.

And rest assured that I always made it very clear to the candidate that abandoning a question they are stuck on is best to maximize their chance of doing well in the interview. If I have a 45-min time slot to spend on a candidate, I don't want to waste 30 min on a single coding challenge that they do poorly on and have barely 15 min to cover other topics. If I get a sense they won't do well after 10 min, I stop it, move on, and that leaves us 35 min to do other coding challenges. I have more chances of finding what the candidate is good at in 35 min than in 15 min.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#875

Post by neutronicus »

kevstev wrote: post #808
trinovantes wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We may have had the same interviewer- tbh I thought this was pretty reasonable and more of a warm up really. I think this also lead to a discussion on some questionable logic and how you could improve the code. I had 10+ years experience in C++, I thought it was completely reasonable. Especially compared to their later questions around something along the lines of finding a shortest path in a tree. I interviewed ther…

Yeah, I had an interview like that

There was a function with a syntax error, that also returned a pointer to stack memory, and made some logic error where it assumed a class with no vtable would be polymorphic.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#876

Post by peoplefromibiza »

marcosdumay wrote: post #802
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The interviewer told me very matter of factly that it was in fact, the filename. which is not even true in some file systems that can inline data directly into the inode, if the data is small enough. for the downvoter(s): > If the data of a file fits in the space allocated for pointers to the data, this space can conveniently be used. For example, ext2 and its successors store the data of symlinks (typically file n…

> the data of symlinks (typically file names) This means the name of the file the symlink points to. It's not the file name of the symlink itself.

true

but they are both paths in the end

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#877

Post by gregkerzhner »

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'…

This statement "we don't usually care if you don't know find the perfect algorithm (unless it's for a senior position)" made me chuckle.

I can see this interviewer writing feedback like "Well, this candidate didn't come up with a perfect implementation of Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm, but its OK, they were pretty close. Oh wait, they are a senior engineer? Nevermind... they should have really mastered these algorithms while building CRUD APIs all these years."

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#878

Post by bostik »

soheil wrote: post #853
mox1 wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you feel if you were going to a job as a writer, and the interviewee asked you to put a story, poem, etc. down on a napkin, with a crayon? Like thats how I would feel writing code into freakin google docs during a job interview...with Google. Tie 1 arm behind by back as the synax goes wonky, I'm fighting the spacing, etc. etc. Or put mario Andretti into a ford focus, then test his lap times, with 0 warning.…

Google Doc is specifically designed for writing and reading and used probably by more people than any other piece of software ever for that task. And you think it's fair to compare it to crayon and napkins? What a world we live in. Programming is often about thinking through the problem, but if you can't separate yourself form your IDE when writing code and it's about syntax then that says more about your style.

While I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment, I can provide a real life take. Not specific to GDocs, this applies to all browser based editors.

You may usually write code in a terminal based programmer's editor (vim, emacs, ...) and realise the code you've just written is not quite right. You want to delete the last two words. There's even a default and handy keybinding for doing that.

So you press ^W twice.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#879

Post by hmsshagatsea »

enumjorge wrote: post #800
hmsshagatsea wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I do agree the CA bar is tougher than it should be, a lot of the low passage rate comes from graduates of less-than-stellar schools. If you look into passage rate per school it’s naturally much better at the higher ranked universities.

Isn’t that almost the definition of gatekeeping? Make the process to enter the law profession so difficult that only students from select universities have a good chance. Of course prospective lawyers should clear a certain level of knowledge before they are allowed to practice, but the passing rate is puzzlingly low. CA law schools, as a group l, really only prepare such a low number of their students to practice?

Well, not exactly. You need to have a certain level of competancy to be an effective lawyer. Those who arent “good enough” for the better law schools are often preyed upon by overpriced and underresourced schools to give false hope those who couldnt cut the mustard. Not saying you cant be successful if you go to a crappy school, but the chances of it happening are slim to none. Just look at pass rates of Whittier (I think they’re shut down now) or Thomas Jefferson and then look at the tuiton rates. And this isn’t even counting the non-ABA approved schools...

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#880

Post by neilv »

bborud wrote: post #506
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 worked at Google and did a fair share of interviews. Two observations: When you have 3 interviews per week for a prolonged period, you, as an interviewer, are not going to do a stellar job every time. What's worse: you will develop a routine and it becomes very easy to give candidates that do not fit your routine a lower grade. It takes effort on the interviewers part to recognize talent that perhaps doesn't fit yo…

Thanks, these seem like the most thoughtful Googler/Xoogler comments I recall hearing on the topic.
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