The rise of never-ending job interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#891

Post by JTbane » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #683

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 sometimes have to implement a sorting algorithm when I write bare metal code that doesn't have any sort of standard library available. Of course, being a 1337 hacker, I then resort to the state of the art bubble sort. Or maybe an insertion sort if I'm feeling fancy. But enough bragging.

Funnily enough, if you're sorting small amounts of stuff it does not matter what algorithm you use. If fact your O(n log n) sorts are probably a lot slower on less than some millions of elements.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#892

Post by rfwhyte » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

Think of it this way. Company A is hiring for role X. They get 100 candidates, interview 10, with each candidate going through a 5 interviews at an average of an hour each, assuming they hire 1 candidate, that's 45 hours of people's lives that have now been utterly wasted.

The problem is companies don't care about you and your time until you are their employee. They'll gladly waste hours and hours and hours of your time, because doing so costs them nothing.

There's actually a super simple solution to this problem.

Require interviews be paid. Doesn't have to be a lot, a simple honorarium scaled to the role's salary would suffice.

If your time has a cost to companies, they'll stop wasting it and start optimizing to minimize the time hiring takes instead of optimizing for other factors and ignoring the negative externality of wasting peoples time.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#893

Post by autarch » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

sandyarmstrong wrote: post #844

autarch wrote: post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> communication ability (this is very, very close to being racist…draw your own conclusions) I'm trying to draw my own conclusion but I'm confused. Communication ability is very important for developers and other technical roles. We need to be able to talk to each other about our work, and in many organizations we also need to be able to work effectively with other non-technical staff. Of course, this doesn't mean th…

The way I read it is that "communication ability" is something people can use to justify racist hiring decisions. For example, labeling non-white speaking patterns as "unprofessional", or non-American accents as "poor communication skills". When in fact, these candidates may have excellent communication skills, and in a blind interview situation the same interviewer might praise their writing abilities. But you don't…

This makes sense.

I think it's really important to spell out what "communication ability" means so that all the interviewers know what they're looking for. And more generally, it's very important that before you start the hiring process, you have a clearly defined set of criteria that everyone participating in the hiring process agrees on.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#894

Post by graphenus » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

woofie11 wrote: post #643

crispyambulance wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 very much agree with everything you wrote, except for the arrogance bit. Many actually suffer from the impostor syndrome and just a few I could call arrogant. I'm sorry you had to deal with them but please don't generalize from just a few.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#895

Post by loftyal » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:10 PM UTC

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.

If they're IQ tests, then why does doing a whole bunch of leetcode questions make me better at it? Isn't IQ supposed to be relatively stable throughout one's lifetime?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#896

Post by mlengineerio » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

I have a lot of friends got FB offers and most of them spend between 3 months to 6 months to prepare for the interview. With that level of preparation, some of them have to sacrifice their responsibilities on their day job. It's tough. (you can read some stories from my blog).

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#897

Post by notJim » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

Bodell wrote: post #627

lordnacho wrote: post #569

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). 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…

IDK, if the interview is just a few hours of misery to get a significant financial upside, it's not such a big deal. People always assume the job will be miserable too, but that varies from team to team. Especially because the salary is high enough that you may be able to save enough to buy your life back if you're careful and have time on your side.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#898

Post by notJim » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

Twirrim wrote: post #824

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).

100%, speaking as someone who's been both sides of the equation in FAANG hiring. Part of the problem is the sheer scale of hiring, but I think most of the problem comes down to the lack of feedback or evaluation mechanisms on the interviewing side. They train you up, half a days worth, training tells you not to be an arsehole, not to ask stupid questions, not to have unreasonable demands of candidates, not to be bias…

> No one evaluates your interview questions

Are you saying each interviewer just makes up their own questions?! That's ludicrous if so. Where I work, we have a standardized pool, with standardized evaluation criteria.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#899

Post by laurent92 » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

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’m the interviewer, I’m still wondering what happened.

This was the introductory question before launching 200 threads and asking him to solve the deadlocks/inefficiencies, which was the real question supposed to let him show off his skills in front of my employees, specifically crafted for him because I wanted to persuade my employees he was an excellent hire. So he had a taylored chance to show off his skills but failed at the introductory question.

But on the other hand, how can you be asked “Here’s a substring, return true or false if it contains the substring, this is the introduction of 5 questions so don’t sweat it” and not just write two nested loops and an if? I’d pass on UTF8 problems, but when you’ve been working with Java for CRUD apps, you still should have your UTF8 correct. This is how you end up with passwords that must be ASCII because the programmer is bad.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#900

Post by ricardobayes » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 6:42 PM UTC

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…

we have, we don't have technical interviews anymore, just a 'cultural fit' discussion. coding has become so trivial anyone with a brain can piece together snippets from stackoverflow. do yourself a favor and if all you do is crud operations in a web app, don´t even bother with tech rounds.