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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#901

Post by notJim »

laurent92 wrote: post #582
bb88 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's funny is that I specifically remember a conference where some library that a google employee wrote was terrible. The one google developer talking about it, disavowed any responsibility of it. Whatever metrics that google is using in their interviews have probably become worthless in the past decade as people game the system.

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…

Curious about the age of the person who supposedly wrote it in 6 minutes. If you're fresh out of school, "String.contains" may be top of mind, but the vast majority of people never write that function in practice, so it's easy to not think about.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#902

Post by telotortium »

dekhn wrote: post #739
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 failed quicksort the first time I interviewed at google. then got hired and worked there for 12 years and never wrote a sort. I also complained that google's coding solution (docs, basically) was a terrible way to code, other companies use coderpad or whatever, but I expect that Google will never change this. They love to hire people who are excellent at coding CS approximate solutions, but have little to no judgem…

The pandemic has finally. forced them to move to something more Coderpad-like

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#903

Post by bsder »

m-ee wrote: post #322
bsder wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it's FAANG And that's really the issue. The FAANG's are throwing around so much money that people are willing to put up with almost any amount of abuse to be on the other side of the line. The FAANGs can deal out any amount of abuse and they will still have a line of applicants around the block--there is no negative feedback in the interview process no matter how bad they make it. > Hiring in Tech is broken and…

I've interviewed for ME, EE, FW, and SW roles. It's not better in hardware. There's an equivalent to all the things people are complaining about here. Take home coding challenge -> take home hw design challenge where they expect you to have access to expensive software. I got a FW challenge once that assumed I had two different dev boards on hand. Spot the bugs in this printed out code? Find everything wrong with thi…

> Spot the bugs in this printed out code? Find everything wrong with this schematic in 5 minutes.

I don't consider those terribly unfair. Depending upon how the discussion goes, I could see myself doing something like this.

For example, one of my standard questions for firmware people is a state machine in Verilog (for those who claim to know Verilog). What I'm looking for is whether you know the difference between blocking and non-blocking assignment.

> Take home coding challenge -> take home hw design challenge where they expect you to have access to expensive software.

> I have a dozen more questions to get through.

These are not fine, though.

> The interviewer was completely wrong

This, sadly, happens. I have had an interviewer cite incorrect information about semiconductor device physics.

Quite often, though, it happens in more junior interviewers with "standard" questions that are passed around because the interviewer doesn't fully grasp the question. When I was a junior engineer, I was always terrified that I would make that screwup. I used to do review study on my own questions and area before every interview to make sure that didn't happen.

For example, I had an interviewer who gave me a question of "clock a binary number in serially and use a state machine to divide it by 3." It's a really cool question and was passed around between engineers of a certain company. But ...

This is either a really easy question or a really hard question depending upon your choice of direction to clock the number in. If you pick the easy way, it's something like 3 states and it's obvious. If you pick the hard way, it's 6 states and takes a somewhat subtle inductive proof to show that you're right. If the interviewer doesn't know that this can happen, he can't dig the candidate out if they pick the hard direction.

Of course, you know which direction I picked in the interview. LOL.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#904

Post by 908B64B197 »

dcolkitt wrote: post #115
MattGaiser wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where I realised no one gave a shit about anything except my utility as a walking set of tech keywords. I am genuinely asking. Why is this objectionable? Why do people find it so horrible that their labour is a commodity? To me that just tells me I should treat my labour like a merchant treats his goods. Always be checking the market to ensure you have something worth selling and while you might sign long term deal…

Because selecting candidates based on tech stack is almost universally the sign of incompetent tech management. Anybody who understands software, knows that intelligence and master of fundamentals trumps tech stack experience without exception. Linus Torvalds would unquestionably become a better Ruby on Rails developer within four weeks than 90% of people with 10 YoE in it. Good organizations hire talented and bright…

> Good organizations hire talented and bright people with mastery of CS and SWE fundamentals. Bad organizations think "oh we use Java, better hire Java programmers". Really bad organizations think "oh we use JUnit, Spring Boot and IntelliJ, better hire people with experience in JUnit, Spring Boot and IntelliJ"

You can't just go around telling people that: you are going to make hiring harder once everyone figures it out!

When you get a referral for a 10x and you're meeting at Blue Bottle you need an ice breaker; clueless community-college tier HR asking for versions of frameworks makes for an excellent one!

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#905

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #825
buro9 wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not disagree. The more people who interview, the more average the candidate has to be to succeed. For all the talk of "hire fast, fire fast" the reality is that most companies do not know how to evaluate someone within the probation time period in which they could let go of someone with ease (usually under 60 days) and after that they then fear doing so even when it's miserable for both the person (candidate) an…

> the probation time period in which they could let go of someone with ease (usually under 60 days) Is this a thing? I would certainly judge a company doing this, and likely leave a manager who hired someone with an expectation that the beginning is just a probationary period, if I’m understanding you correctly (I hope i’m not). Leaving a safe job for a probationary period puts too much risk on the employee that the…

IME most UK jobs have probationary periods. There's also a statutory probationary period of 2 years where you can be fired for any[1] reason.

[1] strictly not any reason, you can't be discriminated against, but enough reasons that they could invent one.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#906

Post by randomdata »

konschubert wrote: post #764
janoc wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Have they kept their quality? Google does a few things really well, but that drops off very quickly when you look across their suite of offerings.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#907

Post by notJim »

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 is all ridiculous. Of course you have to test that people can code, but it doesn't follow that people must be able to code without any references available, or without using standard libraries. I can code just fine, but I still have to look up the arguments to functions I don't use very often, etc.

As far as algorithms/data structures, most of what we do on a day-to-day basis is more about selecting the appropriate data structures and algorithms that fit the problem, and assembling them together correctly. I've never needed to code a hashtable, but I need to think about their characteristics and whether they're appropriate all the time. I've never written a btree, but I do understand database indices pretty well. So in my view, asking candidates to code up these things on the fly in an interview with no reference materials is a total waste of time. What matters more is if they can correctly apply them. If you're really sure someone needs to write these things, then a more realistic move would be to sit them down with a standard textbook or paper and see if they can get the code working.

> After all, we expect you to be able to write production-level code that servers billions of users.

And you do all this through sheer clairvoyance, rather than using tools like unit tests, code review, design specs, etc, right? No? Then why are you expecting people in interviews to do it without those things.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#908

Post by Twirrim »

notJim wrote: post #898
Twirrim wrote: post #824

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everyone makes up their own. I can't for the life of me fathom how this doesn't subject them to all sorts of discrimination etc. claims (one of the reasons lots of companies favour standardised questions).

Obviously the drawback for FAANG is that standardised questions would rather rapidly leak. Very quickly you'll just end up with candidates that know how to answer your questions.

Where I work now, it's a mix of pool questions ("soft" skills) and interviewer-made questions (technical skills), but it's not a hard and fast rule to use the pool questions. I rarely use the precise wording for the pool questions, and instead adapt them to match the conversation with the candidate.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#909

Post by lrem »

VonGallifrey wrote: post #580
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.

> A typical team of 6-8 replaces two persons per year. How is this fact not seen as a complete failure of hiring practices or company/team leadership?

Internal mobility is strongly encouraged. People typically move after promotion, which is expected after 2 years. Some people don't like to move, bringing it down to about 2/year. All working as intended. Then, people moving out tend to want to join new teams, for the career growth opportunity, while you want new hires in established teams.

Note: that's anecdotal from a couple years of observation. I haven't looked into any Google-wide statistics (and if I did I would not blabber about them). But I'd be surprised if this was way off.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#910

Post by __app_dev__ »

OOPMan wrote: post #578
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).

My profile on LinkedIn for the longest time stated "No PHP jobs please" as a way to weed out recruiters that would send me job offers for PHP roles on the basis that I once did some PHP. I've updated the profile to include "No FAANG companies" because I'm pretty sure I would not be a good fit for them but that didn't stop their recruiters from pestering me.

Good one, I get contacted by Amazon several times a week on LinkedIn to apply.

For my LinkedIn I listed minimum requirements and it saves me 100+ inquiries per week but I still get a ton of irrelevant jobs.

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