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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#911
post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inode question is tricky. It is certainly not something an employer should take for granted you have memorized. But the answer can be reached by reasoning, at least if you know something about filesystems and the concept of hard links. Which you probably do if you have read the "ln" man page. It is still a pretty poor question, I remember getting a similar kind of question when I passed through the (at the time,…

Well, maybe it'd be better called "aptitude test": if you don't know that gasoline lighter than water that means you've never handled it manually, so better not put you into an automechanic position.

It was 2 days of various tests, resulting in a number of scores, physical, intelligence, psycological etc. All together an aptitude test. I don't know why this was called intelligence test, it was a mix of questions, not all of these kind. I remember many were something like "circle the fourth word of the second sentence except if..."

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#912
post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed for a software engineering position with Goldman once (in London). The process spanned several weeks of phone interviews with people in the UK and US (I lost track of the count), followed by a full day of back-to-back interviews on-site with 12 different people - some via video conference with New York. Questions were extremely diverse, both wide and deep. Early on in the process I decided to look at th…

The software industry interview process is such a disaster. The worst part of every job I've ever had (including FAANG) is hitting the LeetCode grind when I want to leave. It's so fucking worthless. Just a giant waste of time. This entire fucking industry has its head up its ass. I can't think of a single other high-paying profession that pulls this shit.

Totally agree! I've been getting hit up by FAANG recruiters (and other companies) non-stop this year.

I live in Los Angeles where companies never did this type of interview when I last got a new job (4+ years ago) so I had to grind LeetCode for several months then didn't get the job I studied for even though I got all questions right (I was a little slow on some of them). I kind of resent it because I know my time can be much better spent (keeping up on security topics for example).

The process is so bad it makes me hope to be no longer doing software development as a employee sooner than later.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#913
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.

What did you do differently once you accepted it?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#914
post #732

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Is there a shortage of attorneys in California?

many people including myself believe that availability of legal services is broadly lacking in the US. not necessarily a shortage of attorneys, but a shortage of attorneys that can do work for anything but top-quintile clients. artificially restricting who is and isn't allowed to perform certain jobs often has that sort of effect.

Not GP, but I never thought of this side effect before. Thank you for making me aware of it!

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#915

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…

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.

I'm really curious what company "we" is.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#916

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As i mentioned in another post, don't forget to work in those LP's otherwise you get 0 Bezos points and your experience is worthless. Edit: Meant LP's. Leadership Principles.

What's GP? Gaussian process? General practitioner? Or, most commonly on HN, grandparent [post]? Or maybe the whole point of using that abbreviation is to exclude those outside Amazon?

This is one thing that really pisses me off about hacker news. The excessive use of abbreviations only hinders communication, it doesn't improve it.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#917
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…

What was the problem statement you gave to the candidate?

What were you trying to tease out from the problem statement?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#918

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These numbers are misleading af. Most of those applications are just spam, not really relevant and never get read by any human. I’ve done ~150 interviews for backend roles at google and based on my experience 4 years ago if you make it to onsite you have 5-10% of getting an offer

So the top range is 10% chance of getting an offer? And how many hours do you have to spend chasing 10%?

Somewhere between 0 and infinity? I asked extremely simple questions algorithmically (not anything posted online) and didn’t discount candidates on not knowing the algorithm but about half of the people couldn’t write ~20 lines of code after we’d already talked through it. Another 30% could but the code was total mess. I passed roughly 20% personally of which about half passed the hiring committee.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#919
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These numbers are misleading af. Most of those applications are just spam, not really relevant and never get read by any human. I’ve done ~150 interviews for backend roles at google and based on my experience 4 years ago if you make it to onsite you have 5-10% of getting an offer

if you get onsite at most companies for an experienced position the chance is rather 50% to get hired. if i would know the chance is only 5 % i would decline the onsite interview at google.

From my experience 50% couldn’t write code at all. So yeah if you only look for “can code” checkbox then you’d probably extend offers to half. Google chose to place the bar higher and that’s their right to do that

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#920
post #762

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 somet…

Agreed. It's more like:

> I acknowledge that it is long process, so we appreciate your patience.

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