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Don’t do interviews, do discussions

thinkingthrough.substack.com

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Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#181

Post by nbzso »

geoduck14 wrote: post #91
CalRobert wrote: post #26

I've finally reached a point in my career where I have a great paying job and like it well enough, and really don't give a shit what interviewers think. Paradoxically, I think I interview a lot better. I can steer conversation towards stuff I care about, and if they insist on being annoying, just thank them for their time and leave. Though this might just be a result of being pickier about who I interview with. If no…

>I've finally reached a point in my career where I have a great paying job and like it well enough, and really don't give a shit what interviewers think. I've interviewed people who have resched this point. It makes for a chill interview. In some cases, the interviewee is overly "chill" and is bored with the challenges described in the job. I prefer to hire people who are EXCITED about the challenges they will face i…

Please, stop. This EXCITEMENT you cannot apply as a Golden rule. You can use it for junior position, may be junior to senior transitions but there is no sane professional with EXPERIENCE and EXPERTISE that will communicate and show excitement in a natural way. It is not logical.

When you have 20+ career, filled with success and failures, from which you can learn how to see and seek BALANCE, the last thing on your mind is excitement. You tend to see the world with realistic and moderate lens. And this is not only good for companies, this is a golden opportunity.

Sadly, more and more I look at the startups as a kindergarten party with serious consequences. Some VC's are playing the game and some lucky kids are taking this as a validation for knowledge and expertise. Selecting teams with "cultural fit" and "excitement" to fulfill a hollow visions of "changing the world".

P.S. I don't feel excitement. I consider myself a craftsman with a passion and deep love for my work. And your way of thinking is positioning you in the group of "thank you for your time" crowd. Automatically.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#182

Post by [deleted] »

mattnewton wrote: post #32
CalRobert wrote: post #26

I've finally reached a point in my career where I have a great paying job and like it well enough, and really don't give a shit what interviewers think. Paradoxically, I think I interview a lot better. I can steer conversation towards stuff I care about, and if they insist on being annoying, just thank them for their time and leave. Though this might just be a result of being pickier about who I interview with. If no…

I wonder how much "interviewing" is really testing the kind of performance anxiety that people without other good offers yet have. I experience this too as I not just as I progressed in my career, but even within one batch of interviewing. I've always tried to batch as many interviews as I can. By the third interview I am feeling much less anxious and just perform much better and by the fourth or fifth I am nailing t…

[deleted]

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#183

Post by russelldjimmy »

nbzso wrote: post #181
geoduck14 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've finally reached a point in my career where I have a great paying job and like it well enough, and really don't give a shit what interviewers think. I've interviewed people who have resched this point. It makes for a chill interview. In some cases, the interviewee is overly "chill" and is bored with the challenges described in the job. I prefer to hire people who are EXCITED about the challenges they will face i…

Please, stop. This EXCITEMENT you cannot apply as a Golden rule. You can use it for junior position, may be junior to senior transitions but there is no sane professional with EXPERIENCE and EXPERTISE that will communicate and show excitement in a natural way. It is not logical. When you have 20+ career, filled with success and failures, from which you can learn how to see and seek BALANCE, the last thing on your min…

As I near the entry into my 30s, I begin to see this more and more clearly. I used to be EXCITED about my job, about a project, about a task. It also made me very stressed and made me take things personally when they didn’t go according to “my vision”. Back then, I’d have read this sentiment as “jaded” and “cynical”. But as I mature, I find the balance, and I find truth in these words.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#184

Post by e-clinton »

wpietri wrote: post #129
mattnewton wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much "interviewing" is really testing the kind of performance anxiety that people without other good offers yet have. I experience this too as I not just as I progressed in my career, but even within one batch of interviewing. I've always tried to batch as many interviews as I can. By the third interview I am feeling much less anxious and just perform much better and by the fourth or fifth I am nailing t…

This is a really important point. Many of the best programmers I've worked with are extremely conscientious people, and I think interview anxiety goes naturally with that. When I'm interviewing people, I work very hard to put them at their ease and discount interview anxiety when I see it. Too many interview processes are tuned for confidence, not actual skill.

Agree with this. The way I start every interview is attempting to disarm the other person and making them feel at ease. I kick back and try and make the conversation as casual and amicable as possible, even if I notice that they aren’t a good fit along the way.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#185

Post by opportune »

dtoms wrote: post #113
01100011 wrote: post #30

Depends on the role and the candidate. If I'm hiring for a lower skill position and the candidate has a strong resume I just might want to verify the resume and confirm they have a basic grasp of the relevant skills. If I'm hiring for a high-output FANG job, you bet your ass we're going to the whiteboard. Sure, I hate it too(on either side of the table), but it's not too much to ask to prove that you can think on you…

so there is no glue code at FAANG? Or you have overqualified folks doing, and getting bored, and jumping ship between FAANG every 1.5 years...

There is no "this engineer should only touch glue code" and "this engineer should work on the really hard cool stuff". For category A, if something is expected to be extremely tedious drudgery, usually vendors/contractors are used rather than full time employees.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#186

Post by [deleted] »

synergy20 wrote: post #180

Good idea on paper, not practical in real. FAANG etc are whiteboard/leetcode-ing everyone, I believe it's one way to filter out the seniors. Be senior's definition it means people don't spend a few months on algorithms to pass interviews because they had no need to use them in the past 20+ years of their career. It's intentional, talking about 'dont do interviews, do discussions' is missing the point. By the way, I d…

[deleted]

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#187

Post by robertwt7 »

I love it, love the way principal engineers in google said that. I know how nervous some candidates are, also how nervous I am when I want to change jobs to big tech companies and being interviewed like that (man live coding sucks).

Wished more companies are implementing this way of interviews

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#188

Post by spurgu »

austincheney wrote: post #100
rsj_hn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, just lie. I think this is bad advice. I have never lied in an interview. I've also never had a job not offered to me if I made it to the in person interview part. This isn't to say that I have magical job-getting powers, but only that not lying has not hurt my chances. In one job I applied for, I didn't have a lot of domain knowledge, but I had knowledge in an adjacent domain and wanted to to jump over to this…

Think about it like this. The goals are attain employment and maximize compensation. That’s it. That said you are probably best off training machine learning to do this for you. It won’t suffer the nonverbal faults associated with dishonesty, because truth to a machine is how effectively it completes the assigned goal.

I recently accepted a position with 20% lower pay, because the work is more interesting, challenging and rewarding.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#189

Post by kamaal »

geoduck14 wrote: post #91
CalRobert wrote: post #26

I've finally reached a point in my career where I have a great paying job and like it well enough, and really don't give a shit what interviewers think. Paradoxically, I think I interview a lot better. I can steer conversation towards stuff I care about, and if they insist on being annoying, just thank them for their time and leave. Though this might just be a result of being pickier about who I interview with. If no…

>I've finally reached a point in my career where I have a great paying job and like it well enough, and really don't give a shit what interviewers think. I've interviewed people who have resched this point. It makes for a chill interview. In some cases, the interviewee is overly "chill" and is bored with the challenges described in the job. I prefer to hire people who are EXCITED about the challenges they will face i…

>>I prefer to hire people who are EXCITED about the challenges they will face in the job.

Anybody who looks excited about things they they have no stake in is just pretending and is likely a ace imposter.

I'd be very vary of hiring such a person.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#190

Post by reikonomusha »

jstx1 wrote: post #15

"Discussion interviews" can suck because they're a lie. You're still being examined, and now you have to pretend that you aren't being examined in addition to performing well. Some of my best interviewing experiences have been when as part of the interview I ended up having a discussion about something. But the interview didn't explicitly start with that format in mind. Some of the worst interviewing interviewing exp…

Ah! What you describe drives me bonkers!

I’ve had interviews which start very casually, “we just want to have a high-level conversation, no crazy whiteboard coding or anything”, then, absolutely randomly in the middle of said “high-level” discussion, I get

> “well we did prepare a question to test your quantitative reasoning skills; so assume we have a bug that is detected by an analyzer with a false-negative rate of 0.3% and the probability of a bug existing at all is 7% and what’s the probability that a given test will report blah blah blah”

Of course this is communicated purely verbally.

> “This looks like a typical Bayes rule problem. Is that what you want me to calculate?”

> “Maybe, maybe not. That could be an approach. We just want the final percentage. Feel free to pull out your phone and use the calculator.”

Then of course, on the spot, I’m fumbling around with whether you divide by P(A) or P(B) or … to find P(B|A), and mucking around on a 4-function calculator like a dweeb.

So much for the “high-level discussion.”

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