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Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

kevin.burke.dev

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Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#41

Post by kevinburke »

pugworthy wrote: post #40

So here's my read on this, based on the post. The author is focused with technical review, and as such he probably fails to see just how important personal review is. Yes, you are being reviewed technically, but you are also being reviewed personally. You may know a lot of technical things, but do I want you on my team? The phone interview is what i'm going to use to make that decision. Technical we can work over lat…

I worked as a sole proprietor/consultant for several years, which involved lots of “personal review” during the sales process. I am well aware of how important that is.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#42

Post by tfehring »

nawgz wrote: post #34
autarch wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really want to test someone's coding, let them do some coding in their own time with their own tools and send it to you. This isn't ideal, since it can be time consuming, but I think it's more humane than live coding in some weird environment.

I would argue that using less of someone's time is strictly "more humane" than using more of someone's time, because an individual's reaction to a situation is... individual

There's no reason an asynchronous coding assignment needs to be more time-intensive than a synchronous coding interview - that's the convention but it's not a necessary one. Lots of companies do 4 hours of technical interviews, it's not hard to come up with an effective programming assignment that takes less time than that.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#43

Post by ushakov »

zimmertr wrote: post #32
ushakov wrote: post #22

at this point of my career i straight out refuse technical/coding interviews i have a GitHub account with 7 years worth of contributions, multimillion dollar exit, projects online and previous senior roles on my cv if they still don’t trust me to do my job, the one i’ve provably done about a decade, their loss nowadays it’s easier to find high-dollar consulting gigs than deal with dysfunctional hiring processes advic…

I've been starting to refuse 4 hour technicals myself and they all immediately drop me. I don't have your seniority but I have some. As well as a powerful online presence across Github and LinkedIn. At what level of seniority did you start doing this and what is your success rate?

they drop me too, but those companies are not worth working at to begin with

they’re not interested in hiring employees, their interest is to get candidates through the loop and to see you fail

this is fine when you’re applying to FAANG, but a terminal sickness when the company is barely known

rather than spending weeks on interviewing, i’d suggest making a open-source contribution or reading a book

the companies, especially startups have a bigger problem than you - they need to show the growth so they can attract more investors. Therefor, if they’re not getting people, they have harder time growing. If they see you as a potential candidate, but you refuse, they’ll bend their back over backwards

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#44

Post by kafkaIncarnate »

nasalgoat wrote: post #38
ryandrake wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

23 years here and at this point I consider interviews to be 1d100 random dice rolls. No matter how much you prepare there is no way you can predict how sensible the interviewers are. I figure just deal with it and interview more. If each interview is 1% independent chance of getting an offer, and you interview 50 times, you have a 40% chance of getting an offer.

You're right, it seems totally random. For one they had the Scrum Masters interview me and they felt I didn't have enough scrum experience. For another I had to try and compile a video encoder on a three generations out of date VM and it took all day and I got $100 for my time. Madness.

What was that interview for? That seems like an odd interview... What software were you compiling, ffmpeg?

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#45

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

Your code on github is pretty slick. I love the documentation.

Leetcode is an exam that you can study for. For me, it's pretty damned hard and I dislike it.

I can think of three reasons why someone might be good at those kinds of problems:

• You just have a knack for it.

• You are very intelligent.

• You practiced a lot.

Which one of those can you do something about?

Every time I force myself to grok a new leetcode trick, I've truly learned something. Something irrelevant in my ten years of programming, but allegedly an indicator of someone who might be good at what we do.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#46

Post by dimmke »

gilbetron wrote: post #28

Interviewing is really tough. The OP replaced some coding questions with other questions and if he were to interview a bunch of people with them, we'd get another set of blog posts complaining how ridiculous his interview questions were. "Why is it bad to write a file to the disk one byte at a time?" What are they interviewing for, low level disk experts? "Here's a stack trace from an open source project, can you tel…

Seriously. I feel like complaining about hiring for programmers is the #1 topic discussed on HN.

I actually feel like algorithm questions are somewhat of an improvement in the programmer hiring process over the alternatives. When interviewing at places that don't have them, the surface area of questions you can be asked is so much bigger.

Like one of the anecdotes in this thread about getting drilled on a testing framework (that the candidate probably added to their resume because they have to have all these keywords to make it through their automated resume scanner and maybe they only played with it for a couple hours one afternoon because they don't use it in their day job.)

With algorithmic questions: - You're doing one type of preparation for a large amount of potential roles - There's tons and tons and tons of great material out there to help you prepare - Probably most controversial but I really believe it: It really does make you a stronger programmer.

For me, doing those kind of questions forced me to learn data structures more thoroughly and dramatically improved my understanding of how to write algorithms and think about performance. This stuff really does matter in terms of code quality and it really bothers me that it's always portrayed as these completely silly puzzles.

The other thing that I see pushed a lot in these discussions is this idea that every company (or most companies) that hires programmers does these exercises. That's just not true. If you're getting coderpad links for every phone screen, you're going after a certain type of company.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#47

Post by nasalgoat »

kafkaIncarnate wrote: post #44
nasalgoat wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, it seems totally random. For one they had the Scrum Masters interview me and they felt I didn't have enough scrum experience. For another I had to try and compile a video encoder on a three generations out of date VM and it took all day and I got $100 for my time. Madness.

What was that interview for? That seems like an odd interview... What software were you compiling, ffmpeg?

Some other ffmpeg knock-off. System admin work.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#48

Post by xyzzy123 »

ryandrake wrote: post #27
civilized wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those ICs are either sociopathic or they're channeling the sociopathy of their managers.

They could just need training and feedback. A lot of places just throw any rando engineer into an interview with no coaching on how to behave, how to set guide rails for the candidate, how to empathize and pace the interview, what the evaluation criteria and rubric is. And then after the interview, the person has no idea if he conducted the interview properly. Totally open loop. Just yeet him at candidates untrained…

I've been that person :(

I still cringe when I think back on some of the early interviews I did.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#49

Post by tharkun__ »

gilbetron wrote: post #28

Interviewing is really tough. The OP replaced some coding questions with other questions and if he were to interview a bunch of people with them, we'd get another set of blog posts complaining how ridiculous his interview questions were. "Why is it bad to write a file to the disk one byte at a time?" What are they interviewing for, low level disk experts? "Here's a stack trace from an open source project, can you tel…

    What are they interviewing for, low level disk experts?
While I agree that "disk" stuff is "low level" compared to a web developer, it's definitely a very relevant question. You might ask it and if the candidate is interviewing for a web developer position rephrase it after getting a blank stare: Why is it bad retrieving 50 users from a REST endpoint like `/api/users/{id}`, one at a time?

    Oh sure, print-based debugging is awful, you just have to read stack traces from unfamiliar projects in the blink of an eye.
That's actually pretty relevant. If you want to be nice, make it something that uses the same stack as you're hiring for but even if not, it can tell you something about the candidate. Some candidates might react like you did in this reply. Not hired. Some candidates might go "oh well, that looks like python, which I'm not familiar with but let's see, ..." and then they try to figure something out from the function call naming and error messages shown. In any large enough company you will definitely be looking at unfamiliar stack traces, potentially from a service you are unfamiliar with and potentially a different stack than you're used to. Happens all the time at my place for example. I can't just throw up my arms and ignore it. Gotta dig in and use generic problem solving skills.

    Ah yes, the reductive "everything is a CRUD app" - this interviewer doesn't understand that most applications don't fall under the simplistic "CRUD" moniker!!!!
Or maybe it's a simple test of "OK, so all of the other questions the candidate sort of failed on. Can he at least do 'stackoverflow copy and paste programming'?" Whether it's a CRUD endpoint or something else entirely doesn't matter. The point is: can this candidate work w/ something potentially unfamiliar and still get something done? Happens all the time in any large enough code base. Happened to me just this week where I had to implement something I needed in a old python service we have. I don't like python and I don't know any of the python frameworks used there. I copy and pasted, adjusted and google some basic python syntax and got it done in like half an hour. That's what they're testing for there. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
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