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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

#61

Post by ushakov »

echelon wrote: post #60
ericbarrett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still recall an interview I did at a recently public company in New York, for a DevOps position. 4/5 of the interviews went sailingly, with heavy emphasis on networking, scripting, and AWS knowledge. Then the lead engineer sailed in, five minutes late. He gave me an algorithm question straight from the Google playbook (I don't remember the question, sadly), then after I asked for a few minutes to ponder, proceeded…

What an ass. I wish there was a way to report bad interviewers. Maybe some tech media company will do hidden camera interviews and publish a scathing rebuke of the practice.

there’s a site in Russian, ebanoe.it (translated: f*cked IT) which does exactly that!

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#62

Post by Kye »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #24
redis_mlc wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This post ought to be the final nail on the coffin of the cult of leetcode/whiteboard style inverviewing. Looks like he has ADHD. Maybe somebody with more time can go through his blog post line-by-line and figure out what's going on. Most of my Coderpad stuff compiles and runs the first time, so I don't use his incremental test method, or see a need for it. Maybe he learned programming on heavy-weight IDEs and got…

A lot of devs have ADHD.

There's even a subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD_Programmers/

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#63

Post by zaptheimpaler »

redis_mlc wrote: post #3
vanusa wrote: post #2

This post ought to be the final nail on the coffin of the cult of leetcode/whiteboard style inverviewing. Just looking at this guy's repo and his writing style -- you'd be foolish to waste his time or yours on leetcode-style hazing. Your conversation should be strictly high-level. If you must, pick a file at random from one his larger projects, and ask a few straightforward quetions ("I'm new to Go - can you explain…

> This post ought to be the final nail on the coffin of the cult of leetcode/whiteboard style inverviewing. Looks like he has ADHD. Maybe somebody with more time can go through his blog post line-by-line and figure out what's going on. Most of my Coderpad stuff compiles and runs the first time, so I don't use his incremental test method, or see a need for it. Maybe he learned programming on heavy-weight IDEs and got…

Maybe you're trapped in mentally simulating a compiler and those of us with good dev setups can dedicate brainpower to other concerns?

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#64

Post by kevinburke »

dkarl wrote: post #25

> I often make trivial mistakes just trying to get a "first draft" of a program out In my experience, it's helpful to add simple tests as you go. I have done some live coding tests in Python recently, which I'm not super familiar with, and the first couple I did, I made a lot of trivial errors that caused my solution to fail until I went back and cleaned them up. Luckily the interviewers kept their mouths shut while…

I address this in the post and part of the problem is that this is more difficult on Coderpad, and also interviewers (n=~8 out of 10 or so) discourage writing tests.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#65

Post by marstall »

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'm on your team. up front technical "gotcha" style evaluations feel like they don't respect where I'm coming from, nor my track record of work - and are a cue that the job is not the place I want to be at.

I've gotten nearly 100% of the jobs I've gotten in the past 15 years through friends. Interview process real easy after the informal "backchannel" reference check has happened. Just hi, how you doing, when can you start.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#66

Post by cebert »

Companies are missing out on tons of great, talented individuals who are frightened to endure Leeetcode-like interviews. Are there any firms that give candidates choices on how to demonstrate they’re a good fit for open positions? Maybe you do like grinding Leetcode algorithm questions, maybe you want to create a new service that satisfies requirements and discuss the design choices, perhaps you’re really good at contributing to existing projects.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#67

Post by ushakov »

marstall wrote: post #65
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'm on your team. up front technical "gotcha" style evaluations feel like they don't respect where I'm coming from, nor my track record of work - and are a cue that the job is not the place I want to be at. I've gotten nearly 100% of the jobs I've gotten in the past 15 years through friends. Interview process real easy after the informal "backchannel" reference check has happened. Just hi, how you doing, when can you…

same thing, same thing

better spend more time maintaining those connections

i myself never really practiced algorithms, so in an interview they’ll see me as a weak learner

however the reality is complete opposite - i have spent thousands of hours on piano and guitar and speak 3 languages

i have the opposite of learning disability and learn stuff quicker than many of your algorithm-knowing employees can

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#68

Post by ushakov »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #48
ryandrake wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

at least you acknowledge your past mistakes and learn from it

some people don’t

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#69

Post by eklavya »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #30
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? Why would only low level disk experts be able to answer that?

That’s not their point. Point is, it’s really subjective and there is no standard answer. As much hate as leetcode style interviews get, you at least have a standard interview process as that point but yeah don’t overdo it and make sure the loop is varied in the areas it covers.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#70

Post by nijave »

echelon wrote: post #60
ericbarrett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still recall an interview I did at a recently public company in New York, for a DevOps position. 4/5 of the interviews went sailingly, with heavy emphasis on networking, scripting, and AWS knowledge. Then the lead engineer sailed in, five minutes late. He gave me an algorithm question straight from the Google playbook (I don't remember the question, sadly), then after I asked for a few minutes to ponder, proceeded…

What an ass. I wish there was a way to report bad interviewers. Maybe some tech media company will do hidden camera interviews and publish a scathing rebuke of the practice.

Some companies will ask for feedback after the interview and there's sites like Glassdoor.

The last place I did interviews at, we'd bring all interviewers into a quick debrief meeting and talk about whether to give the candidate an offer (going off the notes we took during the sessions). It was pretty obvious if someone had a particularly bad session and could be weighted against other peoples' input

Unfortunately it can be really hit and miss

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