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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

#71

Post by nijave »

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…

Im not a huge fan of leetcode or work samples but on the receiving end it weeded out a huge number of bad candidates. We'd get tons of copy/pasted together infra as code from top Google results that wasn't even close to runnable (usually being close to runnable with a few small bugs was a good submission and runnable with no bugs was a great submission)

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#72

Post by Gigachad »

spoonjim wrote: post #36
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #6

One thing I realized recently while interviewing candidates at my company is that it’s one of the few opportunities that individual contributors like myself have to exert significant power over someone else, and not everyone is prepared to handle it well. Recently, we had a candidate come through that wasn’t a good fit for us (he claimed to be a cypress expert so we asked him to set cypress up in a dummy react repo a…

Well he could also be pissed off that he’s interviewing someone who claims to be an expert in something he can’t even install.

I have been doing React development for 4 years now and I have never set it up from scratch and only have a rough idea how it’s done. I still apply for react jobs and do fine. Installing something from scratch is one of the least important tests because it’s something that companies typically do once every few years, they can afford to flounder for a few days on that.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#73

Post by kevinventullo »

eklavya wrote: post #69
EdwardDiego wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I believe “Writing to disk one byte at a time will be slow” is the standard answer, with varying levels of detail depending on the role.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#74

Post by ljhsiung »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #6

One thing I realized recently while interviewing candidates at my company is that it’s one of the few opportunities that individual contributors like myself have to exert significant power over someone else, and not everyone is prepared to handle it well. Recently, we had a candidate come through that wasn’t a good fit for us (he claimed to be a cypress expert so we asked him to set cypress up in a dummy react repo a…

I recall voicing an opinion that we should record interviews we give candidates and re-review it during the hiring committee, much like we do code reviews. Have the interviewer justify certain beliefs about the candidate with hard timestamps rather than platitudes ("not confident", "wanted to see how they react under pressure", etc. etc.).

My comment always gets pushback. Privacy, respect for interviewer ("If I work here, then I myself can judge fine!"), not enough time, etc.

Hiring processes are about as contentious as CI methodologies, it seems

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#75

Post by dehrmann »

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.

> I wish there was a way to report bad interviewers.

You can always tell the recruiter/coordinator. It's just tricky because you don't want to burn bridges, doing it before you hear back could be read as you asking for a do-over, doing it after could come across as bitter.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#76

Post by vanusa »

nijave wrote: post #71
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…

Im not a huge fan of leetcode or work samples but on the receiving end it weeded out a huge number of bad candidates. We'd get tons of copy/pasted together infra as code from top Google results that wasn't even close to runnable (usually being close to runnable with a few small bugs was a good submission and runnable with no bugs was a great submission)

On the receiving end it weeded out a huge number of bad candidates.

Along with (as was the main point of the original blog post) probably quite a few false negatives, Like the author of that post, for example.

Meanwhile, you can achieve the same filtering benefit by far less obnoxious and more accurate means (a cursory glance at their repo, fore example).

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#77

Post by LordDragonfang »

colmvp wrote: post #56
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…

> "They look like a great fit for the team and our goals, and let's give them a chance to learn the tech" I wish more were like you. I've definitely had my fair share of interviews that bombed so I feel like I have a good bearing of when I don't leave a good impression, but it's always the worst feeling to have an interview that you think went well based on the overall mood/feeling, only to receive the eventual rejec…

Re: your last paragraph, I feel like that's symptomatic of a change in the relationship between capital and labor that has happened to some extent at every level of the market.

Companies are increasingly unwilling to invest in the wellbeing or value of individual workers, instead treating workers as fungible assets to minimize the cost of which serve as solutions to current (rather than long-term) problems. We see this with the near-universal embracement of short-staffing in service-level jobs, lack of career mobility from starting positions, and even in the tech industry with the expectation that you usually have to switch companies to get a raise.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#79

Post by cosmotic »

Gigachad wrote: post #72
spoonjim wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well he could also be pissed off that he’s interviewing someone who claims to be an expert in something he can’t even install.

I have been doing React development for 4 years now and I have never set it up from scratch and only have a rough idea how it’s done. I still apply for react jobs and do fine. Installing something from scratch is one of the least important tests because it’s something that companies typically do once every few years, they can afford to flounder for a few days on that.

Exactly. Greenfield projects are exceedingly rare.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#80

Post by dehrmann »

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…

To quote the author,

> Triplebyte has a quiz that actually does a pretty good job of this; you get asked thirty or so questions about databases, networking, and simple coding questions ("what is the value of 'a' when you get to line 17?").

I could absolutely see people complaining about multiple choice questions and how you're more likely to get tripped up by minor mistakes.

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