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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

#131

Post by solididiot »

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…

This is very insightful. I'd also add that having such people let loose to do interviews without training and checks and balances also is a huge red flag about the org.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#132

Post by solididiot »

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.

You can (and should) report to glassdoor. At least forewarn other poor souls.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#133

Post by eckesicle »

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?

There's not really a seniority level where this happens.

The outrage around the technical interviews shows a lack of understanding for the situation companies face when hiring.

The reality is that something closer to 99% of the pool are applying for jobs they're not qualified for (not the same as saying 99% of developers aren't qualified - there's extreme survivorship bias in the pool).

At company X we would hire ~1/400 applicants who applied, and about ~1/20 referrals. At a smaller company I worked for we hired perhaps 1/200.

The thing is, many of these applicants have five to ten years experience (some at FAANG), but can't code at all. It's simply not possible to trust anything on a CV without verifying it. How do you verify this at scale? A pair programming exercise.

Now the training of most interviewers is often poor, but it's far better to go down this route than the HN alternative: hiring without technical screening.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#134

Post by bsder »

ljhsiung wrote: post #74
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…

I don't agree with recorded video, but I am now convinced that there should always be an random "observer" (interviewer does not get to pick) who does nothing but watch and take notes along with an interviewer.

You can give whatever excuse you want "Adding a new person to the loops," "normalizing the loop level," whatever. But I am now convinced that interviewers cannot be trusted alone with candidates anymore.

Maybe I'm naiive that they ever could be, but if one of my guys did half of the stuff people keep reporting to a candidate and I found out about it, I'd have his head and maybe his badge.

Fsck you very much whichever FAANG HR department decided that "interview loop" was something to be added to corporate evaluations for points and then promulgated it to other companies. Thus making both sides of interviewing even shittier than it was before.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#135

Post by zerocount »

ericbarrett wrote: post #21
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 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…

This happened to me at a recent Google interview. It was the last interview of 5 and the guy gave me a gnarly graph problem. I was trying to wrap my head around it, but he kept interrupting me and giving me unwanted help. I ended up getting writer's block and just mentally shutdown because he wouldn't let me have time to think. He ended the interview early because of poor performance.

It made me feel like I didn't know anything and was very embarassing. It also changed my outlook on Google, and I'll never interview with them again.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#136

Post by derwiki »

zerocount wrote: post #135
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…

This happened to me at a recent Google interview. It was the last interview of 5 and the guy gave me a gnarly graph problem. I was trying to wrap my head around it, but he kept interrupting me and giving me unwanted help. I ended up getting writer's block and just mentally shutdown because he wouldn't let me have time to think. He ended the interview early because of poor performance. It made me feel like I didn't kn…

That’s rough. But sounds like an unpleasant work environment so at least you short-circuited that!

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#137

Post by wiseowise »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #114
wiseowise wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is skin color, ethical or gender are related to their point? > Should we throw all the female applications in the trash because they're statistically not as likely to be developers? What do you mean?

The point is that top level comment talks about something being predictive of job performance. In this case, leetcode. What if skin colour, ethnicity or gender were highly predictive of job performance? It doesn't seem very ethical to judge candidates like this. I believe the GP is not convinced by the "all that matters is that it's predictive of job performance" idea.

Anything else aside from whataboutisms?

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#138

Post by wiseowise »

sofixa wrote: post #119
wiseowise wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the other way around, from my experience. People who can write a program without any setup can solve it even on paper, while people that are hardwired to specific setup or IDE quickly froze when you ask them for something.

> People who can write a program without any setup can solve it even on paper, As someone who had courses in C on paper, i can only say that it's a colossal waste of time. Tooling exists to make lives easier, gain time and productivity, why avoid it? It'd be like saying only the farmer who can do everything by hand without any tools increasing their productivity is a real one. Or an accountant refusing to use Excel/c…

> It'd be like saying only the farmer who can do everything by hand without any tools increasing their productivity is a real one. Or an accountant refusing to use Excel/calcuators/ERPs and writing everything on paper.

You're trying to map manual work onto engineering.

And absolutely I'd rather work with accountnant who can write me on paper without Excel/calculator/ERP his logic.

It's like you're being obtuse just for the sake of the argument. Someone who can clearly express themselves without specific medium, be it paper, IDE or whatever is strictly superior to someone who is tied to one specific medium.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#139

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

I have 15 years of experience and have found unless I'm contacted directly by the internal recruiter of a company it's pretty much impossible to even get a reply to a job ad.

I don't know how people who are new to this industry are managing to find work. Pretty sure I'm getting filtered near 100% of the time.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#140

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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