Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens • Hacker News Board

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#241

Post by baskethead » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 3:59 PM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #159

sofixa wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this why there are trial periods ( no idea if it's a thing in the US with the "right to work" thing)?. Over here in the EU a work contract can't be terminated from the company just like that, there needs to be a specific reason ( like downsizing, or a serious error), and you can't quit just like that a mandatory notice period is required ( of course negotiable depending on the situation), usually in the 1-3 mon…

In the US you are always on a trial period. The problem is that firing people is annoying and bad for team morale. More importantly even dealing with a bad coworker is really bad for team morale. No one wants to join a company that is likely to fire them in 3 months because the company f-ed up their own hiring process. No one wants to recommend their connections join a company where that is likely to happen. Made wor…

What is bad for morale is keeping someone around who is a bad fit. Netflix has solved this problem by paying everyone at the top of the scale and firing everyone who doesn’t meet their bar.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#242

Post by ghaff » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 4:01 PM UTC

aigo wrote: post #233

chiph wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who was born before the moon landing and saw one of the last IMPs get installed on the ARPANET, yeah that was offensive. You should apologize. Knowing to silence your phone in meetings is a matter of having manners, not age.

Just as no-one would begrudge a dominated race from poking fun at the dominant race, I don't see why you are so on your high horse about the dominant age group getting the same. 'Punching up' is fair game where I come from. I'm afraid I just don't get your outrage at an innocent comment poking fun at the most dominant section of society. But, as you're the second person to have taken offence, I'm going to delete it a…

First of all, I'm not a particularly big fan of generational stereotypes in general, especially on a board like this that aims to do better. If I made a comment to the effect of "Zommers are the most entitled group I have ever seen," I would be (rightly) most likely downvoted to oblivion.

Secondly, I have never encountered it as a problem--at least in a way that affected me (never could really get into a dot-com company but we know how that mostly ended up). But that's mostly because I've had various roles where experience really trumped other things. But ageism is clearly an issue in tech broadly so I take issue with with the justification that it's OK to make casual cracks with the justification that it's punching up.

To say nothing that it added absolutely nothing to your comment. Rude interviewers are the issue. Not some imagined inability for older individuals to silence their phones.

Finally, I'm not sure doubling down on the oppressed race thing helps your argument--especially given what the age breakdown in tech looks like.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#243

Post by mrfusion » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

MathYouF wrote: post #221

mrfusion wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incompetent until proven competent. Most industries don’t have to deal with that attitude but it’s prevalent for us. Imagine asking a doctor basic biology questions or what an antibiotic is used for in an interview.

Asking a doctor who had completed their 12 years of medical school and residency basic biology questions would be a bit absurd. Asking someone who claims to be a doctor of natural medicine the same might yield you more than half unable to answer. Since there is no 12 year stringent accreditation process for being a software engineer, I'm not sure why this is a good comparison. There are many people who don't know so…

On the other hand we all deserve to be treated with dignity.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#244

Post by sokoloff » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 4:06 PM UTC

Jach wrote: post #235

sokoloff wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have interviewed senior candidates (more than two, fewer than five) who couldn’t write code to sum an array of ints (ignoring overflow). * Not in the sense of missed a bit of punctuation, but rather in the sense of “couldn’t get started with anything that vaguely smelled like an answer, didn’t understand the type system of the language they claim 5 years of experience with, etc”. I’ve probably interviewed fewer tha…

I love this because I agree 100%. I accepted the idea that they were "out there" but only really internalized it after I interviewed someone with a Masters in physics who couldn't make any progress on my simple problem. (The problem does assume you can understand the concept of a geometric line, but I give the two line equations most people first run into in junior high, among other things, I'm not testing recall.) E…

On the “we can take a chance here” front, I’ve sometimes struggled with hiring someone out of a stable situation and putting them into a role where they might earn a termination. If someone’s already unemployed and that happens, they’re no worse off (and likely better off). If it happens that they resigned a stable job and that happens, they’re made worse off.

As a hiring manager or interviewer, I’m not their fiduciary, but when facing a risky hire, I wish there was a way to let the candidate make a more fully-informed choice without the knowledge that we think it’s a high-risk offer influencing them negatively in any way.

Right now, they interview and get an offer or don’t. If they get an offer that we think is high-risk, they have no reasonable way to know that.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#245

Post by joelbluminator » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 4:09 PM UTC

saxonww wrote: post #211

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 hadn't done many interviews before starting at my current job, where they seem to make a point of getting a lot more people involved in the interview process. I guess this is an idealistic view, but it should be pretty clear if you're a hiring manager whether the people you're getting involved in the interview process are likely to be jerks to a candidate. What you describe is embarrassing, and does reflect poorly…

> In the future, you might interrupt the coworker

Not many people are gonna risk confrontation with a colleague over some candidate they don't know. Especially not during the interview, maybe afterwards when things are calm. I'm agreeing with you here but let's stay realistic; some companies have assholes working for them, sometimes these assholes get to positions of power. Usually the company knows damn well employee X has a bit of an attitude problem but...guess he adds enough value (or acts well enough) to keep being employed.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#246

Post by heavenlyblue » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 4:18 PM UTC

GiorgioG wrote: post #202

zcw100 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's really great is if you can get the interviewer talking about themselves. If you're lucky you'll spend the entire interview nodding and saying things like, "wow", "that's really cool. How did you come up with that?". At the end, if it's the kind of interviewer that will talk about themselves for an hour straight they're going to love you, just sat there and let them be the center of attention. The problem is do…

This is how I got a job with a bunch of really smart folks in the early 2000s (they were all MIT grads and I was a graduate of a state liberal arts college in NY.) It was several rounds of interviews and a couple of the folks interviewing me (who clearly liked me) warned me that the interview at the end would be the hardest because the interviewer was an old non-nonsense engineer (MIT CS degree and MIT MBA.) It was i…

So that engineer was a full-nonsense interviewer :)

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#247

Post by Jach » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 4:19 PM UTC

MathYouF wrote: post #221

mrfusion wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incompetent until proven competent. Most industries don’t have to deal with that attitude but it’s prevalent for us. Imagine asking a doctor basic biology questions or what an antibiotic is used for in an interview.

Asking a doctor who had completed their 12 years of medical school and residency basic biology questions would be a bit absurd. Asking someone who claims to be a doctor of natural medicine the same might yield you more than half unable to answer. Since there is no 12 year stringent accreditation process for being a software engineer, I'm not sure why this is a good comparison. There are many people who don't know so…

It is a strange comparison, though I don't think the "stringent process" is the issue and it's more just that they are entirely different fields with different ways of working with different kinds of feedback in the broader economy with different levels of observability. You might find that even the doctors that had years of study and paid supervised practice (residency) are unable to answer basic things. From an MD last year: "Even doctors forget the relationship between calcium and Vitamin D, and I have spoken with doctors who did not realize that 5000 units a day could cause problems. As a doctor, there is a lot to know and remember, and most doctors haven't studied calcium metabolism in many years." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24065115)

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#248

Post by treis » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 4:23 PM UTC

bogwog wrote: post #222

treis wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 Perhaps it's just me, but I took a look and I'm not convinced. Nothing jumps out to me as overwhelming proof of programming ability.

Can you explain why? To me it's obvious that this guy knows how to code, and he's probably better at it than most of the engineers I've met.

Hard to explain the absence of something other than it's just not there. The list of projects/accomplishments are fine but the reality is that people lie about stuff like that. I poked around their recent GitHub commits but it was mostly bug reports. Nothing really that points to being obviously great at coding.

I see that on paper they're a great candidate, but the reason that companies do these tests is that often the candidate doesn't measure up to the resume

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#249

Post by MathMonkeyMan » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 4:24 PM UTC

tkiolp4 wrote: post #187

Good candidates do not apply if leetcode is involved; good candidates know they can code and they want to have interviews where they are asked, from a high level perspective, about past projects and the like. On the other hand, bad candidates know they cannot code nor talk about past projects in a decent way, but it’s easier for them to cheat by submitting copied pasted code than to talk about software. By using leet…

Yes, but bad candidates are going to apply anyway. How many depends on the size and visibility of your company. I suspect that for FAANG, leetcode is a much better filter than random (or going by shoe size). And there must be a filter. Also, think about the cost of the time employees (developers) spend interviewing -- let's come up with something quick, standardizable, and programming-related. Leetcode.

Re: Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

#250

Post by heavenlyblue » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 4:26 PM UTC

oneepic wrote: post #112

ljhsiung wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If I was the candidate, and you informed me the interview would be recorded with video, I would politely thank you for your time and end the call.

Why? It could easily be optional by the way.

I would be ok with the recording as long as they don’t make my sign the form allowing it to be used as part of some public campaign.