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Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?

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Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?

#21

Post by b20000 »

drenvuk wrote: post #10
kerneloftruth wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've walked out on a couple of interviews when they tried whiteboard coding. I politely laughed and said I really don't do performance art. I thanked them for their time and left.

What? What would you rather have? A takehome? People find a reason to complain about those as well because the ones administering them become really god damned nitpicky. What I try to give is a three parter simple string parsing manipulation question where you build on each successive part as well as providing both valid and invalid inputs for them to use as test cases. It shows organizational skills and the ability…

whiteboard/leetcode is not necessary. discuss a prior project and walk through code of a prior project and discuss it. if you don’t have a prior project, build one. takes only a few days and you will have a new asset you own the IP to. if your interviewers don’t do it this way, pass politely.

Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?

#22

Post by WorldMaker »

drenvuk wrote: post #10
kerneloftruth wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've walked out on a couple of interviews when they tried whiteboard coding. I politely laughed and said I really don't do performance art. I thanked them for their time and left.

What? What would you rather have? A takehome? People find a reason to complain about those as well because the ones administering them become really god damned nitpicky. What I try to give is a three parter simple string parsing manipulation question where you build on each successive part as well as providing both valid and invalid inputs for them to use as test cases. It shows organizational skills and the ability…

> What would you rather have?

Ideally? Not to assume my resume/education experience is a lie and to instead assume that I've done enough technical work by this point to merit respect that I don't need to prove some "technical merit" via any sort of whiteboarding exercise that is neither anything like day-to-day technical work nor it is it much more than time wasting busy work to give interviewers plenty of room for excuses on why they don't like people.

But, I'm in a minority opinion in general that I'd rather see the industry mature and if it needs to build a standardized test like the MCAT or the Bar Exam or PE certification to stop asking trivia questions in interviews it should just build a standardized test and stop wasting everyone's time.

Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?

#23

Post by ryanbrunner »

monkeybutton wrote: post #14

I've had candidates do their phone interviews by walking out of the office they're working at currently. It was awesome trying to understand their answers as a motorcycle rips past on the street. I think its just a lack of respect and self effort awareness on all sides. Just think about what you are going to be doing ahead of time is all it takes.

This is a tricky one, and I can't really fault an interviewee if it's a 30 minute phone screen. Cafes can be just as bad as out on the street for noise, most candidates won't be comfortable getting a meeting room in their office, and finding space to have a quiet call for just 30 minutes can be really difficult.

Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?

#24

Post by [deleted] »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #17
ellard wrote: post #7

Not currently interviewing, but in the past i've failed interviews because I didn't do something that the interviewer didn't ask me to do. This would be something like expecting the interviewee to go in depth about a specific part of the problem that to the interviewee might have thought was trivial, or expecting them to do TDD in a coding exercise when the interviewer never mentioned it. I can brush off overt rudene…

I've seen the TDD one, and I hate that so much. The last time I interviewed for companies, I started asking "how do you want me to answer this? Are you looking for me to get a complete solution quickly, or write this like I was writing software I planned to maintain?", but I really shouldn't have to - putting your candidates through a guessing game of which you want is a dumb way to interview.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?

#25

Post by ryanbrunner »

tayo42 wrote: post #16
maximp wrote: post #8

Lack of presence. Any interviewer that's not giving the interview as much of their full attention as possible (emergencies aside, of course). I've been on both sides of this, and I feel bad for interviews I've given where I was distracted or underprepared. Conversely, my best interviews (and 1:1s) have been with people who are fully present.

> and I feel bad for interviews I've given where I was distracted I had this happen, i had his resume up on my screen for the interview and i was taking notes and suddenly i got a message that there was some big production issue i had to help with, so yeah i couldn't focus on the interview. I still feel bad about that

I've had this, and it's honestly just better to duck out, apologize and reschedule the interview. If you're worried about candidate experience make sure to get back to them within an hour or two - if the production issue takes much longer than that you've probably blown your chances anyway just by virtue of giving the impression that multiple hour production issues happen with any regularity.

Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?

#26

Post by asimpletune »

kerneloftruth wrote: post #6
sillysaurusx wrote: post #3

They keep giving me questions from TopCoder. Stop doing TopCoder-based interviewing. You're ruining your company this way. I'm offended on principle.

I've walked out on a couple of interviews when they tried whiteboard coding. I politely laughed and said I really don't do performance art. I thanked them for their time and left.

But that is sort of a performance art response isn’t it? Unless you think that whiteboard interviews are so bad that they’re universally seen as wholly inappropriate.

The thing is they’re not. Sometimes we want to see code that runs and compiles. Sometimes people want to see how you think. Whiteboard interviews are designed to do the later, because coding is not thinking.

I think the whole whiteboard interview = bad phase of blog posts from thought leaders was half hot takes from people who didn’t like how they were evaluated in that dimension, and half actually companies trying to push products that they sell. I don’t however think the consensus among senior engineers ever really bought that. It was more nuanced, like a “yeah, it’s not the only thing we should do, but programming interviews with an IDE shouldn’t come at the permanent exclusion of whiteboard interviews altogether” sort of thing.

Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?

#27

Post by KaiserPro »

I had one interview at a financial "family office" where a rich person forms a company to manage their investments. In this case it was a high profile trade who was banned from taking customers.

I was brought in, I mined the front of house staff. Its always good to see how they are feeling. Plus if you are nice to them, you get the good biscuits. They looked fine, until they started talking about the CEO/boss. They then looked stressed.

The interview started started a bit odd, the first person that interviewd me was nice, but looked at my CV and said: "well youre a linux guy like me, but they really want a windows guy" I thought it was a bit odd as the job spec was mostly linux hooked to AD (which was a dark art at the time, one I had mastered.)

Interviewer one went out and brought in the "head of engineering/systems/something".

I was treated to four sneering people. The "Header" started off with "oh you can't do windows can you?" I replied that I can hold my own(insert story about AD migration) This shut him up a bit, and made him more hostile. His acolytes (think crabbe and goyle plus two extras)

The interview reached a natural end. I was then told to go out and get lunch, and come back for more interviews. I leave my stuff there and go out for lunch, and come back at the ascribed time.

I walk through the door to where stuff was, I can here a stage whisper "OH my god, he's come back, whats he doing here? No you tell him to go."

Neeedless to say I did(Edit did not) get the job.

I wrote a message to the recruiter explaining what happened, and that I expect grownups to tell me to my fucking face that they've made a mistake.

Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?

#29

Post by asimpletune »

WorldMaker wrote: post #22
drenvuk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? What would you rather have? A takehome? People find a reason to complain about those as well because the ones administering them become really god damned nitpicky. What I try to give is a three parter simple string parsing manipulation question where you build on each successive part as well as providing both valid and invalid inputs for them to use as test cases. It shows organizational skills and the ability…

> What would you rather have? Ideally? Not to assume my resume/education experience is a lie and to instead assume that I've done enough technical work by this point to merit respect that I don't need to prove some "technical merit" via any sort of whiteboarding exercise that is neither anything like day-to-day technical work nor it is it much more than time wasting busy work to give interviewers plenty of room for e…

I mean we could have like a bar but that would severely limit opportunities of smart people who can code. It’s one of the best/worst things about our industry.

Personally, I wouldn’t suffer, but I think as an industry we're unique in this way and it’s kind of overall maybe slightly better than not.

Re: Ask HN: How are your interviewers being rude to you?

#30

Post by drenvuk »

davidw wrote: post #18
drenvuk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? What would you rather have? A takehome? People find a reason to complain about those as well because the ones administering them become really god damned nitpicky. What I try to give is a three parter simple string parsing manipulation question where you build on each successive part as well as providing both valid and invalid inputs for them to use as test cases. It shows organizational skills and the ability…

> takehome They’re all bad options in some way, but at least takehomes simulate how most people actually approach a project, rather than sitting there trying to do something while someone stares at you. Some of us really, really hate that.

Well here's something that may make you feel a bit better about interviewing:

When I'm asking you a technical question, I'm looking at the code you're writing, not you. The camera is only on to make sure you're not lip synching or something. The layout of your code and the logic that went into it is more important than your mannerisms.

I refuse takehomes on principle because I've had enough bad experiences with poor reviewers so I'll never give one out.

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