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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?

#131

Post by zenlot »

b20000 wrote: post #124
watermelon0 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we are comparing expensive cities, we might as well start with Geneva: > You would need around 7,858.14$ (7,254.94Fr.) in Geneva to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 8,300.00$ in San Francisco, CA (assuming you rent in both cities). Although other countries/cities in Europe are cheaper than this, you should know that Switzerland has extremely low income tax, compared to others.

Switzerland is not really part of europe.

Part of what then?

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

#133

Post by asimpletune »

WorldMaker wrote: post #127
asimpletune wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of professions split into separate job categories for white collar/blue collar or "formally educated"/"on the job learning". Lawyer/paralegal, Doctor/RN/Nurse Practitioner, etc. I don't know if that is something that software could use, but it certainly is a known option, and might help. In some ways software already has bespoke versions of those career paths, but there's no standardization from company to comp…

Yeah, apprenticeship would be a cool route to take.

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

#134

Post by asimpletune »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #101
asimpletune wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Suppose a chef interviews for a kitchen. Rather than anyone testing the chef on his or her ability, they test them on their poetry. That’s exactly analogous to whiteboard interviews. You can feel however you want to feel, and no one will change your mind. The fact is, you never code on a whiteboard. You’re not testing ability.

But you do code on a whiteboard?

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

#135

Post by marcinzm »

taude wrote: post #106
marcinzm wrote: post #5

Giving a coding assignment that would take 10+ hours and then pinging me why I didn't finish it before the weekend?

What kind of coding assignments are people asking be completed that take 10 hours?

This was a data science take home for a Director level position. Multiple data sets, domain specific, bad/missing data that you had to discover, predictions needed that combine disparate data types together, data is complex enough that off the shelf models wouldn't work, writeup of how to deploy in production, etc. I estimated 10+ hours to do it even half properly and that was probably an underestimate even if you got lucky with your first approach.

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

#136

Post by kube-system »

WorldMaker wrote: post #130
kube-system wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I give take-homes because they’re a better representation of people’s actual work output. But I’m not giving them because I think people are lying. I can tell if people are lying about their experience in the first interview. The assignment part of the interview is to assess the quality of their work. Some people do awesome work straight out of school, and some have been doing awful work for 20 years. We do have stan…

But it is about "lying": you don't trust the quality of people's "actual work output" despite what their resume states. You have a "guilty until proven innocent" attitude with respect to people's professional work. You aren't trusting that other companies develop talent or prune people "doing awful work". Sure, a resume isn't about "job performance" but how much do you distrust the labor market in your own industry t…

> But it is about "lying": you don't trust the quality of people's "actual work output" despite what their resume states.

No, I’m saying that resumes simply don’t convey quality of work. They convey the duration of work and who it was for.

Duration isn’t a proxy for quality. Beyond the first couple years of experience, I don’t think I’ve seen much of a reliable pattern between experience and ability.

I can’t really look at some random project at some random company on a resume and tell you whether participation in that project amounted to brilliant engineering work, or whether it was changing ‘if’ statements three times a week in a legacy system.

> how much do you distrust the labor market in your own industry that you think people can do awful work for 20 years and still remain meaningfully employed enough to have resume experience across all 20 of those years?

I’ve been on the wrong end of hiring mistakes where that was exactly the situation.

There are definitely certain types of jobs that are “known for being cushy” in this industry.

Although, that’s nothing unique to tech. People coast in tons of white-collar jobs.

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

#137

Post by KaiserPro »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #60
KaiserPro wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fuck take home work. I am not going to spend three hours of work, when I'd rather be doing something else, only to be fucking ghosted. (times by godknows how many companies.) I got bought out by a FAANG and I am eternally grateful that I "only" had to do four interviews to keep my job. Rather than the real time coding horse shit.

Damn, you got lucky! A FAANG on the CV without preparing leetcode BS for months! I had one of the guys I was managing in a startup get into the AI company that Google bought without leetcoding. I was pretty jelly but still determined not to spend months on leetcoding, dealing with shitty big org politics, performance reviews and having to work from the office (it was still back in the days when people were free to wo…

Well it was quite cute actually.

With that still to come, we as a company stopped working on the core business for two weeks and settled down for leetcode practice and mock interviews. We had the luxury of doing it all together and learning form each other in work hours. So it was a lot less stressful than it would have otherwise been.

In the UK it's illegal to buy a company and fire/rehire all the staff. The way they got round that was to say that if we didn't agree to waive our rights, we wouldn't get any money. The money we were offered as part of the share settlement was about half what we could expect if we went to court(ie 1/2 a years wage net). The main deal from the evil overlord was "join us and you'll be spaffed with cash"

turns out there are a lot of myths about being bought out, its nowhere near as glamorous as we've been lead to believe.

but yeah, I don't think I'd have ever really have applied, especially given the silly amount of prep one is supposed to do.

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

#138

Post by gattr »

wrnr wrote: post #66

Interviewer asked me if I wanted something to drink, and I was like: water is all good with me. He brings me a glass and I take a sip. The tast was absolutely foul, acidic with a taste I just couldn't place. In the most civilised way possible I spit the water back into the glass. Sorry I say, there must have been some mistake here, maybe some detergent left after cleaning. The interviewer looks horrified at me and ac…

Interesting. I haven't seen it here in Europe, but there is such a jar in Mrs. Nguyen's nail salon in the TV series "Better Call Saul" [1]. (Well, I'm not sure about the rose petals.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIg9WdWJoME

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

#139

Post by jgwil2 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #73

It's not rude to negotiate on salary. That thought is laced throughout these comments. Understand that when interviewing, work duties vs salary is the entire conversation. By definition it is not rude to perform that function.

No one is claiming that it is rude to negotiate on salary. What people are claiming is rude is when companies allow candidates to go through a lengthy interviewing process when they already know that their budget doesn't align with the candidate's asking price. That is a waste of everyone's time.

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

#140

Post by JoeAltmaier »

jgwil2 wrote: post #139
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #73

It's not rude to negotiate on salary. That thought is laced throughout these comments. Understand that when interviewing, work duties vs salary is the entire conversation. By definition it is not rude to perform that function.

No one is claiming that it is rude to negotiate on salary. What people are claiming is rude is when companies allow candidates to go through a lengthy interviewing process when they already know that their budget doesn't align with the candidate's asking price. That is a waste of everyone's time.

...not matching what I read. Folks giving up after the first (low) offer, only to get a better one a few days later. This is how it works. It can take a little time. If you get butt-hurt on the first offer and go off somewhere else, you're leaving money on the table.
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