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Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

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Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#11

Post by acwan93 »

thurn wrote: post #10

People never talk about the most important metric for interviews: your target rejection rate . Google and Facebook need to do these interviews because of the number of applicants they get. Any process they design must definitionally reject 99% of people who go through it, and they found it is essentially impossible to hit that kind of rejection rate with just 'tell me about your work' questions. If your startup opera…

Doesn't this work like Harvard/Yale/Princeton/etc admissions, where if they selected a completely different set of applicants everyone there would just as likely be qualified and deserving of attending?

I swear sometimes it might just be easier or even fairer to throw all resumes/applications in the air and see which ones land inside of a predetermined circle.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#12

Post by light_hue_1 »

> One of the recurring themes is the "leet code" interviews

What makes these "shitty" interviews? They're very simple and they test for your ability to write code.

They set the bar clearly and you have the ability to study for them with ease. Solve 200 of these problems once in your life and you'll never have an issue again. You'll breeze through all of these interviews.

Compared to the alternative, where people ask insane unrelated questions and that are incredibly subjective, these aren't all that bad.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#14

Post by jezclaremurugan »

I totally agree that asking people who created/maintain/make significant contributions to open source projects is a waste of time.

However, for hiring people who don't have a public body of work to point to - it remains pretty effective. (I am not affiliated with hackerrank/hackerearth/codility - just been on the hiring side for the last many years)

Also, in my current org - we've been able to trust people lacking the "expected" graduate degrees - solely because they were able to prove their acumen in the interview by solving algo-data-structure problems. (Of course, we have to be creative here - and avoid like the plague the same bunch of questions which are present all over the web)

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#17

Post by errantmind »

sweettea wrote: post #4

The point of a leetcode style question is to test someones' ability to explain and adapt a tricky problem on the fly. Given most of a software engineer's day to day is about communication and adapting existing solutions to related problems, leetcode problems are a very powerful tool for analyzing candidates.

While there is a lot of nuance to interviewing people, I can't say that solving leetcode problems in an interview setting is similar to any problem solving I've done on the job.

The closest might be white-boarding potential solutions in meetings, but there, most of the time, I have a lot of context wrt. the company and situation.

In the past I haven't minded presenting solutions to contrived problems in interviews, but these days I wouldn't. I also wouldn't take a job without significant equity attached, but I'm probably not representative of most devs.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#18

Post by speedgoose »

ngc248 wrote: post #5

I myself am not pro-leetcode, but I see the advantages of leetcode from both the interviewer and the interviewee side. From the interviewee side: It gives you a known set of material to prepare for (ofc there may be newer questions). But this alone helps a lot. With the explosion of frameworks, libraries, languages it is very hard to prepare for everything. From the interviewer side: Again it will give you a standard…

> I work for a company where I have to get permissions if i am gonna start a open source project, even though it may not be related at all to my current work.

Is this common ? Or legal ?

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#19

Post by anandsuresh »

ngc248 wrote: post #5

I myself am not pro-leetcode, but I see the advantages of leetcode from both the interviewer and the interviewee side. From the interviewee side: It gives you a known set of material to prepare for (ofc there may be newer questions). But this alone helps a lot. With the explosion of frameworks, libraries, languages it is very hard to prepare for everything. From the interviewer side: Again it will give you a standard…

I'm curious about the legality of such practices. Your employer needs to authorize what you do on your own time and dime? What country/state are you located in?

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#20

Post by chrisaycock »

majormajor wrote: post #2

So what do you propose as a replacement? In your case, they should've certainly dug into your open source, at least if it was directly in their line of business. I certainly love it when I ask a candidate "tell me about a project you found interesting" and they can go into details, talk about tradeoffs, etc. Sadly, most candidates can't . They can't come up with anything better than "well I rewrote the thing, and it…

I ask the same thing you do: "Tell me about a project you've worked on." There is tons of ground we can cover with that:

* implementation choices with pros and cons

* details about how the underlying system works

* domain knowledge, where applicable

* sample code where the candidate writes to mimic something from the system

My interview style has always been: "Tell me what you know, and we'll see if that's true or not." Surprisingly, most candidates fail even that since they don't seem to understand their own projects. But I find this approach the fairest of all since it allows the candidate to lead the interview and it doesn't assume anything about the candidate's knowledge or prior experience.

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