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Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

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Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#21

Post by rgreasons »

ravenstine wrote: post #7

Yup, there are countless employers looking to hire coders. If your spidey senses tingle, end the interview and move on to the next one. I've got a little anecdote on an interview that I should have ended, but I was a junior so I didn't really know better at the time. At this interview, one of the things they wanted me to do was to do a series of one minute coding challenges. They weren't leet code or anything, but ju…

I think OP implied a better solution when mentioning interviews that mimic the job: present interviewees with a small take-home case study based on a real on-the-job problem. I have done a few of these and they have been much more enlightening experiences than any paired programming boilerplate live coding exercise. Even in situations in which my proposed solution weren’t up to snuff to land the job, the conversation with the team about my solution felt like an actual representation of what it would be like to be a member of the team.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#22

Post by friedman23 »

> Stop accepting shitty interviews

Why should I stop? My personal experience is that many of the best companies to work for have shitty interviews. All I need to do is to study a bit and go through a 5 hour interview and I have a cushy high paying job? Sign me up. Complaining about interviews is missing the forest from the trees, I don't spend the majority of my working life interviewing, I spend it working. So if preparing a lot for interviews and getting my ego bruised a little means I get a good job so be it.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#23

Post by skeeter2020 »

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.

>> The point of a leetcode style question is to test someones' ability to explain and adapt a tricky problem on the fly.

This is just nonsense, since the only reason the developer can answer the question is because they crammed it in preparation for the interview. Leetcode questions are not tricky, they're just tricks.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#24

Post by schreiaj »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #12

> 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…

> They're very simple and they test for your ability to write code

Do they? Or do they test for your ability to memorize a set of common problems?

I don't have another solution, but just because they are the best we have come up with doesn't mean they aren't shitty.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#26

Post by friedman23 »

rgreasons wrote: post #21
ravenstine wrote: post #7

Yup, there are countless employers looking to hire coders. If your spidey senses tingle, end the interview and move on to the next one. I've got a little anecdote on an interview that I should have ended, but I was a junior so I didn't really know better at the time. At this interview, one of the things they wanted me to do was to do a series of one minute coding challenges. They weren't leet code or anything, but ju…

I think OP implied a better solution when mentioning interviews that mimic the job: present interviewees with a small take-home case study based on a real on-the-job problem. I have done a few of these and they have been much more enlightening experiences than any paired programming boilerplate live coding exercise. Even in situations in which my proposed solution weren’t up to snuff to land the job, the conversation…

> present interviewees with a small take-home case study based on a real on-the-job problem

In my experience these are terrible. It becomes an arms race, what the company intended to become a 5 hour take home assignment becomes a 20 hour assignment because everyone else that's doing the take home assignment is also spending 20 hours. Take homes are a trap.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#28

Post by doix »

acwan93 wrote: post #11
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.

> 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.

When I was a responsible for hiring interns, we used to joke about this all the time. Just throw away 75% of applicants, everyone that got thrown out is unlucky, and we don't want unlucky people bringing the company down.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#29

Post by beezle »

acwan93 wrote: post #11
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.

The Monte Carlo hiring technique?

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#30

Post by exdsq »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #12

> 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…

Thank you for your application to extend our web forum built with Next.js. We query APIs from X, Y, and Z to offer Foo to 500 users. I see you have three years experience with Next.js and eight years working with X, Y, and Z! Excellent. We only have one question before we hire you - can you implement a Trie from scratch in an hour on this whiteboard without the internet?

...

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