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Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

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Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#31

Post by myself248 »

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…

Because in OP's case, they indicate that the company either doesn't care that OP wrote software the company uses and thus has already demonstrated competence and then some, or they indicate that the company's hiring process is too inflexible to avoid insulting someone who they already know is beyond qualified.

Either one is a red flag, and a perfectly great reason to bail from an interview. If hiring/HR is rotten, the rest of the company is likely similar.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#33

Post by hartator »

friedman23 wrote: post #22

> 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 pr…

Yes, it’s easy to forget we are in of the highest paying industry. But yeah interviews should skip some redtape and HR bs.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#34

Post by skeeter2020 »

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…

More efficent? maybe. More effective? debatable.

What you're describing are not advatanges as much as ways to make the job easier, without accounting for if it produces better results.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#35

Post by 62951413 »

It was common ten years ago. It was still possible in 2015 or so, at least in "B-round startups". I was still asked about my relevant previous experience. In hindsight, I believe people like me who ended up in companies like that were already trading down significantly. Or I have never been as smart as I thought.

My experience in the last year or so categorically states that leetcoding is the only game in town in CA. I hate it, I am bad at it, I find it humiliating and irrelevant. I was told by Asian teenagers that I am not good at coding after 20 years building software. I have failed multiple interviews because of dynamic programming&Co even at companies where I had a decade of highly relevant experience. Nobody ever wanted to hire me for my production experience with all of Scala/Kotlin/Java even though I routinely meet companies where they don't use Scala/Kotlin because of hiring difficulties.

It's just the way it is nowadays. The world is getting progressively crazy. If you're in a position to not accept such interviews I envy you big time. I don't see it happening even in smaller (i.e. not-FAANG compensation) companies though. Some European/remote companies occasionally give you a home coding challenge. But they are an exception.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#36

Post by 1123581321 »

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…

Rejection rate has been discussed many times. It is not the most important metric since it's just an observation. You can't start with a desired rejection rate and come up with a good interview process. What you can do is know what kind of person you want to reject or select for, design a process to do that, and then adjust other factors (listed compensation, recruiter talent, marketing site, etc.) so that you have enough candidates to which you want to extend offers.

Few companies are actually in a position, given their knowledge, stability of their industry, and marginal quality of hiring success, to succeed at deliberately loosening or tightening their interview process to arrive at just the right number of final candidates.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#37

Post by chrisaycock »

cphoover wrote: post #13

What open source software did you write out if curiosity?

My most used in finance is a few functions in pandas, like merge_asof(). It's pretty industry standard now.

https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.merge_as...

The biggest open-source thing I've ever written is Empirical, a language for time-series analysis.

https://www.empirical-soft.com

I'm also top 1% on Stack Overflow. A lot of companies have found me through there.

https://stackoverflow.com/users/478288/chrisaycock

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#38

Post by raverbashing »

friedman23 wrote: post #22

> 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 pr…

Yes, if you know the job is good go for it, it's a minor hurdle

Otherwise you might not just bother, because it's usually a reflection of what the company values and how it thinks

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#39

Post by Barrin92 »

I personally like these questions a lot and I've used them in the past when I was tasked with hiring people because it basically boils down to a few things. One is that people who have a good grasp on algorithms, math or academic problems generally are pretty smart, and you can teach them practical coding skills very quickly while the reverse isn't true. so it's sort of like a IQ test.

Secondly it rewards people who at least put the effort in to prepare for an interview. These questions are a very reliable way to eliminate candidates.

And to take the journalism example, I actually think that'd make a pretty solid test because if a journalist doesn't have a basic grasp on formal language I would have to reconsider how strongly they're committed to their craft. It's honestly only the case in software, an engineering discipline to boot, that people question the necessity of being able to solve basic theoretical problems. Would anyone trust a civil engineer who can't answer first semester math questions?

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#40

Post by selcuka »

friedman23 wrote: post #22

> 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 pr…

I get your point, but if every good/senior developer stopped accepting "shitty interviews" the companies would be forced to change their methods and you would be surrounded by better engineers instead of people who studied a bit to go through a 5 hour interview.
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