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Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

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Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#41

Post by macromagnon »

I have interviews lined up with google and coinbase which both are going to ask leet code style questions. I'm going to go through it just for the promise of more $.

Even if it is annoying to spend hours and not get an offer, I can see why they ask these types of questions to see your problem solving ability first hand.

I would expect any decent engineer to be able to solve leet code style question, or at the very least be able to model the problem reasonably well and give a recurrence. Even if the code contains errors or there's missing edge cases then it allows you to see how someone approaches a problem.

Leet code style questions are basically a bunch of combinatorial algorithms. Even if they seem like a different trick each time there's general techniques that can be used to approach each problem.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#42

Post by wildrhythms »

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…

What a strangely adversarial comment. In my experience, I can gather more information about a candidate's ability in just 15 minutes talking 1 on 1 with them rather than hours of Leetcode busywork. Funneling candidates through an annoying, needlessly rigid, and blatantly time consuming process is not a good thing, and probably leads to perfectly qualified people being denied; a system that optimizes for 'signals' that should not exist in the first place.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#44

Post by barry-cotter »

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…

They don't have a target rejection rate. They have a target quality threshold. More software engineers that can productively employed is good for them. It's not like Harvard or other institutions where the point is to be elite, not to do something. The more SEs Google can hire the better. If they could reduce their false negative rate in half that would materially impact their bottom line. False negative for Harvard is basically undefined. They could easily dectuple the number of students they admit without compromising on academic quality or family wealth and making only very small declines in average power level (dictator, princes, senator, governor children)

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#45

Post by wvenable »

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.

This statement is an oxymoron.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#46

Post by asdff »

hartator wrote: post #33
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.

Still, it's not like any other field of engineering has something equivalent to leetcode. You don't make someone with a civil engineering degree and a resume of bridge building go up to a whiteboard and work out an irrelevant physics problem like it's undergrad again. You don't have an M.D. talk you through a hypothetical surgery. Only in computer science is there this metagame that you have to dedicate unpaid time toward, yet is hardly ever relevant to the tasks outlined in the job description. I feel like it's been pushed onto recruiters by companies that specialize in creating this crap like most other Enterprise software sold to HR teams, and now there is this expectation that this is how you are supposed to do these interviews because it's been going on for years now. Snake oil salesmen and lemmings in HR brought this upon us, not technical leadership demanding competency.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#47

Post by wildrhythms »

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…

"We need to serve 1TB of data. How would you do it?"

Start there. Let the candidate walk through the problem. Ask questions, and introduce hypothetical limitations. "We need to display the data in a table on a webpage." (frontend) ... "We need an API that can query the data." (backend) ... "We need to sort the data." (discuss algos) It's not that hard to find people's strengths, and make sure you're hiring qualified folks.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#48

Post by anonygler »

Better advice: Leetcode is easy as shit. Suck up your pride and be good at it. You’ll rake in money getting companies to fight over you. I had a $670k offer that’s appreciated to $1m/yr. The company I joined didn’t ask LC, but it still mentally prepared me for the questions I got.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#49

Post by deckard1 »

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.

Yes, but that would destroy the illusion of a meritocracy and the idea that these companies are basing their hiring decisions on rational, objective metrics and not simply making it up as they go along.

Steve Yegge made that observation many years ago regarding Google. For every person working at Google, there is a panel of interviewers that would have rejected that person.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#50

Post by selcuka »

Barrin92 wrote: post #39

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…

I guess it all boils down to who you are hiring (the OP is talking about hiring senior developers). It is ok to ask more technical questions to fresh graduates as they don't have any other experience anyway.

> it rewards people who at least put the effort in to prepare for an interview

Is this a good thing? Would you rather hire smart people, or people who studied a few leetcode questions the night before the interview?

> Would anyone trust a civil engineer who can't answer first semester math questions?

Civil engineers use that knowledge in everything they do. A really small subset of developers need to implement tree traversal algorithms from scratch on a daily basis.

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