I sympathize but I'm not sure this is the hill to die on. As a potential employee I'm looking for the best company to join for myself, and the likelihood that I will enjoy working somewhere has very little correlation to their recruiting/interviewing practices. So if I want to work somewhere I'll jump through their hoops (within reason), but I'll also be keeping an eye out for red flags from engineers and managers I talk to, because the downside of an annoying interview that is not to my taste pales in comparison to the downside of accepting a job and then discovering the work environment is a tire fire.
Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews
51–60 of 127 posts
Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews
#52> 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.
Exactly. Nothing is more valuable than a coworker who can implement a half-ass hashtable with a linked list even though there are state-of-the-art implementations available in nearly every programming language.
I’ve got a sickness, and the only prescription is more bloom filters, baby
Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Civil Engineers and Doctors have professional boards that certify they meet a minimum level of competency.
Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews
#54I prefer interviews that ask leetcode questions because they are standard. I can prepare once and interview with multiple companies. The alternatives are take-home projects, pair-programming sessions which in my opinion are very subjective and more time-consuming.
Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews
#55Asking people to stop accepting interviews because they're bad (which I agree they are) is a bit like asking people to stop using combustion-based car because it is bad for the environment. On an individual level, sure -- a few people might flat out decline such interviews as a matter of principle. But as a whole this kind of appeal hardly has any impact.
I rue the day that leetcode-style interviews became the norm, but I don't think they're going away any time soon. The incentives are just too strong. Leetcode style quizzes are a (yes, flawed, biased etc) somewhat reasonable proxy to coding skills, they cost very little to implement, scale easily etc. Personally I prefer take-home half-day projects, but its easy to see how absurdly impractical those are for larger companies.
Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews
#56> 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' tha…
To be fair the parent commenter's post doesn't claim that this process is even remotely efficient, only that it's reality and they find it easy to game.
Also more meta-level commentary, I find the word "should" interesting, as in general I have found that comments on HN which contain this word reflect a level of frustration that X is X instead of Y, because "X should be Y". Someone else may come along and say "X should be Z", and all the meanwhile, X is X.
Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews
#57> 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' tha…
I don't see anything adversarial, it is just someone describing how they play the interview game.
There's a whole leetcode culture on sites like teamblind.com. A lot of people are happy to play the game.
Not my cup of tea either, but to each their own.
Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews
#58Better 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.
You are absolutely right from your angle, but this is the perfect example of why the process is wrong. Nobody should be using something as trivial as leetcode to choose people they are willing to pay $1M.
Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews
#59Not going to lie, I actually like Leetcode style interviews. What you put in is what you get - you know how to control your own outcomes, and that's by putting in the time and work to study for the questions.
People shouldn't have to cram little tricks and algorithms into their brain just to pass a Leetcode challenge; that's the point. No real-world programming career is driven by such pointless exercises.
Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews
#60In interview design there are a lot of trade offs.
Coding something quick within an hour? "It's too time constrained."
Take home interview question? "It takes way too long for the busy professional who already has a job, and plus, even if we time constrain it, they'll put way more time in. Or they'll cheat with friends."
Ask to see previous code? "Many good candidates do not do open source and couldn't tell us what they work on in detail due to NDAs."
Don't use automated interviewing for initial rounds? "We are wasting a lot of expensive engineering time on poor results"
Just ask about work experience and make a subjective call? "We don't know if they actually know how to code, and it's way too random, prone to bias and opens us to lawsuits."
Use different interview methods for different candidates? See above
Watch over a person live code? "Too anxiety provoking". Don't? "How about cheating?"
Trial to work for 2 weeks? "Immigrants cannot do that, and people wont leave their stable job for an unsure offer. So only the unemployed could do it, and why are they unemployed?"
etc, etc
Also there is the entire mountain of going over glacial HR departments and getting them to change their interview processes.
I agree leetcode is shit and I made it a personal mission to change the processes at work to remove the leetcode and add more work sample interviewing, but it's difficult!