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Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

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Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#71

Post by barry-cotter »

selcuka wrote: post #40
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.

> people who studied a bit

Most of the population couldn't do 200 leetcode problems if they were given two months full time one on one tuition and told they'd get $100,000 in cash at the end. That would probably hold true even if you restricted it to college graduates and definitely would for high school graduates. Most people are really, really bad at mathematical thinking. It's more than just a bit of study.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#72

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

asdff wrote: post #46
hartator wrote: post #33

Earlier 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…

I've done an EE "leetcode" phone interview with a non-technical HR person asking scripted problems. Didn't get to a real interview, then they foolishly called me back a year later where I just told them not again. This is for a company in the hinterlands of Oregon where you're making a sacrifice to work for the only viable employer in the area.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#73

Post by friedman23 »

wildrhythms wrote: post #42
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' tha…

What does adversarial mean in this context? That I disagree with the original poster?

> 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

This is your perspective as someone doing hiring. My perspective is from someone being hired. I really don't think leetcode is that difficult all things considered so a system based on leetcode is just not that bad in my opinion. It's really not that difficult, there is a set of 15 or so algorithms that are all 40 or so lines long and you just need to memorize them to the point of instant recall. Now you can get hired almost anywhere.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#74

Post by anandsuresh »

I understand and empathize with the sentiment here. Interviews have a skewed power-dynamic. A handful of people, or sometimes even a single person, can make or break your chances at what you feel is your dream job, and there is nothing you can do about it. It is an extremely frustrating place to be in, indeed.

I've had people with half my years of experience, ask questions that were likely from an algorithms course they took during their (under)grad school days, with little regard for its applicability to the role. These are the kinds of red flags I look for, and while I am yet to walk out of an interview, I do make it a point to provide feedback to the recruiter, along with my decision to withdraw from the process.

It is also pretty telling when a company fails to account for the candidate's experience. At best, it shows a lack of experience with recruiting; at its worst, it is a good indicator of poor culture. Having a person with 10+ years of experience write a quick-sort algorithm is unlikely to produce a good result; mostly because any engineer with that kind of experience would not really write a sort function by hand, unless working on a very low-level system (and even those are mature enough to have an optimized sort function readily available for use).

Like interviewing, conducting an interview is a skill that needs to be developed, and any good company would take measures to ensure it does a good job of it. Recruiting, after all, is a pretty expensive affair.

You've likely dodged a bullet there. Count your blessings, and move on to greener pastures. :)

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#75

Post by Turing_Machine »

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 you have objective evidence that this is an effective test of "the ability to write code", or is that just your belief?

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#76

Post by koonsolo »

wildrhythms wrote: post #42
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' tha…

So in those 15 minutes, how do you know this person is able to write good code? How do you know they are not just riding on the success of their former colleagues, and bullshitting you with high level responses they heard their colleages talk about?

How many people did you interview and hire?

Just asking since I interview and hire a lot of people, and find it very hard to asses someones capabilities.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#77

Post by yongjik »

wildrhythms wrote: post #42
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' tha…

> 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.

You think you can gather more information. I doubt that your decision is more accurate than leetcode interviews on average.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#78

Post by irvingprime »

I somewhat agree. I've been through a lot of terrible interviews. The last year or so I've started walking away when they get too annoying. For example, I refuse take home exercises. I used to do them, I don't anymore. Too much work to do on spec.

But everything involves trade offs. By being very selective of what I will put up with during the process, I've lost some opportunities. If I NEEDED a job, I would suddenly be much more tolerant.

Either way, I don't see the industry as a whole learning to interview better. When I refuse a particular exercise, or drop right out of the process, they don't blame themselves. They just move on to hazing the next candidate and hope for the best.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#79

Post by anduru_h »

wildrhythms wrote: post #59
anduru_h wrote: post #25

Not 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.

I would think that real world programming careers are affected by someone's ability to remember information and put in effort, and that's demonstrated by the time spent to study for the little tricks and algorithms that go into passing an interview. I think it makes things a lot less subjective - you put in the time, you win.

Re: Tell HN: Stop Accepting Shitty Interviews

#80

Post by koonsolo »

novok wrote: post #60

In 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 t…

I can't give you enough upvotes. I also do a lot of interviews and hire people, and it's just very hard.

Plus, you only know the false positives, but never the false negatives.

And I also think that a lot of people who never interview candidates don't realize how many of them can't even code the most basic stuff.

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