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How to get hired (or, 'The silly story of interviewing in the valley')

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Re: How to get hired (or, 'The silly story of interviewing in the valley')

#61

Post by steve8918 »

sgrove wrote: post #59
steve8918 wrote: post #53

I call complete and utter bullshit. Each "technical interview" I've been to is about 3-6 hrs. I've yet to see a Silicon Valley technical interview where it's not at least 3 hrs, meeting with 3 people. So right there, fitting 25 "next stage" interviews in 1.5 weeks is bullshit. Where is he going to find the time for 40 initial phone interviews? That requires talking with the recruiter, and then the recruiter schedulin…

Rough. But you're free not believe, I don't have a problem with that.

Sorry buddy, but please explain the complete discrepancy in what you reported.

How do you fit 3 on-sites and 6 interviews per day? Even if your onsites were 1 hr long and they offered you a job after a single interview, you still have to drive back and forth to each location. How did you have time for the 6 phone screens per day?

Re: How to get hired (or, 'The silly story of interviewing in the valley')

#62

Post by sgrove »

eru wrote: post #57

I can't post to the site, could somebody who can (or can contact the author in some other way), leave a note to the author, notifying him of a typo in "For people hiring, remember that anyway can pass yours tests with enough experience interviewing, even someone as bad at coding as myself." (It should be `anyone' not `anyway'.) Thanks!

Got it, thank you eru!

Re: How to get hired (or, 'The silly story of interviewing in the valley')

#64

Post by steve8918 »

tptacek wrote: post #50

Programmer interviews are famously terrible. Take a second to think about FizzBuzz, why anyone ever thought we'd need something like it, and how it actually continues to serve a purpose. Everyone thinks they're better at interviewing than they are. They often have a survivorship bias. In clueful companies, it's not that dead weight doesn't get hired. It just gets washed out. Interviewers tend to remember the people t…

These are great questions. The one question I use with experienced hires is "Talk to me about the hardest bug you've ever worked on." I will keep drilling down to deeper and deeper levels to figure out how much they actually know, as opposed to memorize.

Re: How to get hired (or, 'The silly story of interviewing in the valley')

#65

Post by sgrove »

steve8918 wrote: post #61
sgrove wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rough. But you're free not believe, I don't have a problem with that.

Sorry buddy, but please explain the complete discrepancy in what you reported. How do you fit 3 on-sites and 6 interviews per day? Even if your onsites were 1 hr long and they offered you a job after a single interview, you still have to drive back and forth to each location. How did you have time for the 6 phone screens per day?

I didn't have a car actually. I just scheduled all the interviews as close to possible every day, and walked around SOMA/FiDi from morning until evening going through different stages of different interviews - initial chat (morning coffee/lunch/dinner/drinks), whiteboarding session, meet with the team, build a mini-project, discuss final offer.

Each successive stage is more time intensive, but there were also fewer of them. There's a lot of noise, especially in the beginning, so a lot drop off very quickly. From there, it was just a matter of tightly packing the schedule and doing it from day to night.

Like I said, the "you'll be homeless again very soon" factor was a big one for me.

Re: How to get hired (or, 'The silly story of interviewing in the valley')

#66

Post by zmj »

tptacek wrote: post #50

Programmer interviews are famously terrible. Take a second to think about FizzBuzz, why anyone ever thought we'd need something like it, and how it actually continues to serve a purpose. Everyone thinks they're better at interviewing than they are. They often have a survivorship bias. In clueful companies, it's not that dead weight doesn't get hired. It just gets washed out. Interviewers tend to remember the people t…

I'm not sure I understood you correctly about FizzBuzz, but if you're saying that it isn't necessary then I'd have to disagree. I wish the world was such that FizzBuzz wasn't an effective filter, but it is.

I really like the rest of your questions.

Re: How to get hired (or, 'The silly story of interviewing in the valley')

#67

Post by andrewflnr »

Aqua_Geek wrote: post #2

Are these kinds of interview questions really that prevalent? From the hiring side of the table, I can understand wanting to quickly know whether somebody knows some of the "basics" like data structures and whatnot. But I can't help feeling that you're needlessly limiting your applicant pool to only those who got a CS degree (and paid attention during the process). Why is so much emphasis placed on the theory of how…

It's hard for me to imagine knowledge of Big O notation being a major limiting factor. I gleaned at least a superficial knowledge of it cruising Gamedev.net in high school, well enough that they didn't throw me out when I had to use it for an internship interview. It seems reasonable to expect people to have at least seen it. But perhaps I was an aberration.

Re: How to get hired (or, 'The silly story of interviewing in the valley')

#68

Post by tptacek »

zmj wrote: post #66
tptacek wrote: post #50

Programmer interviews are famously terrible. Take a second to think about FizzBuzz, why anyone ever thought we'd need something like it, and how it actually continues to serve a purpose. Everyone thinks they're better at interviewing than they are. They often have a survivorship bias. In clueful companies, it's not that dead weight doesn't get hired. It just gets washed out. Interviewers tend to remember the people t…

I'm not sure I understood you correctly about FizzBuzz, but if you're saying that it isn't necessary then I'd have to disagree. I wish the world was such that FizzBuzz wasn't an effective filter, but it is. I really like the rest of your questions.

I'm saying that the fact that FizzBuzz actually works should be an indication of how crappy programming interviews tend to be.

Re: How to get hired (or, 'The silly story of interviewing in the valley')

#69

Post by patio11 »

zmj wrote: post #66
tptacek wrote: post #50

Programmer interviews are famously terrible. Take a second to think about FizzBuzz, why anyone ever thought we'd need something like it, and how it actually continues to serve a purpose. Everyone thinks they're better at interviewing than they are. They often have a survivorship bias. In clueful companies, it's not that dead weight doesn't get hired. It just gets washed out. Interviewers tend to remember the people t…

I'm not sure I understood you correctly about FizzBuzz, but if you're saying that it isn't necessary then I'd have to disagree. I wish the world was such that FizzBuzz wasn't an effective filter, but it is. I really like the rest of your questions.

Thomas is saying that the hiring process for programmers is so comprehensively fubared that asking the FizzBuzz question to someone who has worked as a senior developer for 8 years at a well-regarded firm provides valuable signal and that if you fail to ask it you might hire people who are completely incapable of programming even with your fancy-dancy recruiting process, which shows that the pipeline and standard interview process are both borked like crazy.

Re: How to get hired (or, 'The silly story of interviewing in the valley')

#70

Post by steve8918 »

sgrove wrote: post #65
steve8918 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry buddy, but please explain the complete discrepancy in what you reported. How do you fit 3 on-sites and 6 interviews per day? Even if your onsites were 1 hr long and they offered you a job after a single interview, you still have to drive back and forth to each location. How did you have time for the 6 phone screens per day?

I didn't have a car actually. I just scheduled all the interviews as close to possible every day, and walked around SOMA/FiDi from morning until evening going through different stages of different interviews - initial chat (morning coffee/lunch/dinner/drinks), whiteboarding session, meet with the team, build a mini-project, discuss final offer. Each successive stage is more time intensive, but there were also fewer o…

Even more interesting then, because you just lost 2 hrs every day commuting back and forth on Caltrain.

"Each successive stage is more time intensive, but there were also fewer of them."

You just said you had 25 onsites. Unless you knew beforehand that you were going to cut out of them early, there's no way you could have scheduled 3 per day. And at 6 phone screens per day, the last 2-3 days worth of phone screens occurring near the end of the 1.5 week period would not have been able to produce an onsite within 1 or 2 days, therefore, that means most of the 40 phone interviews must have been front loaded in those 1.5 weeks, with the onsites being back-end loaded. Which means that your density of onsites would have been higher than 3 per day.

It's a great story, but you should use more realistic numbers next time.

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