Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

teamblind.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

701–710 of 748 posts

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#701

Post by kranner »

kmarc wrote: post #659
everforward wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. My other favorite is very open-ended questions. I mostly do ops-y interviews, and my favorite question is "what happens when you type 'curl https://google.com ' in a terminal and hit enter?" The question is so broad there isn't a "correct" answer to Google, and it crosses enough domains that any article they find is going to be too long to skim. Then I ask them to really zero in on some aspect of it they feel c…

That's what I do (instead of curl, with a browser). MANY super cool convos spun out of this question (interviewed around 60 people). One of them never actually got to the network request part bc we went DEEP into event handlers in a GUI etc. Another candidate was all over the place with key exchange protocols and what and how can go wrong. I usually don't ask further questions to "corner" them, let them go into any o…

This is a popular question, turns out.

https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#702

Post by midoridensha »

maximus-decimus wrote: post #694
Miner49er wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you tell them they can, that seems great. I think it's normal for people being interviewed to assume they can't use any outside assistance.

Why? You'll have access to google when you're working so I would assume you're allowed to google stuff during the interview.

Because people administering tests always have weird or arbitrary assumptions and restrictions. Part of getting through school is jumping through all the contrived hoops they place before you, even when it'd be much easier to just walk around the hoops. Job interviews are no different; different interviewers have different expectations, and many don't want you consulting outside information sources.

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#703

Post by midoridensha »

gardenhedge wrote: post #4

I grew up staunchly against cheating. Becoming an adult was hard. My whole university class cheated on a tough assignment - someone found the solution online and shared it around. I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks. I also see the same mindset in work. People don't prepare for presentations and then spitball when present…

This is two totally different things. Not preparing for a presentation means you deliver a mediocre-to-bad presentation; you can't cheat by looking up the answer somewhere.

So if delivering a lousy presentation is good enough for whoever wanted the presentation, why go to the effort of making a great presentation? Are the rewards for that effort worth the expenditure? Probably not, which is why people are "spitballing" it.

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#704

Post by dang »

scarface74 wrote: post #670
dang wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments and taking HN further into generic ideological battle? Regardless of how right you are or feel you are, it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. Fortunately it doesn't look like your comments have been dominated by this, but still, we've had to ask you this several times in the past. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator…

I usually don’t respond to mods - and honestly after taking a step back, I usually begrudgingly agree. But if the purpose is to spark conversation that doesn’t devolve into tribalism, I think my posts have from the number of replies without name calling on either side and dispassionate debate it has had. I also have gotten about as many upvotes as downvotes. But really? Going back to 2020, 2019 and 2018?

Sure, we tend to cut people a lot of slack, especially if their comments are a mix of good ones and bad ones, and it sometimes takes us years before we ban them.

If you'd please just not post any more generic ideological comments and/or flamebait, that would be good.

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#705

Post by kmarc »

kranner wrote: post #701
kmarc wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I do (instead of curl, with a browser). MANY super cool convos spun out of this question (interviewed around 60 people). One of them never actually got to the network request part bc we went DEEP into event handlers in a GUI etc. Another candidate was all over the place with key exchange protocols and what and how can go wrong. I usually don't ask further questions to "corner" them, let them go into any o…

This is a popular question, turns out. https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when

Thanks for this. Looks like it's going deep into "client side".

Thing about "Google.com" (I used Facebook/Gmail) is that when server side stuff is of interest (as it was for this cloud engineer job), then I also want to hear about geo DNS, reverse proxies, LBs, CDNs, eventual consistency, distributed storage, etc, all the complexity that is happening once that cat video appears in the browser.

Then again we can go back to JS, CSS, JIT and others' space

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#706

Post by midoridensha »

ryandrake wrote: post #222
asimpletune wrote: post #115

Reading some of the comments in this thread I'm surprised. It seems that a substantial number of people think one of the following: a.) cheating on interviews is ok, because interviews don't reflect the actual job b.) this is acceptable because the promotion process is distinct from the interview process or c.) that the cheaters clearly are skilled after all because of all their success, as evidenced by being promote…

I read these comments not as a defense of cheating, but as resignation that "This is just how the world is." Your view is right at home in a Star Trek The Next Generation world where everyone's needs are met and people act ethically, with good intentions and are in return treated fairly. A civilized, meritocratic world that doesn't exist. Like it or not, we live in a zero-sum dog-eat-dog world that pits neighbors aga…

>Your view is right at home in a Star Trek The Next Generation world where everyone's needs are met and people act ethically, with good intentions and are in return treated fairly. A civilized, meritocratic world that doesn't exist.

Right, but this is why ST:TNG is such a nice show to watch, because it's the kind of show that some of us, at least, want to live in. Whereas Star Trek Discovery is a terrible show to watch, because it's not. Who wants to watch a show about a bunch of unlikable characters that fight each other and backstab? (Apparently a fair number of people these days, or else the show would have died quickly.)

>Like it or not, we live in a zero-sum dog-eat-dog world

If you want to see the best depiction of the universe we live in, watch the Star Trek episodes about the Mirror Universe (esp. the "In a Mirror, Darkly" 2-parter in Enterprise). Those episodes show humans as they really are in our universe, unlike the moral and conscientious humans depicted in ST:TNG.

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#707

Post by eckesicle »

breckenedge wrote: post #106
eckesicle wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran a largish statistical analysis where I was working on all interviews and employee ratings for the following year (16000 data points). My conclusion was that: * some interview problems carried zero signal * some interviewers are really good at identifying strong candidates, and others correlate negatively! On average interviewers rating is a weak signal ( * geographic location is a medium signal (0.2) * a releva…

Do you have a link to this research? This is amazing.

Sadly not. We ran the study on internal company data, so it was never published. The purpose of the study was to improve and inform on our hiring practices

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#708

Post by eckesicle »

hermannj314 wrote: post #104
eckesicle wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran a largish statistical analysis where I was working on all interviews and employee ratings for the following year (16000 data points). My conclusion was that: * some interview problems carried zero signal * some interviewers are really good at identifying strong candidates, and others correlate negatively! On average interviewers rating is a weak signal ( * geographic location is a medium signal (0.2) * a releva…

The choice of language being a signal is interesting. That goes against my intuition. Can you elaborate?

Yes. Interviewees were free to pick any language to attack their problem. We found that interviewees who picked certain languages performed consistently worse during their interviews, and also received worse feedback in their 360-review after working for a year (if they passed).

The bottom languages were: Java C++ Php

They also made up the bulk of interviews. I suspect that Java and c++ together accounted for about 75% of all interviews.

Languages like ruby, python and golang increased your chances of passing the interview as well as getting good peer feedback one year on.

More niche languages (rust, erlang etc) didn’t have enough data points to be analysed separately, but if you grouped them they were the choice of the strongest candidates.

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#709

Post by BlueTemplar »

slondr wrote: post #688
BlueTemplar wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even at the local branches ??

Many companies aren’t ginormous with branches everywhere. Google Meet is cheaper than a flight & hotel room.

And yet all the examples so far have been of "ginormous" companies, haven't they ?

Re: My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

#710

Post by n4r9 »

bee_rider wrote: post #183
n4r9 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is large enough to maintain market dominance via strategies other than technical excellence.

So then why hire technically excellent people? They might expect excellent salaries or excellent working conditions.

It may still be worth hiring those people if it prevents them going to competitors. Even if you also hire a bunch of mid-range devs that cheat or get lucky. It's a classic example of uncompetitive practices being very wasteful but lucrative to the directors.
Post reply on HN