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Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?

#151

Post by m463 »

garrickvanburen wrote: post #24

Circa 2000, I was invited for a lunch interview. I walk into a completely dark and empty cubicle space, one lit office in the back. Lunch meant the interviewer ate a Hot Pocket off a paper plate as we talked. Didn’t even offer me any. First interview I walked out of.

I had a day of interviews once, and I remember the person who interviewed me during lunchtime. Wvery time I would get a fork near my mouth I would have to put it down and answer a question.

I remember dumping a full lunch in the trash can as we walked out towards a conference room for the next interviewer I would meet...

Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?

#152

Post by m463 »

ericrallen wrote: post #148
m463 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really odd, because I remember asking someone who had interviewed a lot and she said that kind of question is almost worthless. Everyone is where they want to be, so of course they like working there. They have also achieved their position, so they think it is a great place to work. The question comes from a self-selecting population.

I prefer to ask something like, “What’s one thing you love, and what’s one thing you’d change tomorrow if you could?” Everybody would improve something, and it can give you insight into actual day-to-day challenges. If they say, “Nothing,” either it’s the one rare perfect workplace or they are too afraid or checked out to give a real answer. Either way it’s informative.

cafeteria is a safe answer there.

(sort of like: "my one weakness is I work TOO hard!")

Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?

#153

Post by Tommah »

m463 wrote: post #142
romanhn wrote: post #8

Years ago I was interviewing for a software engineering role. At the end of one of the interviews I asked how they liked working there. And the interviewer caught me off-guard with "it kind of sucks". She went on to explain that the company recently promoted a bunch of youngsters into VP roles through a combination of nepotism and early start dates, and they didn't know what they were doing. I thanked her and politel…

That's really odd, because I remember asking someone who had interviewed a lot and she said that kind of question is almost worthless. Everyone is where they want to be, so of course they like working there. They have also achieved their position, so they think it is a great place to work. The question comes from a self-selecting population.

> Everyone is where they want to be, so of course they like working there.

This reminds me of the joke where the economist sees the $100 bill on the ground and says if it were real, someone would have grabbed it already. It assumes that the market is perfectly efficient when it is not. There are tons of reasons why someone would work at one job when they would prefer another job:

Maybe the local job market is poor, but the worker can't move.

Maybe their spouse has a medical condition that requires really good health insurance, and moving to another job would lose that coverage.

Maybe the worker has been job-hopping too much and has to stay at this job for another year or whatever.

etc., etc.

Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?

#154

Post by romanhn »

ericrallen wrote: post #148
m463 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really odd, because I remember asking someone who had interviewed a lot and she said that kind of question is almost worthless. Everyone is where they want to be, so of course they like working there. They have also achieved their position, so they think it is a great place to work. The question comes from a self-selecting population.

I prefer to ask something like, “What’s one thing you love, and what’s one thing you’d change tomorrow if you could?” Everybody would improve something, and it can give you insight into actual day-to-day challenges. If they say, “Nothing,” either it’s the one rare perfect workplace or they are too afraid or checked out to give a real answer. Either way it’s informative.

Yeah, this is definitely a much better formulation and one I've used in more recent interviews.

Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?

#155

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

quanto wrote: post #128

At a tier-1 hedgefund. I got an offer for its branch in Asia, and I was in the US at the time. It said it would like to make an offer, but it said it can show me the employee contract only in person. I asked I need to see the contract before I fly and move to a different country. I did not take the offer. Also, the compensation happened to be 80% lower than then-current compensation.

That's not a red flag, that's a scam.

Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?

#157

Post by Tommah »

frfl wrote: post #47
ezedv wrote: post #12

Once, I had an interview where the hiring manager seemed uninterested in my questions about team dynamics and growth opportunities. It made me wonder if they valued open communication. I believe interviews are a two-way street, and if a company isn't willing to engage in meaningful dialogue, it might signal potential issues down the road. For those interested, we have open positions! https://www.ratherlabs.com/open-p…

Why are you linking job postings, for your current employer/company(?), in this thread? Seems like a very strange thing to do.

You might even call it... a red flag.

Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?

#158

Post by slyall »

throwaway1995v2 wrote: post #62

Very long take-home assignments, I was interviewing with a startup for a backend position. they gave me 5 days to build a Cinema Ticket Reservation API, this by itself was long since it required managing 5 to 6 tables with it corresponding crud and business logic of each one (and also tests) but apart from that they wanted to see complex data structures, design patterns, caches strategies, be able to "scale", a desig…

I got the opposite. They requested a Infra design with one page of explanations and one page for the diagram, it was actually two designs, an onprem version and a cloud version.

Physically not enough room to put in everything with explanations.

I got the impression I failed because I didn't put in an WAF but then the recruiter said they'd decided not to hire anybody so I suspect they were not all that serious.

Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?

#159

Post by md_ »

jerkstate wrote: post #61
allo37 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what the answer was. I've read plenty about how the boutique finance sector is basically a parasite that only benefits a small cohort of already wealthy individuals, would like to hear what the other side has to say.

The answer I get from people working at market makers I’ve talked to is that they provide liquidity (so you can buy or sell a security immediately rather than waiting minutes or hours?) and decrease volatility. An example is onions futures; see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act and check the onions price history: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU01130216/ compared to a commodity where futures tra…

In contrast to the parent post:

When I was an undergrad, I interviewed at a then-very small, now-very-prestigious quant firm. In the last interview or so, I asked the quant head something like, “but what value do you provide to society?”

He said, “we provide liquidity.”

I turned down the job they later offered and went to work at a software company that sells a thing people buy.

Re: Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?

#160

Post by malloryerik »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #140
wdg3 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The relationship between futures traders and farmers is pretty much identical to that between any kind of insurance company and its customers - it's a risk arbitrage transaction where the client (farmers in this case) are sacrificing profit in expectation for a flatter outcome curve which in a properly priced market yields higher utility in expectation, since utility as a function of profit is concave for an individu…

I understand the mathematics. The problem is that there is a practical asymmetry of information. Large future traders can invest a lot of resources into getting a much better prediction of future prices, while individual farmers cannot. In such scenarios, it is inevitable that farmers will be exploited by future traders into making bad deals.

You might try examining -- with an open mindset -- a few CFTC Commitments of Traders reports and then see if you feel the same way.
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