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

Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

propelauth.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 181 posts

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#51

Post by dinobones »

majormajor wrote: post #13
paulcole wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great! Isn’t that the point? That some people who really don’t want the job won’t invest a bit of their time and people who do really want the job will?

Don't forget about the people who don't have to spend weeks or months focused just on interview prep to do well on the average leetcode question... That's who interviewers are looking for. Now, a case can be made that there aren't that many of those people and you might not need them anyway, but... if you can spend a few weeks to catch up that's not all bad compared to what high-end job offers in other professions de…

If you want to receive top compensation, and work at the Meta/Roblox/AirBnBs etc, you will need to be able to solve 2 Leetcode medium questions in 45 minutes, correctly and optimally.

I work for a big tech company where people smell their own farts and think they are geniuses even though they work on CRUD interfaces for admin portals for Cloud. The interview process is well known.

I have seen wrong solutions made by these genius question writers in their own doc, or where they find out 4 weeks later that the time complexity of their own solution is not really what they thhink it is. Do you really think in a company with 50k+ software engineers, where many studied English (but like to conduct CS interviews like they’re CS researchers), that everyone will know and understand details like; how the expected linear time complexity of quickselect works?

It’s a nightmare; it’s blind leading the blind. It’s been completely gamified at this point and the only way to win is to play the game, maybe 10 years ago you could’ve passed on your own merit of having a CS degree and knowing basic DS&A, but I promise you that is almost the case nowhere anymore.

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#52

Post by meowtimemania »

one_buggy_boi wrote: post #33

> When interviewing as a software engineer, for example, you’ll run into places that lean heavily on algorithms interviews. And don’t get me wrong, those interviews can be fun (in the same way that Project Euler can be fun), but it’s not very relevant for most jobs I'm curious what changed around 2015-2016 that led to the current interview process. In the before times the interview was more of a technical conversatio…

I recently started interviewing again and haven't encountered many leetcode style questions this time around. I'm noticing lots of contrived questions that relate to some feature the company had to build.

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#53

Post by zilti »

kanbara wrote: post #42
jstarfish wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

leetcode interviews and intense algorithmic problems for roles which don’t require such acumen can definitely be ageist the pronoun issue is your own, however, and speaks nothing to the character of colleagues who may be genderqueer. they aren’t aliens, they’re human beings.

They are humans indeed, and as the phrase goes, "your mental health is not your fault, but your responsibility"

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#54

Post by neuralzen »

I went through something similar once when I was interviewing for an IT position in the Antarctic (I'd applied for positions at both McMurdo and Amundsen-Scott), and I was supposed to connect to their network simulator to troubleshoot and solve some network issue, but it wasn't working on their end so the interviewer walked me through the scenario, and responded as a DM would. - Quite frustratingly this was my 3rd interview for the position, and although I diagnosed and solved the DM'd scenario of a downed vlan issue in a Cisco environment in ~5 minutes of this off-the-cuff "simulation" using DM provided prompts, help menus, and outputs, I did not get the job. I think he penalized me for relying on the DM provided help menus and auto suggest tabbing...which is something anyone on a working simulator would have done. Which was a bummer because even though I was overqualified for the positions and would take a pay cut, I really wanted the experience of living for months in the Antarctic. So while I see the usefulness of this kind of interview, there are noteworthy issues of bias which a real simulator wouldn't begrudge you.

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#55

Post by DoctorDabadedoo »

dmoy wrote: post #37
one_buggy_boi wrote: post #33

> When interviewing as a software engineer, for example, you’ll run into places that lean heavily on algorithms interviews. And don’t get me wrong, those interviews can be fun (in the same way that Project Euler can be fun), but it’s not very relevant for most jobs I'm curious what changed around 2015-2016 that led to the current interview process. In the before times the interview was more of a technical conversatio…

> I'm curious what changed around 2015-2016 that led to the current interview process. In the before times the interview was more of a technical conversation, sure they had some gotcha questions, but nothing too brutal. If you had real experience that you co... Places just copied big tech companies that were already doing that for many years prior to 2015. I had leetcode style interviews well before 2010 even.

Big Tech could afford to do that due to their aura of mysticism and greatness, but if you're a mom and pop shop with Google-esque aspirations but none of the compensation and status, I wonder how many candidates have the patience and interest to go through the hoops.

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#56

Post by marcellus23 »

meowtimemania wrote: post #52
one_buggy_boi wrote: post #33

> When interviewing as a software engineer, for example, you’ll run into places that lean heavily on algorithms interviews. And don’t get me wrong, those interviews can be fun (in the same way that Project Euler can be fun), but it’s not very relevant for most jobs I'm curious what changed around 2015-2016 that led to the current interview process. In the before times the interview was more of a technical conversatio…

I recently started interviewing again and haven't encountered many leetcode style questions this time around. I'm noticing lots of contrived questions that relate to some feature the company had to build.

What does it mean for an interview question to be contrived?

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#57

Post by lovegrenoble »

one_buggy_boi wrote: post #33

> When interviewing as a software engineer, for example, you’ll run into places that lean heavily on algorithms interviews. And don’t get me wrong, those interviews can be fun (in the same way that Project Euler can be fun), but it’s not very relevant for most jobs I'm curious what changed around 2015-2016 that led to the current interview process. In the before times the interview was more of a technical conversatio…

And this Dungeon Master tool can add some ambience to your adventure)) https://tabletopy.com

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#58

Post by thdc »

one_buggy_boi wrote: post #33

> When interviewing as a software engineer, for example, you’ll run into places that lean heavily on algorithms interviews. And don’t get me wrong, those interviews can be fun (in the same way that Project Euler can be fun), but it’s not very relevant for most jobs I'm curious what changed around 2015-2016 that led to the current interview process. In the before times the interview was more of a technical conversatio…

I like to think it went like this

1. Interviewer: If you're a good software engineer, you can answer basic algorithmic questions.

2. Interviewees: Practice algorithmic questions so you appear to be a good software engineer.

3. Interviewer: People are just studying leetcode to get jobs, what can we do? Ask harder leetcode questions.

4. Other companies: Let's copy them since they're successful.

In short, the questions used to be reasonable until people specifically prepared for them. No one knew what to do about it so they just raised the difficulty, which made it even more unfair for people who don't specifically prep.

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#59

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #36

It is possible to structure interviews so that: * Every candidate get an almost-identical interview * The interview is not heavily dependent on the investment or natural aptitude of the interviewer * Interviews generate data that can be scored by a rubric * Interviews aren't scored by the interviewer, thus eliminating the intrinsic bias of being in the hot seat with the candidate It looks different for every role. Fo…

[deleted]

Re: Becoming a dungeon master for an interview

#60

Post by azangru »

yieldcrv wrote: post #29
neilv wrote: post #3

> Interviews should be as close as possible to the work that the candidate would do if they join. Interviews should give information to both parties about what it would be like if the person joined. Simulating a typical work task, as this article describes, might give you some of that. Though important to remember that's far from all that's relevant to either party. A recently fashionable Leetcode hazing, on the othe…

making a react component in a 45 minute interview (something I recently did) is better than leetcode, but still a poor signal. on the job I'll never do a time trial where I'm being watched and gaslit about "just wanting to see how I think" as opposed to "do it perfectly from memory in this collaborative coding session faster than this guy escaping a dystopia in Asia, and trying not to be deported back" find a way to…

> faster than this guy escaping a dystopia in Asia, and trying not to be deported back

While that guy may have an advantage over you in motivation, you might have an advantage over him in communication.

Post reply on HN