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An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

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Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#61

Post by pavlov »

CastFX wrote: post #46
pavlov wrote: post #16

Why bother with this style of interview where the candidate is under extreme time pressure and isn’t allowed to use any of the research tools they would normally use in their job? What is this controlling for? It barely made sense when these were conducted in person, and it’s completely inane over video meeting. Instead of grilling people, talk to them. Give them meaningful take-home exercises that you can discuss to…

I agree but a big problem remains. How do you make it scale for 100k applications?

Employing someone is renting their labor.

How do you find an apartment rental in a large city with thousands of options?

You can’t expect to visit them all. And you certainly can’t come up with increasingly bizarre torture tests for landlords to pass (“I might rent from you if you can answer enough trick questions about tenant law within 15 minutes”).

To find the apartment, you probably sample enough of the options to form a picture of what’s available, and then make a decision knowing that you didn’t have perfect information but you had to move ahead. The same applies to hiring.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#62

Post by rvz »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #58
geraldwhen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most applicants fake the take home problem or have someone else or ai do it for them. You have to watch someone produce a compiling for loop to prove they’ve ever built software before. Fraud is rampant.

I've been lucky to never have to deal with that. Sucks for everyone that has. On the other hand, I personally cannot code properly while someone is conceptually "breathing down my neck". A for loop sure, but I'd probably fail at writing a hash table or whatever despite nearing 10 years of experience on many different projects, including compiler frontends and a simple garbage collector I wrote for the fun of it.

Today, I guarantee you that candidates will eventually take that risk to cheat in the online assessment stage in the hopes of getting an offer from the company and will likely turn into a bad hire.

Not hiring them is better than a bad hire.

If it were me, I would not use Hackerrank, Leetcode, or other online puzzles sites. Instead it would be just a conversation in to just show me your open source contributions in large repositories or you building projects (open / closed) that others are using.

That is it.

For contributions, they must be under public code review or you doing the review and for open source projects they shouldn't be hello world / test projects but useful to others which are used as dependencies in other larger open-source projects.

A basic easy conversation that rids of 95% of cheaters and frauds and those who cannot code.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#63

Post by tamimio »

qwer1234321 wrote: post #32

I might be calling obvious but if candidate uses something like this, is this not lying to potential employer? I'd rather be rejected than got job I'm not qualified to do, that's why I never prepare for interview above studying the actual company- and that is more to give me proper signal if I want to work for them, I want to be motivated to make move on more than just money. I also have never done leetcode, though I…

> that's why I never prepare for interview above studying the actual company

You and me both. I just read a bit about the company before applying for the job. In the interview, I ask the interviewer only two questions: what’s the management style? Is it a servant leadership style with autonomous work, or is it a hierarchical task-based one? The second question is, what does an average day-to-day job look like? Sure, there are few stressful days and others are relaxed, but on average you can tell. Is it chaotic, always running against deadlines and having new tasks thrown at you, or is everything sorted out properly? Sometimes, I also ask about the meetings. I personally don’t like useless meetings. A lot of middle management uses meetings as part of the power dynamics and exerting power rather than actually discussing and solving issues.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#64

Post by jochem9 »

xandrius wrote: post #36
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #29

I don't get why companies waste time with this sort of interview that just turns into this stupid cat and mouse game. Even ignoring this sort of software, someone cramming leet code exercises is the same thing in my view (they won't remember or use in their work 99% of that stuff). Just talk to the person, talk about the sorts of problems you expect them to solve. Can they understand the problem? Do they have ideas o…

Same! This topic gets me soo irritated. If someone is supposed an expert in a field (hence them being an interviewer) how can an average joe fool them into thinking they know more than they actually do during a conversation? Even now with LLMs generating almost real time, there is always a slight delay and we all know that LLMs are far from perfect. It seems the tech community on one hand complains at how bad LLMs ar…

Not all interviewers are experts. If you are building out your business you will be hiring roles that don't exist yet. Of course that brings different requirements for that first hire, but judging their skill level might prove very hard.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#65

Post by tamimio »

vanhakoira wrote: post #9
mog_dev wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technical interviews are useless and its normal that their victims fight back

I heavily disagree with this. Technical interviews are great if done correctly. Or do you think that technical interviews hold such trait that is always present, that you can label all of them useless?

I think a better option is to have a system in place where companies hire them for a month or so then after that period you choose whoever made a better impact. And before you say it will be costly, most companies can afford it, especially if it will lead to a better outcome. That way they get tested on the actual systems and not just some useless questions from the internet.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#66

Post by [deleted] »

tamimio wrote: post #51
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #29

I don't get why companies waste time with this sort of interview that just turns into this stupid cat and mouse game. Even ignoring this sort of software, someone cramming leet code exercises is the same thing in my view (they won't remember or use in their work 99% of that stuff). Just talk to the person, talk about the sorts of problems you expect them to solve. Can they understand the problem? Do they have ideas o…

Yep, it’s why I stopped looking for software development jobs long ago. It's this die-hard criterion that’s based on very isolated problem-solving issues rather than the big picture or the concept at least. This has resulted in the current outcome of software development nowadays, where you need a ‘wrangler’ (aka product manager) and all sorts of useless methodologies to deliver a product that’s literally identical t…

[deleted]

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#67

Post by [deleted] »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #29

I don't get why companies waste time with this sort of interview that just turns into this stupid cat and mouse game. Even ignoring this sort of software, someone cramming leet code exercises is the same thing in my view (they won't remember or use in their work 99% of that stuff). Just talk to the person, talk about the sorts of problems you expect them to solve. Can they understand the problem? Do they have ideas o…

[deleted]

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#68

Post by AndrewDucker »

tamimio wrote: post #65
vanhakoira wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heavily disagree with this. Technical interviews are great if done correctly. Or do you think that technical interviews hold such trait that is always present, that you can label all of them useless?

I think a better option is to have a system in place where companies hire them for a month or so then after that period you choose whoever made a better impact. And before you say it will be costly, most companies can afford it, especially if it will lead to a better outcome. That way they get tested on the actual systems and not just some useless questions from the internet.

As someone with a job I'm not giving up my job security to take a job that might go away after 1 month. Doesn't matter how much more it pays - I need income every month to pay rent!

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#69

Post by thaumasiotes »

szastupov wrote: post #55
xandrius wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you want sympathy but it just shows that some people just don't understand the power dynamics of an interview. I believe live coding is a scourge and we should get rid of it altogether. Get a tiny open ended project, which requires more design/architecture skills than actually finishing the solution. You do it at your own time and shouldn't take more than 1-2h. You submit it and provide your mental pro…

> I believe live coding is a scourge and we should get rid of it altogether. I would take an hour of live coding any time over a take-home task that is one hour only on paper and takes you three in reality. Engineering is collaboration, and it's fair to expect candidates to talk, solve problems, and explain their solutions. Where we could do better as an industry is the type of problems we give to people. I'm not a f…

> But even if you have to ask something algorithmical, I'd prefer the style of "Advent of Code" exercises where the same problem has variations and multiple levels of complexity.

That's how Amazon does their interviews.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#70

Post by thaumasiotes »

gzer0 wrote: post #39
xandrius wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you want sympathy but it just shows that some people just don't understand the power dynamics of an interview. I believe live coding is a scourge and we should get rid of it altogether. Get a tiny open ended project, which requires more design/architecture skills than actually finishing the solution. You do it at your own time and shouldn't take more than 1-2h. You submit it and provide your mental pro…

The core issue here is the sheer volume of applicants. Microsoft opened 30 new-grad software engineering positions. Care to guess how many applications they got within 24 hours? 1,000? 10,000? Nope. 100,000 applications. In under a single day. With that kind of applicant pool, I’m honestly not sure what the best approach is—even though, in a perfect world, your suggestion would be the more appropriate route. The real…

> With that kind of applicant pool, I’m honestly not sure what the best approach is

You should see the number of people that apply to college.

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