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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

#151

Post by dahart »

lordnacho wrote: post #97
gzer0 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem is attempting to optimize a noisy process. Instinctively people think they need to look at all the applicants. Start interviewing people, and once you have enough people who pass your bar, you tell the rest tough luck. Secretary problem.

That, to some degree, is guaranteed to happen naturally. But why not use a sieve approach and narrow the pool exponentially using a range of tools that goes from automatic and instantaneous at the start to manual and time-intensive interviews at the end? The potential upside for a company is relatively large - with a small amount of work they have the opportunity to get the approximately best 30 people out of 100k graduating students. From the company’s perspective, this isn’t a problem at all, it’s a massive windfall of an opportunity. They can afford to optimize it, and they’re motivated to. As a hiring manager or company founder, I’d love to have this “problem”.

That said, your comment reminds me of a Monte Carlo algorithm I think I’ve heard about. There is a way to have some statistical confidence in getting the top K out of a sample of N without examining all N samples. I’m blanking on what it’s called, and I think it’s related to Reservoir Sampling. I don’t know if I read this or am making it up, but my instinct is that you can get to high levels of confidence after looking at sqrt(N) samples.

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

#153

Post by zeta0134 »

Spivak wrote: post #137
toast0 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Live interviews control for wasting the candidate time in a way that take home exercises don't. Both the candidate and the interviewer need to take time out of their day for the interview. If it's an in-person interview, the candidate also takes travel time etc, which could be more disruptive. But it takes almost no time to give a take home problem, so there's potential for a significant assymetry in time spent betwe…

Huh? I've done take-home problems and they've been fine. I'll take it 100% of the time over live coding.

Sure, if *you* did them they might have been fine. One really important thing the interview needs to screen for is the qualifications of the person actually trying to be hired, and not their buddy doing the work instead.

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

#154

Post by ryandrake »

lordnacho wrote: post #103
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…

I agree. My whole interview technique is just to have a long conversation with the person. My team was hiring recently. Guy comes on, says he's never used Rust, but has some thoughts on it. We talked about all the pros and cons of it, what the system requirements would be, and so on. He talks us through everything to do with the domain, just two seniors talking to each other at a high level. Very pleasant. We hire hi…

You got very lucky. Congrats!

This industry is unfortunately full of very charming, polished, smooth talkers who would ace that interview and then 3 months later it would dawn on you that you made a big mistake. There is this growing breed of "LinkedIn thought leader" types who, during character creation, put all their skill points into Charisma. And they're really good at sounding technical, using the right buzzwords, overwhelming the interviewer with word-salad, subtly steering the conversation towards areas where they have crisp, prepared answers, and so on. They look great, speak eloquently, and have those ivy-leaguer mannerisms that allow them to breeze through these kinds of informal chit chat interviews. Doubly so if that kind of interview is conducted by an exec or someone less-technical. Beware!

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

#155

Post by __turbobrew__ »

gotoeleven wrote: post #140
stego-tech wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And while I sympathize with your frustration, workers are caught between companies who can't even be bothered to send a rejection form letter anymore, companies posting "ghost jobs", and companies who post such broad salary ranges (if any at all) that they're unusable. Then you roll in the "resume farms" abroad (shady recruiters submitting candidates without approval and who don't match the requirements, so they can…

How do employers fix being blasted with resumes from unqualified morons?

A lot use recruiters to reach out to talent, that is how I got my current job. I applied directly and got ghosted but a month later a 3rd party recruiter reached out to me and I got the same job I applied for. Lots of other jobs have funnels through referrals and networks, people can make recommendations of past colleagues.

The only way to stop people from blasting resumes is to make it cost them something, for example charge $5 — which goes to charity — to apply for the job.

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

#156

Post by pmg101 »

tamimio wrote: post #63
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,…

Of course I would also want the information from your second question, but it never occurred to me that asking directly would get me that information. I guess if it's a leaf node they might just tell you the truth, but in general you'd expect the interviewer to say what they think you want to hear wouldn't you?

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

#157

Post by __turbobrew__ »

Rustwerks wrote: post #134
emseetech wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

| distinct lack of focus on code reviews as part of the assessment "Writing code is easy, reading code is hard" An interview based on reading, explaining and critiquing complicated code would give a better window into a candidate's skills than having them solve the kind of coding challenge that can be completed in a short interview. Also, being able to identify which algorithms would be useful in solving a unique pro…

I tried this and found that there are a set of potentially good candidates who simply cannot bring themselves to criticize anything in front of an interviewer due to the power dynamics of the interviewer/interviewee relationship.

Those are the same people who will know the project is heading off a cliff and not tell you before it is too late.

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

#158

Post by helsinki »

jasode wrote: post #23

Just in case this repo isn't a joke and some job seekers are seriously thinking of this tactic... Companies already know about cheat methods like this and candidates still have to demonstrate skills in-person on a whiteboard in a 2nd round of tech interviews. A high-paying FAANG job isn't going to hire candidates based on just one remote Zoom tech interview. That still may not deter some folks and they'll try to cont…

I received an offer from Apple in July after performing six remote interviews. Did this change since July?

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

#159

Post by pintxo »

emseetech wrote: post #102
CharlieDigital wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've recently been studying leetcode (for reasons) and went through an interview process. It was, by far, the most boring interview I've ever had to participate in. The leetcode problem was easy (detect if two strings are anagrams; solved with O(n) solution in talk about non-functional requirements -> write some API routes -> draw a load balancer (because of course, there's always a load balancer) -> draw a service -…

| distinct lack of focus on code reviews as part of the assessment "Writing code is easy, reading code is hard" An interview based on reading, explaining and critiquing complicated code would give a better window into a candidate's skills than having them solve the kind of coding challenge that can be completed in a short interview. Also, being able to identify which algorithms would be useful in solving a unique pro…

It’s my personal interview approach, I have a some 60 lines of code example I will ask questions about. What does it do, if I wanted to change x, where would I need to do this, etc. Seniors will take 30 seconds for the first two questions. I‘ve had junior applicants where I had to stop after 15 minutes of trying.

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

#160

Post by shepherdjerred »

jasode wrote: post #23

Just in case this repo isn't a joke and some job seekers are seriously thinking of this tactic... Companies already know about cheat methods like this and candidates still have to demonstrate skills in-person on a whiteboard in a 2nd round of tech interviews. A high-paying FAANG job isn't going to hire candidates based on just one remote Zoom tech interview. That still may not deter some folks and they'll try to cont…

> A high-paying FAANG job isn't going to hire candidates based on just one remote Zoom tech interview.

Have FAANGs gone back to real onsites? I've only see virtual onsites since the pandemic.

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