An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by thot_experiment » Sat, Dec 07, 2024, 8:43 PM UTC

dannyeei wrote: post #191

thot_experiment wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your hiring process is broken by people using AI then the process is either not evaluating the right things, or maybe it's fine because realistically speaking you're hiring a dev who's going to be using AI anyway.

Unfortunately real life problems involve a lot of context and introducing that to interviews is hard. It either requires a long conversation where someone might lose track, or involve writing a large ish code base and getting them to work on that (which is a lot of work, and once again they don’t have context). In my experience if a problem simple enough to be completed in an hour, it’s simple enough for AI.

IMO if your interview question has a right answer that's like, a basic early screening tool to see if the person is paying the slightest bit of attention. The sorts of questions that really give you useful insight into who someone is as an engineer are the ones that don't have a right answer, and can't be reasonably solved in an interview. If your question has an achievable correct answer you're clipping the gamut of info you can glean from it.

I recently had a question where I was just given a bunch of tuples and told "let me know anything you can glean about this data in two hours". I think you learn much more by seeing how someone fails at a complex nebulous task than whether someone can implement a doubly linked list from memory or whatever.

Real life programming is like 80% failing at complex nebulous tasks, picking yourself up and trying again (by volume). Interviews should simulate that. If AI helps you, so be it.

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

#202

Post by geraldwhen » Sat, Dec 07, 2024, 8:45 PM UTC

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.

When I say for loop, I mean for loop. No tricks.

Declare a variable with any number type initialized to the value 0. I’ve seen candidates fail that, spend 30 minutes attempting to declare a variable in the LANGUAGE OF THEIR CHOICE.

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

#203

Post by Viliam1234 » Sat, Dec 07, 2024, 8:47 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #45

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 think it's worthwhile doing simple coding tests to check that the interviewee can actually code. It seems crazy but I've interviewed plenty of people that couldn't write a simple for loop. I agree asking difficult leetcode questions is less useful because it depends so much on whether people have practiced (or now whether they cheat with AI). Often these questions are so difficult there's no way you could come up w…

Exactly. "Yes to fizzbuzz, no to leetcode" seems like a reasonable position that few companies take; usually it's either both or neither.

In my entire career, I only once had a situation where they gave me a trivial technical problem, I wrote the first line, and they were like "okay, you passed the test, no need to finish this, we just use it to filter out the people who can't even start". And then we talked.

But usually it's either just talking, or some puzzle that requires you to remember some extremely specialized optimization technique which you will never in your life use again if you pass the test.

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

#204

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Sat, Dec 07, 2024, 9:03 PM UTC

stego-tech wrote: post #193

dahart wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we can’t fix it Applicants don’t have to apply to Google or Facebook for jobs they’re not qualified for, and if they stopped, the mess you’re referring to would disappear. At least at Google and Facebook’s doors, anyway. It might move somewhere else simply because there are a lot of people (literally everyone) looking for jobs that pay well. It’s funny to tell someone on the other side of the interview table that t…

> Applicants don’t have to apply to Google or Facebook for jobs they’re not qualified for, and if they stopped, the mess you’re referring to would disappear. Counter-point: employers don't have to pay garbage wages while demanding FAANG-quality candidates, thus focusing the talent pool on the few companies that do pay wages that might help candidates reach into the bottom of the Middle Class. > It might move somewher…

Trying to excuse cheating by pretending it's some kind of economic equality issue and badmouthing hiring of immigrant tech workers is a bad look. Software developers themselves don't want to stuck be working alongside any of the -10x coders who cheat their way past interviews and generally are grateful when they are let go so this can't be passed off as some kind of "sticking it to the man" / "power to the workers" thing.

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

#205

Post by lordnacho » Sat, Dec 07, 2024, 9:06 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #151

lordnacho wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gr…

The problem is noise.

Say you want to take 10% at each round. You have to do this three times to get 100 people, and then another round to get the top 30.

If you tighten the criterion, noise matters more, so you will drop your actual best candidates, since people need a high skill+noise. But if you try to keep the unlucky "good" candidates by having a wider band, you pay more.

Also, if you are successful at finding the best candidates in a batch, noise matters even more the next round.

I've been thinking about how to vizualize this. I have it in my mind and I'll try to describe it.

You plot a bunch of points with S, N for each candidate. They are independent, so a scatter plot looks like a 2D gaussian. Lets say skill is vertical, and noise is horizontal.

You want to find the 30 highest points, but you aren't allowed to just look on the scatter plot and select the top points. You have to draw a line S + N = c, and choose the person with the highest c. Basically sliding a ruler out that crosses the S and N axes as far away from the origin as possible.

Observation: if N is high (wider distribution) compared to S, you just get the luckiest people. If S is high compared to N, you just get the most skillful.

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

#206

Post by hackable_sand » Sat, Dec 07, 2024, 9:06 PM UTC

Tech companies are so tall,

they've become scared of their own shadows.

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

#207

Post by deadbabe » Sat, Dec 07, 2024, 9:46 PM UTC

acheron wrote: post #196

deadbabe wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally all the engineers at the company went through the same process. For all the bitching and complaining an interviewee does, there’s probably a hundred people who just went through the process and got hired. Suck it up, it’s part of the job. If you can’t do it, you don’t belong. Simple as that.

This is called “hazing”.

Do you want a job or do you want to live unhazed?

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

#208

Post by eastbound » Sat, Dec 07, 2024, 9:54 PM UTC

stego-tech wrote: post #186

gotoeleven wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Recruiters are the tried-and-true method of thinning the herd effectively. A good recruiter relationship might cost your company some money, but it's likely to be an order of magnitude less than the cost of ATS systems and AI resume scanners. Recruiters have always been the best path forward, as they serve as valuable "social grease" between high quality applicants who aren't extroverted enough for the network game,…

> Recruiters are the tried-and-true method of thinning the herd effectively. A good recruiter relationship might cost your company some money

I know the price: Instead of an ad on LinkedIn (100€ per recruit in 2019), we now pay recruiters 20% of the yearly salary.

In France the “salaire brut” is 60k€ → We pay 12k€ before an employee starts working, excluding the time WE spend in interviews. That’s a 12.000% increase over a simple ad.

> no single employer can fix this either

Yes, thank you for diagnosing the problem! For me, it’s due to LinkedIn. They know perfectly well that bulk-apply-in-1-click is hell. They could fix it in one day.

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

#209

Post by BeFlatXIII » Sat, Dec 07, 2024, 9:54 PM UTC

vunderba wrote: post #170

Great job on further eroding the trust from a prospective employer. Require a formal degree in CS? That's gatekeeping. Need to pass a whiteboard exam? Not representative of the actual work. Live coding session? Biased against people who don't perform well under pressure. Take home project? It's too much work to do for free. Showcase a personal portfolio? Not fair to people with families or other obligations. Either y…

The pushback is precisely because paying the high standards up front pulls up the ladder that made tech such an attractive option to people without traditional academic skills who managed to be computer whizzes.

Take home projects and personal portfolios are the options that are the best. Those are the ones where candidates are given the time to show their best work and don't require the debt of a college degree in a specific major (whose knowledge is probably largely irrelevant to your day-to-day coding).

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

#210

Post by eastbound » Sat, Dec 07, 2024, 9:59 PM UTC

stego-tech wrote: post #197

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 examp…

> 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. That's just more short-termism. It ignores the desperation of the masses for the Middle Class lifestyle they've been promised, in favor of yet-another-hurdle to be jumped over for a chance at a job they need to survive. All you'll end up doing is encouraging furt…

> > A lot use recruiters to reach out to talent, that is how I got my current job.

As an employer, I’m flummoxed that a recruiter with a human fibre is required. It means instead of paying higher salary, 20% goes to the pocket of the intermediary the first year.