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We built a crowdsourced interview question database for tech interviews

interviewdb.io

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Re: We built a crowdsourced interview question database for tech interviews

#61

Post by seafoamteal »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #57
kube-system wrote: post #28

Might want to include a DMCA takedown address, so that you don't get them sent to your upstream provider. I regularly submit takedown requests to other sites when I see my interview questions posted there. I'm sure others do as well.

Is an interview question copyrightable? I am sure that if someone is uploading the specific wording of an interview question, then that would potentially be a copyright violation. But if they're just describing the problem in their own words (for instance "I was asked to design a system for selling movie tickets") then there shouldn't be a copyright issue.

Not sure what the legal technicalities are, but one of the questions I saw on the site was just a picture of a the user's screen with the question on it, so it's definitely more the former than the latter.

Re: We built a crowdsourced interview question database for tech interviews

#62

Post by nusl »

ericjmorey wrote: post #56
zeroq wrote: post #40

As a hiring manager or company owner (I wore both hats) I developed a routine during the interview that basically leads to a breaking point. I want to either drill down your bullet points to find out if you're actually an expert in XYZ as the resume claims, or work with you on a coding problem that's simple to understand yet more complex than leetcode challenges. I don't expect you to ace, but I want to check if you'…

You're not filtering on honesty, but desperation. The desperate will lie because of the higher stakes for themselves.

I dunno. If your immediate response is to lie rather than admit that you don't know something, it increases the probability that this is the person's default response when in such a situation. You don't want that person working for you if you depend on them for critical stuff, like many development or similar positions.

If you've ever worked with someone like this, you'd know that it's frustrating and unpleasant mid-to-long-term. Someone breaks prod and refuses to admit it unless given a commit as evidence and a confrontation rather than owning up and fixing/helping fix it? Pretends to know everything then produces terrible work that sucks more hours out of other devs? Nah.

Admitting fault and lack of knowledge is important, and it's different to ignorance.

If you're desparate, actually know your stuff, and still lie, that's on you IMO. If you don't know your stuff and you lie, you probably wouldn't have made it anyway.

Re: We built a crowdsourced interview question database for tech interviews

#63

Post by kube-system »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #57
kube-system wrote: post #28

Might want to include a DMCA takedown address, so that you don't get them sent to your upstream provider. I regularly submit takedown requests to other sites when I see my interview questions posted there. I'm sure others do as well.

Is an interview question copyrightable? I am sure that if someone is uploading the specific wording of an interview question, then that would potentially be a copyright violation. But if they're just describing the problem in their own words (for instance "I was asked to design a system for selling movie tickets") then there shouldn't be a copyright issue.

Yes, the bar for copyright protection on written text is very low. And I've never not seen them just plainly copy/pasted.

If someone rephrased them I really wouldn't have an issue with that, because the phrasing is fairly important to the particular questions I'm asking. (and the doofuses using these sites probably would miss any nuance when rephrasing them anyway)

Re: We built a crowdsourced interview question database for tech interviews

#64

Post by madcaptenor »

kccqzy wrote: post #18
nsxwolf wrote: post #11

For those who work in the dark matter of the industry, there are no real resources because most places don't even have "question banks". When an interview request pops up on my calendar, I just go out and find a random question - it's totally disposable and unlikely to be used again, and we don't interview enough for someone to compile enough information on us. None of the places I've interviewed at in the last 5 yea…

Bigger companies do have question banks. Finding a random question at interview time makes it (1) difficult to compare across candidates; (2) makes the interviewer work too hard since the interviewer hasn't first thought about the question and makes the hints given to candidates less useful. And Google, being the maker of a search engine, was good at detecting leaks of their questions.

I work for a large company that hires a lot of developers. If you're in the US you've heard of us and there's maybe a one-in-three chance you're our customer. We are not "sexy" though. I have seen question banks circulate occasionally but when it's time to actually interview nobody can ever remember where the question bank is. Usually when I've been on a team that's actively hiring we make up a bank of questions for that particular round of hiring, which helps us in comparing those candidates that are directly competing against each other. But nothing at scale.

Re: We built a crowdsourced interview question database for tech interviews

#65

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

nsxwolf wrote: post #11

For those who work in the dark matter of the industry, there are no real resources because most places don't even have "question banks". When an interview request pops up on my calendar, I just go out and find a random question - it's totally disposable and unlikely to be used again, and we don't interview enough for someone to compile enough information on us. None of the places I've interviewed at in the last 5 yea…

> For those who work in the dark matter of the industry

Can you be more specific about what this means?

Re: We built a crowdsourced interview question database for tech interviews

#66

Post by TheBigSalad »

swiftcoder wrote: post #35
lesuorac wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not probably. The hiring rubric gets items added/dropped based on what portions are statistically significant when compared to post-hire performance reviews. There's a lot of research in the public about "Structured Interviews".

When I was an engineer at Amazon, we all just made up our own questions, or passed fun ones around the office. I assume the Bar Raisers probably had an actual rubric, but the rest of us didn't (and we all had interviewing quotas to meet)

How long ago?

Re: We built a crowdsourced interview question database for tech interviews

#67

Post by muzani »

mavelikara wrote: post #22
pc86 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I struggled early in my career with interviews. Granted this was 2008-2010 era so the job market was not great, especially in a not-quite-urban non-coastal city where I was for a junior developer. But something did change when I stopped treating interviews as "convince them to like me" / "convince them to hire me" and started treating them as "find out if I want to work (in order) 1) at this company, 2) on this proje…

What makes those questions ok for Tier-1 companies to ask, in your opinion?

Tier 1 is default alive and thriving. They don't need the smartest people. They need people who do not screw up. Someone who's willing to spend 3-6 months cramming interview questions is also someone who is unlikely to drop the ball.

Startups are the opposite. They are default dead. If they hire good enough people, they die. They need exceptional, hungry people. The kind of people who abhor busywork. Startups will pull much lower quality on average and paying higher rates drastically increases the odds of death. So their hope is to get lucky on an exceptional junior. They're also more willing to fire fast instead of doing some odd layoff down the line.

Basically Tier 1 will bias towards minimal false positives, and startups will bias towards minimal false negatives. Most companies are somewhere in the middle, default dead in 30 years or so.

Tier 1 also has a huge funnel and they hire lots of people so they need it. A lot of junk gets into the funnel because of the sheer size of it. They need that 1 out of 300, so they just layer enough filters to hit that rate.

Tier 2 companies who need to filter 1 out of 50 should not be adopting Tier 1 practices. Startups probably have like 10 applicants and 6 of them can't do FizzBuzz. But they still need to filter, even if sometimes they end up with 0.

Re: We built a crowdsourced interview question database for tech interviews

#68

Post by nh23423fefe »

ericjmorey wrote: post #56
zeroq wrote: post #40

As a hiring manager or company owner (I wore both hats) I developed a routine during the interview that basically leads to a breaking point. I want to either drill down your bullet points to find out if you're actually an expert in XYZ as the resume claims, or work with you on a coding problem that's simple to understand yet more complex than leetcode challenges. I don't expect you to ace, but I want to check if you'…

You're not filtering on honesty, but desperation. The desperate will lie because of the higher stakes for themselves.

That presumes I can't catch people lying to me?

Re: We built a crowdsourced interview question database for tech interviews

#69

Post by nottorp »

dangus wrote: post #19

This gamified payment model is not my cup of tea. The whole vibe of this site seems like it’s more interested in growing user count and making money rather than helping people. I also feel like “crowdsourced” is a euphemism for “stolen content.” Sure, it’s a capitalist world and I’m not against starting a business, but this feels like something supremely lazy, like the author is hoping to make money without any of th…

Maybe the real business model is to sell the data to the LLM trainers.

Unless said LLM trainers figure out some way of downloading all the data without paying...

Re: We built a crowdsourced interview question database for tech interviews

#70

Post by jeetoid »

muzani wrote: post #67
mavelikara wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes those questions ok for Tier-1 companies to ask, in your opinion?

Tier 1 is default alive and thriving. They don't need the smartest people. They need people who do not screw up. Someone who's willing to spend 3-6 months cramming interview questions is also someone who is unlikely to drop the ball. Startups are the opposite. They are default dead. If they hire good enough people, they die. They need exceptional, hungry people. The kind of people who abhor busywork. Startups will pu…

> Someone who's willing to spend 3-6 months cramming interview questions is also someone who is unlikely to drop the ball.

I don't believe this at all, they're unlikely to not comply and execute arbitrary commands. Which at least in my experience is orthogonal to whether they're able to actually problem solve or build good things.

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