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Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

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Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#11

Post by sagichmal »

Hiring isn't broken, dude. You just don't interview well, and you seem antagonistic even to the idea that your cachet and skills, insofar as they exist, aren't useful to the market. That's a problem -- for you.

Interviews exist because employers need a way to quantify and qualify your ability. Typical computer science problems are a (flawed, but concrete) way of doing that. No reasonable interviewer expects you to recollect breadth-first search flawlessly, on demand, onto a whiteboard. But they do expect you to be able to reason from a problem statement to something approximating a solution. That's fundamentally what programmers do. You should have the chops to think in this way, and you should be eager to try. Emoting "what the fuck?!" and claiming you can't, or won't, because you're not a recent graduate is an excuse and a cop-out.

A few popular open-source projects don't necessarily speak to your talent as a programmer. A 960 day GitHub streak is trivia, not a signal of anything useful. (If anything, it marks you as a target for burnout!) A few Hackathon wins and a couple hundred GH stars are the artifacts of a successful hobbyist, not a proxy for professional ability, or a gateway to employment.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#12

Post by jpatokal »

stegosaurus wrote: post #7
taneq wrote: post #6

The examples that always come up of "stupid interview questions" in this kind of rant: Implement a breadth first search, or reverse a binary tree, or write FizzBuzz. Are these really such difficult things to whip up, off the top of your head? Is it really that unreasonable to want to hire someone who can do so? Yes, if you need such a thing and it's not immediately obvious how to do it, off to StackOverflow you go to…

I don't know what BFS is. I just googled it. Oh, I know what it is now. If you haven't been exposed to it, it's just jargon. That's the point. You are testing for jargon rather than ability. It is the distinction between saying 'implement FizzBuzz' and going silent, and actually explaining what it is. As an interviewer it is easy to forget that whilst you may have asked a question 20 times, this may be the candidate'…

No, it's not a test of whether you know it, it's a test of whether you can implement it. If the candidate doesn't know/recall what BFS is, it's trivial to demonstrate the basic idea on a whiteboard, and it's the candidate's job to convert the idea into code. (Which, at the end of day, is pretty much what the vast majority of coding is about.)

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#13

Post by daurnimator »

The purposes of these interviews is not (usually) to see if you know the answer. It's to see how you problem solve.

If you knew the correct answer to e.g. the BFS algorithm, you'll get thrown another question that they hope you don't know.

When interviewing, the thing I want to see most is how someone works through a problem: can they solve from first principles? do they go via trial and error? do they ask for a computer to google things up/a book?

Picking raw CS problems is an easy option, as its something that you should be able to solve, and it means I don't have to require you to know Angular/React/Flavour of the month (new tools are easy to teach the right candidate).

You're not going to immediately know the answer to everything that comes up in your job; so evaluating how you solve the unfamiliar is very important.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#14

Post by malbs »

Just went through this process from the POV of employer.

The risk of choosing the wrong person is so great, that it's often better to not choose anyone. If there is any doubt what-so-ever, it's better to not make a a hire, it can be too damaging to a team, manager, company.

I've tried so many different "coding interview" scenarios. But I found the best one was a real task that a real staff member would be expected to do, extract it out into its own example, and before I talk to someone, they present their solution to the task, and the only thing we talk about, is their solution. If they can dissect and discuss their solution eloquently, and reason about trade-offs, short-cuts, talk about what they may have done better....

Of course, it can also be a simple case of, "is this person an asshole? are they going to rub my team up the wrong way? yes? fuck them."

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#15

Post by stegosaurus »

jpatokal wrote: post #12
stegosaurus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what BFS is. I just googled it. Oh, I know what it is now. If you haven't been exposed to it, it's just jargon. That's the point. You are testing for jargon rather than ability. It is the distinction between saying 'implement FizzBuzz' and going silent, and actually explaining what it is. As an interviewer it is easy to forget that whilst you may have asked a question 20 times, this may be the candidate'…

No, it's not a test of whether you know it, it's a test of whether you can implement it. If the candidate doesn't know/recall what BFS is, it's trivial to demonstrate the basic idea on a whiteboard, and it's the candidate's job to convert the idea into code. (Which, at the end of day, is pretty much what the vast majority of coding is about.)

I edited my post. Yes, this makes sense, if the interviewer describes what they're actually after.

I have experienced (on both sides of the table) situations in which it just hasn't happened. 'Can you do X?' 'What is X?' 'Never mind, let's move on'.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#16

Post by niemyjski »

Completely agree with all of your points. I think I'd do horrible in most on the spot interviews, but give me an ide with intellisense and a book of advanced algorithms and I'll complete what ever you want. I understand the most common algorithms but I don't use them hardly ever in all the work I have done over the past 10 years. Am I implementing a big data search engine, no. So why would I know all the specifics to that, but given an hour or two of reading I'd be up to speed and be on top of things.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#17

Post by drakenot »

stegosaurus wrote: post #7
taneq wrote: post #6

The examples that always come up of "stupid interview questions" in this kind of rant: Implement a breadth first search, or reverse a binary tree, or write FizzBuzz. Are these really such difficult things to whip up, off the top of your head? Is it really that unreasonable to want to hire someone who can do so? Yes, if you need such a thing and it's not immediately obvious how to do it, off to StackOverflow you go to…

I don't know what BFS is. I just googled it. Oh, I know what it is now. If you haven't been exposed to it, it's just jargon. That's the point. You are testing for jargon rather than ability. It is the distinction between saying 'implement FizzBuzz' and going silent, and actually explaining what it is. As an interviewer it is easy to forget that whilst you may have asked a question 20 times, this may be the candidate'…

Most specialized fields have jargon. It is the common language between the practitioners of that field. At what point should a person be expected to know some basic ideas and the words associated with them for the field they work in?

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#18

Post by ams6110 »

jpatokal wrote: post #12
stegosaurus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what BFS is. I just googled it. Oh, I know what it is now. If you haven't been exposed to it, it's just jargon. That's the point. You are testing for jargon rather than ability. It is the distinction between saying 'implement FizzBuzz' and going silent, and actually explaining what it is. As an interviewer it is easy to forget that whilst you may have asked a question 20 times, this may be the candidate'…

No, it's not a test of whether you know it, it's a test of whether you can implement it. If the candidate doesn't know/recall what BFS is, it's trivial to demonstrate the basic idea on a whiteboard, and it's the candidate's job to convert the idea into code. (Which, at the end of day, is pretty much what the vast majority of coding is about.)

It's still not realistic. People don't code on whiteboards. You code (today) with all the resources of the internet at your fingertips, and if you need to invert a binary tree you will use a well-tested implementation from a standard library.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#19

Post by akadien »

tyingq wrote: post #2

>> "The first round started with introductions, followed by a coding exercise — write a maze solving algorithm. What the fuck?! Seriously?...I am not a recent college graduate anymore" I wonder if just writing a brute-force maze solver, and then explaining that you are aware better solutions exist...but that you didn't have any memorized, would have sufficed.

If you're sure you don't want the job, turn the tables and say something like "I have no clue. Can you show me?" Most likely, they don't have a clue either.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#20

Post by stegosaurus »

drakenot wrote: post #17
stegosaurus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what BFS is. I just googled it. Oh, I know what it is now. If you haven't been exposed to it, it's just jargon. That's the point. You are testing for jargon rather than ability. It is the distinction between saying 'implement FizzBuzz' and going silent, and actually explaining what it is. As an interviewer it is easy to forget that whilst you may have asked a question 20 times, this may be the candidate'…

Most specialized fields have jargon. It is the common language between the practitioners of that field. At what point should a person be expected to know some basic ideas and the words associated with them for the field they work in?

Well, if the knowledge of a particular thing is useful for that job, then yes, that's reasonable.

But we know that most of the time this isn't true. If I'm a multinational company, I want my accountant to know what transfer pricing is. If I'm a self employed joiner, I don't.

Problem solving tests are good. Memorization tests are terrible. We have search engines for that.

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