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The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

jarednelsen.dev

11–20 of 851 posts

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#11
In my admittedly limited experience, there's one way to avoid such nonsensical interviews - run away from bureaucracy. Seek smaller organizations (startups in particular) and if you're lucky enough to have a minimally cross-disciplinary background, you can seek out niche organizations where you'll interview with technical specialists who'll ask reasonable questions that are actually related to your work and your interviewers won't be saddled with "standardized" managment pleasing bullshit. One of the biggest problems I see with modern tech (and large industry in general) is this ridiculous idea that MBAs can standardize all processes across all departments across all industries. This is a source of needless pain and waste - but I suppose it keeps execs happy when they can reduce every metric to a nice little [bullshit] number. Interviewing at FAANG is a case in point.

I've never in my life had to implement a recursive memory optimized underwater red black tree balancing algorithm, and it's insulting to be told I'm not a good enough programmer if I can't pass your totally contrived white board problem. Who the hell are these people even selecting for with these kinds of questions? Do they understand how much talent they're throwing away?

In any case, I have a strong suspicion that, aside from compensation, working for FAANG is hugely overrated. And that's not just sour grapes talk - mountains of red tape, processes upon processes, overwork and burnout, and best of all, you get to spend your best years infecting society with the cancer that is adtech.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#13
Unfortunately, it doesn't matter - since all tests test for something, and all these things are highly correlated, grueling job interviews are entirely justified.

As much as it pains to say me, HR is entirely justified in their approach of asking people to fill out a form, importing the list into excel, sorting on the GPA column, and calling the top N candidates on the list.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#14

What does it mean for the industry when there's one of these articles on the front page every other week?

That most people have a hard time viewing the world from different lenses.

The article presents a picture of a guy “studying up” for a career and his adventures in interviewing. As someone who’s interviewed hundreds of candidates I noticed red flags right away. For instance, if someone asks you to design a micro service - you don’t say “I can’t”. No FAANGco interviewer wants you to fail. In fact, they want to help you. The best worst answer would have been “I’m not really familiar with micro services but I’ll give it a shot. Could you explain a bit more about them?” This shows the candidate doesn’t falter at a challenge, is willing to dive deep, and is committed to the task.

The lens shift comes into play when 50% of the candidates can’t complete fizz buzz, another 25% simply lied in there resume about any relating experience, and the other 24% don’t have any real understanding about algorithms.

There are software developers and then there are great software developers. It’s generally initiative and algorithms that separate the two.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#15
Everyone knows it's broken, but interview cycle still continues to bring in talent, even if there are false negatives. People still brave the grueling gauntlet. People still show up for interviews. Smart people still get hired. The system works, just in a terribly shitty way.

To HR, the engineer hiring process is voodoo magic and we best not touch it.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#16

Interviews are so bad because there are too many capable programmers. If there really was a market shortage, companies would not interview like this.

If the problem was oversupply, we wouldn't be getting the cushy salaries and benefits we do. I think the issue is more that it's pretty easy for people with no programming ability to appear competent on a resume, especially to a clueless HR rep or headhunter. There are a lot of people out there whose backgrounds look good on paper who can't solve FizzBuzz...

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#18
I've been doing initial phone screens (small companies) this week (two just today, actually), and with all of them when the recruiter (internal or external) gets to the "we'd like to send you a coding challenge" I interject with: "Let's do a code exchange. I'll point you at some of my GH projects, and you send me some of your code".

So far they've accepted ("I'll forward it to the hiring manager"), and it's far too soon to see if this works... but I'm hoping.

The next step I'll be trying is "I'd like you to pay me for my time. If you're not comfortable with that yet, let's talk about what's involved in getting there."

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#19

Interviews are so bad because there are too many capable programmers. If there really was a market shortage, companies would not interview like this.

This is the obvious point which needs to be repeated till it sinks in. We are not seeing the evidence we would expect to see if this was a tight labor market.

As a point of contrast, consider American industry in 1942, as the nation mobilized for war. It doesn’t matter what profession you look at, the attitude everywhere was “Just show up and we can train you.” That applied to welders and bolt tighteners and also the engineers who designed tanks and aircraft. Every company was hiring and every company was willing to hire inexperienced workers and then train them.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#20
To me the main misstep with a lot of modern interview testing is the time-constraint factor. Having 20 minutes to solve a complex problem sans-Google in a not-really-a-text-editor field on a web page just isn’t a real-world scenario. And, what you do in that setting doesn’t really say anything useful.

If you’re going to test people, either whiteboard it and make it absolutely clear you just want to see how they break it down; or, give them hours to do it right without a lot of restrictions.

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