Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Interviewing in Silicon Valley

symbo1ics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 117 posts

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#101

Post by tptacek »

dionidium wrote: post #64
tptacek wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good comment. Some nits I'd like to pick: * Companies aren't required to provide a level playing field to applicants. I think you've alluded here to discrimination against protected classes; that is, you're suggesting that someone could get an unnecessarily hard interview and use it as evidence that they were constructively rejected for their race or gender. That could happen, but most companies probably us…

That could happen, but most companies probably use the same terrible interview for everyone but their friends, which, while unethical, is lawful. Wait, why is it unethical? It's frustrating and inconvenient and sucks for everyone but their friends. But, unethical? On what grounds? I don't have an obligation to give strangers the same favors I give my friends, do I?

If you have a preferred candidate for a role and that candidate isn't being vetted by exactly the same process as the rest of the candidates, you're obligated to disclosure something to that effect. You might not come right out and say "you should know, we have a preferred candidate", but you need to say something.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#102

Post by jerrya »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #81

Let me posit a couple things to my fellow interviewing engineers here: 1) I like to ask questions during interviews. I hate the whole "I'm a brilliant guy charade." I'm not. You're not. Einstein was. Deal with it. 2) And I especially don't have a care for rote memorization bullshit for things I can look up in less time than it would take me to remember. I'm a thinker, not a fucking textbook. So, if you said to me "do…

I tend to say, and this has not worked well for me, "Uh, I would google it, and see what other people have done, and learn from their experiences, and either use their license appropriate code, and or their knowledge and experience and consider that and how it would fit into our architecture and start from there".

Because that's how I engineer. I try to stand on the shoulders of others. And Google provides such an excellent step-stool.

But as I've said, that doesn't seem to go over well.

Implement your favorite sort algorithm? I don't know that algorithm, I tend to use the sort algorithm that comes along with the libraries of the language I am using on the assumption that a) it's good enough until proven otherwise, b) it's well implemented and mostly bug free by the language designers, and c) schedule is paramount, the most bummed out, tweaked out, sort is not.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#103

Post by dclowd9901 »

jerrya wrote: post #102
dclowd9901 wrote: post #81

Let me posit a couple things to my fellow interviewing engineers here: 1) I like to ask questions during interviews. I hate the whole "I'm a brilliant guy charade." I'm not. You're not. Einstein was. Deal with it. 2) And I especially don't have a care for rote memorization bullshit for things I can look up in less time than it would take me to remember. I'm a thinker, not a fucking textbook. So, if you said to me "do…

I tend to say, and this has not worked well for me, "Uh, I would google it, and see what other people have done, and learn from their experiences, and either use their license appropriate code, and or their knowledge and experience and consider that and how it would fit into our architecture and start from there". Because that's how I engineer. I try to stand on the shoulders of others. And Google provides such an ex…

Yeah, but this differs in what I'm talking about, in that I am going to prove to you that I'm good at doing the most important part of the task: implementing an idea into code.

I think, regardless of memorizing a specific algorithm, if I can prove that I can understand something after only knowing about it for a few seconds, and then actually create a mechanism that works with that understanding, that's really what an interviewer would want to see.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#104

Post by jerrya »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #103
jerrya wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to say, and this has not worked well for me, "Uh, I would google it, and see what other people have done, and learn from their experiences, and either use their license appropriate code, and or their knowledge and experience and consider that and how it would fit into our architecture and start from there". Because that's how I engineer. I try to stand on the shoulders of others. And Google provides such an ex…

Yeah, but this differs in what I'm talking about, in that I am going to prove to you that I'm good at doing the most important part of the task: implementing an idea into code. I think, regardless of memorizing a specific algorithm, if I can prove that I can understand something after only knowing about it for a few seconds, and then actually create a mechanism that works with that understanding, that's really what a…

I thought that by telling them I would use google to learn what other people have already learned about the task, I WAS proving to them I know how to implement their ideas into code.

I am more worried about the folks that just jump into a complex project without seeing if someone has already done this beforehand.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#105

Post by vijayr »

tptacek wrote: post #101
dionidium wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could happen, but most companies probably use the same terrible interview for everyone but their friends, which, while unethical, is lawful. Wait, why is it unethical? It's frustrating and inconvenient and sucks for everyone but their friends. But, unethical? On what grounds? I don't have an obligation to give strangers the same favors I give my friends, do I?

If you have a preferred candidate for a role and that candidate isn't being vetted by exactly the same process as the rest of the candidates, you're obligated to disclosure something to that effect. You might not come right out and say "you should know, we have a preferred candidate", but you need to say something.

If it has been decided that their friend is going to be hired anyway, then why have interviews at all? Just hire the said friend, no?

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#106

Post by vijayr »

brightsize wrote: post #90
balloot wrote: post #18

I despise interviewing for software positions. Engineers love to treat interviews like some kind of hazing. They're gonna make you quiver and sweat and if you can still solve their stupid brainteaser maybe they'll give you the honor of working with them. Problem being, this has basically nothing to do with how good you'll be at the job. I spend 0% of a normal day with someone I don't know staring me down and judging…

I'm a software developer. By far the best interview I've had in the past few years was with a very small startup in NYC with some cool tech. We had a fairly extensive and relatively detailed tech interview over the phone that included mostly general questions like explaining how DNS lookups work. They then gave me a fun, throw-away programming project to do offline in a day or so that utilized their preferred stack,…

woah, you got paid for it, that is awesome. When I started my career, I had to work two weeks for free to prove I'm worth hiring :(

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#107

Post by tptacek »

vijayr wrote: post #105
tptacek wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a preferred candidate for a role and that candidate isn't being vetted by exactly the same process as the rest of the candidates, you're obligated to disclosure something to that effect. You might not come right out and say "you should know, we have a preferred candidate", but you need to say something.

If it has been decided that their friend is going to be hired anyway, then why have interviews at all? Just hire the said friend, no?

That is also true.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#108

Post by i0exception »

bane wrote: post #51

I agree with this article that communication with companies is getting absurdly poor. With all these communications channels available, why is it so hard to send a quick email? Don't have time because of too many candidates? Maybe you shouldn't have more candidates than you have time to handle. I've reached a point in my career where I'm not interested in engineering positions anymore (a great motivator has been to a…

>>This rings some alarm bells as some of the larger SV companies have found themselves on the business end of a law suit for this.

Any citations for this?

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#109

Post by mc-lovin »

randomdata wrote: post #50
mc-lovin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's hard to quantify the relative importance of personality and cultural fit vs intelligence and programming ability. You can turn what you said around, and say that you can be the nicest, coolest person in the world, but if you are a fucking moron who can't code, you won't be very useful. But the big tech companies seem to have settled on the current process, and are therefore probably fairly happy with the pe…

The big tech companies haven't been happy with the people the interview process have been giving them – all we heard about for a long time is about how they couldn't find anyone to hire. Perhaps this settling you speak to marks the end of developer shortages in the industry?

Not really. These are two separate issues. If I am a gold panner, I might be very satisfied with my gold panning technique, and yet complain that there is a shortage of gold in the river.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#110

Post by bane »

i0exception wrote: post #108
bane wrote: post #51

I agree with this article that communication with companies is getting absurdly poor. With all these communications channels available, why is it so hard to send a quick email? Don't have time because of too many candidates? Maybe you shouldn't have more candidates than you have time to handle. I've reached a point in my career where I'm not interested in engineering positions anymore (a great motivator has been to a…

>>This rings some alarm bells as some of the larger SV companies have found themselves on the business end of a law suit for this. Any citations for this?

I only know of a few that I've heard of through my personal network, but don't have any specific citations I can point at. Even if the candidate loses the lawsuit, the cost of handling them is probably more than any company is willing to take on, just easier to drop the riddles instead.
Post reply on HN