Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by khuey » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 1:55 PM UTC

Scea91 wrote: post #64

yownie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring IS broken, unfortunately everyone isn't realizing it simultaneously, so half of us end up speaking about it to the other half who are already employed and feel the need to justify their employment. Since these discussions never happen out of CS / IT circles they very rarely propogate upwards to changing company practices unless the CTO/CEO happens to read HN. You're just further contributing to the rigged scen…

Hiring in CS / IT is massively more objective compared to most of other fields.

Unfortunately it's objectively wrong.

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

#112

Post by falcolas » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 1:55 PM UTC

mkozlows wrote: post #72

robbiemitchell wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about OP's comments that the algorithm questions were unrelated to the front-end positions?

Of course they're unrelated. The interviewer asking this doesn't expect you to write these algorithms all day, they want to know that you have the basic mental dexterity to figure things like this out. They are, ideally, abstracted problems of the complexity that you'd be expected to be able to solve on your own. There are some positions where you don't have to care if people can really problem-solve; as long as they…

> they want to know that you have the basic mental dexterity to figure things like this out

If you have the "mental dexterity" to coming up with your own solution which is identical to Dijkstra's pathfinding algorithms in terms of complexity within an hour interview, you are a god among mortals.

And that's what they expect - a solution to a problem that is equal to the best minds of our field. I say this from experience: I was expected to do exactly that, and criticized when I came up with a O(n^3) instead of O(n^2).

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

#113

Post by paddy_m » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 1:55 PM UTC

I hired Sahat as an intern three years ago while he was an undergrad. It was one of the best hiring decisions I have ever made. He was productive immediately and our (small) team felt the loss when he went back to school. This guy is good and gets stuff done, ask people who have worked with him.

I wish Sahat had reached out to more of his network before responding to random recruiters. Tech interviews as Sahat experienced them are broken, but tech hiring is slightly less broken especially when you leverage your network.

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

#114

Post by Xcelerate » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 1:56 PM UTC

When I was an undergrad, my team won the Facebook Hackathon at our university in 2011, so they gave each of us job interviews. None of us got an offer, but the irony is that one of my other team members went on to work at Instagram, which was then acquired by Facebook less than a year later. I'm pretty sure that was about the most expensive way FB could have hired him.

During my interview, the interviewer asked me where I was getting my CS degree from, and I replied that I wasn't getting a CS degree — my major was chemical engineering. He was silent for a few seconds, so I'm pretty sure that wasn't the answer he was expecting.

What I remember about the interview process is that I was asked to implement some kind of odd search/sort algorithm. I remember thinking "why would I have this memorized off the top of my head when I could easily Google the best algorithm suited for the task?"

In high school, I don't think there was ever a chemistry or math exam that I didn't get a perfect score on, but I would also take much longer to finish than the other students. I frequently ran over the allotted class time and worked well into the lunch period (luckily, I had nice teachers who allowed me to do this). In college, I remember perplexing the physics professor, because I got 70s-80s on the quizzes throughout the semester, then I got a 113 on the final exam. I told him the only difference was that I was given 20 minutes for the quizzes, whereas I had 3 hours to complete the final exam. The extra time made all the difference.

So I wonder if a lot of companies are missing out when they look for 1) people who have a lot of simplistic CS algorithms memorized and 2) people who can work quickly on the spot. I may not be able to write a FizzBubbleRedBlackSort algorithm on a whiteboard in ten minutes, but give me a week and I'll have you a parallelized implementation of quantum monte carlo that runs on a hundred thousand cores.

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

#115

Post by kinai » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 1:57 PM UTC

mikearagua wrote: post #104

kinai wrote: post #74

"I could feel my frustration rise as I am struggling to come up with a solution on a whiteboard....yep, I am definitely not going to pass this interview. I ran out of time before coming up with a working solution." Instead of standing there with nothing its better to be straight up and just say "No idea mate" and then name reasons why that is but how you'd solve it in a normal situation. It is a lot about human psych…

Incidentally, I interviewed a guy yesterday and we whiteboarded a real problem we had encountered last week. He couldn't solve the problem we presented and really didn't even try to dig in much. I was surprised how unwilling he was to dig in so I started asking him about his own environment and tried to get him to describe other problems he's solved and how they might relate. He couldn't really do it even with that b…

Obviously one has to be smart about this attitude :) I am not saying acting arrogant/Idontcare will always be a good thing. Just the right amount of it so you don't come across as a scared little applicant.

But as I said earlier its usually bad to stand in silence with no answer and let time run out. Better to admit whats going on and try to explain what the issue is.

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

#116

Post by falcolas » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 1:58 PM UTC

unoti wrote: post #93

Google and similar companies aren't for everyone. They're looking for people on top of their game and willing to go the extra mile. > To be fair, I already knew about Google’s idiotic interview process that is optimized for hiring book-smart academic candidates who know their algorithms and data structures cold, so my expectations were rather low to begin with. I also did not get much sleep that day, so my problem so…

With all due respect, being able to recite algorithms from memory is no actual indication of being at the top of your game. All it really indicates is that you are capable of memorizing algorithms.

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

#117

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 1:59 PM UTC

49531 wrote: post #80

Technical interviews became 10x easier when I realized that most companies aren't necessarily looking for the right answer as much as they are trying to look into your mind. As a self taught programmer things like binary search trees and linked lists are a foreign concepts (especially as a self taught frontend developer). When I am asked to solve a problem in a way I've never encountered before, people are pretty ope…

That's fine in theory, but the reaction you get during an interview - which is a highly stressful, completely artificial situation - tells you nothing useful about the reaction you'll get when someone is settled in a role, they know the culture, and the culture knows them.

OP sounds like someone who will rage quit and have tantrums. Those aren't employable qualities.

But is that an accurate impression in context? He obviously has a practical background, likes to code, and can solve problems.

How do you tell if he'll be a net benefit or a net loss to a team?

I don't think asking anyone to improvise a BFS tells you much about that.

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

#118

Post by dspillett » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 2:00 PM UTC

unprepare wrote: post #90

Scea91 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring in CS / IT is massively more objective compared to most of other fields.

IT (By IT I'm talking about my industry, I'm an IT administrator, not programming) hiring is based a lot on certifications, certifications which are abundantly easy to scam. You can find full exams with answers of CCNA and every Microsoft cert imaginable, I've worked for companies that incentivise certifications, and i watched coworkers use these 'tools' en masse to gain easy pay bumps and pad their resumes. I've had…

>* being hired because they passed a test they cheated on*

The certificate shouldn't matter in the interview itself - it is just a way to pair down the choices of who you interview when you have many candidates. If you have knowledgeable people in the interview process (i.e. at least have a dev present for a dev interview, not just managers or HR people) then you should be able to catch those that don't really have the skills.

Heck, even people who genuinely have a certificate might be rubbish overall but revised well for the exam days - you'll hopefully weed those out in a good interview process too.

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

#119

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 2:00 PM UTC

cmdkeen wrote: post #92

stegosaurus wrote: post #4

Is it even just hiring? Every employer I've worked for has made the experience farcical. If not at the start, then over time. You interview for one job, and eventually end up doing something else. A full time career that doesn't pay enough to buy a home. And they say software developers are overpaid. I think the end-game for me is to just go camping with a laptop or something. I'll code for fun, rather than trying to…

I'd say a majority of those who graduated my CS class 6.5 years ago now own their own home, and that's in the UK where devs aren't as relatively well paid and house prices are high. There are plenty of good employers out there, though they don't spend all their time hiring because they have low turnover. As for "eventually end up doing something else" isn't that career development? We can't bemoan having non-technica…

> I'd say a majority of those who graduated my CS class 6.5 years ago now own their own home

I think what you mean is that they have a mortgage they'll be repaying for a long time. Houses are still too expensive to buy in the UK with a junior- to mid-tier developer's salary in the UK, even if you went to a place like Cambridge and worked for Google.

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

#120

Post by simula67 » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 2:01 PM UTC

sagichmal wrote: post #11

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 re…

I don't interview well. Technology for me is exciting because of its potential to bring happiness to people. If someone tells me that the product I am working on has a security issue because it does not follow some the security portions of the RFC correctly, I will be delighted to read it carefully, study arcane encoding algorthms etc and implement code that brings up the compliance to an acceptable level. If you ask me to devise an algorithm to find the longest increasing subsequence in an array of numbers without any context I won't do so well.

Maybe I am conceited, but I can't convince myself I am an inferior programmer because of it. I can make money for your company. I can work well with a diverse of group of people. I take pains to conduct myself with integrity. Shouldn't all that be the central measure of how people are hired ?