121–130 of 590 posts
I did a coding test the other day. To be fair they said don’t put more than 2 to 4 hours in. However I’m not someone who can fail to meet the requirements so I spent 8 hours building it to meet the requirements exactly. Heard nothing at all back. Silence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you hire a sculpter by taking them to lunch and talking about tools but never seeing their sculpture?
The sculptor’s resume is their portfolio, and having worked on screening artists for jobs, that is the first thing we examined, and for online hires, the only thing we could examine. This is a false equivalence.
> Developer hiring is broken This seems to be a pretty popular opinion. It totally might be right, but it’s not my own experience, so I have a serious question because maybe I don’t know what’s happening out there with most hiring today - what are the broad-stroke outcomes that demonstrate that hiring isn’t working? Are there statistics that show that hiring has problems? All of the reasons given in the article are c…
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much data around hiring outcomes because companies really don’t have a reason to share that information. For a lot of people, it comes down to personal experiences. I’ve definitely interviewed with companies where I was put in really unnatural situations that I struggled to shine in. For example, I bombed an interview in which I had to do a live coding challenge where I had to tal…
FWIW, there is limited time to collect data about a candidate in the context of an interview, and being able to observe a candidates’ thought process can help a lot with that. Obviously, this biases hiring towards candidates that are more observable, all else being equal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Technical interviews were once seen as a breath of fresh air. > You can be a nobody without connections or degrees and if you can prove you have skills during an interview process you may be hired. I think it stops being seen as a breath of fresh air when e.g. Google's explicit expectation is that you will spend multiple months studying for the privilege before interviewing with them.
That's how long people study for the bar and board exams. And that's after investing years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra schooling. You also don't get to retake those every couple years.
Is this really a thing outside US/US companies? I've been now 10 years in software industry (as a developer) in Asia and Europe and never had one of these "whiteboarding algorithm"-interviews. Interviews I have attended might have included something like that, but it's usually 1-5%. Most of the interview is talking about my previous experience, "how would you design a system xyz", homework tasks, "Take a look at this…
My favorite interview was at digg.com. A four hour interview was going great. My dream job. I knew their tech solid. Then the last guy - walked in [ianeure]. He asked: "What is a having statement in sql". I leaped in - rambled on and on how you can filter aggregated sets. His response: "I don't think you know how they work." I sat there confused and concerned. He explained you don't need a group by with a having stat…
My favorite interview was at digg.com. A four hour interview was going great. My dream job. I knew their tech solid. Then the last guy - walked in [ianeure]. He asked: "What is a having statement in sql". I leaped in - rambled on and on how you can filter aggregated sets. His response: "I don't think you know how they work." I sat there confused and concerned. He explained you don't need a group by with a having stat…
> He explained you don't need a group by in a having statement and that I needed to go back and study sql. I sat there awkwardly [I have been writing sql since I was 14 - I was 25]. He's technically right though. For instance in postgres, you don't need to have a GROUP BY clause when using HAVING https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-select.html#SQL-...
Technical interviews were once seen as a breath of fresh air. You can be a nobody without connections or degrees and if you can prove you have skills during an interview process you may be hired. Contrast this with other hiring processes which are more irrational, like med residency match, investment banks favoring "target school graduates", law firms favoring "top 14 graduates", etc. I think whiteboarding is dumb an…
It has never ever been true that you can “be a nobody” and get hired on merit alone. Even with dozens of responders to this comment coming to say that’s how they got hired, it’s total round-off error compared to size of tech hiring at large. Your credentials and political connections are what allow your resume through the ten arbitrary filters before you even get to the technical screen, collaborative coding, etc., a…
1. Fizzbuzz 2. If you claim SQL: Explain LEFT JOIN ... IS NULL pattern. Do you know about little bobby tables (injection exploit). 3. "How does the internet work?" 4. "Tell me about a hard / interesting / instructive bug you had to handle. 5. What would you do differently if you were the lord high poobah on your last job? 6. Tell me about something you helped finish and ship to users. 7. What do you have to say about…