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

Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

blog.interviewing.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 394 posts

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#121

Post by gedy »

Galanwe wrote: post #107
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #66

As someone with 20+ years in the experience, red flag #1 for me is being expected to go through a skill-testing technical whiteboard (or similar) coding exercise before even having a deeper discussion about the role and whether there's a fit, etc. I've seen this many times and I find it baffling: I already have a very high paying high quality job, I want you to sell _me_ on the position before demanding I do stressfu…

After being on both sides of the interview situation for quite a while now, my feeling on this is more nuanced. The thing is, when you look for a job, you will often go for 5 to 10 interviews. On the other end, when I'm looking for someone to fill a position in my team, I will interview at the very least 50 candidates. That is to say, all things equal, the interviewer has most likely more incentive than the interview…

I think a big problem is companies and in house recruiters who reach out to experienced/settled engineers and first thing they want is send you through some hr / tech quiz pipeline. No. I need to hear what this is about and if it's something I'll bother jumping through hoops for. Your recruiter's quick calls are not cutting it and that is not the same as "applying".

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#122

Post by vkou »

sjg007 wrote: post #105
shuntress wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that Microsoft is a huge company but the inconsistency in quality is something I find quite comical. To pile on to the Windows control panel for a minute: If you open the start menu and search updates, you bring up the settings menu for updates. Likewise for network settings or any other section of the control panel successor. But if you open network settings from the start menu while you already have updates o…

I am amazed when I see older style windows pop up alongside the windows 10 styling.

As am I, because the older style settings windows tend to actually be able to solve my problems.

What truly blows my mind is when the same settings are scattered among four different windows. See: Anything to do with sound.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#123

Post by kthejoker2 »

azangru wrote: post #68
kthejoker2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't "red flags" from the interviewer side pretty obvious? Most interviews are just noise with very little signal. Some basic red flags: * Poor ability to self-reflect or demonstrate that they've learned things from their experiences * Lack of or otherwise poor critical thinking * Inability to communicate * Inability to display core competency in the skills required for the job, especially when challenged (I don't…

I'm 100% on board with the "would I like to work with this person" criterion, but I wonder how well it fares now, in the age that, at least on the surface of it, wages a crusade against all and every biases. If I am biased against a particular group, I probably wouldn't like to work with a person from that group, would I? How does the "would I like" criterion hold against this?

I completely agree it can be misused - the best way to counteract biases in interviewing is have a standardized process.

So for example, we don't actually phrase it as "Would I like to work with this person?" we just ask for feedback on "General Behavior and Attitude"

If they pass the other components of the interview but fail that one, we usually send them on to a second interview and directly look to confirm or refute the poor behavior / attitude assessment.

We also ask recruiters specifically to reach out between interviews for "small talk" to discern behavioral findings.

In terms of training interviewers, I couch it in terms of decorum and "putting your hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel" and that it's a box-ticking exercise, not a psychological study - that is, 90% or more of the subpopulation of qualified candidates with sustained work history know how to "behave professionally", and this isn't a differentiator.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#124

Post by LoSboccacc »

opportune wrote: post #93
mdgrech23 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would echo your sentiment that the role of project manager, product owner or whatever they're calling it these days needs to be rethought. In my org we literally have a squadron of these individuals which leads to bickering and an in-cohesive product experience.

My issue with the two “PM”s I interact with the most: Project managers basically do something that the devs, especially dev manager, can handle themselves. It seems like a leftover process for when software contracting was more common. There’s no reason a developer can’t just manage the Kanban board and write a quick report. Product managers can be really good but in a lot of cases they just devolve into stakeholder…

project manager are there to free devs mind from various distractions.

I'm glad I can delegate them the reasoning about which task is more urgent, and them acting as buffer to clients frees me from a lot of time trying to understand what they want, how they want it and all the back and forth about how much they want to pay for it.

good project managers, that aren't just bossing internal people around but working with the team at different part of the projects like communication and operations, are rare, but are a joy to work with.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#125

Post by cmrdporcupine »

dddbbb wrote: post #117
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of that is because of the expectation at Google that you will just move around. You don't really hire specifically into a given team, and that could be disconcerting, for sure. But you are also given enough respect by the company to assume that as a competent SWE you should be able to move around fairly easily to almost any team in the company. When I started (9 years ago) it was stated during onboarding that yo…

Doesn't that put off a lot of very high-quality candidates though? If someone joins because they want to work in an interesting machine learning team, they probably don't want to be potentially moved on to a legacy Java CRUD app. Or is transferring determined more by what the employee wants?

The latter. You transfer to where you want to go. There's an internal listing of open positions, but there's also word of mouth. Assuming the team has headcount and you get on with the manager, it's usually not hard, and doesn't take a lot of effort.

Yes, the first bit doing something you don't like might suck. But I like that Google conceives of software engineering positions as a broader discipline than "I'm a fullstack developer who uses XXX language and YYY framework"; that isn't going to be of any use to Google anyways. We generally build our own tools and have our own frameworks.

Does it put people off the hiring process? I'm sure. Luckily Google has lots of people to choose from.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#126

Post by vkou »

dddbbb wrote: post #117
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of that is because of the expectation at Google that you will just move around. You don't really hire specifically into a given team, and that could be disconcerting, for sure. But you are also given enough respect by the company to assume that as a competent SWE you should be able to move around fairly easily to almost any team in the company. When I started (9 years ago) it was stated during onboarding that yo…

Doesn't that put off a lot of very high-quality candidates though? If someone joins because they want to work in an interesting machine learning team, they probably don't want to be potentially moved on to a legacy Java CRUD app. Or is transferring determined more by what the employee wants?

Unless your job is going away, transfers are determined by what employees want.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#129

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

jacquesm wrote: post #112
redisman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that's funny is when the internal recruiter for company X (that I had to google) reaches out to me and sets up a call. Then their question is why did you choose this company specifically? And I'm like dude, you called me!

Classic. I had a similar thing happen a while ago. US based company - not named to protect the guilty - wanted me to move to the United States to do some pretty specific work for them. I'm not open to such offers but they went out of their way to make the invitation, offered to fly me out there and a whole pile of other buttering up bits and pieces. So I said if they wanted me that badly, could we do this remote? You…

I always love getting a question about "Why are you interviewing for this position?" and replying "I got an email from your internal recruiter".

The follow up is usually "Why do you want to leave your current company?" replying with "I'm not, your recruiter said this was a cool place".

Post reply on HN