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Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

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

#131

Post by falcolas »

paddy_m wrote: post #113

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 experi…

> I wish Sahat had reached out to more of his network before responding to random recruiters.

Has his network moved forward in what they do? I've found with my own network that so many of them are in the same (or equivalent) spots they were when I left to advance my career. Not precisely positions of power which I can take advantage of for the next step forward in my career.

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

#132

Post by eulji »

You have to go with the flow. Unfortunately.

They treat you like hobo that came to their kingdom begging for a cookie.

They are the kings and queens and you are nothing just a pathetic beggar.

It's really exhausting and painful to go through it again and again especially when you know that most of the companies are just wannabe hipsters or the same corporate hellholes.

They pretend they are on the same level as Rob Pike and alike but what most of the people do is they write shitty code, shitty UI and shitty everything.

Google is definitely worse they cannot really make a compelling product that would DIRECTLY earn them money .It's all about ADS.

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

#133

Post by ckozlowski »

Scea91 wrote: post #96
unprepare wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

None of the employees I would consider working for gives f k about certifications. I agree with you that certifications are crap but I haven't encountered a single good company that cares about them.

In my experience I wouldn't say they were complete crap or didn't care at all, but I'd agree with the notion that they're a poor indicator by themselves.

When my team would look at candidates, past accomplishments and projects counted for tons more than a cert. Still, a cert told us what someone was interested in and what they wanted to bone up on. They could expect questions relating to that cert field during the call. If they had trouble talking on the subject, then we knew that the cert was likely there to be a pad or just something to fulfill some billet requirement. In good cases we'd find that the cert was an indicator of something they were passionate about.

So I consider it a pointer of sorts. Never worthy of hiring someone on it's own, but I'd recommend them to people who are /ready/ to demonstrate knowledge and may not necessarily have the project experience otherwise. I'd just recommend to them that they be ready to talk to it in an interview.

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

#134

Post by stegosaurus »

drakenot wrote: post #107
stegosaurus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if the knowledge of a particular thing is useful for that job, then yes, that's reasonable. But we know that most of the time this isn't true. If I'm a multinational company, I want my accountant to know what transfer pricing is. If I'm a self employed joiner, I don't. Problem solving tests are good. Memorization tests are terrible. We have search engines for that.

I think memorization tests of the sort that ask what FunctionX you should use from LibraryY for a particular situation are terrible. I don't consider asking a developer about basic data structures and their properties as terrible. This is foundational knowledge that is useful for nearly every programming job. Knowing about lists, hash tables, trees, etc and their operations or tradeoffs is extremely important. Simila…

Sure. I know what a list, a hash table, a tree are because I looked it up whenever I saw someone mention it, and eventually internalized it.

But before that, I'd used them for 10-15 years without knowing the name because it doesn't matter. Take a hash table. Python calls it a dict. C++ calls it an (unordered) map. Java calls it.. whatever it calls it. It's nice to have that 'hash table' google term to find the thing you want in a new language, but otherwise they're just words.

Actually in usage I type {} in Python and it is what it is.

I'm not arguing that these things aren't useful at all.

I'm arguing that the distinction between the CS-ified person that has spent the effort to learn what the words mean to pass interviews is not substantially more knowledgeable or useful than the version of that person that will have to find it out in the future. It's marginal.

Basically it feels like a sort of 'table manners' test. You've put the fork on the wrong side of the plate, so you can't eat dinner with us today, you scoundrel.

Don't take this to mean that I think that computer science is useless. Far, far from it. It is simply that I think that relying on jargon is testing whether someone genuinely has a CS degree (or equivalent without certification). It's not testing whether someone is a good programmer.

If that's what you want, just ask for it. Let's not waste each other's time and money.

The anger here exists because people want good faith interviewing, and instead they get "bloody hell the last 20 people were crap I can't be bothered any more" interviewing.

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

#135

Post by Lawtonfogle »

tyingq wrote: post #2

>> "The first round started with introductions, followed by a coding exercise — write a maze solving algorithm. What the fuck?! Seriously?...I am not a recent college graduate anymore" I wonder if just writing a brute-force maze solver, and then explaining that you are aware better solutions exist...but that you didn't have any memorized, would have sufficed.

"Being that this isn't my specialty, I would research a solution online as it would provide a far greater business value for the time spent. But you probably want to see me try to solve it anyways, so I let's start with a brute force and improve from there."

Point out that in a real life scenario you wouldn't do this because it is so more efficient to use the work of others, but then solve the problem so they can measure your problem solving skills.

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

#136

Post by maxxxxx »

When I interview people I usually ask what they have done and let them explain to me why some things were done in a certain way, what alternatives they had thought about and so on. When I can have an intelligent conversation the candidate usually is a go, otherwise not. I just want to know whether they can think straight or just repeat memorized stuff.

If you know your stuff you usually can separate bullshitters from good people.

This has worked pretty well for me so far.

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

#137

Post by bcook »

wott wrote: post #121
bcook wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero(?), but I have also never had a "great" job that I had to fight for. Regardless, I think everyone knows through experience that an employee's technical skills are practically useless if said worker is socially inept.

And what are your social skills? You, who can't even see that the "fuck you, I quit" attitude does not come up first out of nothing but after a series of rejection and nonsensical situations, i.e. that it is a consequence of successive experiences and not the reason of these experiences. You, who decide unilaterally from your failure to understand the logic of events in a blog post, that the blogger is once and for a…

You started your post with a veiled ad hominem attack, which instantly sets an illogical, angry tone... :( Yeah, I have no social skills, so what? I may also have a below average mind, so what?

I did not call the author "socially inept"; that sentence was a hypothetical example of how an individual's incredible technical skills can be overshadowed by other problems.

I am sorry if I offended you. I thought my posts were critical but logical...

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

#138

Post by stegosaurus »

bad_user wrote: post #105
stegosaurus wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this makes sense if you consider an interview as extending a hand to a poor, down-trodden vagrant, rather than an exchange amongst equals. The article might go over the top a bit with self-pity, but personally I just see it as suboptimal behaviour. http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ - Dan Luu explains better than I can. I think fundamentally the idea of paying developer X 40K and developer Y 80K (because…

Are you sure you replied to the right comment? :-) From my point of view, an interview really isn't an exchange between equals, but a meetup where two parties meet, state their demands and evaluate each other. It works in both directions of course.

Yes, I am.

>> From my point of view, an interview really isn't an exchange between equals

If you design it that way, sure. It doesn't have to be like that.

The whole principle here is that there exists a growing portion of developers who can't be bothered with interview ping pong.

If you don't want them, great! Everyone wins. You don't need to convince us, we won't be working at your company anyway.

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

#139

Post by maxxxxx »

emerongi wrote: post #30
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 think many software engineers deal with "computer science problems" in their everyday jobs. GitHub stars are worth much more IMO. It shows that other developers value your work. That says a lot. In the end, we have to realize that most developers are just average. Why go through the ridiculous process of finding average developers who by luck (or some homework) happen to solve the problems you throw at them p…

Most developers are average and most jobs are average. How many people really get to think about breadth first or binary trees daily? Most of us spend their days wondering why Chrome doesn't render a div in the expected way or why some API doesn't do what it should and finding workarounds.

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

#140

Post by blubb-fish »

Why bother applying at those super fancy companies. There are loads of medium-sized shops with a friendly work atmosphere and reasonable hiring practices.

Vimeo, Facebook, Google, ... they hire elitists and those design the interviews. And honestly I doubt their work is at the end of the day more efficient then that of most other "regular" companies.

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