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

Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

meekg33k.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 247 posts

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#151

Post by pault »

yread wrote: post #126
irrational wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working in the industry for 25 years. I've never received even 5 minutes of training on how to interview people, yet I've been asked to interview people dozens of times. This is everywhere from small companies up to huge Fortune 100 companies. The skill set to be an effective programmer and to be an effective interviewer are not the same. But, I don't do interviewing often enough that I've felt the need to…

The most important lesson in interviewing I've learnt is to shut up. If you're doing the talking you're not learning about the candidate. Say as little as possible, if they ask good followup questions they will figure stuff out (see also above comment about curiosity).

One of my most frustrating interview experiences was when the lead engineer constantly interrupted me in the middle of my answers, clearly looking to get an answer that confirmed his existing opinions, then stopped the interview because we were out of time. He didn’t let me finish answering a single question, then rejected me because my technical knowledge was “too shallow”. I’m glad I never had to work with the guy.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#152

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

anonymoushn wrote: post #101
vmception wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exploding offers are bluffs. We all know the team wanted someone that could hit the ground running yesterday for the last 6 months.

Google gave me a 4-day exploding offer and it really did explode.

What a joke. I've received two offers from Google and the first took nearly 5 weeks from start (phone screen) to finish (offer), and the second well over two months. And both offers were seriously disappointing.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#153

Post by onei »

beforeolives wrote: post #92
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have personally given up on "whiteboarding people"... reminds me of waterboarding. I skim the resume, underline anything we use internally and talk to them about experiences. We've done over 300 interviews in the last expansion year (2017) because we had to build a brand new development office (+50 devs). After hiring all of these people, we've quantified this as three things: Curiosity, Ability to Learn and Abilit…

You can't really quantify attributes like curiosity, ability to learn and ability to listen so it's difficult to interview for them without having all kinds of biases sneak in. How do you deal with this in your process?

Quantifying it is hard for sure, but some sample questions I've used in the past:

1. (Curiosity) How do you keep up to date with tech? Then explore something recent they started playing with and how they found it.

2. (Ability to learn) Ask about past failures, what they thought went wrong and what they'd do next time. If that's a bit harsh, ask what they'd change about their last major project.

3. (Ability to listen) For me this is about how they work with others, so probe for areas of friction they've had, particularly with people outside their immediate team.

You can't discount bias, but you get a baseline over a few interviews and can go from there. It's worth pointing out that all of these are soft skills, and quantifying those is always hard. Sometimes you've just got to trust your gut. It also helps if you've spent time working in a customer focused job, because you tend to be better at spotting egregious personality flaws.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#154

Post by ric2b »

bluGill wrote: post #119
david38 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hypocrisy is that to even get to the point where you have a 24 / 48 hour exploding offer, you (the candidate) had to often wait weeks to get a response to the application, phone screen, on-site, decision. So I don’t buy this fairness argument. If we’re talking about fairness, the process would be super quick, and then I would get a week to think about a decision that will affect YEARS of my life. To say nothing o…

Quick can be bad - if someone submits a resume on day one that is good should we hire them or wait a week for someone else to discover the position? If you don't know you want to work for the company until by random chance is shows up in one of your searches as hiring your type of person then you need the time to discover us. As a results policy is we can't interview anyone until the position has been posted for a we…

> if someone submits a resume on day one that is good should we hire them or wait a week for someone else to discover the position?

if some company gives me an offer on day one that is good should I accept it or wait a week for some other company to give me an offer?

It cuts both ways.

> In most cases people don't actually have two serious leads to a job at the same time.

That's common for me, as I usually do a bunch of interviews around the same time when I'm interested in knowing what else is out there.

Most of the time I'm not really paying attention to my LinkedIn unless I see something that immediately catches my attention, which is rare.

> but for most people there isn't a choice.

If there isn't a choice people will decide and reply quickly, you don't need an exploding offer in that case.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#155

Post by mkl95 »

diehunde wrote: post #125
mkl95 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is similar to the author's, and I live in a not so well off area of Europe. I'd expect to receive dozens of offers per month if I lived in the US. Most recruiters are just chasing quantitative metrics and don't really care about candidates being a good fit. If you have certain keywords in your resume, you are going to get bombarded with offers. One of the few negative aspects of the rise of remote worki…

You mean dozens of recruiter invites to chat right? Getting offers takes much more than just adding keywords to your CV

Offers as in contract and project details after one or two interviews, with no take home tests or phone screen interviews required. You basically have to agree and sign a couple of documents at that point. Lately, tech recruiters come across as desperate more often than not.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#156

Post by kevinskii »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #82
kevinskii wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. I work for a big company. I've been here for 18 years. It is a fantastic place to work. The people, the pay, the flexibility, the meaningful work, all are great. No place is perfect, but I haven't yet found anywhere I'd rather be. However, our hiring process is sometimes shameful. You name it, we've probably done it. We've ghosted candidates that did really well in their interview. We've taken wee…

> We're getting better, but sometimes there are legitimate reasons for things like delays and ghosting that can't be disclosed to the candidate. Can you elaborate? I'm having trouble imagining a legitimate reason to ghost a candidate, other than a court order or National Security Letter.

We make medical devices. They are surprisingly complicated things, and many peoples' lives depend on them. There's also a lot of ways in which they might potentially fail, and these failures can manifest years after the product has been in the field.

When there's even the slightest hint of a potential safety issue, it quickly becomes the top priority for a whole bunch of people. Most issues turn out to be false alarms, but we can never assume that. Lots of other things get put on hold, including hiring.

If you're an unlucky candidate who happens to interview right before one of these shit storms, you might be ghosted for a couple of weeks at least. Obviously we can't share the reasons for the ghosting, as much as we'd like to. Even a polite response from HR like, "Sally really enjoyed talking to you but she's unexpectedly tied up in something" can be market-moving information if you find Sally's role on LinkedIn and tie it to recent news about the company.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#157

Post by vmception »

yellowstuff wrote: post #97
vmception wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exploding offers are bluffs. We all know the team wanted someone that could hit the ground running yesterday for the last 6 months.

That is certainly not true in all cases. It's possible that there's a second choice candidate, and the hiring manager wants to extend an offer to them as soon as the other candidate declines. Probably more common is an experience I was in- we found a good candidate, he wanted to finish other interviews before making a decision and I gave him a few weeks to decide, then later I regretted giving him so much time. It me…

Treat them as bluffs anyway.

Of course if you personally were on the job market and were actually desperate because your spouse said "maybe its time to be realistic" and the bills were piling up, then you don't have the luxury of playing this game.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#158

Post by Baeocystin »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #141
beforeolives wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really quantify attributes like curiosity, ability to learn and ability to listen so it's difficult to interview for them without having all kinds of biases sneak in. How do you deal with this in your process?

> can't really quantify attributes like curiosity, ability to learn and ability to listen You can get a feel for it... ask about personal projects, then follow-up on why. The best candidates will cop to "I wanted to check out the new tech (curiosity)", "I wanted to learn the new programming language (learning)". Listening is a little bit more difficult to quantify, but we're mostly looking at people who know how to f…

Having been on both ends of the income spectrum over the years, I am convinced that curiosity/side-project questions are simple proxies for financial stability rather than anything deeper. The only people who will have the time & energy to do such things are ones whose more prosaic needs have been met. FWIW.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#159

Post by Espressosaurus »

temp667 wrote: post #140
kelnos wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think what you're talking about applies to the particular criticism leveled in the post. The company gave him 72 hours to accept an offer. To me, that's a red flag right there. And then they started pestering him (well before the 72 hour time limit) to accept the offer. If this had just been HR or the recruiter, I'd find it annoying, but perhaps not a big red flag. But the VP and hiring manager were calling h…

72 hours is not a quick timeline. I've routinely set shorter (48 - 36)... Just say no if you don't like offer so company can move on.

72 hours is quick. A week is more reasonable. I had one company try to pull a 48 hour decision on me and I straight up told them I was declining the offer if they didn't give me more time to consider it. They backed down.

This is a decision that will impact my career trajectory, and I may have other offers coming. So yes, I want enough time to consider all options before making a decision with ramifications that will last years.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#160

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

Baeocystin wrote: post #158
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can't really quantify attributes like curiosity, ability to learn and ability to listen You can get a feel for it... ask about personal projects, then follow-up on why. The best candidates will cop to "I wanted to check out the new tech (curiosity)", "I wanted to learn the new programming language (learning)". Listening is a little bit more difficult to quantify, but we're mostly looking at people who know how to f…

Having been on both ends of the income spectrum over the years, I am convinced that curiosity/side-project questions are simple proxies for financial stability rather than anything deeper. The only people who will have the time & energy to do such things are ones whose more prosaic needs have been met. FWIW.

True, it can be a proxy for it but even the desire to want a personal project (it's not a side project, it's not a hussle check) implies the person sees the development field as more than just a paycheck.

Someone seeing the field as just a paycheck will often cease to want to improve themselves, take new challenges and other desired traits.

Sadly, some of these conversations do devolve into some weird eugenics-like items....

Post reply on HN