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Don’t do interviews, do discussions

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Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#151

Post by xyzelement »

osrec wrote: post #148
xyzelement wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's totally subjective. What someone may perceive as "turning the screw" could simply mean "probing deeper" or "seeing how you handle tough questions". One can get self righteous about that but it may be costing you tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost earnings.

I understand your point of view, but I'm the sort of person that responds poorly to someone asserting too much authority. I've had issues with bad interviews before, where I've been rejected by someone, but then got the same job at the same firm, when interviewed by a different person. Also, the lost earnings argument doesn't matter much if it comes at the cost of your mental health. A bit unrelated, but there's an o…

I hear your example and I have the counter :) I had an interviewer push deep on a failure. The entire interview, maybe 45 minutes, focused on something I failed to pull off at my old job. He kept pressing me for "what else I could have done" and I kept coming up dry for most of the interview.

Two magical things happened - during this interview, I realized that I missed a huge opportunity at my previous job (in that case, the step I fell short of was escalating to the CEO) but more importantly, I got the job.

I learned later that the company put a huge emphasis on their employees, especially managers, to be self reflective and not shy away from self examination or probing by others. The point of this interview wasn't whether I could come up with an answers but whether I had the stomach for looking critically at my own failure.

So, I got the job. It paid a lot because the company had to pay for people who could pass these kinds of tests. And it was great to work with people who knew that "their shit stinks too" because they had all passed this kind of self reflection bar.

If I walked out of the interview because the questions felt uncomfortable, I would have missed out on all that.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#152

Post by _dw7s »

geoduck14 wrote: post #91
CalRobert wrote: post #26

I've finally reached a point in my career where I have a great paying job and like it well enough, and really don't give a shit what interviewers think. Paradoxically, I think I interview a lot better. I can steer conversation towards stuff I care about, and if they insist on being annoying, just thank them for their time and leave. Though this might just be a result of being pickier about who I interview with. If no…

>I've finally reached a point in my career where I have a great paying job and like it well enough, and really don't give a shit what interviewers think. I've interviewed people who have resched this point. It makes for a chill interview. In some cases, the interviewee is overly "chill" and is bored with the challenges described in the job. I prefer to hire people who are EXCITED about the challenges they will face i…

> I prefer to hire people who are EXCITED about the challenges they will face in the job.

In this case your pipeline is optimized for hiring great actors.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#153

Post by nemo44x »

It matters where you are in your career in terms of the power dynamic of interviews. Early on while unproven your answers matter and how you answer matters while having good questions is super important.

As you establish yourself the power dynamic changes considerably as companies are really trying to convince you to come over. At this point it really should be a conversation to understand if you’re a fit and it’s worth your time. Do the people you’re speaking with impress you?

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#154

Post by 01100011 »

dtoms wrote: post #113
01100011 wrote: post #30

Depends on the role and the candidate. If I'm hiring for a lower skill position and the candidate has a strong resume I just might want to verify the resume and confirm they have a basic grasp of the relevant skills. If I'm hiring for a high-output FANG job, you bet your ass we're going to the whiteboard. Sure, I hate it too(on either side of the table), but it's not too much to ask to prove that you can think on you…

so there is no glue code at FAANG? Or you have overqualified folks doing, and getting bored, and jumping ship between FAANG every 1.5 years...

Sure there's some of it, but not in my group and it's not something I'd be tasked with hiring for. Occasionally there's some infrastructure related task but I'd prefer someone on the team who actually has to use that stuff be the one to work on it.

We don't have a lot of glue code because we don't glue things together. We write the things other people glue together. That's why this is fundamentally different than 90% of anything I've ever done.

I also don't mean to say that all FANG work is like this. I could see some roles at, say, Google working on Android where it very much would be the kind of gluey work I've done before.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#155

Post by sky_rw »

mattnewton wrote: post #32
CalRobert wrote: post #26

I've finally reached a point in my career where I have a great paying job and like it well enough, and really don't give a shit what interviewers think. Paradoxically, I think I interview a lot better. I can steer conversation towards stuff I care about, and if they insist on being annoying, just thank them for their time and leave. Though this might just be a result of being pickier about who I interview with. If no…

I wonder how much "interviewing" is really testing the kind of performance anxiety that people without other good offers yet have. I experience this too as I not just as I progressed in my career, but even within one batch of interviewing. I've always tried to batch as many interviews as I can. By the third interview I am feeling much less anxious and just perform much better and by the fourth or fifth I am nailing t…

I had a strategy for this that I frequently recommend to people. Back when I was "in the game" and living in NYC, I used to take 1-2 interviews per month despite being happy in my then current role. I was up front with current and prospective employers about this.

This strategy served me well on many fronts: confidence in my skills and my options, familiarity with evolving interview trends, and networking opportunities with team leaders in a tight knit industry. It also allowed me to chase roles/positions which I wasn't immediately qualified for without feeling stress and anxiety, and was immensely helpful later on as an engineer turned startup CEO to know what product/project management interviews should feel like.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#156

Post by mattnewton »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #69
mattnewton wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much "interviewing" is really testing the kind of performance anxiety that people without other good offers yet have. I experience this too as I not just as I progressed in my career, but even within one batch of interviewing. I've always tried to batch as many interviews as I can. By the third interview I am feeling much less anxious and just perform much better and by the fourth or fifth I am nailing t…

Do you really want to work for any outfit that believes that's a tactic that brings out the best in someone? Hard pass.

I really don’t think it’s what is being intentionally tested. Evaluating people is a necessarily stressful process to some extent, and it just takes a lot to counteract how different people handle it.

Just like I wouldn’t want to be written off for a place for being nervous I wouldn’t write off a place for doing the standard tech interview day-of-45-min-white boarded-questions.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#157

Post by 01100011 »

brailsafe wrote: post #106
01100011 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HPC programming library. It has to be fast, correct, secure and has strong compatibility guarantees so design decisions can have never ending repercussions. Previous to this job I laughed at the goofy CS questions asked in interviews. "I've been doing this 30 years and never needed A* or a graph algorithm." I have to retract that statement now. Not that the modern coding interview isn't a little overdone, but there i…

How did you transition between the previous state you describe and when you found success getting into your current role, in terms of prepping to do that sort of testing, as well as motivation? I'm very close to 30 now, and have been burnt out enough times that it's a struggle to imagine how I could care about tech enough to attempt to re-transition into almost only caring about sort of climbing that ladder.

I got divorced, lost almost everything, and had to do it or accept living on sustenance net pay for the rest of my life. I really didn't want to do this. I had a cozy gig in my past life, but I couldn't make it on the engineering salary in my town.

I don't come from a CS background. I'm a EE. I just happened to get an embedded job right out of college and kept getting more and more software work. The only algorithms I'd dealt with were linked lists, circular buffers, and synchronization.

Burn out is a constant worry. I still question if my chosen path is even worth it. If I didn't still have hope of having a child someday... I don't know. I don't think I could find the motivation to keep going.

I don't try to climb the ladder. I hit a level I'm more than happy with and now I just need to try to stay on. I find I'm much more compatible with my team because I'm not trying to make the next level. I can share advice freely with the younger folks because I'm not trying to block them. On the contrary, I want my teammates to go far and kick ass.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#158

Post by ghaff »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #41
sillysaurusx wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the proper way to negotiate. Most people don't do it while they have a job, only when they want one, and it puts them at a serious disadvantage.

The flip side is it will often get you dropped out of most interview funnels since you're likely to be a waste of time.

And that may be fine. If I (rarely) respond that I’m pretty happy where I am but happy to have a chat and you vanish, shows you’re not terribly interested either.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#159

Post by somberi »

Been on the hiring side for more than a decade. In addition to other advice in this thread, I would like to add -

I treat the interview as my chance to help the candidate pass the interview. This bent of thought may seem subtle, but makes all the difference in meeting the candidate in their terrain, and seeing the world from their point of view. Consequently, the case studies given explicitly state that if the candidate finds something else that intrigues them, I am happy to take that as a case study instead - gives them something to flaunt and for me to learn about.

Some candidates are shy to open up, or just not comfortable conversing with strangers, or misread the power asymmetry in the interview and get anxious - I spend a fair bit of time just conversing human to human.

For the really uncommunicative candidates, I make a slight of what they built (fake slight) and this gets the conversation going like a star. The good candidates exhibit a great amount of "Builder's Pride" and defend what they built. They really good ones admit to the possibility that there were other better ways to have built, or explain to me the constraints under which they made the choices they did.

Re: Don’t do interviews, do discussions

#160

Post by 01100011 »

neeleshs wrote: post #139
01100011 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HPC programming library. It has to be fast, correct, secure and has strong compatibility guarantees so design decisions can have never ending repercussions. Previous to this job I laughed at the goofy CS questions asked in interviews. "I've been doing this 30 years and never needed A* or a graph algorithm." I have to retract that statement now. Not that the modern coding interview isn't a little overdone, but there i…

Thank you! That is a very interesting world indeed. But, just focusing on the algorithms part of it, I never could answer how exactly a specific algorithm worked, but I've had to use many algorithms in my "normal" job. I just know "oh this needs a modified DFS, or A*, with custom heuristics, or a priority based permutations generator". I cannot answer how any of this works in detail on the fly, but I know where to lo…

Is it sufficient? Depends on your interviewer and other factors. I personally wouldn't fail anyone for not knowing absolute specifics(unless they claimed to know as much). I would expect some 'algorithmic thinking' and basic familiarity. The interview is also based on a fair bit of luck. In my case, I was asked about virtual memory, and I had literally just days before done a deep dive through the Linux VM subsystem. If they asked me a week before I wouldn't have gotten the job.

When I started interviewing, I couldn't even do tree traversal. It just wasn't something I was familiar with, and never directly used in decades of coding. I don't blame Amazon for passing on me then.

> gone toe to toe or even better when pow-wowing on some real problems with googlers

I don't think making blanket statements like this is a good idea. Sure, you might be able to code better then them, but can you think of a new solution which is better than the current best practice based on some practical consideration(behavior of your HW, caching behavior, some niche use case, etc)? I think a lot of people are great coders in many ways but that's not always the skill folks are looking for. We don't necessarily crank out a lot of code, but it has to be really good code. You also are expected to come up with self-driven innovations and ways to push the industry forward. It would be nice if there was just a set of problems someone handed me and had me solve, but that's really not what they're paying me for.

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