181–190 of 415 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdotally, I've learned to expect nothing. I used to ask a graph-based question -- I had to adjust it so that the first step was doing a dead-simple DFS. This tended to weed out a good sixth of candidates and save us both a lot of time. And this was pretty constant against education level and background.
DFS == Depth First Search?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have had a similar problem - interviewed dozens of people with exactly that pattern and they were universally clueless. No idea how seemingly-good Masters programs bring in so many people with zero basic CS knowledge.
My alma mater has a great undergrad program, but an absolutely awful masters. I've been told that they don't have the resources to teach it, and that the college keeps sending recruiters throughout Asia to pick up as many foreign students as possible for the extra tuition money, though that might have just been a bitter professor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that is the case, and the records show that, then the company is probably ok. But you have to show that all of the people you hired could pass FizzBuzz right? Google gave one of the best hiring training lectures I've ever attended on eliminating personal bias from interviewing questions. A lot of it was thinking about the question and the response and putting it in the context of someone you knew, what would you t…
How does personal bias factor in to FizzBuzz? It's literally what I'm hiring you for -- I should be able to describe some process to you, and you should be able to write it out in code. Communication is a huge part of software engineering, and I don't understand why anyone would be expected to hire employees they cannot communicate with.
Personal bias also potentially factors into how you describe it (so consider presenting it written, in the same format for everyone). E.g. let's say the interviewer goes into extra detail or ask for confirmation of understanding from candidates they favour.
Doesn’t this result just tell us that Palantir’s recruitment funnel is broken. If your funnel is attracting 73% Asians then fix the funnel at the top, not the bottom.
Fix the American educational system?
It would be really nice if some of these reporters at least clarified if among those rejected were US Citizens. In the kind of work Palantir is involved in it is quite possible that they are trying to staff a US Citizen only shop to meet government requirements. Just look at the ITAR regs for example and the 'nonpermanent resident' gets waved about quite a lot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fix the American educational system?
more like keep the asians accountable. everyone knows that indians/chinese are vastly more likely to go to great lengths to cheat/inflate resume
Palantir gets some of my sympathy. My organization has a large internship program and I've been first contact for many applicants. I found that a similar number of applicants had to be dropped either due to communication skills or an overall technical skills gap and they tended to be asian/southeast asian. Interestingly most of them fit the same profile of a bachelor's from India, 1 or 2 years at a consulting firm in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked at Palantir in the covered period and did a ton of interviews, 5-10 a week. I experienced exactly this dynamic - very large numbers of applicants who had a bachelor's degree from a South or East Asian university, a year or two of work experience, and a Masters from a mid-tier US University. The large majority washed out on the FizzBuzz-level technical questions on phone screens (or asked in person at job fai…
I've seen American university CS grads wash out on FizzBuzz level questions at alarming levels as well so this is not exclusively a phenomenon with these backgrounds. How in the world are people making it through schools (with a MS!) without actually.... uhh.... you know.... knowing the subject at all ?
When I studied CS, data structures and algorithms was the second CS course we were expected to take, right after "introduction to programming". It would usually be taken in the second semester.
That's the last time we were tested on a long range of algorithms, except indirectly if we happened to need a given algorithm to complete our work later. In the 22 years since, I've probably needed e.g. a depth first search once, and many of the algorithms I learned I've never touched on since.
So for many, it boils down to whether or not you cared about and liked that course. I happened to love it - I read the set texts the first weekend of the course, and spent a lot of time reading up on algorithms in the years before and after. But for a lot of my class mates it was a course they had to endure to get to more interesting stuff. Many of them would go on to do very well in other subjects.
If they can't figure out a problem like FizzBuzz given a complete description, then that's a deeper problem. But a lot of algorithm questions can sound like they are on that level because we expect people to know a catalogue of algorithms that most developers don't actually need through most of their careers.
Palantir gets some of my sympathy. My organization has a large internship program and I've been first contact for many applicants. I found that a similar number of applicants had to be dropped either due to communication skills or an overall technical skills gap and they tended to be asian/southeast asian. Interestingly most of them fit the same profile of a bachelor's from India, 1 or 2 years at a consulting firm in…
There's alot of cheating and other shady nonsense. Bodyshop contractors will do anything. I've seen cases where those companies send shill candidates to interview, claim that candidates have more experience in reality (in one case a 22 year old with a decade of Oracle Financials experience) and submitting fake resumes.
Twice we hired someone based on the phone interview and it was someone else who showed up.
The third time it was someone reading interview answers off a chat client window.
I'm mostly annoyed because it reduces the value of the phone screen and requires more face to face interviews.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You didn't know George Tech was a state school? Does that have some special meaning other than public?
No, I did not. I thought it was privately owned (like Stanford, Johns Hopkins, USC, etc).