What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies • Hacker News Board

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#181

Post by mesozoic » Thu, May 25, 2017, 5:58 AM UTC

seizethecheese wrote: post #47

jonnycoder wrote: post #24

I do not go home and code after work. I have plenty of hobbies that all pertain to the outdoors (I call it balance). This quote stuck out: "I once worked with a candidate at Google for a product manager role. During the interview, he started talking about how he kept chickens at his house. He was extremely passionate about building a door for the coop that opened and closed automatically to control the chickens’ move…

For chickens specifically, you need to open and close the door to their coop every day. and make sure that they're all accounted for, or else they get eaten.

Wouldn't it be a little too late if they aren't accounted for?

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#182

Post by tutufan » Thu, May 25, 2017, 6:20 AM UTC

gaylemcd wrote: post #22

siliconc0w wrote: post #16

Sure- you don't need a CS degree but you need to know everything taught in a CS degree regardless of it's applicability to real life software engineering. You should also buy a bunch of books and section off at least a month to study. Especially if you don't have that CS degree. Hope you don't have other obligations like a family or a demanding job. You should also spend a lot of time doing coding competitions even i…

1. No, you don't need to know everything. You should know what a binary search tree. You probably don't need to know the specifics of how to balance one. (If a company is requiring this knowledge, then they're doing whiteboard interviews poorly [or they have a very specific skillset needed]. That's not a problem with whiteboard interviews. That's a problem with that company or interviewer. It takes maybe a week for a…

> Do you want companies to hire based on how smoothly you're able to bullshit about what you can claim to have done in the past?

I want to work for a company that doesn't start with the assumption that I'm a liar, yes.

Going further, it'd be nice to have a company that basically knew what they were looking for, and knew how to evaluate that in a casual conversation.

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#183

Post by famil » Thu, May 25, 2017, 6:20 AM UTC

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #177

famil wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#2 and #5 are issues with the company/hiring manager. #1, #4 and #7 are issues with traditional interview as well. #4 It's incredibly difficult to accurately assess potential during an interview. #1 and #7: This holds true for white-board interviewing. Most successful candidates (including myself) invested time to practice coding interview questions. I did over 150 questions on LeetCode and it dramatically increased…

#2 is not a trend we want to start in industry. With phone screens, both sides make an investment. With a pre-screened assignment, there is very little cost to the company. This gives them a much stronger incentive to throw everything on the wall and see what sticks. Or even feel that they're doing candidates a favor by 'letting' them take the 4hr assignment. Doing a phone screen aligns incentives. You think you hate…

I agree, it's bad for candidates but companies might like it. If everyone gives out take home assignments, it would be harder for candidates to negotiate by lining up multiple offers.

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#184

Post by BoiledCabbage » Thu, May 25, 2017, 6:34 AM UTC

bzbarsky wrote: post #180

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That puts 200k right around the mark for a livable wage To begin with, when discussing wages most people are assuming for a single person taking care of his or herself. The wage needed to support a fully family including enough for a stay-at-home parent would be significantly higher. Even with all of that a family of 4 with only a single adult working is estimated a living wage in SF area is deemed to be 70k.[1] No…

First of all, these are all gross income numbers and include no savings at all. If your estimated gross living wage is 70k, but you're making 200k, that means an extra 130k. About 55k of that goes towards taxes (see tax rates below), leaving 75k. That needs to cover all your savings (if you make 200k, you better be saving about 20-30k/year for retirement, plus you might want to have college savings and such if you ha…

Excellent detail - we've calculated the required income for the expensive end of common life people would have.

A family a 4, with only a single parent choosing to work, with fully funded retirement savings, while also saving for college, and possibly even saving for a house. Using the estimate above, that came to 150-200k.

So now, 65%+ of households have both parents working.[1] A single parent household is a luxury (without any judgement or whether it should or shouldn't be that way, it is). Assuming dual incomes in the above situation we would half our salary range. Taking the upper end, we'd get 100k as the required livable wage to match this household income.

Even more notably it's a calculation for a household income for a family a 4. Not a livable wage for a single-person which would be the other default expectation besides two parents working. Using the same two sources as previously we can see that the income required for a 1 Adult household is roughly 50% that of a family of 4 single breadwinner household. Take our 150-200k estimate multiple by this roughly ~50% factor, take the more generous end and again we end up with the salary in the range of 100k.

From this the most reasonable number for a livable wage would be ~100k.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/22/the-d...

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#185

Post by bzbarsky » Thu, May 25, 2017, 7:07 AM UTC

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #184

bzbarsky wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, these are all gross income numbers and include no savings at all. If your estimated gross living wage is 70k, but you're making 200k, that means an extra 130k. About 55k of that goes towards taxes (see tax rates below), leaving 75k. That needs to cover all your savings (if you make 200k, you better be saving about 20-30k/year for retirement, plus you might want to have college savings and such if you ha…

Excellent detail - we've calculated the required income for the expensive end of common life people would have. A family a 4, with only a single parent choosing to work, with fully funded retirement savings, while also saving for college, and possibly even saving for a house. Using the estimate above, that came to 150-200k. So now, 65%+ of households have both parents working.[1] A single parent household is a luxury…

> Taking the upper end, we'd get 100k as the required livable wage to match this household income

Unfortunately, not quite. If both parents make 100k, your tax burden is higher than if one of them makes 200k and one 0 (because of the social security cap). More importantly, your child care expenses are much higher. So are your food expenses, typically; this part is correctly reflected in the data table you linked to.

In practice, I would expect a two-earner household, both earning 100k, to have 10-30k/year more in expenses than a one-earner household; the range mostly depends on how much child care costs.

100k for a single person is certainly pretty comfortable, even in San Francisco. Much more comfortable than 200k for a family of 4, I suspect, because housing is so much simpler.

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#186

Post by BoiledCabbage » Thu, May 25, 2017, 7:51 AM UTC

bzbarsky wrote: post #185

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent detail - we've calculated the required income for the expensive end of common life people would have. A family a 4, with only a single parent choosing to work, with fully funded retirement savings, while also saving for college, and possibly even saving for a house. Using the estimate above, that came to 150-200k. So now, 65%+ of households have both parents working.[1] A single parent household is a luxury…

> Taking the upper end, we'd get 100k as the required livable wage to match this household income Unfortunately, not quite. If both parents make 100k, your tax burden is higher than if one of them makes 200k and one 0 (because of the social security cap). More importantly, your child care expenses are much higher. So are your food expenses, typically; this part is correctly reflected in the data table you linked to.…

> I would expect a two-earner household, both earning 100k, to have 10-30k/year more in expenses

Ok, so 105k-115k / yr. I think we're reaching the point (in economic terms) where the marginal cost of corrections or adjustment exceeds the marginal value they provide.

The summary though is that 105-115k is not near the 200k originally mentioned and absurdly far from the 300k.

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#187

Post by ramblerman » Thu, May 25, 2017, 7:54 AM UTC

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #86

claudiulodro wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be super harsh, but this sounds awful. - First day is 4 interviews and a take-home project. - Second day is an interview in front of a panel followed by an indeterminate amount of further interviews. - Third day is a "culture fit" interview. 3 separate days of interviews and a take-home assignment? What professional has time for that?! EDIT: I guess it depends on the length of the interviews. Is the total inte…

So far the people who we've called have been ok with this process. I'm pretty flexible because I don't want to impose too much, so we have shortened it to two a couple of times. On the other hand, we need people who will stick around for a few years. Our tech is very domain specific and there are few candidates that can drop in and get to work. We have to spend a lot of time bringing them up to speed on the code base…

> So far the people who we've called have been ok with this process.

I went through some of these. I had just come back from a 6 month trip and was effectively 'unemployed'. I was fine with it then as well.

No way that I would have/make that time currently being a full time employee.

Just keep in mind you may be selecting for a particular type of candidate with this strategy.

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#188

Post by lm2s » Thu, May 25, 2017, 8:06 AM UTC

mesozoic wrote: post #181

seizethecheese wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For chickens specifically, you need to open and close the door to their coop every day. and make sure that they're all accounted for, or else they get eaten.

Wouldn't it be a little too late if they aren't accounted for?

Maybe not, a chicken might just walking around and not have returned to the coop. So you go and make sure it goes into the coop before night time.

If you have a system that tells you if there are chickens missing from the coop, you can save some time by only going there if needed.

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#189

Post by dlwdlw » Thu, May 25, 2017, 12:52 PM UTC

One thing i've come to believe is that interviews are broken not because of some cultural relic or clueless managers or unintentionally evil bureaucracies and processes but because of the engineers themselves. I've been a part of interview panels where during the voting I think "well shit, I wouldn't pass this either".

I also came to believe that the questions I historically asked were also mostly pointless. They were either cookie cutter things from googling "how do ininterview" or things i thought up myself to go on an ego trip of seeing how well a person matched my specific thought process.

The process was heavily biased towards the type of person who would memorize "cracking the coding interview" who would often be people who would overcomplicate things and rapidly create terrible abstractions because the only thing they knew was making things DRY. Then there's the positive feedback loop that comes with this and the resulting codebase of increasing complexity from everyone trying to prove that they're smart.

It's ridiculous. Though i suspect it's intended. The other trait this process filters for is heads down order taking and the specific type of discipline necessary to memorize a dictionary. Also, the long hours of someone trying to prove their worth. A benefit in large companies.

Re: What I've learned from 100s of interviews with candidates at top tech companies

#190

Post by potbelly83 » Thu, May 25, 2017, 1:12 PM UTC

dlwdlw wrote: post #189

One thing i've come to believe is that interviews are broken not because of some cultural relic or clueless managers or unintentionally evil bureaucracies and processes but because of the engineers themselves. I've been a part of interview panels where during the voting I think "well shit, I wouldn't pass this either". I also came to believe that the questions I historically asked were also mostly pointless. They wer…

'I've been a part of interview panels where during the voting I think "well shit, I wouldn't pass this either".' Been in the exact same position. Couldn't agree more with this sentiment.