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For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

blog.hackerrank.com

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Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#201

Post by p4wnc6 »

jblow wrote: post #154
p4wnc6 wrote: post #44

Any time a company asks me to do a HackerRank test, I immediately reject them. It's just not possible to have a quality engineering team and to also believe the results of HackerRank tests correspond to on-the-job success. HackerRank is an attempt to commoditize software labor (literally reducing evaluation of your labor fitness to standardized examples). It communicates immediately that creativity is valued less tha…

This analogy is correct, except ... you're not Robert De Niro, and neither is almost any programmer in the valley. Just like almost no actor is Robert De Niro, and most actors are lucky to even be able to audition for commercials.

Your company is not Robert De Niro either! And, to boot, you don't have to be way up at the level of a Robert De Niro to be an offer-only actor. Basically, anyone with a decent and verifiable acting record is offer only. It's actually pretty common. And some actors are offer-only for some kinds of work, such as voice-over work if that's what they're known for, but not for feature films.

Anyway, I think your reply totally misses the point. The companies who are so obsessed with needing to weed out the bottom 60% are themselves well in the bottom 60% of employers. What gives them the audacity to claim that certain developers are too low skilled, if the company itself is not any good?

A good developer is going to see that and immediately walk away. Unless the company is already verifiably a great place to work with great technical prowess, then their obsession with getting rid of "garbage" programmers makes them seem extremely dysfunctional.

(Just look at how people here on HN are speaking about other developers -- so now you're "garbage" if you're in the bottom 60%, even though that still places you well into the top 5% of humanity in terms of technological skills and quantitative thinking. It's absurd!)

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#202

Post by busterarm »

fapjacks wrote: post #191
busterarm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You go into this process knowing that it consumes time and that not everything is going to pan out. If you had the data and processes to identify the perfect candidate, you wouldn't need to bring people in to interview. It's not waste, it's data collection. If you're not building usable data out of your interview process, your hiring process sucks. My team was interviewing candidates recently and we brought in a guy…

Here's really the meat of it (and well said!): I interview "for fun" because 1) I've always got my ear to the rail for a better opportunity, and 2) I love meeting cool, smart people working on awesome projects! I'm not a VC so this is my way of touring the technology industry and networking. The thought that I'm "wasting" someone's time I think is really strange.

I've had people bring me in to chat telling me ahead of time that they weren't interviewing me but they wanted to get to know me so that when I had the years of experience they were looking for they'd call me up.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#203

Post by quicklyfrozen »

crispyambulance wrote: post #170
logfromblammo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only that were true. I'm a U.S. national event champion in Div. C Science Olympiad (Road Scholar), and I not only have to deal with whiteboard nonsense all the time, but also, the spouse never really believes that I know how to get anywhere from anywhere else. (Sure, argue with Siri/Google, rather than allowing that I might possibly know which direction north is.) Credentials are only as good as the trust other pe…

> I've had plenty of them remark "you are the only candidate that has answered that question correctly" and then never speak to me again. Stop right there :-) I think that's where you need to do some deep introspection. There's A LOT more to a job than technical aptitude. It appears that you're excelling in one aspect of the evaluation but failing in another. There's a reason WHY they're not following up. Find out wh…

Good advice. I know I've turned down candidates that aced the technical questions but were so opinionated that it seemed unlikely they'd able to work as part of the team.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#204

Post by pcthrowaway »

lostcolony wrote: post #180
cbhl wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies interview multiple candidates looking for the best one, and they'll solicit applications from candidates that will never make it past a phone screen. Why wouldn't you do the same with companies?

Companies don't go into the interview saying "we'll never hire this person, we're just talking to them for the practice". It's fine to interview at multiple companies that you might consider taking an offer from, but interviewing at a place you know you'll say no to strikes me as, yes, wasting their time (and money, as we usually have a few people interviewing one candidate at the same time).

I believe companies certainly do interview people they don't intend to hire, to get a feel for things like what the field is like, or what the expected salary for prospects with certain skills are. I've heard there are situations where they have a person in mind for a position, but because of corporate policies they're required to post the job and interview people.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#205

Post by accidc »

A piece of advice from someone who wanted to work at startups.Having realized that its unlikely that my skills will translate to doing well at startup interviews, its only pragmatic to not pursue that path. But my end goal is not to work at a startup, its to keep learning and to stay relevant/employable and those can be done outside of a startup.

Any interview that is structured like a test is a bad interview. Starting your relationship with an abusive process will set the tone of the relationship and I applaud all those who have walked away from interviews that make one jump through hoops. From personal experience, The last interview I took lasted 40 minutes and the person we hired is the best developer I know.

I was never confident at giving interviews until my mindset changed from it being a test to an exchange where someone who needs help is trying to get together with me, someone who can help them. They should able to explain to me how they see me helping them. Questions like: 'what is your biggest challenge right now' or 'if I were hired, what would be the first task' help start that conversation. They obviously will do their due diligence and I need to do mine (collaborative environment, sane hours, reasonable pay, competent management etc.)

All of the above is opinion.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#206

Post by gingerrr »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #198
frcknfrckn wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But look at it from the company's point of view - why would they invest time in a 30-minute skill check interview for every applicant if they can just as easily run the code challenge up front and eliminate a large proportion of the unsuitable applicants?

The problem is that you can't "just as easily" run the code test. The code test is unreliable -- bad developers who overfit their knowledge to trivia make it through. The code test also causes the really good developers to simply reject you, so you don't even get a chance to hire them, or even find out who they are. You're basically saying you want to lop off the bottom 60% of an imagined Normal distribution. Except…

You said this so much better than I did. Thank you!

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#207

Post by anonymoose123 »

frcknfrckn wrote: post #85
p4wnc6 wrote: post #44

Any time a company asks me to do a HackerRank test, I immediately reject them. It's just not possible to have a quality engineering team and to also believe the results of HackerRank tests correspond to on-the-job success. HackerRank is an attempt to commoditize software labor (literally reducing evaluation of your labor fitness to standardized examples). It communicates immediately that creativity is valued less tha…

Ugh. Using a coding test shouldn't be a red flag. They are an incredibly useful tool for weeding out the applicants who, quite frankly, don't know their ass from their keyboard. I've done hiring at several companies over the years, and I can honestly say that the signal-to-noise ratio for programmers tends to be very low. Even eliminating the obviously unqualified resumes leaves us with dozens of supposedly 'qualifie…

So, if someone fresh out of college who has time to spend lot of time on the sample interview questions he/she is better than someone with experience/expertise in a particular area?

Sure if the experienced person spends enough time practicing, can ace the interview as well. But he/she would rather spend time on interesting stuff than say, how to print a tree spirally and hundreds of other silly questions out there :)

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#208

Post by philovivero »

bpchaps wrote: post #172
philovivero wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who's made it onto an Olympiad team[1] of any significant geographical scale, in any category, shouldn't have to deal with this whiteboard nonsense. Oh yeah? I've interviewed my fair share of self-righteous prima-donna "I shouldn't have to deal with you plebes" sorts before to know you'd better put them through MORE of this whiteboard nonsense rather than less. And if they get all huffy, you know that when t…

You sound unnecessarily angry and your interview style seems far more formal than it needs to be. Think their issue might be with you? ;)

You'd be wrong. A vast majority of people find me very personable. I'm only talking about this microcosm of human interaction.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#209

Post by frcknfrckn »

anonymoose123 wrote: post #207
frcknfrckn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. Using a coding test shouldn't be a red flag. They are an incredibly useful tool for weeding out the applicants who, quite frankly, don't know their ass from their keyboard. I've done hiring at several companies over the years, and I can honestly say that the signal-to-noise ratio for programmers tends to be very low. Even eliminating the obviously unqualified resumes leaves us with dozens of supposedly 'qualifie…

So, if someone fresh out of college who has time to spend lot of time on the sample interview questions he/she is better than someone with experience/expertise in a particular area? Sure if the experienced person spends enough time practicing, can ace the interview as well. But he/she would rather spend time on interesting stuff than say, how to print a tree spirally and hundreds of other silly questions out there :)

Who said anything about grading results or comparing applicants? This should be a screening test, nothing more. Pass/fail. Any decent developer should be able to knock out decent responses to simple problems in very little time with no prep. The goal is simply to eliminate the ones who can't even do that.

Re: For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies

#210

Post by innocentoldguy »

I've come to the point where I walk out of interviews that involve whiteboard questions. I have conducted my fair share of them, and I have been on the interviewee side as well, and in no situation have I ever found any modicum of value in a whiteboard question. They are a complete waste of everyone's time, and to me, they are the hallmark of an incompetent interviewer/manager (and yes, I felt that way about myself back when I used them).

There are plenty of companies out there who agree that whiteboard questions are ridiculous, and I'd rather work for one of them.

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