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The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

jarednelsen.dev

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Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#201

Post by peterebailey »

phkahler wrote: post #191
paxys wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah! Reminds me of https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 . Cynical answer though — Google does not want people like you. They don't want to hire entrepreneurs or inventors. They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.

>> They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for. Somehow I doubt that. Can anyone who actually works at google comment on what it's like? Do people come to you with specific requirement and expect you to crank out code like the interview problems? I've never worked somewhere where the software folks were actually just coding machines.

Gathering and defining requirements is very much a part of the job. It is entirely unsustainable to rely on others to tell you what to implement in Google.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#202

Post by glofish »

mattmanser wrote: post #94
glofish wrote: post #45

In my personal experience, having interviewed dozens of candidates (data science), I believe that asking "easy" and "simple" questions is the most effective way to probe the problem-solving skills of a candidate. Fun and interesting solutions to easy questions are hallmarks of great individuals. The question would go like this: Suppose I have a column-oriented file and I want to print out a column in a reverse-sorted…

A column orientated file? What format? Excel? CSV? What is cut, sort or head? Are you only accepting Linux candidates then, a tiny percentage of users? This sort of utter nonsense question, heavily loaded to your "standard" experience, which is anything but, is even worse than the questions cited in the article. All you're doing is filtering for people who are in your tribe, who followed the same path as you and thin…

Interesting how negative your reaction is. Also how far off target all that anger is.

I am not selecting for a tribe, I am selecting for a job. The questions are loaded, of course. Among the many duties, the jobs do require processing large files, sometimes with cut, Python or C. I want the candidate to use the most appropriate tool as needed. I'd rather not have people implement functionality that already exists in the 'comm' command.

Of course, I want the candidate to ask me what the column separator is. That's why the question is formulated that way.

The right answer will depend on the column separator. Proposing the UNIX cut if the file is CSV is not such a good answer, but for tab-separated files, it is just fine. If the file is CSV and they tell me about cut, my next question would be if that is a good universal solution for CSV files in general.

When someone that knows about the pitfalls of using cut when parsing CSV it shows me they have indeed had experience with that.

Do you see why this question is the best... the possibilities are endless, and the rabbit hole much deeper than it may seem

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#203

Post by ummonk »

makecheck wrote: post #20

To me the main misstep with a lot of modern interview testing is the time-constraint factor. Having 20 minutes to solve a complex problem sans-Google in a not-really-a-text-editor field on a web page just isn’t a real-world scenario. And, what you do in that setting doesn’t really say anything useful. If you’re going to test people, either whiteboard it and make it absolutely clear you just want to see how they break…

There is something ironic about not being able to use Google when interviewing with Giant Search and Advertising Company...

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#204

Post by heartbeats »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #27
jorblumesea wrote: post #15

Everyone knows it's broken, but interview cycle still continues to bring in talent, even if there are false negatives. People still brave the grueling gauntlet. People still show up for interviews. Smart people still get hired. The system works, just in a terribly shitty way. To HR, the engineer hiring process is voodoo magic and we best not touch it.

It only works because there's always another body standing outside the door waiting their turn to be abused by the process. It'll end real quick if they run out of interviewees.

And then, the system will adapt. There is never any problem.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#206

Post by dropit_sphere »

majormajor wrote: post #40
lkrubner wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the obvious point which needs to be repeated till it sinks in. We are not seeing the evidence we would expect to see if this was a tight labor market. As a point of contrast, consider American industry in 1942, as the nation mobilized for war. It doesn’t matter what profession you look at, the attitude everywhere was “Just show up and we can train you.” That applied to welders and bolt tighteners and also the…

I've gotten a couple of those "show up and we'll train you" jobs but with a catch - the hiring people didn't believe that "anyone" could be trained quickly to do it. But I convinced them that I could. Now that I've been on the other side of the table for a while, there's no shortage of candidates looking for job, but there's a (real or not) perceived shortage of quality candidates. And the thing that makes it really…

>And the thing that makes it really screwy is that we don't even know how to train developers very well.

I think this is a really important point.

What does it mean to be a good developer? How do we know?

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#207

Post by [deleted] »

petagonoral wrote: post #149
parsimo2010 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time pressure, foreign environments, and people watching/judging your work are all exactly the things that happen when you're developing stuff that hasn't been done. You run into problems. You find out that requirements or an API spec weren't perfectly written and have to deal with change. You have to work with other people, and they will judge you. Hard coding exercises with a time limit that have an answer that can…

You're speaking as if you have experience with this but looking at your LinkedIn and previous comments, you have zero years professional software dev experience? Yet, you speak so authoritatively and decisively in this comment and your parent comment. The other people responding (including me) all have multiple years experience in actual software companies of all sizes.

[deleted]

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#209

Post by closed »

paxys wrote: post #60
closed wrote: post #35

Something that strikes me in reading articles like this, is the distopian part often seems to be thinking about this: p(job_capable | not_interview_capable) That is, it's crazy that an interview could miss so many people qualified for the job. However, I wonder if oftentimes companies are aiming for.. p(job_capable | interview_capable) If p(job_capable | interview_capable) is high, and p(interview_capable) is pretty…

A simple way of saying this - companies are optimizing for filtering out bad candidates, at the expense of sometimes filtering out good candidates. Because the cost of hiring the wrong person is a LOT higher than missing out on the right one.

The simple explanation makes sense, but I'm realizing there's a subtle point here that I should been more clear on.

They might not be filtering out the bad at the expense of the good. But filtering out some of the good in the name of saving the money it would cost to develop / administer more general assessments.

That's the p(interview_capable) piece whereas the trade-off you mention is the conditional probability (also important!).

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#210

Post by Cu3PO42 »

heartbeats wrote: post #181
gonehome wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Europe (and the UK) undervalue software engineers. At least in the UK this seems like a cultural thing where management is high status/high value and engineers are low status/low value. I think the US generally gets this right (at least in silicon valley), but it could partly be because the US has some extremely valuable software companies that operate on a global stage that aren't really present elsewhere. R…

There's only really one place that can have these big tech companies, and that is the US. What technology companies of note do the UK have? It's just stupid nonsense like "writing spreadsheets for the local government" and minor web development. In tech, it really is US vs. ROW

ARM, for example?

But let's assume for a second that the only relevant companies are US-based. A lot of them also hire in other countries and it is my understanding that compensation isn't what it is in the US either.

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