Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry • Hacker News Board

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#211

Post by bpchaps » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 3:49 PM UTC

tachion wrote: post #170

After reading author's post I've a feeling that its not the programming skills that the author has issues with, but instead the attitude, stress durability, expectations to the world around him. True, hiring can be broken, it often is, but as with everything, the persistence usually allows us to find the proper company with proper hiring process. He's getting frustrated pretty quickly, complains when is asked to perf…

If interviews weren't scheduled at the drop of a hat and employers actually took the time to decide whether to bring someone in for an onsite interview, then this wouldn't be a problem as big as it is. Fact is, when someone needs to take a day off of work, or to do schedule gymnastics for every one of their interviews of course your attitude's going to get screwed up in the process. It's exhausting, often humiliating and incredibly impersonal.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#212

Post by swayvil » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 3:50 PM UTC

tachion wrote: post #170

After reading author's post I've a feeling that its not the programming skills that the author has issues with, but instead the attitude, stress durability, expectations to the world around him. True, hiring can be broken, it often is, but as with everything, the persistence usually allows us to find the proper company with proper hiring process. He's getting frustrated pretty quickly, complains when is asked to perf…

You are right. His problem is that he is not persistent enough. Maybe he lacks passion.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#213

Post by metaphorm » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 3:50 PM UTC

notliketherest wrote: post #197

metaphorm wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to apologize for and defend google's interviewing practices. they are entitled to interview in whatever way they choose, but you should recognize that it is a highly idiosyncratic process that has been widely criticized by many many many people.

It's also helped them become the world's most valuable company and home to some of the world's most brilliant engineers. I'm skeptical of people who critize this process - it's not perfect, what is? But it's worked out well for them I'd say.

and you're still doing it. do you work at google or something?

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#214

Post by _lce0 » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 3:51 PM UTC

cwilkes wrote: post #130

mkozlows wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they're unrelated. The interviewer asking this doesn't expect you to write these algorithms all day, they want to know that you have the basic mental dexterity to figure things like this out. They are, ideally, abstracted problems of the complexity that you'd be expected to be able to solve on your own. There are some positions where you don't have to care if people can really problem-solve; as long as they…

They aren't asking those questions to see if you have mental dexterity. They are asking them as they asked hundreds of people that same question before and kid themselves to thinking it is an objective measure as, well, everyone working at the company passed it and everyone here is a 10xer and so if you don't pass it you are a loser.

I find the 10x funny..

If everyone is an 10x, then everyone is an 1x .. Isn't?

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#215

Post by paddy_m » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 3:51 PM UTC

I hired Sahat as an intern three years ago while he was an undergrad. It was one of the best hiring decisions I have ever made. He was productive immediately and our (small) team felt the loss when he went back to school. This guy is good and gets stuff done, ask people who have worked with him.

I wish Sahat had reached out to more of his network before responding to random recruiters. Tech interviews as Sahat experienced them are broken, but tech hiring is slightly less broken especially when you leverage your network.

*note this is the same comment I made in the other thread. I stand by it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11579757

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#216

Post by aetherson » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 3:52 PM UTC

I feel like it's a little weird that one of the author's big examples of a difficult algorithmic question is breadth-first search. While I agree it's not something that's very likely to come up much in real work (especially for a front-end dev!), it's also... not actually hard? You check the current node for your truth condition, you add its children to a queue, you pop the queue and do the same thing for that node. If the queue is empty, you return false.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#217

Post by scalajunkie » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 3:52 PM UTC

notliketherest wrote: post #180

If you don't like Google's hiring process, apply somewhere else. There's plenty of viarety among a whole host of different companies large and small. The reality is Google gets hundreds of thousands of candidates a year and has these processes in place for a reason. The interview machine at Google spans the entire company and everyone is expected to participate and give detailed feedback at each stage and "rank" a ca…

The interview process is not the only thing broken at Google. I turned them down about a year ago (for a better offer elsewhere) and was essentially told I would be blacklisted from applying there again. I do not know if this was official policy or just someone talking out of their ass. Either way, talk about sore losers.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#218

Post by serg_chernata » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 3:52 PM UTC

HillaryBriss wrote: post #192

I truly appreciate the OP's honest, detailed accounts of recent interview experiences. Thanks for writing this.

Just chiming in to say I agree. Thanks for being brave enough to vocalize these things. I'm not even on author's level and that is very concerning.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#219

Post by dimino » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 3:53 PM UTC

I've been in interviews where those stupid "I have three balls and want to guarantee the ball I pick is red" questions get asked, and what I've noticed is if they want to hire me, I can just take vague guesses and they'll help me along, but if they don't want to hire me, they'll sit coldly, watching as I flounder about. By the time I've sat down in the chair, a lot of times the person hiring has already made a choice. I'm not charismatic enough to reverse their choice, but I'm not antisocial enough to disqualify myself if they already like me.

The thing I learned about applying to jobs last time I went through this is that if your primary goal is obtaining a source of income, you need to send your resume to ~10 people a day, every day, and go on every possible interview, and do every possible thing people ask you to do.

You'll still lose a lot of jobs to these techniques, because they're effectively random, but since it's random, your odds of success increase with volume. Eventually you'll hit a position that you do just randomly happen to know the algorithm they're looking for, or they don't ask CS theory questions (I'm self taught, so theory is a weak point for me as well), and you can talk about/demonstrate your actual job qualifications, rather than some contrived talent that's entirely irrelevant to the position.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#220

Post by notliketherest » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 3:54 PM UTC

metaphorm wrote: post #185

notliketherest wrote: post #180

If you don't like Google's hiring process, apply somewhere else. There's plenty of viarety among a whole host of different companies large and small. The reality is Google gets hundreds of thousands of candidates a year and has these processes in place for a reason. The interview machine at Google spans the entire company and everyone is expected to participate and give detailed feedback at each stage and "rank" a ca…

I'm not sure why you feel the need to apologize for and defend google's interviewing practices. they are entitled to interview in whatever way they choose, but you should recognize that it is a highly idiosyncratic process that has been widely criticized by many many many people.

I can't reply to your other comment but I worked there several years ago. Am I brilliant? No. Did I study my ass off and understand the company's hiring practice in and out BECAUSE I WANTED A JOB THERE? absolutely. I didn't go in with some attitude like this guy in the article and resign myself to failure because of preconceived notions.