221–230 of 271 posts
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Maybe you are idealistic and work for non-profit dealing with human trafficking in your spare time and have to cut it to take a silly HackerRank test?
Why are you interviewing if you're working your dream non-profit job?
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Replying to myself as I can't nest further. I never said raising issues is bad. Where I work, we highly encourage people to bring up issues as they see them. However, when you bring something up as an issue, it usually helps to suggest a solution (which this original GitHub post fails to do) and we don't generally try to take unsolicited advice from people who aren't even part of the company yet .
The original GitHub post offers pretty reasonable solutions.
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Maybe you are idealistic and work for non-profit dealing with human trafficking in your spare time and have to cut it to take a silly HackerRank test?
More likely it is watching Netflix and reading HN...let's not pretend we're all out there saving the world and volunteering our free time for selfless causes...
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But now your process is heavily biased against folks whose work has primarily been for their current employer, and they don't have any reasonable side projects to walk you through.
How so? It's not like I say "oh, that's too bad then, sorry". It just takes longer to interview those candidates because we don't have that shortcut.
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> Is your company considered the best, properly paying top talent, to employ the same schema? Yes, this was true of every job I've ever had. Maybe I've been lucky. I don't really understand why asking someone to do a small amount of programming for a programming job interview, when they claim to be an experienced programmer, is any sort of "extreme" practice. You've expressed a lot of complaints about coding quizzes,…
Because if you have in your CV verifiable statements that you worked on some super tough engineering challenges, including advanced snippets of code/projects on GitHub demonstrating your dominance in that area, doing silly low-end coding quizzes seems like a total waste of time. Can't you really see that? It's literally like if I asked you if you ever ran a company and if you could handle preparing a budget, despite…
If it takes longer to verify than it does to test your coding ability directly, why shouldn't I just ask you to do some coding? The challenges you took might be less impressive or well known than you think. The challenges you took might not say much about you if they were team challenges.
> including advanced snippets of code/projects on GitHub demonstrating your dominance in that area
That doesn't help me compare one candidate to another at all. Nor does your github demonstrate dominance in anything, unless your project is React or something like that. Github is a vast wasteland of barely used code.
> doing silly low-end coding quizzes seems like a total waste of time
It's going to take about as long to get through job interviews no matter how the interview is conducted. You can spend it programming, or you can spend it talking. The time spent is an investment in getting the job. If you don't actually want the job, then you're right, it's a waste of your time.
What's not going to happen, ever, is someone will take the initiative to read through all your work, verify the things on your CV, and offer you a great high paying job without going through the interview process.
> Can't you really see that?
To be very frank and honest, given all the reasoning and experience I've shared with you, this question gives me the impression that you might be very inexperienced.
> It's just super arrogant.
What, precisely, is arrogant? What are you talking about specifically? Using Hackerrank in an interview? Having an interview at all? Not noticing that you're a rockstar before talking to you?
Please take some time to articulate what the right interview process is, rather than spend any more time passing blanket judgements.
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>There is always a shortage of good jobs. If their hiring process involves jumping through hoops before being granted permission to interview and if the tasks assigned to you bear almost no relationship to the job at hand, the chances of the job actually being good are low . Employers that do this kind of thing typically have an entitlement complex and not the smartest. People with an entitlement complex who are not…
I'd love to hear examples of how to do it right, without taking all my time. I'm genuinely interested in how to hire people without wasting their time or mine. I'd love to screen people with a day of pair programming or a 2 week paid internship, or whatever other good ideas are floating around. I can't. You have just dismissed most tech companies. All the large ones (Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) give codin…
"Mimic real life" means no puzzles (unless I've literally experienced them in real life), no binary tree reversals and no big O notation questions.
>You have just dismissed most tech companies. All the large ones (Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) give coding puzzles as part of their interview process.
I think that type of thinking leads to embarrassments like this:
https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768
I think he experienced exactly the same problem the OP is talking about and in this case it's not him who was dumb, it was Google.
I wouldn't rule out any of those companies but I think I'd rule out joining through the standard interview process - I'd look for specific people who looked to be doing exciting work on specific teams and try to befriend them.
>you'd be wrong to say they have an entitlement complex or aren't the smartest.
I think it would depend upon the team. I think they're not all geniuses, and they do have a tendency to drink their own kool aid. For sure some teams are great though.
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Why are you interviewing if you're working your dream non-profit job?
You mean you do service to other people for no salary in your spare time and you are asking why do you need a job to pay bills? Seriously?
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How so? It's not like I say "oh, that's too bad then, sorry". It just takes longer to interview those candidates because we don't have that shortcut.
My fear would be that you wouldn't have a rigorous, well-tuned process for those folks, so there could be a lot of noise or randomness in their evaluations. And it could be very hard for you to compare them with the folks with extensive GitHub portfolios and resumes.
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Coding questions are not language independent though. You might as well ask to write a monad transformer in a language of their choice.
Of course the question is biased against certain programming languages. For example, in python: def reverse_str(x): return x[::-1] works. If you remember this notation, then you'll have this problem done in 30 seconds or less. But even if you don't remember this notation, I expect a candidate to figure out some way to reverse a string within 5 minutes in some language. I can think of engineering roles that rarely wor…
or code units/code points/grapheme clusters/emojis. Thanks to hard work of many developers string handling becomes easier over time, but I don't think it's trivial if you don't exactly specify what you mean by "string" and "character".
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I'd love to hear examples of how to do it right, without taking all my time. I'm genuinely interested in how to hire people without wasting their time or mine. I'd love to screen people with a day of pair programming or a 2 week paid internship, or whatever other good ideas are floating around. I can't. You have just dismissed most tech companies. All the large ones (Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) give codin…
In the past I've given programming tasks that mimic real life work as closely as possible and fit them into a reasonable time frame - for example, 1 hour of pairing/programming during an arranged face to face interview. If the test is well designed, touches on a number of areas and self contained, I think this was sufficient for me to assess their skills. "Mimic real life" means no puzzles (unless I've literally expe…