Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days • Hacker News Board

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#221

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 12:52 AM UTC

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #85

vmception wrote: post #21

>I turned down the [exploding] offer because the experience got me thinking about the company’s work culture. Were the methods employed by the company to get me to accept the offer indicative of their work culture? I've never found the interview process to be reflective of the company. I find the interview process to be a random hodgepodge across the entire industry because nobody knows what they are doing. Small/not…

I have personally given up on "whiteboarding people"... reminds me of waterboarding. I skim the resume, underline anything we use internally and talk to them about experiences. We've done over 300 interviews in the last expansion year (2017) because we had to build a brand new development office (+50 devs). After hiring all of these people, we've quantified this as three things: Curiosity, Ability to Learn and Abilit…

A few years back, I built out a team of about 30-ish technical people and had a similar experience, but I phrased it a bit differently: Aptitude and Enthusiasm were the best predictors of success, and I phrased most of my questions in a way to get a gauge of those two metrics.

"Aptitude" correlates strongly to your "ability to learn," "enthusiasm" correlates loosely to your "curiosity." I think "ability to listen" is more of an obvious prerequisite to being a functional employee.

The real takeaway is that experience doesn't matter nearly as much as people think it does, especially in a company that has a culture of ramping up new hires very well.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#222

Post by walshemj » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 12:56 AM UTC

vkou wrote: post #118

walshemj wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "deathgrip" is the red flag here

I have doubts that someone stepping in for 2 hours of interviews can consistently and accurately determine whether or not the company in question is in the deathgrip of stack overflow fads and dumb blog posts. In anything but the most egregious cases, anyone making such an assertion tells me more about themselves, than it does about their interviewers. In the rest, the correct judgement to make after a bad interview…

Yeh you can - gets easier with age and experience

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#223

Post by path411 » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 1:00 AM UTC

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #221

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have personally given up on "whiteboarding people"... reminds me of waterboarding. I skim the resume, underline anything we use internally and talk to them about experiences. We've done over 300 interviews in the last expansion year (2017) because we had to build a brand new development office (+50 devs). After hiring all of these people, we've quantified this as three things: Curiosity, Ability to Learn and Abilit…

A few years back, I built out a team of about 30-ish technical people and had a similar experience, but I phrased it a bit differently: Aptitude and Enthusiasm were the best predictors of success, and I phrased most of my questions in a way to get a gauge of those two metrics. "Aptitude" correlates strongly to your "ability to learn," "enthusiasm" correlates loosely to your "curiosity." I think "ability to listen" is…

How do you easily test an interviewee's "Aptitude"? Especially in a developer sense. I struggled with how to do this when asked to help with interviews in the past.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#224

Post by mleonhard » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 1:34 AM UTC

jowdones wrote: post #133

devmunchies wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if he was personally trying to guarantee quick response times to customers, then that sounds like his priorities are right. Especially at a "small startup", this is a good sign. Makes me think there was more work than employees which is why the CEO was interviewing and doing customer support.

Meh, it's disrespectful and rude. I had a friend, haven't seen him in a while then met for a coffee and a chat. 10 times in 20 minutes he would pick up a call in the middle of the conversation and "hold that thought". Made a huge effort not to tell him to go f himself at the end but that concluded our "friendship".

If you had told him that you needed him to stop answering his phone, you might still be friends.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#225

Post by LaserToy » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 2:26 AM UTC

omgwtfbbq wrote: post #123

LaserToy wrote: post #20

Had similar marathon 8 years ago and it is draining. Now, being on the other side (hiring folks for a startup), I would argue that some of flags are a bit misleading. Examples: “Undue pressure to accept an offer letter” - interviews are not free, companies are investing eng time into evaluating each candidate and once they find great one, they really want them to join. They also do not want to be part of a bidding wa…

>They also do not want to be part of a bidding war, so it is natural to impose limits (some folks do go overboard). AKA accept our lowball offer before you realize how much you're worth

No, the offer might be good, but I’m just not willing to wait a month as there are other candidates in the pipeline.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#226

Post by WrtCdEvrydy » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 2:31 AM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #181

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get a feel for it... ask about personal projects, then follow-up on why. The best candidates will cop to "I wanted to check out the new tech (curiosity)", "I wanted to learn the new programming language (learning)".

How do you deal with "I don't want to learn new language X"? I do investigate some time with new languages/tech to a degree, but to the extent I have time to learn, I tend to want to go deeper in the things I have competence in already. There's generally always more to learn (between the language itself evolving and the ecosystem developing) such that taking time away from those areas to 'explore' some hot new thing…

> I tend to want to go deeper in the things I have competence in already.

That's still learning, the issue is someone who says "Well, I don't have to learn anything new".... "at all".

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#227

Post by WrtCdEvrydy » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 2:32 AM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #180

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get a feel for it... ask about personal projects, then follow-up on why. The best candidates will cop to "I wanted to check out the new tech (curiosity)", "I wanted to learn the new programming language (learning)".

This comes up a lot on HN and the common objection is that the criteria you listed discriminates against talented people who have families (for example) and therefore no spare time to indulge their curiosities by learning new languages or whatever.

Wanting to learn something is fine, being curious about a new technology is fine. It's the people who don't want to learn anything and have no curiosity about new technology. I spent 30 minutes talking to someone about their plan to build a machine learning machine and try to learn some machine learning in python.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#228

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 2:44 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #168

anonymoushn wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

companies apparently have no issue rescinding offers, so I wonder whether it is really illegal to give verbal offers to n candidates and then rescind n-1 of them.

Maybe not illegal but seriously crappy and amoral behavior.

Immoral, not amoral.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#229

Post by vmception » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 4:37 AM UTC

atleta wrote: post #130

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have personally given up on "whiteboarding people"... reminds me of waterboarding. I skim the resume, underline anything we use internally and talk to them about experiences. We've done over 300 interviews in the last expansion year (2017) because we had to build a brand new development office (+50 devs). After hiring all of these people, we've quantified this as three things: Curiosity, Ability to Learn and Abilit…

I don't exactly whiteboard, because in the past several years I've only interviewed online and while I'm looking for the same qualities, I found that (a simple) coding challenge does help with determining these. (I'm also looking for the smarts, but not "google smart" scale.) Just by struggling with a (really not that hard) challenge tells a lot about how well someone is able to listen. E.g. when you try to give hint…

What I would actually do for your company on a day to day basis is very iterative with the IDE, API reference, unit tests and actual performance correcting me 20 times in ten minutes, allowing me to avoid all pitfalls and synthesize new pitfalls to avoid.

What I would do during your interview is performance theatre and it would tell you nothing. I would lie to you about whether I have seen the problem you presented before, because I would only be there because I was on an interview-circuit with every interviewer that thinks they are so clever and hasn't changed their question for years and I recycle and adapt answers, and for you, the answer to your question is probably listed verbatim on Blind, Glassdoor or Leetcode forums about your company and role.

Re: Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

#230

Post by goatinaboat » Fri, Mar 12, 2021, 6:49 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #139

bluGill wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so if you can't hit the ground running in two weeks or less (2 weeks notice to leave your previous job) we will move on. The job market is hot, but we do have other candidates. I've been in the situation where we liked person A best, but person B was almost as good and would have got an offer if we had 2 positions open, so if you can't accept fast we want to get your offer to person B before they find a differ…

>if you can't hit the ground running in two weeks or less (2 weeks notice to leave your previous job) we will move on That seems unreasonable in a lot of situations. In my current position, yes, they did want me to start right away but I really did want to take a real vacation before I started so I negotiated it out to a month or something like that. No, it's not reasonable to offer to start in six months. It's prett…

No, it's not reasonable to offer to start in six months. It's pretty reasonable IMO to offer to start in a month.

This depends very much on the industry and the location. In much of Europe, particularly at senior levels, 3 months notice is the norm and between one thing and another you might start at the new company 4-5 months after accepting the offer.