The dystopian world of software engineering interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#251

Post by cbHXBY1D » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:13 AM UTC

throwaway5283 wrote: post #212

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.

This is absolutely true. I work at Giant Search and Advertising Company, and joining was a huge mistake. I thought I would be working interesting technical problems with a high degree of autonomy — instead the work is extremely boring, and you get ahead by playing political games rather than by innovating. I’m one of the rare few here who managed to get through the interview without really preparing. Before joining,…

Similar experience and similar feelings here :/

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#252

Post by _wldu » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:13 AM UTC

I strongly encourage self-taught developers to take a good theoretical algorithms class. In it, you'll learn to represent most problems as some sort of graph problem and map the problem at hand to nodes, edges, etc. and find the most efficient way to solve it, prove your solution and show how long it takes. You'll also learn (more importantly) what classes of problems cannot be solved at all.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#253

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:13 AM UTC

Benjammer wrote: post #5

proximitysauce wrote: post #3

In addition to all of the very dystopian examples given in this post, there are other non-technical, super-dystopian things that have been popping up as "trends" in the tech industry. Ever heard of top-grading? It's the most oppressive interview technique of all time. A series of grueling multi-person interviews. A retrospective of all work experiences since high school . You also have to get multiple prior employers…

Yet, the people who pass the grueling gauntlet will still be dumped on a fringe feature team with a first- or second-time engineering manager within 2 years of your age, and a PM that's fresh out of college (or worse, just finished MBA) who is spending 100% of their time learning how to use Jira instead of how to build product.

[deleted]

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#254

Post by jedberg » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

coconut_crab wrote: post #52

> There is a cottage industry springing up around passing interviews This, a million times. I was told to practice solving dynamic programming problems to prepare for the interview[1]. Looking around the web I found out that people spending months solving thousands of dynamic programming problems, just for getting a job. This strongly reminds me of the rote learning I had to do in order to get into university, which…

I mean, there has been a not-so-cottage industry around getting into college for decades now.

I suppose we could agree that college admissions are as broken as tech interviewing though...

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#255

Post by andai » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

> At one particular ‘top’ tech company the process is that when a candidate goes through an interview he or she has a packet compiled about their interview performance. The packet then goes to a committee whose job it is to impartially review the packet to make a hiring decision. At one point a particular committee got so critical that they rejected every packet for several months. When HR caught wind of this they decided to set up a test. They sent the committee a new round of packets and once again the committee rejected them all. HR then called them all into a meeting and explained that they packets they had just reviewed were in fact the hiring committee member’s own packets from when they interviewed for that company. They had unknowingly rejected themselves! How could anyone pass that bar?

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#256

Post by amznthrowaway5 » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

glofish wrote: post #202

mattmanser wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

TSV and CSV have the same limitations. A tab-separated file could still have tabs inside a field depending on the quoting convention. Either separator could be used with cut. I can't believe you are so confident in your partially truthful answers.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#257

Post by glofish » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:15 AM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #121

glofish wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the post was getting too long to put in all the details, but basically, what I was getting at, imagine the data comes in batches and you have to retain the N largest seen so far

IMO, that's not an appropriate question for a data scientist . Maybe it's better for a data engineer or a SRE.

Basically you are saying that you cannot think of a way of doing this, other than the most inefficient way --> hiring a new person

This answer would make you fail the interview :-)

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#258

Post by chillacy » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:15 AM UTC

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #193

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…

I realise this is tangential to the original topic, but this notion that the UK is not a part of Europe (and therefore mentioned separately) seems really weird to me. They can leave the EU as much as they want, but it doesn't change the fact that physically they're still in Europe. Is this because of some perceived notion of cultural differences? Because if we're starting to draw lines based on that we probably need…

Mexico and Canada are technically part of America (North) and Russia is in Asia, yet most people don’t say that Canadians are Americans and Russians are Asians. One of the great funs of language.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#259

Post by ApolloFortyNine » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:15 AM UTC

sciencewolf wrote: post #24

codingslave wrote: post #9

Interviews are so bad because there are too many capable programmers. If there really was a market shortage, companies would not interview like this.

As someone who interviews, you'd be shocked how many "senior engineers" can't write a function with two for-loops.

It honestly is shocking. I tend to ask a question that I think would be an easy 101 homework assignment, and easily a third of candidates fail it so poorly I could end the interview right there. Another third fail, but close enough to where there's a bit of hope if they did the rest of the interview perfectly.

It's basically a word problem that can be solved with a for loop, and you wouldn't believe the number of people who hard code for the values in the list instead of just looping through it (think 10 if statements).

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#260

Post by AmericanChopper » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:16 AM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #19

codingslave wrote: post #9

Interviews are so bad because there are too many capable programmers. If there really was a market shortage, companies would not interview like this.

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…

> We are not seeing the evidence we would expect to see if this was a tight labor market.

The evidence of a tight labor market is in remuneration. If the appropriately skilled labor was so abundant, then there’s simply no way to explain the remuneration.

You can use some pretty simple first principles to explain the hiring practices. If you were advertising a high salary position in a tight labor market, what would you expect to happen? I would expect a huge amount of low/no skilled applicants to apply, and a small amount of appropriately skilled ones. Anybody who’s tried hiring to a decently paid engineering position has seen this for themselves. How would you expect companies to deal with this? I’d expect to see rigorous evaluations being performed on candidates.

The software industry also has some additional confounding factors, in that it’s filled with low quality products (although for which there is still plenty of demand). The average software product is low quality and poorly coded, because that’s the only kind of product that the average product manager, technical leader or software engineer knows how to make. Software is a very immature industry, and a result of that is it essentially has no consistent standards for quality. So if you want to implement your own standards, you have to content with the fact that a majority of the labor market won’t be able to meet them.