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Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#261

Post by user5994461 »

chris_va wrote: post #244
user5994461 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

L7/L8 positions are comparable to the director of a department with 100+ people underneath in a large company or the owners/executives at a smaller company. Of course people in these positions don't code, they couldn't be further away from developers. It's fine that FAANG want heads who can code AND run a department but it shouldn't come as a surprise that candidates don't match that.

There are different ladders with different hiring expectations (e.g. SWE and Eng manager). Regardless, a lot of leeway is given for code rustiness at these levels, but design skills are still important. Algorithmic skills are often still required (e.g. imagine you are hiring a senior dev into a Search Infrastructure group, do you want them to be rusty on algorithms?).

> (e.g. imagine you are hiring a senior dev into a Search Infrastructure group, do you want them to be rusty on algorithms?).

That's precisely the sort of things I hire for and I have mixed feeling about that :)

First, infrastructure has a bazillion technical things to deal with between OS, systems, architecture, networking, hardware. Most of these are not even expected from software engineers so it seems disingenuous to make them a hard requirement for a management/lead position.

Second, it's irrelevant to the job. Senior candidates will be mentoring younger developers, developing the team and the department, coordinating and working with other teams (potentially hostile), taking architecture decisions a thousand step above coding a loop, handling hiring and promotions, taking care of budgets and schedules, etc... they should be evaluated on that.

People can't be perfect on technical aspects and soft skills and management. That's an impossible high bar.

After seeing tens of candidates, some of whom would certainly have done the job just fine, yet all got rejected for one minor thing or another. I have mixed feelings about the interview process. Yes, being rusty on algorithms should not be a blocker for some roles.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#262

Post by FireBeyond »

nickff wrote: post #161
pnw_hazor wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always accept the time critical offer and continue interviewing and then jump if a better one comes through. There is no reason to be nice or considerate to companies, they will drop you in hot second if it is convenient for them.

Accepting an offer without an intent to follow through is fraud. If you think your counter-party is dishonest or ill-intentioned, then you should refuse to enter into any agreement with them.

He is going to follow through. Circumstances change.

I have a PA friend who was offered a job in Alaska, relocating his home and family from WA. Job was offered, signed, and less than two weeks prior to start, when the house was on the market, and trucks loaded, he got an email.

"The urgent care clinic has been sold to another company. As part of their review of the clinic, assets and employees, they are rescinding your offer indefinitely. Thank you for your interest in the position."

He, thankfully, though not without significant effort, was able to get compensation for some of the non-trivial expenses and inconvenience.

I'd argue _that_ was fraud.

I hear companies wanting a lot: "we're looking for someone willing to commit for three to five years, and not move on". Well, what are you willing to do for _me_? Or am I going to risk a "Hey, take a seat. As you know, the economy isn't great. Accordingly, today will be your last day"?

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#263

Post by fredley »

bjornedstrom wrote: post #138
StillBored wrote: post #23

Role clarity is a huge one in my book. I've turned down numerous offers because when I asked what the specifics of my day to day job were going to be, the answers weren't clear. From the secret FAANG that likes to pretend what they are doing is defense contractor level top secret, and even after your hired you might not know what your actually working on, to the big companies where its clear the hiring manager only h…

Just to offer a different perspective: An employer having too clear of an idea of a role can also be a red flag. The past 10 years I've often been the first employee - or one of the first - joining or building up the company's security organization. The combination of (1) having a specialist skill and (2) being around very few other people with the same skill, naturally leads to a situation where too much clarity can…

This is a huge factor in early hiring success: can you effectively hire people whose roles you don't fully understand? Can you develop trust with the person you've hired and delegate effectively?

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#264

Post by victor9000 »

duderific wrote: post #208
victor9000 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't like being a runner-up then you should negotiate with the candidate so that your company ends up in a more competitive position.

It's extremely hard for smaller companies to compete with the likes of Google and Facebook, who (I've heard) offer 25% more than everyone else. Which is why they end up with all the talent. Lather, rinse, repeat.

If this is a company's reason for not finding talent then the hiring team is simply not competent at hiring.

You can do any number of things to differentiate yourself from a FAANG to make your company more appealing. However, each candidate will have different values, so in order to gain an edge you first have to engage each candidate with the goal of discovering these values.

For example, this morning I was reading a recruiting email while considering a Sr SDE role on the AWS S3 team. They list 4 basic requirements for candidates, one of which reads:

· Able to debug, troubleshoot and resolve complex technical issues reported by customers

This screams of being responsible for legacy code and spending time on-call resolving other people's bugs. Can your company offer green-field development? Then congratulations, you've just gained an edge over a FAANG!

Other ways to differentiate are to consider the candidate's career trajectory. Maybe they want to become a manager, a technical lead, or pick up new technical skills. Can you place them on a team that will facilitate their professional development? If so then holy cow, this small company is looking better and better!

The point is that you can't go to war with a Goliath and expect to win using brute force. So if your opponent has 10 ships while you only have 1 then do yourself a favor and fight on land.

For context, I've had to lead and grow technical teams in the Seattle market, which means competing with Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and to a lesser degree Apple and Google. Having filled ~50 technical roles, I can say that succeeding in a competitive market requires you to be hands-on and highly engaged. And if your recruiting pipeline begins and ends with a submit form then you're going to make life really hard on yourself.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#265

Post by [deleted] »

salawat wrote: post #151
opportune wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue with the two “PM”s I interact with the most: Project managers basically do something that the devs, especially dev manager, can handle themselves. It seems like a leftover process for when software contracting was more common. There’s no reason a developer can’t just manage the Kanban board and write a quick report. Product managers can be really good but in a lot of cases they just devolve into stakeholder…

I used to see things the way you do. Then I actually ended up in the position where I took on the responsibilities of a Project Manager in the course of building a department. I see it much differently now having worn both those hats as a generalist. You're tracking two different sides of the same body of work, and there is solid value that a good project manager provides in terms of producing a meaningful skeletal s…

[deleted]

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#266

Post by 88840-8855 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #66

As someone with 20+ years in the experience, red flag #1 for me is being expected to go through a skill-testing technical whiteboard (or similar) coding exercise before even having a deeper discussion about the role and whether there's a fit, etc. I've seen this many times and I find it baffling: I already have a very high paying high quality job, I want you to sell _me_ on the position before demanding I do stressfu…

I think you are arrogant.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#267

Post by FireBeyond »

pnw_hazor wrote: post #258
user5994461 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to play the legal game, the contract is void because it was signed under duress. Forcing the employee to sign in 24h qualifies as consent under duress, not free consent.

Employment offers in the US rarely establish contract. Employers often rescind offers that have been accepted by persons for a variety of reasons. Similar for employees. Sometimes a party that can show they relied on the offer and then suffered money damages after it was rescinded can get some relief in court, but it is rare. Typically these cases are folks who accept an offer, quit their job, and move across the cou…

Absolutely. From one of my other posts:

> I have a PA friend who was offered a job in Alaska, relocating his home and family from WA. Job was offered, signed, and less than two weeks prior to start, when the house was on the market, and trucks loaded, he got an email.

> "The urgent care clinic has been sold to another company. As part of their review of the clinic, assets and employees, they are rescinding your offer indefinitely. Thank you for your interest in the position."

He got compensation without having to go to court when he made mention of the fact that it wasn't a surprise to the clinic that they were being sold, nor would it be unexpected that the new purchaser may (would) want a financial review, and final say on new hires.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#268

Post by TheFiend7 »

Galanwe wrote: post #107
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #66

As someone with 20+ years in the experience, red flag #1 for me is being expected to go through a skill-testing technical whiteboard (or similar) coding exercise before even having a deeper discussion about the role and whether there's a fit, etc. I've seen this many times and I find it baffling: I already have a very high paying high quality job, I want you to sell _me_ on the position before demanding I do stressfu…

After being on both sides of the interview situation for quite a while now, my feeling on this is more nuanced. The thing is, when you look for a job, you will often go for 5 to 10 interviews. On the other end, when I'm looking for someone to fill a position in my team, I will interview at the very least 50 candidates. That is to say, all things equal, the interviewer has most likely more incentive than the interview…

I've been a software engineer for over 6 years and I still have to do 20+ interviews.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#269

Post by joezydeco »

Throysksk282 wrote: post #102
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #66

As someone with 20+ years in the experience, red flag #1 for me is being expected to go through a skill-testing technical whiteboard (or similar) coding exercise before even having a deeper discussion about the role and whether there's a fit, etc. I've seen this many times and I find it baffling: I already have a very high paying high quality job, I want you to sell _me_ on the position before demanding I do stressfu…

On the flip side, I've been interviewing people with supposedly 15+ years of experience using simple whiteboard questions for a while and I've seen too many people fail miserably at writing basic for loops (a very slightly more involved problem than fizzbuzz, really) for me to simply trust that spending time selling you on the company is useful. Lying on a resume is easy, and even truthful resumes can be misleading.…

I've seen the same thing. I hire a lot of embedded engineers and when I need someone that has solid experience with drivers and bit-level work, I'll ask a simple question to start off. In the past I've never disclosed the question, but why the hell not now. I didn't write it anyway:

Given a 32-bit unsigned integer, return true if the binary representation has two consecutive ones in it.

And...that's it. And people that have passed the recruiter gates and made it through the phone screen just completely lose it here. Let's be clear - I really don't care how you do it. There are 3-4 ways right off the bat ranging from a state machine to a shifting mask all the way down to a single inline math statement.

If you're as comfortable as you say, it will be a no brainer. As a check I took an intern and told him to meet me in a conference room to get the same stress level out of him. I posed the problem and got an answer in five seconds.

Re: Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews

#270

Post by nomagicbullet »

guhcampos wrote: post #198

I had already accepted a position in a local bank when they called me again because one of my future colleagues wanted to ask me some further questions. I got there and met with a guy who had 3 or 4 "AWS Certified" pins attached to his shirt. He wanted to know how I had learned AWS since I did not have any courses or certifications on my resume. I dropped the position immediately after.

The disregard for proper process would already a red flag, but the prospect of working with that coworker would make me nope out of that job before I left the building.
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