An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#261

Post by Kon-Peki » Sun, Dec 08, 2024, 8:19 PM UTC

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #220

stego-tech wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only way to stop people from blasting resumes is to make it cost them something, for example charge $5 — which goes to charity — to apply for the job. That's just more short-termism. It ignores the desperation of the masses for the Middle Class lifestyle they've been promised, in favor of yet-another-hurdle to be jumped over for a chance at a job they need to survive. All you'll end up doing is encouraging furt…

> All you'll end up doing is encouraging further fraud with such a proposal How do you plan to defraud the banking system when you need to pay $5 to send in your application? The issue is that it takes almost zero effort to apply for a job so there needs to be proof of work on the applicants side. The easiest proof of work in through our banking system because there is massive amounts of effort to prevent fraud and e…

So if an employer posts a ghost job, does that become wire fraud?

And if the employer posts a real job but the candidate doesn’t get a response, or is immediately rejected, will the employer get accused of wire fraud?

Sounds like a nightmare for employers.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#262

Post by lordnacho » Mon, Dec 09, 2024, 12:29 PM UTC

hnfong wrote: post #252

lordnacho wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is noise. Say you want to take 10% at each round. You have to do this three times to get 100 people, and then another round to get the top 30. If you tighten the criterion, noise matters more, so you will drop your actual best candidates, since people need a high skill+noise. But if you try to keep the unlucky "good" candidates by having a wider band, you pay more. Also, if you are successful at finding t…

I don't see how your method works better than a sieve with noise. Instead of a "noisy" sieve, you're just using the time of application as your sieve. Which, unless your job opening values the skill of submitting lightning fast job applications, is pretty much 100% random noise. You say a sieve approach drops the best candidates. Your approach also drops the best candidates. And if the bar is actually so high that on…

The difference is that you don't need to wait for 100k people to show up.

If you're already reasonably confident from the first batch of people what the potential in the pool is, why would you wait? People have work to do and they want those people in as early as possible.

I'm not saying you will do much better sieving by time, in terms of quality. But you will save all the effort of looking at the people at the back of the queue, for little loss.

Sure, half the best people will be at the back, but what is your loss on taking the second best people earlier? Chances are you won't even be able to tell.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#263

Post by dahart » Mon, Dec 09, 2024, 4:17 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #262

hnfong wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how your method works better than a sieve with noise. Instead of a "noisy" sieve, you're just using the time of application as your sieve. Which, unless your job opening values the skill of submitting lightning fast job applications, is pretty much 100% random noise. You say a sieve approach drops the best candidates. Your approach also drops the best candidates. And if the bar is actually so high that on…

The difference is that you don't need to wait for 100k people to show up. If you're already reasonably confident from the first batch of people what the potential in the pool is, why would you wait? People have work to do and they want those people in as early as possible. I'm not saying you will do much better sieving by time, in terms of quality. But you will save all the effort of looking at the people at the back…

If the problem is having to wait for applicants, then you’re right; stopping early will help. In my experience, companies already do what you’re suggesting simply by having a deadline or time window for filling a job. Even if a lot of companies would love it, most job posts don’t get over three thousand applicants per seat available.

In this particular case, MS didn’t have to wait for people to show up, they got 100k candidates before they could have even made a decision on a small subset. And in general, the problem being discussed in this thread isn’t having to wait, it’s how to deal the flood of applications coming in too fast.

* huge edit to this comment after this rattled around my head a little more: actually, duh, sieve and early stopping are completely orthogonal, this is not an either-or situation, and you are probably assuming a sieve in your proposed approach. You can sieve 1 candidate at a time, since it’s a series of criteria ranked in order of how much time each one takes to evaluate. If someone doesn’t meet minimum requirements, they’re rejected quickly and not invited to interview. If you’re going to stop early but you have a lot of candidates to evaluate, then you still have to sieve. Like, I’m pretty sure you’re not proposing to conduct 37,000 interviews for 100k candidates, right? Even if we stop before looking at all candidates, each candidate will have some early criteria used to cull them, and only the ones that pass all the early criteria are invited for an interview. That’s true whether or not we stop early. The sieve is a given and unavoidable. The only question is whether to stop early, which we would only do if it solves a problem. We can, if we want, interview the same number of candidates either way. The sieve allows you to look at all candidates efficiently, but does not require it. If you do look at all candidates, then the more people in the top of the sieve, the statistically better the final interview pool will be. Stopping early is valuable only if the applications process is slow (which is not the case here) or if the early criteria take significant time to evaluate.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#264

Post by aguaviva » Mon, Dec 16, 2024, 11:44 PM UTC

vunderba wrote: post #170

Great job on further eroding the trust from a prospective employer. Require a formal degree in CS? That's gatekeeping. Need to pass a whiteboard exam? Not representative of the actual work. Live coding session? Biased against people who don't perform well under pressure. Take home project? It's too much work to do for free. Showcase a personal portfolio? Not fair to people with families or other obligations. Either y…

Live coding session? Biased against people who don't perform well under pressure.

No, it's biased against people who perform perfectly well (sometimes exceptionally well) under real, actual pressure. But who do not take kindly to the bullshit / theatrical pressure typical of the standard interview context, these days. And to companies that just can't tell the difference (or are under the delusion that performance in the latter category is in some way predictive of performance in the former).

Take home project? It's too much work to do for free.

It's more that the companies simply abuse the process in various callous and careless ways -- either by assigning projects with inadequate specification and/or unknown goalposts (or plainly unrealistic expectations of the actual time required, given these ambiguities); or simply assigning scores of these assignments (often automatically to every candidate who applies) when in fact they have no intention of even looking at the vast majority of the submissions.

Easily ameliorated by simply paying people for their time.

Re: An invisible desktop application that will help you pass technical interviews

#265

Post by aguaviva » Tue, Dec 17, 2024, 12:01 AM UTC

dingnuts wrote: post #101

stego-tech wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, these sorts of “practical interviews” aren’t just limited to Big Tech. There’s been an arms race for thirty years now between applicants and employers, the latter creating new hurdles to overcome and the former finding new ways to bypass unnecessary hurdles. Employers demanded applications instead of resumes, so candidates used copy machines. Then they wanted block lettering, so candidates used type writers. A…

this does NOT match my experience as an interviewer. Our company went through piles of candidates who were not qualified and it took us months to find a good fit after going through hundreds of resumes and scores of interviews. I hope the folks we hired are paid enough to retain because there were was absolutely no glut of talent. It was hard to find the folks we wound up hiring. There was a glut of applications, yes…

Our company went through piles of candidates who were not qualified and it took us months to find a good fit after going through hundreds of resumes and scores of interviews.

Except you don't always simply know they weren't qualified. Only that they didn't pass your filter.

I know, I know: In many cases, it's reasonably clear the candidate simply isn't even ballpark qualified. But when we get to "maybe" territory, the recall-precision gap, and hence room for false negatives, is also quite large.