Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 693 posts

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#271

Post by badloginagain »

swayvil wrote: post #229
paddy_m wrote: post #215

I hired Sahat as an intern three years ago while he was an undergrad. It was one of the best hiring decisions I have ever made. He was productive immediately and our (small) team felt the loss when he went back to school. This guy is good and gets stuff done, ask people who have worked with him. I wish Sahat had reached out to more of his network before responding to random recruiters. Tech interviews as Sahat experi…

I'm seeing a lot of "reaching out" in this thread. Is this a new thing, like "passion"?

A personal connection, with someone who is in a hiring position, has a high likelihood hiring you outside of their interview process. With a vested interest to hire you in the company, it's much more likely that the interview process will be a more collaborative experience- such as coffee with a CTO to discuss the problems they're having.

And it doesn't need to be "best friend" level of personal connection, it's someone you often see at that AngularJS meetup or whatever- after three or four pleasant conversations you'd be surprised how invested they can be to hire you- especially because they already know what your skill set is and would only look at you if you fit the problem they're having.

This is the value proposition of going to Meetups, Conferences, Talks, etc. You start to see who the "regulars" are, and persons in a hiring position tend to bias very heavily to people they are already familiar with.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#272

Post by maxsilver »

What frustrates me about this is not even these questions, specifically, but which companies seem to use them.

If Google wants to ask crazy algorithm questions, that's at least sort-of reasonable. There's at least a hypothetical chance your work will involve that knowledge.

But I've interviewed at companies who's entire tech stack is a simple CRUD web app, or a simple RESTful mobile app, who's so-called "big data" is less than a few gigabytes in total, and they still want to throw algorithms and brain teasers at me. These same companies then post some inane blog post about the "developer shortage" and how "we can't find talented people".

If these companies could actually find the candidate they're testing for -- this hypothetical hyper-intelligent developer who had a IBM-Watson-like memory of every CS algorithm and it's application in every language, that person would get completely bored working there and quit in 3 months or so. These companies could never retain the type of person their own hiring process exclusively selects for

---

Hiring doesn't need to get fixed, companies need to get honest about what they are and what they actually want. To restate this in 1-10 scale : Many companies delude themselves into believing they are a 9 or 10, and are trying exclusively to hire 10's (and hypothetical 11's that don't exist).

When in reality, most companies are in the 4 to 6 range, they only need people in the 4 to 6 range, but are rejecting 7 and 8s type candidates, because they aren't a 10.

This process itself isn't broken, so much as the businesses holding the power in the process are delusional about...everything (what they are, what they need, who could provide that, etc).

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#273

Post by markbnj »

There's selectivity, and there's courtesy and respect. Companies are entitled to be as selective as they like, and if those are the kinds of tests that yield the people they want to hire then good for them. On the other hand courtesy and respect would demand that you're clear with the candidate about your expectations and requirements, that you don't waste their time, that you respect the investment of time by communicating after the interview to let them know how they did, and perhaps even that you let them know up front what areas you expect to cover. Otherwise, as was noted in an earlier comment, it really is just a lottery to see if you happen to be fresh on whatever thing they happen to ask you.

There is another side to this which leads me to ask why companies feel they have to be so defensive? My wife is a registered nurse on a cardiac critical care ward. If she doesn't know what she's doing actual people can actually die, something that is a rare outcome for even the worst software developer. Nevertheless, she has a BS, and work experience, and when she interviews they don't require her to stand up at a whiteboard and prove she's a nurse all over again. They respect her experience, and the questions are more about process, work habits, personality, etc. In the software development world we appear to have zero respect for experience, and I wonder why that is? Have employers been burned so often? Or is this more of a geek cred gauntlet thing?

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#274

Post by bpchaps »

lallysingh wrote: post #257
bpchaps wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If interviews weren't scheduled at the drop of a hat and employers actually took the time to decide whether to bring someone in for an onsite interview, then this wouldn't be a problem as big as it is. Fact is, when someone needs to take a day off of work, or to do schedule gymnastics for every one of their interviews of course your attitude's going to get screwed up in the process. It's exhausting, often humiliating…

Yes, and I think the appropriate response is to rate-limit the interviews to one that you can handle easily. 1/week? Employers typically have pipelines designed for hiring throughput, so they won't mind spacing out stages longer (modulo any recruiter metrics, but I haven't heard of a case of that). And as they're all similar style questions, they should just read up on these. Hold off on interviews until you're confi…

So, are you suggesting that folks take one day off per week? That seems a little ridiculous. The number of employers who haven't even looked at my resume, even after a month long process, is insane. Is it really that hard to read a resume beforehand? Why waste everybody's time?!

So please, take your time, skim their resumes and maybe do a bit of github code reviews before inviting someone to sit down. Hell, do it while you're taking a shit in the office if you, as an employer, are overworked. There's a pun in there.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#275

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

wdewind wrote: post #255
askyourmother wrote: post #205

When I hired a plumber for my heating firm, I put her through a hazing interview, tested her knowledge of Maxwell relations and thermodynamic equations. Oh wait, no I didn't. As she has been a plumber for years, so we recognised her skill and experience and cut to the chase. When I hired a programmer for our doomed to die VC life support funded fart of a project, we put her through numerous rounds of comp sci bingo a…

I frequently hear this basic point: "Software interviews test algorithms and data structures that are so clearly not relevant to the work being done and soooo theoretical I don't understand why interviewing isn't better???" I used to believe this myself, mostly because I didn't have a strong CS background and was still successful at carrying out software projects at a relatively high level. The truth is, as I learned…

> http://steve-yegge.blogspot.de/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-...

Steve Yegge thinks people disregarding CS questions in interviews is the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. I think he's right, but I have no way of knowing - due to Dunning-Kruger...

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#276

Post by throw_for_throw »

wdewind wrote: post #255
askyourmother wrote: post #205

When I hired a plumber for my heating firm, I put her through a hazing interview, tested her knowledge of Maxwell relations and thermodynamic equations. Oh wait, no I didn't. As she has been a plumber for years, so we recognised her skill and experience and cut to the chase. When I hired a programmer for our doomed to die VC life support funded fart of a project, we put her through numerous rounds of comp sci bingo a…

I frequently hear this basic point: "Software interviews test algorithms and data structures that are so clearly not relevant to the work being done and soooo theoretical I don't understand why interviewing isn't better???" I used to believe this myself, mostly because I didn't have a strong CS background and was still successful at carrying out software projects at a relatively high level. The truth is, as I learned…

Can you provide a more concrete example of something that you reinvented that you wouldn't have if you had a better CS background?

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#277

Post by cmansley »

askyourmother wrote: post #205

When I hired a plumber for my heating firm, I put her through a hazing interview, tested her knowledge of Maxwell relations and thermodynamic equations. Oh wait, no I didn't. As she has been a plumber for years, so we recognised her skill and experience and cut to the chase. When I hired a programmer for our doomed to die VC life support funded fart of a project, we put her through numerous rounds of comp sci bingo a…

That's not how that works and there are whole websites for figuring out if the plumber is useful. Angie's List, Yelp, etc... Plus plumbers normally have to be licensed by the state.

Instead this process is left to the individual corporations. So, you get mixed results in judging quality, because there is no standardization.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#278

Post by ori_b »

askyourmother wrote: post #205

When I hired a plumber for my heating firm, I put her through a hazing interview, tested her knowledge of Maxwell relations and thermodynamic equations. Oh wait, no I didn't. As she has been a plumber for years, so we recognised her skill and experience and cut to the chase. When I hired a programmer for our doomed to die VC life support funded fart of a project, we put her through numerous rounds of comp sci bingo a…

> When I hired a plumber for my heating firm, I put her through a hazing interview, tested her knowledge of Maxwell relations and thermodynamic equations. Oh wait, no I didn't. As she has been a plumber for years, so we recognised her skill and experience and cut to the chase.

When I hired a plumber, I hired someone that was insured, had multiple good reviews online, and was able to give good, descriptive, and in depth details of the job he was going to do. Generally, a programmer will not insure their work, and usually you aren't hiring for a single job that can be designed and discussed in detail up front.

Even so, some of the contractors were still pretty damn shoddy, and I've had to fix their work (or hire someone else to) in the past.

Part of the problem is that I don't know enough about construction codes and the reasoning behind them to ask, eg, what kind of slopes and diameters pipes need to effectively carry sewage, when it's appropriate to use one type over another, etc. If I could, I would.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#279

Post by dang »

HN doesn't bowdlerize, so the first thing to do with the title is take out the stars. But "Fuck you I quit" is linkbait of the kind that the HN guidelines ask submitters to take out of titles, so we've replaced that bit with a phrase from the first sentence.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#280

Post by quantum_nerd »

While I do agree with the OP that the tech hiring process "might" be broken, I noticed a pattern in his interviews: it seems to me like a self-fulfilling prophecy. From the get go, he already considered the interviewers as enemies and went in with a mindset that they are out to get him. That wouldn't probably help calm those nervous nerves, neither would it show your prospective coworkers that you are someone they would enjoy working with(which is a fundamental part of the interview, I believe).

I have actually noticed that most tech companies(at least they ones I've had to deal with, namely Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft) are doing all they can to take the guess work out of interviews with training sessions, resources, etc...

All the OP needs is to change his attitude from cynical to optimistic and I promise, things will change for him.

Also, BFS (and DFS) are as basic as you can get with algorithms. Either of them is not longer than 10 lines of codes; just remember that BFS uses a Queue and DFS a Stack...

Post reply on HN