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The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

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Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#31

Post by lkrubner »

Analemma_ wrote: post #16
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.

If the problem was oversupply, we wouldn't be getting the cushy salaries and benefits we do. I think the issue is more that it's pretty easy for people with no programming ability to appear competent on a resume, especially to a clueless HR rep or headhunter. There are a lot of people out there whose backgrounds look good on paper who can't solve FizzBuzz...

For most programming jobs wages are lower now than in 1995. Back then, I had many friends who were charging $100 an hour just to build VisualBasic apps and they had more work than they could handle. And Phillip Greenspan has written that his company, from 1996 onwards, offered $100,000 to recent college grads. That was really good money back then, especially if you wanted to buy a house.

Wages right now only look good compared to where they were during the depths of the Great Recession. Over a longer time frame, wages look terrible, except for certain jobs at FANG companies.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#32

Post by mullingitover »

I honestly don't know why anyone gives FAANG recruiters the time of day anymore. I have yet to meet anyone who feels good about the prospect of working for them, anyone who works there who's super proud of their mission, and the competitors who are looking to hire at that level of talent pay roughly similar wages from what I've seen.

My advice for this poor kid is to look around at startups and do more networking. FAANG jobs aren't anything to aspire to anymore.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#33

Post by parsimo2010 »

Comedian Daniel Tosh had a bit about people that claimed to be smart, it's just that they were just bad at taking tests. He said, "oh, so you struggle with the part where we find out what you actually know?"

I hear a lot of complaints about the "typical" software engineering hiring process, and it usually comes from the people that don't do well within the current system. Could the process be improved? Almost certainly, I don't think that anyone thinks that this is an absolutely perfect way to hire people. But it is an undeniable fact that some people pass this interview process; software companies do fill positions with this process.

So that kind of makes me think that many of the complaints are from people that wouldn't cut it at a high-pressure tech company and would be better off coding internal software for a non-tech corporation. I'm sure that the hiring process at Kroger (the grocery store) is much lower pressure than Google's. Google might not need you to code some efficient algorithm to search a b-tree every day, but they pay top dollar and can rightly expect that their software engineers can come up with efficient and creative solutions to hard problems without dragging the rest of their team down.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#34

Post by 01100011 »

32gbsd wrote: post #25

No matter how many APIs and tutorials you do it comes down to being calm under pressure and knowing who you are talking to. You have to practice your communication skills and be cool. Often times you will be interviewed by HR people and managers - rarely will you get to be interviewed by a TDD Clean code geek that you follow on twitter. Eitherway there is nothing out there that you deserve more than other people. If…

> rarely will you get to be interviewed by a TDD Clean code geek

Have to disagree. Every interview in the last 3 years was majority technical with top-tier team members. Yes, I talked to a couple HR reps and managers but they were less than 10% of the individual interviews.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#35

Post by closed »

Something that strikes me in reading articles like this, is the distopian part often seems to be thinking about this:

    p(job_capable | not_interview_capable)
That is, it's crazy that an interview could miss so many people qualified for the job.

However, I wonder if oftentimes companies are aiming for..

    p(job_capable | interview_capable)
If p(job_capable | interview_capable) is high, and p(interview_capable) is pretty good also, then the company will probably get what it's looking for.

This means that the author is right to recognize the test is doing a bad job of measuring their job readiness. A reasonable instrument in this case doesn't have to measure everyone's job fitness (whether there are nasty side effects is another big issue).

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#36

Post by Apocryphon »

berdon wrote: post #14
Apocryphon wrote: post #2

What does it mean for the industry when there's one of these articles on the front page every other week?

That most people have a hard time viewing the world from different lenses. The article presents a picture of a guy “studying up” for a career and his adventures in interviewing. As someone who’s interviewed hundreds of candidates I noticed red flags right away. For instance, if someone asks you to design a micro service - you don’t say “I can’t”. No FAANGco interviewer wants you to fail. In fact, they want to help yo…

And yet, virtually all boot camps allocate time to interview questions now. Hell, there are boot camps devoted entirely to whiteboarding interviews. Surely this cottage industry, similar to those for gaming standardized tests (SAT/GRE/LSATs/MCATs), is a red flag that the industry has fallen into a pit of Goodhart's law?

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#37

Post by samkater »

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…

Also other trends that, thankfully in my experience, have not yet made their way to tech. I suspect it is only a matter of time, though...

A lot of non-technical positions I have seen and heard about (including non entry-level positions) require a video of the candidate to describe themselves and why they would be a good fit for the position. That just sounds awful to me.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#38

Post by Benjammer »

Analemma_ wrote: post #16
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.

If the problem was oversupply, we wouldn't be getting the cushy salaries and benefits we do. I think the issue is more that it's pretty easy for people with no programming ability to appear competent on a resume, especially to a clueless HR rep or headhunter. There are a lot of people out there whose backgrounds look good on paper who can't solve FizzBuzz...

I think this point is really key, more than the general idea that "there isn't really a short supply of good programmers." It's imminently easy for a rich capitalist to tell the difference between a factory laborer who works hard and one who does not, than it is for them to say the same about an engineer; the evidence is plain as day in front of you. Longer hours, more sweat, quantitatively more physical tasks done, period.

For engineers of most sorts, the signals are actually counter intuitive, a lot of the time. There's the easy cliche story of two engineering teams tasked to the same project (not necessarily even software only). Team A has a slow and steady road map, no drama, everyone leaves at 5pm, they never make any noise, mostly hit their deadlines, even if the deadlines are unambitious, etc. Team B always is fighting fires, huddled around someone's desk talking, always working overtime burning to make aggressive deadlines that are never quite reached anyways, always communicating with the wider company about status of issues and problems, etc. Which is the more effective team? Team B will definitely be "known" more in the wider company, and might have more individuals who respect them and think they are hard workers. If you took a "peer survey," Team B might actually still come out ahead. But they may still be a much less effective team for the larger business in a lot of ways.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#39

Post by caiobegotti »

berdon wrote: post #14
Apocryphon wrote: post #2

What does it mean for the industry when there's one of these articles on the front page every other week?

That most people have a hard time viewing the world from different lenses. The article presents a picture of a guy “studying up” for a career and his adventures in interviewing. As someone who’s interviewed hundreds of candidates I noticed red flags right away. For instance, if someone asks you to design a micro service - you don’t say “I can’t”. No FAANGco interviewer wants you to fail. In fact, they want to help yo…

There are N other separations I could think of besides the ones you pointed out:

- someone who gets anxious and blanks out given hardcore requirements these kind of interviews have, smart people can also go bad at tests

- someone who's having a tough day and would fare better taking the challenge home with quiet relaxing time like they would expect to have at work if they need to code complex algorithms

- no interest in past code written that could potentially show other traits of the candidate a quick coding quiz can't

- etc (no need to be extra creative here, just be humble and imagine what the candidate might be going through to get a dream job)

The simple fact an apparently smart young person joining the industry gets burned out like that due to stupidly arrogant hiring processes like these is a sign HR are failing miserably in the computer industry, and it's not something that started last month. Simplifying the burden of such process for actual people looking for a job to show how they are worth is dehumanizing.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#40

Post by majormajor »

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…

I've gotten a couple of those "show up and we'll train you" jobs but with a catch - the hiring people didn't believe that "anyone" could be trained quickly to do it. But I convinced them that I could.

Now that I've been on the other side of the table for a while, there's no shortage of candidates looking for job, but there's a (real or not) perceived shortage of quality candidates. And the thing that makes it really screwy is that we don't even know how to train developers very well. CS programs don't teach the "art"/"instinctual" part of it, bootcamps don't, even many jobs don't. Yet the difference between a bad codebase and a good one can have impacts a project that persist for years after those first developers have moved on...

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