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I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
301–310 of 740 posts
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
These processes are optimized to reduce false positives not false negatives. So they already know that they might be missing on some great developers.
This is the correct explanation; false positives are so much more expensive than the opportunity cost of a false negative.
People always say this, but is it true? It’s easy to fire someone. It’s really hard to find someone who can ship (something you won’t get from a whiteboarding challenge).
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Well... how do we find these people? By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it? By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates? While not perfect I wonder if a person's projects are a good signal for this. There certainly are those who have developed a significant open source project but who get rejected by the FAANG companies, the author…
In Howell's own words from https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... : > I wrote a simple package manager. Anyone could write one. And in fact mine is pretty bad. It doesn't do dependency management properly. It doesn’t handle edge case behavior well. It isn’t well tested.
From later in his same post...
But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
The technical interviewing scheme is not great, but I haven't seen another system that works. > I cannot help but think that these big tech companies (FAANG, et. al) are missing out on diversifying and increasing their engineering expertise by passing over developers like you. I think this is certainly true. > I often think what would Google/Facebook would be like if they hired in some experienced engineers that may…
> Well... how do we find these people? By looking at their resumes where they claim this? By contacting references who will attest to it? By trusting the intuition of subjective evaluators of the candidates? While not perfect I wonder if a person's projects are a good signal for this. There certainly are those who have developed a significant open source project but who get rejected by the FAANG companies, the author…
One unfortunate side effect of being at a FAANG company is that most of your best work is probably proprietary and you will never have the chance to show it to anyone outside the company, nor will you have much free time for personal projects.
As an interviewer, I can definitely say that GitHub has become a bigger part of helping to evaluate people.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
uh, I thoroughly search each room, starting at the left corner and recursively iterating via a hilbert curve. doesn't everybody?
Two different approaches. Each have their adherents. But when someone can’t find their phone or keys that that just had, they probably don’t start by ripping one room apart top to bottom.
I might pull the couch cushions, but I'm not going to start moving furniture until I check other places first.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The technical interviewing scheme is not great, but I haven't seen another system that works. I would argue that pair programming or take home projects do a far better job than the standard Whiteboard Algo interviews. In fact I don't think it's even close but SV engineers have been captured by this Whiteboard Interview Stockholm Syndrome/Hazing and continue to perpetuate the insane idea that there is no better way.
Many people on HN also complain about "I don't have time for pair programming, take home". They don't like interviews. People just expect to be paid top dollar on their word.
> People just expect to be paid top dollar on their word.
And their education, previous employment, etc.
No one makes a neuro-surgeon perform a surgery before hiring them.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#307It's interesting that software interviews have degenerated into literal auditions. Just as with auditions, you need to train specifically for them. Is there really a reason why software jobs can't hire in a blue-collar fashion where there's a background/experience + sanity check and a subsequent trial period? Even looking beyond that, is there any similar profession where interviews like these take place? I'm startin…
Would you want to work with someone who's just a warm body that claims to have experience in the field? Especially in such a high paying field where any random is highly incentivized to just pretend they know how to make software even if they can't pass fizzbuzz?
Clearly interviews are flawed. But I've worked with warm bodies hired through h1b-abuse programs and no matter how much they claim to know about something, a lot of them are just bullshiters. I would never want to work at a place where people with their level of skills could join the regular teams as peers.
I see whiteboarding simply as a logical statistical filtering mechanism. Do they filter out people that are lazy or have difficult personalities? No. But at the difficulty level of places like Google they filter out people who are really bad at programming (which there are a lot of) every single time. They also happen to filter out people who are good at programming too, but enough pass the whiteboarding that the organization can hire to meet their needs, so they don't care that maybe applicant X didn't pass. High false negative rate, low false positive rate
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
These processes are optimized to reduce false positives not false negatives. So they already know that they might be missing on some great developers.
This is the correct explanation; false positives are so much more expensive than the opportunity cost of a false negative.
You think people that pass technical interviews can’t be false positives?
I think they weed out a few, but completely ignore practical development skills, work ethic, soft skills, design and architecture skills, etc.
Of course maybe this explains why most of the big tech companies have seemed pretty stagnant for the last decade, largely failing with products and decisions that have poor execution and market fit outside of the products that made them big in the first place.
Has anyone actually studied the best way to hire devs? Like a real, independent study that measured and compared results across, perhaps, a wide array of metrics?
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just ridiculous. BFS is such a useful building block. If you're stubborn enough to not spend 10 mins on this the best of luck.
I honestly don't mean this in a snide way. Can you give a few concrete examples of how a deep understanding of BFS that can't be googled and read in 10 minutes at the time you need it can help you ship profitable software products faster than your competitors?
There is no "deep understanding" of BFS. All it is is look at your siblings before your children.
I wouldn't hire an electrical engineer who complained that he shouldn't have to know Ohm's Law, either.
Re: I interviewed at six top companies in Silicon Valley in six days
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of people who feel the same way about all the useless startups in SV that exist solely to take VC money. At least Facebook actually provides something of value to the hundreds of millions people who use it.
There is a robust debate about whether or not facebook provides negative value to its users. In my opinion, it's charitable to say that the question of whether Facebook harms its users is open to debate. There seems to be a clear correlation between use of facebook and negative mental health outcomes. The fact that people use a product is absolutely not evidence that it provides value to its consumers, especially whe…
This assumes that FB is harmful to everyone, instead of a subset of people. I don't think that's very well proven. The mental health studies also have a bit of a correlation issue, similar to drug use.
I think sugar is a more apt analogy than smoking. Facebook, like sugars, provides a source of a required human input. (Calories/human connection). Overdone, both are harmful.
Tobacco is a much more charged analogy, and is more extreme in terms of positive/negative balance. I think it reveals more about the biases of the person making the statement than it does about social media.