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The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
311–320 of 851 posts
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#312"I have always sought to be completely honest and humble with myself and others about my abilities."
Well, there's your problem right there.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#313I almost got into a role as a lead dev only to decline myself later. Their entire team had left for some reason and last developer wanted to leave too. No technical interviews, though lol.
Small companies aren’t that great either, when their main business isn’t tech
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#314If all you care about is money, go bust your butt on leetcode and ace a FAANG interview. If you care about a work-life balance, and having a big impact on a small team, work for a medium-small startup and negotiate a flexible schedule. Personally I get a huge kick out of making massive improvements to a small business's tech and infrastructure. The lack of bureaucracy is a freedom that is often taken for granted. If…
The thing is once you get in you will probably work half the hours for twice the pay. I agree about the freedom to do big changes part though.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#315In 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…
My experience as both a 50+ hiring manager and as a candidate tells me that we are collectively living in an illusion of whacked up expectations. Yes, it's super hard to hire good people, but most of the time it's because "good enough" isn't good enough anymore, and while we may think our company is a 9 and we deserve 9s, we are probably more of a 4 based on what people are actually working on. Yes, interviews suck,…
Having helped non-cs managers hire for technical roles, I feel your pain. Usually I start getting worn down around candidate 5-10 for in person interviews, and stop looking for colleague grade employees and more for "yeah, I could train them". Nowadays I've tried to tailor my interviewing style more in that vein; I ask for their approaches to problems I don't expect them to be able to solve alone, and then try to guide them towards a solution. I judge them based on where the conversation lands on the lecture - coworker spectrum.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#316In my personal experience, having interviewed dozens of candidates (data science), I believe that asking "easy" and "simple" questions is the most effective way to probe the problem-solving skills of a candidate. Fun and interesting solutions to easy questions are hallmarks of great individuals. The question would go like this: Suppose I have a column-oriented file and I want to print out a column in a reverse-sorted…
I feel the need to nitpick your example. > does the candidate want to code it up or understands that they could do: cut | sort| head Piping together commands is undoubtedly programming, just in ancient shell script. So in a sense you're really testing for bash expertise. Which is maybe really relevant to you but I wouldn't say you're really "avoiding" coding by knowing to use those commands together, you just decided…
Dude, do you even data science?
Not knowing Unix tools like cut and sort is a hard fail on a senior individual contributor in data science role, as is using sqlite which totally doesn't scale the way sort and cut does. Separates sheep from goats in data science land. You should really learn them if you're in the field and work with reasonably big data sets. Frankly you should learn them if you work with data at all, ever.
I've literally seen FAANGs recommendation engines powered with these tools running nightly on someone's desktop.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#317In 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…
A few words on top grading. We are use a top grading like process, and are pretty flexible on the references part of it. It is just a long conversation. I think it is a structured and simple way to talk about a person and where they have been. Yes, it is comprehensive, but it works well. We hire almost all candidates that have made it to the top grading stage of our hiring process. We don’t use it to find liars and d…
So, do you actually ask the candidate to arrange calls with ex-managers and conduct these calls for all previous jobs? What does it mean that you are "flexible"?
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
A column orientated file? What format? Excel? CSV? What is cut, sort or head? Are you only accepting Linux candidates then, a tiny percentage of users? This sort of utter nonsense question, heavily loaded to your "standard" experience, which is anything but, is even worse than the questions cited in the article. All you're doing is filtering for people who are in your tribe, who followed the same path as you and thin…
Interesting how negative your reaction is. Also how far off target all that anger is. I am not selecting for a tribe, I am selecting for a job. The questions are loaded, of course. Among the many duties, the jobs do require processing large files, sometimes with cut, Python or C. I want the candidate to use the most appropriate tool as needed. I'd rather not have people implement functionality that already exists in…
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Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hilarious, but I think you dodged a bullet. Imagine for a minute actually working there.
To be honest I never understood this logic. Clearly a firm's skill at interviewing might diverge from their ability to mentor, innovate, have a great engineering culture and so on? Sure - perhaps it's slightly less likely, but it's not at all obvious that interviewing skill and company excellence are 100% convergent.
My opinion is based more on the final sentence than on the borked exercise.
Everyone makes mistakes. Character is revealed in how one handles it when the mistake is pointed out in good faith by a party who has a perfectly legitimate reason to do so.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#320I don't even have the coding level that the writer has, but I felt myself so expelled from the industry that I quit looking for jobs. I just gave up and started working independently. Financially now I'm really broke but I think I'm better with myself. Maybe I'm not the "super-programmer-hacker" but at least I don't have to participate feeding the sadistic pleasure and sense of power that recruiters have on us.