The worst interviews of my life were at Google. The reason is, they ping me when I am not looking and that gives me the idea to look - then they are my first interview. The last time I went through a new job search I studied first for two months. The google interview was before all that. Bombing was painful! IMHO job interviewing is a skill and practice is essential.
The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
321–330 of 851 posts
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"?
We generally ask for two references and a warm introduction to each reference. We take it from there. We aim for more recent references. Doing it for all previous jobs is overkill and time consuming. The feedback is generally candid and useful. In some cases (limited work history) we only follow up on one reference. In others the best reference is also the current employer so that obviously can be tricky. The spirit of it is indeed to validate the interview process but also to gain a different perspective.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#323Earlier 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.
No, but their skill at being inconsiderate assholes almost certainly transcends the interview process as well as their engineering process. It likely permeates their whole organization. That's what I think the interviewee is looking at in this case and that's what was found. Unfortunately, fixing inconsiderate asshole syndrome is close to impossible. I wouldn't want to work at a place filled with them as described by this interviewee's experience above.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who has had bad data science interviews before getting my current data science job, the process is highly variable. I've had interviews where the interviewer is looking for a specific right answer, with the answer being a binary you-know-it-or-you-don't thing that can't be talked through or worked out in a dialogue with the interviewer. An example was a whiteboard problem requiring the BETWEEN syntax for S…
My favorite iteration of this is also when the interviewer has a suboptimal answer to this question, and expects you to parrot the wrong thing back to them. I could tell I annoyed my interviewer when they told me I was wrong and I demurred, and politely asked them to look it up since there was some question about the facts. They did not look it up.
I had that from a Microsoft interviewer. Thought my code was O(n^2) because he was a C guy...whereas I was writing it in Java (something I had checked would be okay with both the recruiter and the interviewer). Querying the length of a string is an O(1) operation, not O(n), so while you could make the case it's suboptimal (since a function call per loop instead of just a variable lookup), it's not quadratic in behavior. And when he asked what I would do if a number overflowed and I said "...let the exception bubble up because based on the function you asked me to write there is nothing I can do cleanly within it" it was pretty clear the interview was over.
Good times.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I'd call off the interview and let them know they need to rethink their hiring practices. If that's how they interview the company probably is horrible to work for anyways.
> If that's how they interview the company probably is horrible to work for anyways. If the hiring process seems designed to find the very best people who are willing to put up with being abused, yeah, it seems pretty likely that it's a horrible place to work.
Yes. What's amazing, these incredibly bright people that are being subjected to torture.... Wait, wouldn't the incredibly bright tell you to take your process and shove it?
Very large online retailer is 100% this.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#326[deleted]
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
> 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. You're essentially implying that companies like FAANG can get by just fine, even if they hired "…
You radically overestimate the difficulty of the work performed by the modal SWE at Google. A bright-but-not-exceptional high schooler can do the usual job: writing code and tests and the occasional design doc, and way too much proto to proto work.
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> The right answer will depend on the column separator. Proposing the UNIX cut if the file is CSV is not such a good answer, but for tab-separated files, it is just fine. If the file is CSV and they tell me about cut, my next question would be if that is a good universal solution for CSV files in general. TSV and CSV have the same limitations. A tab-separated file could still have tabs inside a field depending on the…
Bingo!
Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews
#329Interviews are so bad because there are too many capable programmers. If there really was a market shortage, companies would not interview like this.
As someone who interviews, you'd be shocked how many "senior engineers" can't write a function with two for-loops.
Yeah, which is why in-person coding challenges became a fashion in the first place. It's shocking to see the number of "software engineers" who manage to engineer for themselves careers where they don't actually engineer software.
If anything, my personal beef with the classic FAANG interview problem is that it's conflating two very different skills. These are "hard" problems, and require some reasoning and logic in addition to coding. What's constantly surprising to me is the extent to which these skills are decoupled. It's routine to find very smart people with excellent math skills who can't code, and the converse.
And the really mind-bending thing to me is that of the two, it's coding which is by far the rarer skill!