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The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

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Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#331

Post by Frost1x »

alexpetralia wrote: post #310
DoreenMichele wrote: post #295

Earlier 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.

Well, from this example, management side was unwilling to even invest time in exploring or acknowledging the idea that they might be wrong. I don't know about you but I don't want to work with people who you can't have a reasonable conversation with to get to the bottom of a problem and figure out the issues together. Everyone makes mistakes, sorting them out together and achieving mutual goals is what makes this sort of work bearable.

If management doesn't understand collaborative working environments, humility, and basic problem solving, I don't (and will not) work with them.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#332

Post by karlkatzke »

bilekas wrote: post #241
ideal0227 wrote: post #90

When my classmates were preparing interview coding questions, I was working on a mini TCP implementation and a toy kernel. AWS rejected me since I failed to write prefect code to traverse a tree in level order. Google did not even give me an interview since I told the campus recruiter I have not prepared for the coding questions. Then I ended up with an internship at CoreOS and created etcd. I am glad that they did n…

One thing to note about coding interviews, they're very simular to somone looking over your shoulder while you're working. Nobody can perform well like that.. One great colleague who I wish I was in the interview for, simple started thinking out loud. Everything he was thinking, he said out loud, and of course, the team loved it. Because thats all it's about. If its not over a video chat/submission, comment your code…

So I had an interview that was like that, but I wasn’t given enough information. I was asked to implement the “inverse square law in code” ... and I explained to the interviewer who was two years out of college (I looked up all of the interviewers on linkedin, so I had a good idea of their experience and areas of expertise) that my first step as someone who hadn’t been in an academic environment or exposed to this kind of requirement for over a decade would be to research the requirement and asked if I could consult a Wikipedia article. “No, you can’t consult outside sources.” “Ok, can you explain to me the inverse square law?” “No, you should know this.”

I didn’t know that. Also, I didn’t have enough information to ask good questions, because I was pretty sure that this was an incomplete specification and I needed to ask informed questions to reach a particular implementation.

As a result, the company’s evaluation was that I didn’t know how to code.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#333

Post by AtlasBarfed »

RobRivera wrote: post #262
glofish wrote: post #202

Earlier 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…

I don't see anger or negativity. I see valid feedback for identifying bias with passion. To paint it in a negative light is to introduce bias.

Well the person was exposed as someone just validating themselves in interviews, so legitimate criticism works be painted as an attack.

All tech interviews start with a need to legitimize and reinforce the interviewers as successful and talented ....

Even if we're basically all terrible

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#334

Post by mwest217 »

phkahler wrote: post #191
paxys wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah! Reminds me of https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 . Cynical answer though — Google does not want people like you. They don't want to hire entrepreneurs or inventors. They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.

>> They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for. Somehow I doubt that. Can anyone who actually works at google comment on what it's like? Do people come to you with specific requirement and expect you to crank out code like the interview problems? I've never worked somewhere where the software folks were actually just coding machines.

Not at all. I've been at Google for a bit over two years, and my experience has been at the far other end of the spectrum: a lot of autonomy, gathering requirements, designing & implementing. Also I have a fair amount of agency to see something that would make people's lives better and pitch it as a thing I'd like to work on. If it's less than a day or two of work I can generally just go do it.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#335

Post by spunker540 »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #148
codingslave wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are completing 500+ problems on leetcode before heading into interviews at google. Don't believe me? Go read the teamblind forums. People might spend six months studying, after which they pass a bunch of interviews and get good comp. Getting just one offer from a FAANG company often doesnt pay well enough, you need multiple competing ones. If you think this has anything to do with incompetent people complainin…

I'm imagining it's going to bite these people on the backend later in life when they sacrificed everything for their careers and potentially missed other major life milestones: cultivating a relationship, starting a family, etc. I know not everyone spends 6 months getting into Google, but there are so many other companies that will take you without 6 months of preparation. If career is the only thing that gives you m…

For one thing 6 months is definitely the high end of prep time. Even so, spending your evenings studying for one 6 month period in no way precludes you from ever dating or marrying or having children.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#336

Post by [deleted] »

berdon wrote: post #132
Apocryphon wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with an unyielding, fairly uniform obsession with interview problems unrelated to actual day-to-day development is that you're institutionalizing Goodhart's Law. Eventually the interviews will encourage false positives as candidates grind on CTCI and LeetCode and pass interviews without actually being able to excel at actual work responsibilities.

I don’t think so. That’s why you’ll have candidates passing the questions but not the interview. We’re not looking got rote answers, we’re looking for comprehension, problem solving, and discussion.

[deleted]

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#337

Post by chrisweekly »

eyegor wrote: post #304
hnruss wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I've never had much difficulty finding software development work at smaller companies. If I have the required skills that they are looking for, I'm usually confident that I'll get an interview. An interview at a smaller company is likely to be much shorter and easier than the algorithm-based interviews at larger companies. The chance of an offer is also much higher. The pay at smaller companies is still good…

> start your own software company that is eventually acquired by a large company Just a heads up, that isn't how it works. If you've built a product that's good enough to be turned into a company and be bought by google/ms/etc, they don't want to hire you. They want your product. If they hired you, you'd steal away their workers to make another startup. At least that's the usual line of thinking. Source: this happene…

Too quick to generalize from your exp; brother founded a company w product good enough to get noticed, but it was an aquihire situation; FB wanted him and his cofounder, not the product/IP.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#338

Post by bllguo »

agumonkey wrote: post #246
bllguo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well adding the visual element just introduces another source of bias.. and even if we set that aside, depending on the position it may be selecting for an irrelevant skill cover letters are terrible anyway. the signal to noise ratio there must be comical.

what are better recruitment ideas replacing cover letters ? (honest question)

I wish I had answers. I don't - I just know that cover letters aren't it.

I've been on both sides of hiring at this point. On the applicant side, I have never seen any indication that anyone has ever read my cover letters. Writing them is a chore. And though my sample size is very limited, I have never had success with bespoke cover letters/cold emails/etc.; the time has always been better spent on reaching more people.

On the hiring side, I've read a few cover letters. Nothing has ever stood out. I read it over once and that's that. Honestly I feel like it can only hurt you. What kind of powerful, moving statement could you possibly write that would persuade someone to give you a chance when you otherwise had none? I'm sure it's happened, but to force people to write these things at the cost of millions of man-hours, just to cover this absurdly rare and mythical case? And on the other side, there are so many things you could do in a cover letter that would give a _negative_ impression. Maybe the tone is inappropriate, or there are inadvertent grammatical errors, or it's written poorly, and on and on and on. Just more exposed surface area for the naturally critical interviewer's mind to attack.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#339

Post by ajross »

thedance wrote: post #276
reggieband wrote: post #137

> “Yes. Can you write an algorithm to find the Kth highest value in a binary tree?” I got this exact question on a phone screen with "Giant Search and Advertising Company." I got stuck on a stupid detail and botched the implementation. Once I hung up the phone I took a deep breath and fixed the algorithm in about 15 minutes. That still isn't very good since I was only given 15 minutes total at the end of the intervie…

How snarky do people get on these interviews? If anyone asked me to find the kth-greatest element in a tree I'd write down a loop that increments std:set::crbegin k-many times and then dereferences and returns it. This is literally how anybody at Giant Search and Advertising Company would do it, and almost nobody at that company has ever written a tree, they just use the one in libc++, from Jeff Dean on down.

Sigh. They aren't asking you the question because they expect you to write an in-memory data structure library. They are asking you this question because they want to know that you can reason about systems with subtle behavior, and a binary tree is one such system that most programmers learn about in school.

So if you refuse to engage, they'll have no evidence from you about your ability to write subtle code of any kind. And they'll go with someone less snarky who they know does.

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