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The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

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Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#351

Post by ajross »

mLuby wrote: post #308

> 23 interviews and I didn’t get a single offer That's… an unusually consistent signal. Suggests to me that either this person is getting into the wrong interviews (eg junior interviewing for senior role—though they say that's not the case), or more likely there's some hidden variable, like a bad reference, bad BO, really noticeable "culture" misfit, or other "red flag". Regardless, the general points are spot on; it…

Exactly. I mean, hiring strategies like this absolutely do have a bunch of false negatives: people who just didn't get lucky about what problem was asked, or had a brain fart at the wrong time. It happens.

But not at this kind of frequency it doesn't. If I got my quick back of the envelope statistics right (exactly the kind of skill that occasionally crops up in these jobs and on this interviews!), this would mean at 95% confidence the employers were incorrectly rejecting 88% of qualified candidates!

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#352

Post by cortesoft »

Frost1x wrote: post #331
alexpetralia wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

They might not even have reached the management team... who knows if the recruiter passed this on or not.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#353

Post by cdoxsey »

I was given a 2-hour coding challenge once to build a language server for a programming editor. It had to implement 3 functions:

1. show help text (type/doc string) for a word

2. go to definition

3. find all references

My first thought was "this is an absurd request for a two hour coding challenge". My second thought was "boy I hit the jackpot, a few years ago on a whim I built my own language server for Go in sublime text and could probably crank out a new one pretty quick"

Sadly despite my best attempt they rejected me. They never did give me an explanation. (fwiw: https://github.com/calebdoxsey/languageserver-challenge)

I wish I could say it was a fluke, but I've been rejected by lots of companies due to the coding challenge. One day I'd really love to see what the passing code for these challenges looked like. Maybe I could learn where I dropped the ball.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#354

Post by scarejunba »

I actually really like Google's process. It's got everything I look for, as a candidate:

* Predictability - I know what it's going to be like clearly from the beginning

* Trainability - I can become better at it

* Memoryless - They don't care that I did terribly a year ago

Of course, in the end, I didn't actually interview even once with them so maybe I'm lying about what I like. I guess I'm one of those guys who goes from job to job not having a whiteboard interview. Lucky me.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#355

Post by mwest217 »

codingslave wrote: post #55
parsimo2010 wrote: post #33

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 certain…

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…

Maybe some people do that - I didn't do a single interview question prepping for a Google interview; just read through the topics they suggested reviewing, looked up the concepts I hadn't seen before, and did the interviews.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#356

Post by fogetti »

whack wrote: post #301
LordFast wrote: post #100

Earlier 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 "…

I think FAANG has too much money, so they try to solve all problems with money, which could otherwise be solved with better planning, allocating more time, changing the mindset and/or better understanding the problem at hand. That might explain why they pay hire salaries than the rest of the industry.

I don't think that there is necessarily a causal relationship between the salaries and the competence, but that line of thinking is common in those companies.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#357

Post by thedance »

ajross wrote: post #339
thedance wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

Isn’t it up to the interviewer to ask a useful question? This is exactly how I would find the kth item of a search tree. I don’t feel like that is refusal to engage. Is the question is more like “describe various approaches to the designs of search trees and their iterators, and discuss the time/space complexity of a few examples” then that’s a different question.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#358

Post by mixmastamyk »

new_realist wrote: post #244
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…

Google had the equivalent of etcd a long, long time ago.

Was it general and polished enough to get traction though? What’s its name?

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#359

Post by ajross »

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?

Cynically: it means that there are a bunch of jobs that people want and that are hard to get, and the people who didn't get them don't like the process that rejected them.

There's no world in which there is an elite (e.g. FAANG) tier of employers who reject most applicants and one in which no one complains about their hiring.

That doesn't say anything about whether the hiring process is good or bad, obviously. But that is what it says about the industry.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#360

Post by Aperocky »

samkater wrote: post #37
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.

Been through that one time, I should do more of those and just sing Merry Christmas for fun, ideal for wasting time and potentially lighten up the day of the other person who had to watch/listen to these nonsense.
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