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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

nytimes.com

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#361

Post by flukus »

hota_mazi wrote: post #312
throwaway71958 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't take his word as a word of god from heaven. Google's interview process is just as shitty as anyone else's, and shittier than some I've been through. It selects for people who do well on the whiteboard under pressure, which are very often not the best workers overall. It also wastes a ton of time both on the employer and on the candidate side. Source: interviewed ~100 people in my 6+ years at Google.

> It selects for people who do well on the whiteboard under pressure If this were true, Google would have crashed and burned a long time ago. Obviously, their interview process selects for much more versatile engineers than that. Engineers who not only produce reliable and maintainable code, but who can actually come up with products that generate billions of dollars over the years.

>If this were true, Google would have crashed and burned a long time ago.

How many of their projects succeed simply because they are google? Some major ones (like android) come to mind.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#362

Post by flukus »

z3t4 wrote: post #50
anonymoushn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I failed an interview at Facebook because I chose to serialize a binary tree into a list of N items, rather than a list of N items and O(N) sentinels. Most of the interview was spent convincing the interviewer that this could possibly be correct.

i recently failed a programming test after acing all tests except one where i needed a text diff and pulled in a library instead of writing my own in less then ten minutes. they said i need to get better at algos. which is fair. but i dont know anyone that can program a decent working text diff in less then ten minutes.

I ported a diff algorithm (a simple one at that) just a few months ago because the language I was working in didn't have one. I couldn't do it off the top of my head today, or probably the day after, it was transient knowledge that I didn't even try to remember.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#363

Post by flukus »

throwaway9475 wrote: post #332
inopinatus wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not plainly, no, but easily inferred.

You should publish because I know I and a lot of other people would be incredibly interested in divining this information during a job interview.

The best I've come up with is a few proxies, like their deployment process. Someone doing continuous or frequent deployments probably have pretty decent code quality. A company that takes several weeks, several rounds of QA and a dozen release documents that need to be signed in triplicate, they have that process because they've been burned and need scapegoats when the inevitable happens.

The best part is that most people at companies like this aren't aware that it's not normal, so they'll be open about it.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#364

Post by hobls »

nol13 wrote: post #331
hobls wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some common ones: - Lack of self awareness and introspection. Not being able to give specific examples of times you've made a mistake and how you learned from it. - Shit talking old coworkers, general attitude that you're great and nothing is your fault. - Being unable to talk about YOUR specific contributions; "we did this, we did that, the project made money..." Okay, what did YOU do? Surprising amount of people fa…

"- Lack of self awareness and introspection. Not being able to give specific examples of times you've made a mistake and how you learned from it." I'd venture that not being able to answer this question and others like off the top of their head is less an indication that they are unaware of/don't learn from their mistakes than it is an indication how well they practice for bullshit interview questions and can give yo…

> not being able to answer off this question...

Well it certainly shows a lack of preparation and experience.

Here's how I approach those questions. I think about each project I've launched, and whether they're relevant. It's an easy thought exercise, and then you have an answer to that question forever. And seriously, time you've made a mistake should be an easy one, and it's one everyone should have ready. Over your whole career you can't think of a time you've done something that you'd do differently if you had a chance? I bet you can, and if not, it shows a serious lack of introspection.

We want people trying to make themselves better. Thinking about your career and studying for interviews is part of that.

> filter out cynical assholes

Dude, at least 50% of the tech industry is people who would charitably be described as cynical assholes. Part of being professional is being able to turn it off. If you can't give a professional answer in an interview how can the interviewer expect you to give a professional answer in a contentious meeting?

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#365

Post by joshuamorton »

uiri wrote: post #357
joshuamorton wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Actually, Google pays under the average of top companies, because as a top tier company, they can afford. Most people I know who went to work for Google took a pay cut but don't have a single regret about it. Compared to who? They pay more than AMZN/MS/FB/AAPL/etc. for equal level, but are stingier with levels. You might be correct that certain other companies pay more than Google (Netflix maybe?), but they're certa…

> They pay more than AMZN/MS/FB/AAPL/etc. for equal level, but are stingier with levels. Google is more generous to good performers via bonuses once you are working there, but if you have two offers in hand, you are going to find Google highly resistant to negotiating. The notion of people taking a pay cut to work at Google sounds plausible to me. If one's goal is to maximize compensation (particularly in the short t…

> Google is more generous to good performers via bonuses once you are working there, but if you have two offers in hand, you are going to find Google highly resistant to negotiating. The notion of people taking a pay cut to work at Google sounds plausible to me.

I don't think that's true. While google is by all accounts (including in my personal experience) unwilling to move significantly on base salary, they'll happily match pretty much any offer with stock from my experience (and the experience of others I've talked to).

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#366

Post by flukus »

RichardHeart wrote: post #228

You hear lots of these stories about stupid interviews. You rarely hear the stories about the horrible, terrible employees that weren't weeded out, got hired and did great harm to the company and their coworkers. Interviews can be good and bad, I'd venture to say that many the horrible hire has been avoided by any interview at all. Thus, don't make perfect the enemy of good, and try to improve on good. The set of pot…

We have entire websites dedicated to them: http://thedailywtf.com/ . If they did great harm to the company though, that's the companies fault for keeping them and/or not monitoring them.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#367

Post by hobls »

mercutio2 wrote: post #345
hobls wrote: post #21

I've been a programmer for a bit over ten years. I've worked at scrappy little startups, midsized companies, now for a tech giant for a few years. The engineers I work with at the tech giant are consistently better engineers than my other coworkers have been, and I credit the very structured interview process. We're trained to ask specific questions, look for specific types of answers, and each interviewer is evaluat…

I say the same thing on many of these threads. Most people rejected a at BigCos aren't rejected for failing to pass the technical bar(s); those people get filtered out in the phone screens. The by far most common reasons interviewers offer for low scores are: didn't listen/didn't acknowledge when they reached the end of their knowledge/didn't test when they got off the rails/just didn't seem like a cooperative cowork…

This is a great comment. Totally agree.

> didn't acknowledge when they reached the end of their knowledge

Oh man, this one. How hard is "I don't know?" You're not supposed to have the entirety of computer science and software engineering knowledge jammed into your head. Let's talk about what you know and what you don't and figure out whether you're a good fit.

We hire lots of people without direct experience in what we do because they seem great to work with and we think they'll learn quickly. Just please don't try to bullshit; it doesn't usually work.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#368

Post by ashark »

nol13 wrote: post #331
hobls wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some common ones: - Lack of self awareness and introspection. Not being able to give specific examples of times you've made a mistake and how you learned from it. - Shit talking old coworkers, general attitude that you're great and nothing is your fault. - Being unable to talk about YOUR specific contributions; "we did this, we did that, the project made money..." Okay, what did YOU do? Surprising amount of people fa…

"- Lack of self awareness and introspection. Not being able to give specific examples of times you've made a mistake and how you learned from it." I'd venture that not being able to answer this question and others like off the top of their head is less an indication that they are unaware of/don't learn from their mistakes than it is an indication how well they practice for bullshit interview questions and can give yo…

Can confirm. My work life has been smooth and fairly boring, and I have piss-poor autobiographical memory anyway, so I pretty much have to make those up to have anything worth telling. Maybe start from some half-remembered kernel of truth, but it's all BS from there, because it's all I've got. Have to rehearse them so I'm not making shit up on the fly--too much risk of tripping up, or making it too flashy, or accidentally saying something in a way that makes it seem like I'm shifting blame, or taking credit I shouldn't, or anything like that.

Especially the "tell us about a time you had a conflict with someone" question. Ugh. I guess I just need to seek out some assholes to work with because I've got a big fat nothing to talk about on that one. I ought to start writing down the crap I make up for it so I don't have to do it again every time I interview.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#369

Post by LnxPrgr3 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #325
jernfrost wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. First step is to acknowledge that interviewing doesn't work very well. You can't keep deluding yourself because you haven't found a better way. Accept reality. This is one of the biggest problems I see with business guys today. They want absolute certainty in a world which can't offer it. Start accepting that there is a lot of stuff we don't know and can't know at the moment and we simply have to work towar…

Yet, literally every professionally employed person is in their current gig via that process. It works good enough.

Counterexample: I did not apply to, nor interview for, my current gig, and I'm not cheating by working for myself.

And I bet almost everyone reading this has worked with at least one person they think shouldn't have survived the interview, and that person was making a boatload because they convinced the boss they're brilliant. Meanwhile 90% of their day was spent talking about how great they are, and 10% creating new bugs, and no one dared say anything because the thought of them being more "productive" was horrifying.

'It' mostly successfully matches employees to employers, but the quality of those matches may vary wildly.

Interview processes also vary wildly—you can't really say that it works without defining 'it.' Are we talking multiple technical screens that require writing code or a single fluffy buzzword-laden conversation with a C-level? Both have failure modes, but those failure modes sure are different.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#370

Post by mikelyons »

uncensored wrote: post #42

How do you know that the person you'll be marrying won't cheat on you and won't leave you in hard times? If you apply the methods we use today for interviews you'll end up with a 50/50 chance at best, a coin toss. Yet why do some marriages last forever (till death do us apart) while others fail miserably or crumble even after 20 years? The search for the global optimum cannot be performed by asking a set of questions…

You're claiming that sexism/racism is not instinct and there is plenty of evidence that it is.
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