The dystopian world of software engineering interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#391

Post by BlueTemplar » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:02 AM UTC

eyegor wrote: post #315

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,…

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 gui…

These days, we are surrounded by so much complexity that I'm getting quite often the experience of having to delve for a week into a subject so that I can start to appreciate which solutions are the most appropriate ones for the problem at hand. (And then a few years later I realize that quite a lot of that was still wrong, but at least I picked among the best solutions rather than the worst - see also the "getting on the latest fad" kind of mistakes...)

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#392

Post by AlexCoventry » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:02 AM UTC

jonathankoren wrote: post #247

throwaway5283 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely true. I work at Giant Search and Advertising Company, and joining was a huge mistake. I thought I would be working interesting technical problems with a high degree of autonomy — instead the work is extremely boring, and you get ahead by playing political games rather than by innovating. I’m one of the rare few here who managed to get through the interview without really preparing. Before joining,…

You joined a giant megacorp. They’re all like that. There’s very little difference between Google and Oracle in this regard.

From what I've read, Google is a much more humane and pleasant environment to develop software in.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#393

Post by AnimalMuppet » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:02 AM UTC

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #325

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The incredibly secure would tell you to take your process and shove it. I'm not sure to what degree "bright" and "secure" correlate. I suspect that they may do so eventually, but I think many bright young people are still insecure with respect to jobs and employment.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#394

Post by bobsil1 » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:03 AM UTC

paulie_a wrote: post #41

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…

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.

I called BS with a recruiter on an interviewer who was being a dick. But that was the one who made the offer :)

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#395

Post by organsnyder » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:05 AM UTC

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…

I did that for an interview for what is now my employer. It was via Skype with a shared code editor. The interviewer asked me to implement a data structure that I had not used (directly—I'm sure plenty of libraries I use utilize it) since college, and I said as much. I told him I was quickly looking it up on Wikipedia, skimmed the article (mumbling to myself, I'm sure), and then proceeded to implement it. My candor and ability to quickly synthesize information on the fly must have reflected well on me, because I ended up getting an offer.

This wasn't at a big name tech company, though. From the sounds of it, most of those places don't give interviewers nearly as much leeway as mine had.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#396

Post by BlueTemplar » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:06 AM UTC

courtf wrote: post #141

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…

Not sure if they were using this exact method, but I did interview at a place that had a long, grueling process (series of interviews, coding challenge, etc). They also asked for every employer back to high school, as well as contact info for supervisor for all of those jobs, which of course was ridiculous. I did enjoy seeing them taken aback when I provided that information and, despite being in my early 30s, having…

So there are companies corresponding to that "tech bro" cliché ?

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#397

Post by neilk » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:06 AM UTC

thewhitetulip wrote: post #384

neilk wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think there’s any intention to it at all. Unless one takes extraordinary steps to examine what brings truly brings value, most people interview for clones of themselves. Or worse: their idealized self-image. Google started off with very mathy people, and highly competitive people, and interviewing this way has always worked for them, so why change? Some people have done internal studies showing how wildly cou…

> Unearned privilege? I agree that the interview process looks for self clones. I've been in interviews where interviewer was like "why you used Dictionary to do this? Nobody uses dict in prod code" But unearned privilege seems a little harsh doesn't it?

I took that part out. I don’t really know what is in other people’s minds.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#398

Post by monoideism » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:07 AM UTC

LeftHandPath wrote: post #290

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.

> Cynical answer though Honestly I don't think it's that cynical - it just makes sense. There are the people who can and will do that stuff - and do it happily - and they would presumably be the easiest to hire as junior devs. Google views it as a stepping stone towards their next product launch, and the programmers see it as a stepping stone to a more enjoyable job. And then the inventors and entrepreneurs create th…

> and typically both produce and earn more than they would've at the company.

Eh, there's a lot of us who haven't done great financially but who have written a lot of open source code being run at bigcos. Being an entrepreneur requires another skill set altogether. One that I seem to lack, although I finally have come up with a solid idea in the last year that might get me somewhere whenever I'm ready to make the move.

I'm sure if I spent significant time preparing, I could do well at Google's interview process, and other FAANG companies have tried multiple times to get me to interview (oddly, never Google), but I'm not convinced it's a good idea for me. I've been much happier working for smaller companies. The one time I worked for a large corporation years ago, I was miserable. People say Google is different, but I'm not convinced.

I would like that sweet compensation, though.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#399

Post by yahyaheee » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:07 AM UTC

MAGZine wrote: post #68

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…

> Google might not need you to code some efficient algorithm to search a b-tree every day, but they pay top dollar and can rightly expect that their software engineers can come up with efficient and creative solutions to hard problems without dragging the rest of their team down. This is a non-sequitur. Being able to write good software has nothing to do with reading cracking the coding interview and practicing leetc…

Yep it is no measure of success. I look at what people have done, that should tell you more than anything

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#400

Post by Psychlist » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:07 AM UTC

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…

I suck at those interviews but here's a few real life job situations I've been in:

- sitting at my desk with the board of directors on speakerphone. They asked questions, I wrote SQL to find answers, while they tried to come up with a way to stop the company going bankrupt. Small company, I was basically the one guy who knew how the database linked together.

- sitting across the hall from a room full of support people while they went completely insane trying to answer the phones, and I tried to stay cool and calm while peer-coding with two others trying to get the system back up and running.

- having literal truckloads of garbage sitting in a queue while I debugged software that linked number plate recognition systems to a weighbridge and boom gate.

- being "that guy" who kept pushing for an early performance test. Eventually we did one. It went spectacularly badly. Some people wanted to blame me, because I was the one responsible (for the test).

In other words, being able to cope with "completely unexpected interview questions" and being able to cope with "code I wrote has gone wrong" are different skills.