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Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

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Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#41

Post by tobz »

bcook wrote: post #25
sagichmal wrote: post #11

Hiring isn't broken, dude. You just don't interview well, and you seem antagonistic even to the idea that your cachet and skills, insofar as they exist, aren't useful to the market. That's a problem -- for you. Interviews exist because employers need a way to quantify and qualify your ability. Typical computer science problems are a (flawed, but concrete) way of doing that. No reasonable interviewer expects you to re…

Additionally, a good programmer (or worker in general) should be good at much more than programming; like being able to collaborate & socialize with other team members & management without immediately resorting to "Fuck you, I quit". The author seems to have a chip on his shoulder...

Just out of curiosity: how many bad interviews, or interviews with a rejection at the end, have you had in a row? Or total?

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#42

Post by j_s »

onion2k wrote: post #35

If a 960+ days GitHub commit streak doesn’t prove it, then I don’t know what will. crontab -e 30 9 * * * cd /mycode && git add . && git commit -m "Woo!" && git push service crond restart Ta da!

Agreed: GitHub commit history timing metadata means nothing.

https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#43

Post by catnaroek »

ams6110 wrote: post #18
jpatokal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not a test of whether you know it, it's a test of whether you can implement it. If the candidate doesn't know/recall what BFS is, it's trivial to demonstrate the basic idea on a whiteboard, and it's the candidate's job to convert the idea into code. (Which, at the end of day, is pretty much what the vast majority of coding is about.)

It's still not realistic. People don't code on whiteboards. You code (today) with all the resources of the internet at your fingertips, and if you need to invert a binary tree you will use a well-tested implementation from a standard library.

I know for damn sure that, if I'm implementing something algorithmically tricky (not BFS, though), I first sketch the details on a whiteboard or a piece of paper.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#44

Post by rayiner »

I don't think the specific interview questions are all that y fair. BFS, shortest path, etc, are building blocks of computer science and familiarity with them is a good signal someone has a thorough education in algorithms. If you're hiring an engineer and he's not familiar with the Bernoulli equation, or a lawyer who isn't familiar with Marbury v. Madison, that'd give you pause too.

The real issue is why is a front end developer expected to have an education in algorithms? Part of the problem is that programmers doing the interviewing like to show off, instead of focusing on the requirements of the position. I remember the first time I interviewed someone. His resume said he knew C++, so I asked him about the intricacies of templates. That revealed that his knowledge of C++, like that of many people in the early 2000s, extended only to "C with classes." Gave a negative evaluation. But in retrospect, all our code was C with classes so what did it matter? I was really just showing off that I had read TCPPPL.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#45

Post by bad_user »

stegosaurus wrote: post #7
taneq wrote: post #6

The examples that always come up of "stupid interview questions" in this kind of rant: Implement a breadth first search, or reverse a binary tree, or write FizzBuzz. Are these really such difficult things to whip up, off the top of your head? Is it really that unreasonable to want to hire someone who can do so? Yes, if you need such a thing and it's not immediately obvious how to do it, off to StackOverflow you go to…

I don't know what BFS is. I just googled it. Oh, I know what it is now. If you haven't been exposed to it, it's just jargon. That's the point. You are testing for jargon rather than ability. It is the distinction between saying 'implement FizzBuzz' and going silent, and actually explaining what it is. As an interviewer it is easy to forget that whilst you may have asked a question 20 times, this may be the candidate'…

Trees and graphs are fundamental to computer science and there are only two ways to traverse them. I don't know what kids are doing these days, but I learned this because of my high-school curricula.

In other words, it's OK if you don't have a formal education in computer science, but when you don't have it, you need to make up for it by learning on your own, because this is basic stuff that high-school kids are learning. And it's even worse when people do have that education on their resume and don't know BFS, because it means they cheated on those courses.

And what would you prefer for a hiring test? Straight IQ tests? A requirement for public, open-source contributions? Or are you speaking of querying databases and fading out divs? I think we can all agree that neither is entirely fair.

And keep in mind that for all the pain involved in the interview process, the only alternative is optimistic hiring for a test period, except that doesn't work because it causes distress to everybody involved if it doesn't work out. This is why many companies now prefer internships, because thus they are dealing with young people that don't have big expectations.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#46

Post by TheCoelacanth »

ams6110 wrote: post #18
jpatokal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not a test of whether you know it, it's a test of whether you can implement it. If the candidate doesn't know/recall what BFS is, it's trivial to demonstrate the basic idea on a whiteboard, and it's the candidate's job to convert the idea into code. (Which, at the end of day, is pretty much what the vast majority of coding is about.)

It's still not realistic. People don't code on whiteboards. You code (today) with all the resources of the internet at your fingertips, and if you need to invert a binary tree you will use a well-tested implementation from a standard library.

It's not supposed to realistic. It's supposed to be a test of programming ability that fits into an hour interview with time left over for talking about other things. Real world projects last months or years. You can't fit that into an hour, so you have to make do with something that can.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#47

Post by yownie »

sagichmal wrote: post #11

Hiring isn't broken, dude. You just don't interview well, and you seem antagonistic even to the idea that your cachet and skills, insofar as they exist, aren't useful to the market. That's a problem -- for you. Interviews exist because employers need a way to quantify and qualify your ability. Typical computer science problems are a (flawed, but concrete) way of doing that. No reasonable interviewer expects you to re…

Hiring IS broken, unfortunately everyone isn't realizing it simultaneously, so half of us end up speaking about it to the other half who are already employed and feel the need to justify their employment. Since these discussions never happen out of CS / IT circles they very rarely propogate upwards to changing company practices unless the CTO/CEO happens to read HN. You're just further contributing to the rigged scenario when you respond like this.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#48

Post by ts330 »

sagichmal wrote: post #11

Hiring isn't broken, dude. You just don't interview well, and you seem antagonistic even to the idea that your cachet and skills, insofar as they exist, aren't useful to the market. That's a problem -- for you. Interviews exist because employers need a way to quantify and qualify your ability. Typical computer science problems are a (flawed, but concrete) way of doing that. No reasonable interviewer expects you to re…

And this is why there is an impedance mismatch... these people are interviewing for a "computer science" role they're filling when really they want a programmer. The two are different.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#49

Post by fecak »

The good news is there are plenty of shops that don't ask these types of questions in interviews. Most of the companies you mention have a technical reputation as being elite, and as you say they can hire or interview as they please.

Everybody can't work for Google, and there may be some that could work for Google if they were better at interviewing the way Google does (and these other companies do).

The author harbors some hostility towards the recruiters that have landed him these interviews. I'm a recruiter, and I too harbor some hostility towards recruiters when they behave badly.

The recruiters in all of these situations seem to have done the author a service, and there are no explanations of the recruiters behaving badly (other than the going silent/no feedback scenario).

Telling recruiters to "F* OFF" is just blaming the messenger. They didn't design the interviews, they didn't conduct the technical interviews being complained about, and they didn't make the decision not to hire. They simply facilitated the process and relayed the message.

Blame recruiters when they behave badly. Lying about salary ranges, 'bait and switch' jobs, etc. Don't blame them when they do their jobs, just because you didn't like the outcome.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#50

Post by robbiemitchell »

LamaOfRuin wrote: post #36
stegosaurus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what BFS is. I just googled it. Oh, I know what it is now. If you haven't been exposed to it, it's just jargon. That's the point. You are testing for jargon rather than ability. It is the distinction between saying 'implement FizzBuzz' and going silent, and actually explaining what it is. As an interviewer it is easy to forget that whilst you may have asked a question 20 times, this may be the candidate'…

To a degree this is true, but there is also significant value in having (and retaining) that broad base of knowledge that a good CS program or some systematic personal studies will get you. Most of the time you're not going to get a "implement this algorithm" you're going to get a "solve this problem we have" and you need to know the standard tools that are available to get you to a first approximation solution. Depe…

Why would an interviewer assume a front-end dev has a CS degree or has invested personal time in studying algorithms rather than other (probably more) relevant topics, such as various frameworks?
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