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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

#401

Post by pmiller2 »

vdnkh wrote: post #361

It took me a year to find a new job. I got rejected from on-sites 8 or 9 times, a few other rejections before that. I've been through everything the OP has and more. I was once forgotten in an interview room while my interviewer played foosball and then went home. I've managed to pass all rounds with "positive feedback" only to get rejected three days later. I've swam through rivers of aerated bullshit to find a new…

I'm looking right now and my previous experience has made me afraid it's going to be this way for me ("rivers of aerated bullshit.") Add to it that I don't know very many people here in the Bay Area, didn't study CS, didn't go to a "name" school, and half my software engineering experience doesn't seem to count because it wasn't web dev, and I'm just seeing a very long road in front of me. I hope it doesn't take a year.

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

#403

Post by jerich »

limaoscarjuliet wrote: post #282

I am a VP at a medium size company and I do plenty of interviews. I usually talk about what people are interested in and then ask one question: "You are in front of PC/Mac/Mobile screen, type www.cnn.com into browser, and press enter. A fraction of a second images show up on the screen... How? What happened? Tell me all you can from key press interrupts to underwater fiber cables". This question never failed me. It a…

Wow. What a great question! I found that I was sitting here answering it to myself. After starting down a rabbit-hole on how the browser would probably need to do some GPU initialization, I realized how much fun I'd have talking through this with someone in an interview.

"Let's see, I guess the wifi radio is going to have to do an RSSI measurement..."

It actually gave me goosebumps when I realized that I was so caught up in it and how excited I was getting.

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

#404

Post by Tomte »

With some helpful nudges you should be able to do a simple BFS. Still, not a very fruitful interview question, IMO.

What's bugging me about the author is that he dismisses everything that doesn't have direct relevance to the position.

Projects get finished and you still want to work there. Projects get reshuffled and you're placed elsewhere. Your role in the organization changes.

If an interviewee showed such a myopic view of his future work I wouldn't be thrilled. He basically says "let me show you that I'm a one-trick pony", while the interviewer tries to ascertain his capabilities across several potential jobs.

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

#405

Post by aristus »

ryanx435 wrote: post #193
aristus wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not ironic, it's very much by design. It's a bit like the Army. In theory anyone of any age and background can join up, but the physical requirements and "culture fit" does a very good job of selecting for young males.

> It's a bit like the Army. In theory anyone of any age and background can join up. this is patently false. There are very strict requirements for enlisting/being commissioned [0], including minimum and maximum age for new members, minimum aptitude tests, and either be a us citizen or a resident alien. Also many people are disqualified for having a criminal record. > but the physical requirements and "culture fit" do…

Sure, it's 17-34, but the curve of applicants weights heavily toward the left side. And it's not universal; Grace Hopper joined the Navy at 37. Also also, the "aptitude test" sounds a lot like that whiteboard process, right? That was my point. :)

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

#406

Post by zeemonkee3 »

Why don't companies who ask these kinds of CS questions in interviews just put in the job ad something along the lines of "if you pass the initial filter we'll invite you for an interview. We'll grill you on some data structures & algorithms & give you some whiteboard challenges".

Which is absolutely OK. If that's what you're going to do - regardless whether it's sensible or not - then potential candidates can either ignore your ad, and save everyone's time, or apply to you knowing what to expect. If a large enough number of desirable companies do this a candidate might decide to brush up on CS 101 and interview practice.

That's honest and courteous, instead of ambushing candidates in the interview stage - when they've taken a precious vacation day and taken the time flying out to see you. And it saves you time - any candidate you get should know what to expect.

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

#407

Post by Xyik »

No offense, but not knowing BFS is kind of a red flag, even if its for a front-end position. It's the most basic graph / tree traversal algorithm there is. And you when you work with the DOM on a daily basis and use libraries that traverse for you its a good idea to have a basic understanding of whats going on under the hood. It's like saying you're a good programmer but not understanding basic concepts about memory management and whether things are stored on the stack or on the heap.

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

#408

Post by tptacek »

neurobashing wrote: post #397
tptacek wrote: post #379

I'm torn. On the one hand: the interview processes this post describes are hilariously broken. Stand up at a whiteboard and implement breadth-first search from memory! You know, like no programmer at their desk staring at their editor ever does. I think "that's the one where you use a queue, right?" is a fully valid and complete answer to that dumb question. I also think you're within your rights to demand that your…

I recently bombed an interview with a graph theory question. I hadn't done any real from-scratch implementations of that stuff, but I do know enough to discuss it and pseudocode it. They were disappointed, they wanted to see runnable code right there on the whiteboard. I think you're right, you should know basic conceptual computer science. I felt like I did a good job of explaining that I understand enough to do a r…

I spent 2 years writing multicast routing algorithm implementations for an overlay multicast startup I cofounded. The moral equivalents of PIM sparse and OSPF. I wouldn't do it this way again, knowing what I know now, but we did LSA forwarding between nodes the same way a Cisco would flood LSAs over a set of unruly PPP DS1 links. The hard way, is what I'm trying to convey here.

Anyways, I interviewed a company my friend Nate was working for, on a lark (my company was sort of winding down).

First question I got: "explain Bellman-Ford routing". Bellman-Ford is one of the simplest distributed systems algorithms there is, and certainly the simplest foundation for a routing protocol (it's what the RIP protocol does). I had, prior to that interview, implemented RIP twice, in two different jobs.

I totally bombed the interview! My mind just went blank. I could explain how link-state routing with shortest path graph reductions worked, but not how a much simpler algorithm worked.

The interview made some clucking noises about how interesting it was to be interviewing someone who wasn't a Stanford CS student.

The next interview asked me to implement Towers of Hanoi non-recursively. I refused.

Obviously, I didn't get an offer.

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

#409

Post by AlwaysRock »

Tech recruiter in Chicago here.

So many factors go into hiring someone. Often it comes down to little things that have nothing to do with someones ability to do the job. Maybe a particular member of the team really didint like you or the manager and you went to the same high school and you have a connection.

It's crazy how often I will have a developer flat out rejected after a technical screening from one company only to go to another company who loves them and everything they do.

I believe the biggest misconception is that just because someone COULD do the job means that they will or should get the job. A lot of intangibles affect the final decision.

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