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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

#411

Post by crazy5sheep »

mkozlows wrote: post #72
robbiemitchell wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about OP's comments that the algorithm questions were unrelated to the front-end positions?

Of course they're unrelated. The interviewer asking this doesn't expect you to write these algorithms all day, they want to know that you have the basic mental dexterity to figure things like this out. They are, ideally, abstracted problems of the complexity that you'd be expected to be able to solve on your own. There are some positions where you don't have to care if people can really problem-solve; as long as they…

Passing such interview questions could only proof: 1. you are prepared 2. you are eager to get a job 3. you are not dumb

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

#412

Post by pmiller2 »

_clhx wrote: post #123
stocktech wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the author himself describes very positive and negative interviewing experiences, yet having no success at either, I have a hard time blaming the hiring practices.

An interview can be positive and not lead to a job. I went on a lot of interviews (maybe close to 100) before starting my own business, and I'd say at least 9/10 of them were very positive. By positive: I felt we both left the interview a bit happier than we went in. We both had a legitimate good time, and enjoyed it. It wasn't a grind, both people got to know each other. I'd say I had a 10% offer rate. The most comm…

> The most common "why didn't you select me?" follow up answer I got was "we need someone who is an expert in XYZ language." Sometimes it was even that they need someone who is an expert in ABC library (when I was already pretty-much an expert in the language.)

There's nothing really wrong with that as long as they advertise such and make it clear before even starting the interview process that you won't be hired unless you're a library ABC or language XYZ expert. The problem comes when they don't advertise that, bring you in anyway, and waste everybody's time.

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

#413

Post by bjornlouser »

49531 wrote: post #80

Technical interviews became 10x easier when I realized that most companies aren't necessarily looking for the right answer as much as they are trying to look into your mind. As a self taught programmer things like binary search trees and linked lists are a foreign concepts (especially as a self taught frontend developer). When I am asked to solve a problem in a way I've never encountered before, people are pretty ope…

I think you've hit on a great strategy to coast through these interviews: "Gee whiz, that's an amazing question. I've never thought of that before. It's probably beyond my reach but let me try to stumble through it. Will you help me out if I get lost? You're so amazing, how could this company get by without your brilliance?"

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

#414

Post by jmathai »

Xyik wrote: post #407

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…

It's really not a red flag. Not knowing or having BFS memorized does not indicate that one can't implement it relatively quickly by refreshing oneself on the algorithms.

Unless, of course, you mean if all academic papers and material that describe BFS suddenly vanished and you had to come up with a solution yourself in 30 minutes with someone looking over your back. In that case, I agree, it's a red flag for whatever position you're interviewing for.

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

#415

Post by Xyik »

zeemonkee3 wrote: post #406

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…

I've interviewed at companies like this (Amazon / Google / Microsoft) and they do indeed tell you ahead of time there will give algorithms / data structures / coding.

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

#416

Post by mixmastamyk »

wdewind wrote: post #376
mixmastamyk wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, their difficulty is irrelevant. Your experience (like everyone's) is anecdotal and not representative of the immense fields of CS and SE that no one person can know all of, but could certainly look up. If you are looking for a computer scientist, ask for one in the job req. No shame in that, it would save everyone time.

I added a sneaky edit (sorry!) that may address some of this, so I think we probably largely agree. I'm responding to a relatively specific claim, frequently heard by bootcampers and inexperienced engineers in web development, that foundational CS isn't useful, which my experience is somewhat representative of, though you are correct it's still anecdotal.

Yes, one can go too far in the opposite direction... "I don't need no book-learnin'!"

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

#417

Post by aetherson »

koyote wrote: post #306
aetherson wrote: post #216

I feel like it's a little weird that one of the author's big examples of a difficult algorithmic question is breadth-first search. While I agree it's not something that's very likely to come up much in real work (especially for a front-end dev!), it's also... not actually hard? You check the current node for your truth condition, you add its children to a queue, you pop the queue and do the same thing for that node.…

I think that's what he meant by "[...] if I had looked at Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm and breadth-first search one day before my interview, this would have been a trivial problem to solve [...].". Sure, BFS is 'easy' but it's not really something that stays fresh in your memory after years of not having to use it. I completely agree with his point that it if you have to study for an interview, the process is b…

I mean... I'm 17 years out of college and I remember it. I don't have an implementation that I can just write out from memory or anything, but I remember the basics of how the algorithm works and I assume I could come up with an implementation that works.

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

#418

Post by abritinthebay »

pmiller2 wrote: post #401
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 ye…

Your experience will count, it's just you've narrowed the pool of opportunity. Web Dev is just a bigger target with more hiring going on.

If you apply to a Web company without much web dev experience (or knowledge) then yes, it'll count for less.

But that's true of anything. The bay area is probably the easiest place to get hired in tech right now as an engineer.

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

#419

Post by riot504 »

I interviewed for a different position at a company 2 months ago in Seattle. Had 3 phone interviews, then got called in for an on-site interview which I had to fly to requiring me to take 1.5 days off of work. I get there ask them if this goes well what are the next steps, they proceeded to tell me that I would need to do a take home assignment that would take a week to complete and if that went well another on-site interview.

Is that really necessary?

I was going to turn down the position in the end due to cultural differences. In the end I didn't get the position due to lack of technical proficiency though I was only asked behavioral questions.

Waste of time.

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

#420

Post by esja »

markbnj wrote: post #334
aluminussoma wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nurses also have licenses and registered credentials. If they mess up badly, they can be disciplined and lose their license and career. So there is a self-regulation that takes place in that industry. Were it not so, I could imagine nursing interviews to be a lot more intense. There is no such regulation in the tech industry. One bad hire I made faked his technical capabilities and I regretted it a lot when I had to…

Good points. They do have licenses and credentials, and they can be disciplined if they are negligent. Not for making mistakes generally speaking, but for professional negligence. They also have to carry professional insurance against malpractice. On the other hand the consequences of hiring a nurse who isn't qualified are very much worse than the typical consequences of hiring an unqualified developer.

You are right, but the consequences of hiring bad developers are rising every year. I think licensing is coming whether the industry wants it or not.
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