The dystopian world of software engineering interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#411

Post by austincheney » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:16 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #115

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…

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.

You could have saved a lot of space just saying button pressers. This is most large companies and why I am burnt out on writing software professionally.

The reasoning for this is the commoditization of software hiring. The idea is to target the median of the bell curve, to lower risks and costs associated with hiring. This targets the greatest quantity of developers in a moment, but it also means the people who play it safe, follow popular trends, and don’t take any risks on product improvements.

To think about it another way the idea is to create mediocre software with mediocre developers because the software is thought to cost less than finding, hiring, and retaining top quality people.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#412

Post by BlueTemplar » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:17 AM UTC

samkater wrote: post #122

agumonkey wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it that different from a cover letter ?

For some people maybe not. A video would be far more stressful for me. I'm sure my voice would be up an octave (along with my blood pressure) trying to get the recording just right. Speaking aloud is also not my forte. One benefit of a cover letter is it is easier to re-use the base story and update the details as appropriate. Unless you want to spend time editing (which depending on your skill impacts the quality) y…

I was taught that the CV was to be re-used, but the cover letter written from scratch each time after researching the company?

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#413

Post by FpUser » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:17 AM UTC

Ok maybe it is different as I did not apply for permanent position for about 25 years but I have developed/helped to develop many products on consulting basis for other companies and had to go to numerous interviews. Here is my experience:

Some companies are hiring a pie in a sky while other have real problems and want to hire people that can solve real problems. Hence 2 type of questions:

1) Write me working Lisp code of some exotic sort algorithm, oh and btw what that Hermite–Minkowski theorem is about.

2) They ask what you've done, how you did it, some references and how you can help them to solve their problem.

When I smell #1 I just apologize and leave. #2 can go either way but at least you're talking to a reasonable people with real needs.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#414

Post by alok-g » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:18 AM UTC

mwest217 wrote: post #334

phkahler wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for. Somehow I doubt that. Can anyone who actually works at google comment on what it's like? Do people come to you with specific requirement and expect you to crank out code like the interview problems? I've never worked somewhere where the software folks were actually just coding machines.

Not at all. I've been at Google for a bit over two years, and my experience has been at the far other end of the spectrum: a lot of autonomy, gathering requirements, designing & implementing. Also I have a fair amount of agency to see something that would make people's lives better and pitch it as a thing I'd like to work on. If it's less than a day or two of work I can generally just go do it.

How much of interview-style coding is involved in your work? More broadly, would you agree to the OP that interviewing for software developers is broken?

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#415

Post by DoreenMichele » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:19 AM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #352

Frost1x wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, from this example, management side was unwilling to even invest time in exploring or acknowledging the idea that they might be wrong . I don't know about you but I don't want to work with people who you can't have a reasonable conversation with to get to the bottom of a problem and figure out the issues together. Everyone makes mistakes, sorting them out together and achieving mutual goals is what makes this so…

They might not even have reached the management team... who knows if the recruiter passed this on or not.

If you have ever been in a situation where things were done to a standard of excellence, this type of excuse is simply unacceptable. People who have first-hand experience with environments that pursue excellence in earnest have little patience for such nonsense.

Kind of like the movie line "Failure is not an option." The line involves a bit of creative license, but was based on the movie people interviewing someone from NASA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tid44iy6Rjs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_Is_Not_an_Option

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#416

Post by monoideism » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:20 AM UTC

karlkatzke wrote: post #332

bilekas wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So I had an interview that was like that, but I wasn’t given enough information. I was asked to implement the “inverse square law in code” ... and I explained to the interviewer who was two years out of college (I looked up all of the interviewers on linkedin, so I had a good idea of their experience and areas of expertise) that my first step as someone who hadn’t been in an academic environment or exposed to this ki…

> and I explained to the interviewer who was two years out of college

Yeah, that one's easy. Young coder sees a competent, experienced dev and tries to sabotage your interview out of fear you'll show up and make a fool of him. It's possible he was just that arrogant, but it sounds suspicious.

Based on my experience, devs who are 2 years out of college, regardless of how well they understand algos and data structures, are mediocre software engineers. The only exception to that are those devs who have been coding since they were 10 or 12, and who grew up working on actual open source projects (one of my main open source collaborators was like this, and was an excellent dev by age 20). Just growing up coding isn't enough, since you won't have exposure to the actual engineering practices needed for professional developers. And just 4 years of college isn't nearly enough, since you again don't get much exposure to the actual engineering practices needed for professional developers.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#417

Post by bitexploder » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:21 AM UTC

Psychlist wrote: post #383

bitexploder wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few words on top grading. We are use a top grading like process, and are pretty flexible on the references part of it. It is just a long conversation. I think it is a structured and simple way to talk about a person and where they have been. Yes, it is comprehensive, but it works well. We hire almost all candidates that have made it to the top grading stage of our hiring process. We don’t use it to find liars and d…

What you do sounds like a reasonable interpretation of top grading. It's also what I'm used to, largely. Where it gets tricky is with people like who are older and have "done interesting things". I did short contracts for more then a decade and interspersed them with cycle touring. So my full work history is a thing of joy and beauty, but asking me to go through it and re-locate one person from each company, contact…

We just want two references and a warm introduction to them. We pick what we think is the most relevant recent experience and negotiate from there, being sensitive to availability etc. Doing it for every job and asking the candidate to do it is kind of lazy in our opinion. It’s just a logistical chore to set up a meeting. All we need is the intro for context :)

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#418

Post by hogFeast » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:24 AM UTC

glofish wrote: post #299

overgard wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the need to nitpick your example. > does the candidate want to code it up or understands that they could do: cut | sort| head Piping together commands is undoubtedly programming, just in ancient shell script. So in a sense you're really testing for bash expertise. Which is maybe really relevant to you but I wouldn't say you're really "avoiding" coding by knowing to use those commands together, you just decided…

sqlite answer - excellent, that is exactly what I am looking for, things people did, potential solutions let me understand the candidate's real background - not the buzzwords what is not well received is the judgmental tone, passing judgment about me for things you cannot possibly know, no need for that either, simple questions also irritate some, very important to weed those people out too, I expect you would fail t…

Dear God, I hope you don't do interviews. Talking about the "attitude" of someone you don't know, taking criticism personally, thinking that you are weeding people out by trying to "irritate some", suggesting they are trying to suppress it, and (of course) that you will be detect it. Every thread on hiring about HN has these weird passive-aggressive interviewers...interviewing is hard, it is really something that people should be trained to do (and some people really won't ever be able to do it).

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#419

Post by amznthrowaway5 » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:24 AM UTC

buzzkillington wrote: post #386

amznthrowaway5 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The right answer will depend on the column separator. Proposing the UNIX cut if the file is CSV is not such a good answer, but for tab-separated files, it is just fine. If the file is CSV and they tell me about cut, my next question would be if that is a good universal solution for CSV files in general. TSV and CSV have the same limitations. A tab-separated file could still have tabs inside a field depending on the…

The only true Unix column format is ascii delimited text. Oddly no one has heard of that, the only reason why I found out about it is because I had to read in punched tapes with 7 character ascii from an experiment done in the 80s during my undergrad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delimiter#ASCII_delimited_text

Fascinating, thanks. In all of the large projects I've worked on, the CSV format variants and their inconsistencies have caused disasters. Who knew that Pandas and Spark handle CSV settings differently by default and spark has a hard time with newlines in its CSV output. CSVs inconsistencies result in a lot of data corruption, doubly so in large teams.

Replacing CSV with flat JSON or parquet depending on the use case has been a good move for avoiding these issues. The risks of CSV are usually just too high.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#420

Post by bitexploder » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:25 AM UTC

jp_sc wrote: post #284

bitexploder wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few words on top grading. We are use a top grading like process, and are pretty flexible on the references part of it. It is just a long conversation. I think it is a structured and simple way to talk about a person and where they have been. Yes, it is comprehensive, but it works well. We hire almost all candidates that have made it to the top grading stage of our hiring process. We don’t use it to find liars and d…

So... are you hiring right now?

Generally, yes. https://carvesystems.com/careers — we are an information security consultancy. Our tech interview is a take home test similar to a CTF. It can be somewhat time consuming for someone with minimal infosec experience. Just check that page out and shoot us an email (and mention you are from HN, and I can chat further with you if you are interested).