The dystopian world of software engineering interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#421

Post by fsniper » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:27 AM UTC

Not exactly a comment for the piece, but for overall comments going around.

I am really shocked with people's understanding of situations. Like one great example of a different interview process which totally seems like working for the interviewer and his/her interviewees is bashed for not being good for their tastes without even getting the rationale. Or expecting people to spend 6 months on preparation for interviews considered normal or totally acceptable.

Either HN crowd are totally out of loop of life, or their self importance is out of bounds that they can't see anything else which is deemed below.

Is life something that you could spend so easily? What kind of affirmation people get from jumping hoops that would never even matter in the big picture?

The newer interview procedures that are described here really made my jaw drop. I am not the most down to earth guy without the last bit ego, but I believe I improved over the years. Still if I would encounter any of these , I would go jerkiest of egocentrics ever and tell them go do themselves.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#422

Post by akdas » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:27 AM UTC

This is a topic I wrote about recently[0]. The fundamental problem is that these big companies are so afraid of hiring a bad candidate (a false positive) that they are willing to put up with a ton of smart people who fail their interviews (a false negative).

And the worst part of this is, from the inside, it really looks like the process is working. After all, there are some really smart people who get hired, and saying the hiring process is bad feels like you're saying your coworkers aren't smart. But the truth is, these companies are hitting smart people. They're just hitting a non-uniform dust of all three smart people out there.

I think this is an opportunity for smaller companies to hire people who wouldn't make it into the big companies, and innovate in a way the big companies can't!

[0] https://hiringfor.tech/2020/02/10/false-positives-and-false-...

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#423

Post by BlueTemplar » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:27 AM UTC

scottlocklin wrote: post #316

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…

Dude, do you even data science? Not knowing Unix tools like cut and sort is a hard fail on a senior individual contributor in data science role, as is using sqlite which totally doesn't scale the way sort and cut does. Separates sheep from goats in data science land. You should really learn them if you're in the field and work with reasonably big data sets. Frankly you should learn them if you work with data at all,…

Hmm, tell us more? Databases are generally known for their good performance (under locking conditions - this is the relevant factor I guess?), after all...

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#424

Post by yodsanklai » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:28 AM UTC

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…

> When my classmates preparing interview coding questions, I was working on a mini TCP implementation and a toy kernel.

There are plenty of people who do both. They work on their projects, and when needed, they prepare for coding interviews.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#425

Post by danbmil99 » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:30 AM UTC

peterebailey wrote: post #201

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.

Gathering and defining requirements is very much a part of the job. It is entirely unsustainable to rely on others to tell you what to implement in Google.

How many interviews involve asking the prospective hire if they know how to gather and define requirements?

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#426

Post by hogFeast » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:32 AM UTC

coconut_crab wrote: post #52

> There is a cottage industry springing up around passing interviews This, a million times. I was told to practice solving dynamic programming problems to prepare for the interview[1]. Looking around the web I found out that people spending months solving thousands of dynamic programming problems, just for getting a job. This strongly reminds me of the rote learning I had to do in order to get into university, which…

Just speculation but I think a big part of this is that it is often quite difficult to lay off staff.

The issue isn't that you assess employees poorly...it is very hard to be right based on knowing someone for a couple of hours...but that it is so hard to get rid of someone if you are wrong. Would you marry someone after meeting for as long as the interview? That is the decision for a lot of companies.

I think that is why you see places like Denmark and Sweden, that make it easy to fire employees, do well and places like Japan and France do relatively poorly (the latter is particularly odd, they had a big lead in engineering...tech is miles behind)...ofc, it is hard to fire people in California...so not every example fits.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#427

Post by austincheney » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:32 AM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #279

A few months ago I interviewed with Major CDN Company for a front-end dev position. They sent me a take-home React/NextJS project stub with dependencies and such already defined, and instructions to finish building out the full app. "Perfect!", I thought. No stage pressure, plenty of opportunities for going an extra mile. They encouraged me to get creative and I did; it met all the requirements and then some. I proud…

I failed a hiring code assignment because I didn’t provide a unit test. They didn’t ask for unit tests. I did provide various data samples to provide various end-to-end tests with documentation.

Now I abandon any interview that requires a code assignment. I have better things to do than mind reading or dicking around with subjective code style nonsense. If they are taking this seriously they will provide their grading criteria along with the assignment text.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#428

Post by aprdm » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:33 AM UTC

glofish wrote: post #257

minimaxir wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, that's not an appropriate question for a data scientist . Maybe it's better for a data engineer or a SRE.

Basically you are saying that you cannot think of a way of doing this, other than the most inefficient way --> hiring a new person This answer would make you fail the interview :-)

It's honestly pretty ridiculous seeing your tone in the comments and how you think that highly about your bad interview questions and your flawed conceptions about the solutions, including CSV and TSV confusion. This smile makes it embarrassing even.

Hope I never pass your interview!

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#429

Post by ip26 » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:33 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…

I expect you would fail the test because of the attitude

How is this relevant? Now you're just taking cheap shots.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#430

Post by BlueTemplar » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 4:34 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

Quad-spaced facepalm.... How come these were dropped out of usage ?!?