Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 693 posts

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

#431

Post by vdnkh »

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…

Don't sweat if it takes a while, and don't compare yourself. Not everyone is good at interviewing at first. Just try not to burn out - when I first started, I would go crazy studying for a month, then burn for a month. Rinse and repeat. In the past months it's been a slow, steady, and consistent effort to improve. I don't have a CS degree (ECE) and went to a state school (but it has a good rep) and my previous job was at a tiny no-name company. Oh, and you get used to the bullshit. My advice: network. I got a lot of interviews (and my current job, and another offer) due to networking. I went to a lot of meetups at my scene (NJ/NYC).

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

#432

Post by tptacek »

Xyik wrote: post #428
tptacek wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I took an interview with a random developer at your firm, drawn at random, not including you, and I spontaneously asked them to implement Djikstra's shortest path algorithm from memory, what percentage of them would be able to do that? Djikstra is not only basic and extremely simple, but it's also an algorithm that everyone who takes graph theory --- or really, computer science at all --- learns. I'm guessing 10%.

They all got through the interview process so I'm pretty confident about 80% of them would be able to do it and 100% of them would be able to implement BFS. Also yes it's a basic graph algorithm everyone learns, but its inherently much more complicated than BFS which is a simple traversal. It's like bubble sort vs radix sort ... which makes this kind of a loaded question.

Now, I didn't say BFS, did I? :)

I expect they can all do BFS, because your interview process apparently requires that.

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

#433

Post by jaaron »

atjoslin wrote: post #402

Why don't more people do, "We're not 100% sure if you're the right fit, but we'd like to find out. We'll pay you to work with us for [2/4] weeks."

For most companies, the organizational cost is too high.

There's a cost (in terms of time & money) to onboarding someone, integrating them into the company and team, and getting them to be productive. That's a reasonable investment for a long term gain, but for a short probation, it rarely pays off for the organization. The churn itself just isn't worth it.

Moreover, it means the candidate is in an uncertain state. Should they keep interviewing if it doesn't work? Should they change their lives and relocate? Etc.

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

#434

Post by lallysingh »

bpchaps wrote: post #274
lallysingh wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and I think the appropriate response is to rate-limit the interviews to one that you can handle easily. 1/week? Employers typically have pipelines designed for hiring throughput, so they won't mind spacing out stages longer (modulo any recruiter metrics, but I haven't heard of a case of that). And as they're all similar style questions, they should just read up on these. Hold off on interviews until you're confi…

So, are you suggesting that folks take one day off per week? That seems a little ridiculous. The number of employers who haven't even looked at my resume, even after a month long process, is insane. Is it really that hard to read a resume beforehand? Why waste everybody's time?! So please, take your time, skim their resumes and maybe do a bit of github code reviews before inviting someone to sit down. Hell, do it whi…

I read the resumes, and if the code description is interesting, I'll pull up the github repo. I read a lot of them because I do a lot of interviews, and the resumes that get passed to me for interviews all look fantastic and incredibly similar. Because good programmers have remarkably similar resumes as bad programmers -- one was made by sweat & blood, the other with bullshit. It's just text on a page, there's no way of knowing which one's which.

As for their code, I learn a little bit about their programming style -- and it's often unflattering and unhelpful, as these are usually personal projects where people write code below the standard they'd use at the office -- but it tells me little of what parts were hard, what parts involved real insight from the candidate, and what parts were pasted from stack overflow. Given a github URL, how much time do you think it takes to figure out where the interesting parts are? And what's the information payback of that time, given the little information you get about a person's actual capabilities from a bunch of text saved on a server?

I know that everyone's their own special snow flake, but I don't have more than the 45 minutes to give them a fair shake. And it has to be fair - a question that they should probably have enough context to know, and who's answer can't be bull-shitted. I've got 45 minutes to give as objective an interview I can, balancing the Type 1/2 errors of missing someone good, and hiring someone bad.

1 a week was an example of what I was doing when I went interviewing. I mentioned that as slow enough to read up as much as you need. Did you want more? Less?

[Edit: not speaking for my employer, whose name I don't want to mention. ]

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

#435

Post by Grishnakh »

aluminussoma wrote: post #325
markbnj wrote: post #273

There's selectivity, and there's courtesy and respect. Companies are entitled to be as selective as they like, and if those are the kinds of tests that yield the people they want to hire then good for them. On the other hand courtesy and respect would demand that you're clear with the candidate about your expectations and requirements, that you don't waste their time, that you respect the investment of time by commun…

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…

Can you expand on the guy who faked his technical capabilities?

Way back, I was part of a 4-person team that did some phone interviews of contractors. We asked some pretty basic questions, based on their resumes, and after the call voted on him/her. One of my questions to see if they knew anything about C++ was just to ask if they could tell me what a class was. A bunch of candidates couldn't answer that question.

It really isn't that hard to ask some basic questions and talk about work experience, to get a handle on whether someone is actually a competent programmer or not. If you're looking for top-tier talent, this might not be sufficient, but most jobs do not need top-tier talent anyway.

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

#436

Post by collyw »

ionforce wrote: post #356
collyw wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Persistence is a pain in the arse if you have to spend 1.5 hours every Hackerrank challenge (plus you are likely to want a warm up of at least half an hour). Say you have to do ten of those. Why can't employers ask you to bring in some previous work and discuss it? Surely that is a lot more relevant than algorithmic stuff that you likely haven't used for years.

> bring in some previous work Surely your prior work is under some sort of NDA? It's all proprietary (unless it is open source).

I have side projects that I am working on, quite happy to show those - its one of the motivations for doing them so that I have code to show people.

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

#437

Post by tptacek »

Morgawr wrote: post #430
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…

To be honest I was a bit taken aback by the author not being able to implement a BFS. It's a fairly standard and really simple algorithm and it's probably one of the most common ones to actually implement because of a need in your day-to-day work. What do you do if you have a nested data structure (like a tree) and want to print it in order? You write a simple BFS on it. It's not even a question where you need prior…

Hold on. I'm not taken aback by their inability to do BFS in an interview at a whiteboard from memory. That, I think, is a total bullshit question, which is why I think the right play there is to one-up them.

What I have a problem with is the assertion that a front-end dev shouldn't have to grok BFS. Not "be able to implement from memory", but "be able to quickly implement on demand given a few minutes research".

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

#438

Post by vonmoltke »

csixty4 wrote: post #324
markbnj wrote: post #273

There's selectivity, and there's courtesy and respect. Companies are entitled to be as selective as they like, and if those are the kinds of tests that yield the people they want to hire then good for them. On the other hand courtesy and respect would demand that you're clear with the candidate about your expectations and requirements, that you don't waste their time, that you respect the investment of time by commun…

Is your wife re-certified every year or two? Does she have to have a certain number of continuing education hours every year? I don't doubt for a minute that there's some kind of alpha geek thing going on with a lot of interviews. But it's also a reflection of the fact we don't have a widely-accepted accreditation body that can vouch for people.

> Is your wife re-certified every year or two? Does she have to have a certain number of continuing education hours every year?

Every time credentials come up with respect to this industry there are a whole bunch of people who complain that credentials are meaningless because people can just cheat or coast their way through. They go so far as to include CS degrees themselves in that category. What makes you think the education and credentials for nurses are so much better than for software engineers that nurses can be hired based on credentials and software engineers cannot?

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

#440

Post by shoyer »

unoti wrote: post #93

Google and similar companies aren't for everyone. They're looking for people on top of their game and willing to go the extra mile. > To be fair, I already knew about Google’s idiotic interview process that is optimized for hiring book-smart academic candidates who know their algorithms and data structures cold, so my expectations were rather low to begin with. I also did not get much sleep that day, so my problem so…

I could not agree more. My co-workers and I describe Google software engineering interviews as a standardized test. It's absolutely something that can and should be prepared for. Passing the standardized test shows that you know how to buckle down and learn something.
Post reply on HN