Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by Morgawr » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 6:36 PM UTC

illumin8 wrote: post #91

eterm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a disastrous phone interview this week throughout which I remained calm and focused but immediately after putting the phone down I emailed the recruiter to say I wasn't interested. The "Technical" part was just trivia. Never-mind that I was sat in front of a computer and could have googled everything asked, I chose not to do that. So yes, I stumbled when asked "what does the using keyword do". I explained how i…

The first Google phone screen for SRE candidates is so scripted that you can probably Google the questions and get exact answers. It's been years since I've had it, but I remember it being the exact same questions, about UNIX internals and TCP/IP. This type of recruiting seriously turns me off because you can tell they're hiring minimum wage call center workers to read a script and filter out the 9/10 candidates that…

The first Google phone screening for SRE candidates is usually done by a technical recruiter who doesn't have extensive technical knowledge but at least knows the basics and is able to talk with you about the answers you give (albeit not in as much detail). It's supposed to be easy and it's to filter out people who lie on their CV or really don't have broad superficial knowledge.

The follow up phone interviews are what really matters (before the onsite of course) with actual engineers and go more in-depth with coding questions (among other things) at least.

I remember my recruiter was a really knowledgeable guy and he knew his stuff even though he wasn't an engineer. We had a nice chat and he was able to keep up with my (basic, obviously) responses of how TCP works, how to implement inode-based filesystems or whatever information you can read out of a stat call... Nothing too fancy but still it didn't sound like rehearsed script to me.

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

#452

Post by capote » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 6:38 PM UTC

I think it's perfectly reasonable for interviewers to ask scientific and "non-practical" questions.

1. If they just went by open-source contribution and prior experience, the pool of "qualified" people would be immense. You need some way to narrow them down, and it's fine for a company to pick their way, be it CS questions or how handsome someone is (joking) or how easy they are to talk to and interact with (charisma). It's not just about pushing code--lots of people can do that.

2. Questions like these are not totally unnecessary. Even though you won't be dealing with CS questions regularly at work, they still show that you put the effort in to learn them, and that you can think critically and on the spot to solve problems.

I don't think hiring is as broken as people make it out to be. Just learn the science and study up on it a lot before... I even bought a book that is a summary of common CS problems that interviewers ask. It's not a big deal for me to just read it up for a couple hours a day for a couple days before my interview. Good companies are looking for people who are ready to put a lot more effort in than just brushing up on Dijkstra's algorithm.

Note: One of the greatest things I learned from 5 years of undergraduate school has nothing to do with coding or science. It's the ability to just shut up and get some work done. Even if it's hard, unnecessary, or it's difficult to understand the motivation behind being assigned it, it's a useful ability (for growing professionally) to just crank out some work when you're told to do so. Many times, it takes doing the work to understand why you should do the work. Then that lightbulb turns on and you realize how much you've benefited from learning Dijkstra's algorithm and applying it to something; it's pleasant.

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

#453

Post by hvoiiita » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 6:38 PM UTC

bpchaps wrote: post #227

One possible reason is that the brony thing on his github might be a legit turnoff for employers. It's silly, but it's possible. The two people I talk to more than anyone else in this world are bronies (to the extent of going to conventions and whatnot) and have similar issues. Hell, I still don't understand it and find myself irrationally judging them for it, and that's even after daily exposure to it.

I agree. I cringed when I checked out his Github profile because its one of those things that immediately throw up a red flag.

To each their own on their personal time, but you can't seriously expect that being associated with a stigmatized hobby is going to gain you anything.

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

#454

Post by beaubouchard » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 6:39 PM UTC

Interview questions are not pass or fail. They are just there to gauge you're ability to problem solve and function under pressure. I hated interviewing, but disliked conducting an interview even more. The problem is people act so antagonistic when an interviewer challenges their ability, but realistically your character is whats really under scrutiny.

Having a great resume and stellar github is why you get the call back, an inability to conduct yourself in a professional manner is why you didn't get the offer. Especially in newyork, a medium post from an employee could affect stock prices, you can't have a lose cannon working for you.

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

#455

Post by Morgawr » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 6:40 PM UTC

dimino wrote: post #226

bad_user wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trees and graphs are fundamental to computer science and there are only two ways to traverse them. I don't know what kids are doing these days, but I learned this because of my high-school curricula. In other words, it's OK if you don't have a formal education in computer science, but when you don't have it, you need to make up for it by learning on your own, because this is basic stuff that high-school kids are lear…

I'v;e been programming for 8 years and have never ran into a BFS problem. Why do I need to know this to be an effective programmer again?

I've been programming for ~8 years as well and have implemented BFS multiple times, especially in occasions where I have to travel nested data structures and want to print them in a specific order.

BFS and DFS are the bread and butter of tree/graph problems and every software engineer is expected to encounter them at least once in their life. What if you want to debug a complex data structure or just a tree and want to print out its contents in order? Is it really such a weird thing? It's akin to asking to do a for loop through a list to print the elements, except slightly more complex (but certainly something that should be achievable by intuition rather than by memory).

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

#456

Post by cousin_it » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 6:41 PM UTC

simula67 wrote: post #120

sagichmal wrote: post #11

Hiring isn't broken, dude. You just don't interview well, and you seem antagonistic even to the idea that your cachet and skills, insofar as they exist, aren't useful to the market. That's a problem -- for you. Interviews exist because employers need a way to quantify and qualify your ability. Typical computer science problems are a (flawed, but concrete) way of doing that. No reasonable interviewer expects you to re…

I don't interview well. Technology for me is exciting because of its potential to bring happiness to people. If someone tells me that the product I am working on has a security issue because it does not follow some the security portions of the RFC correctly, I will be delighted to read it carefully, study arcane encoding algorthms etc and implement code that brings up the compliance to an acceptable level. If you ask…

For what it's worth, if you were interviewing for a security job and couldn't solve the longest increasing subsequence problem within a minute, I would probably say "no hire". All security folks I know can solve such problems in their sleep, and it seems really important for the job. Or at least you'd have to show your algorithmic skills in some other way, without relying on "business" rhetoric. Does that sound reasonable?

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

#457

Post by adaml_623 » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 6:42 PM UTC

maxsilver wrote: post #272

What frustrates me about this is not even these questions, specifically, but which companies seem to use them. If Google wants to ask crazy algorithm questions, that's at least sort-of reasonable. There's at least a hypothetical chance your work will involve that knowledge. But I've interviewed at companies who's entire tech stack is a simple CRUD web app, or a simple RESTful mobile app, who's so-called "big data" is…

This certainly rings a bit true from the myriad of stories about this around the web.

I would however disagree with your handwaving statement that 'they only need people in the 4 to 6 range'. Sometimes companies need some highly skilled types to try and rein in the chaos being creating by the 4s and 6s.

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

#458

Post by Apocryphon » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 6:43 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #153

beeboop wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a front-end developer perspective, I would google "navigation tree jquery", download some library that does this for me, and be done with it. If all children of a checkbox need to also be selected, that's like a single like of jQuery. Worst case scenario, something custom is written, and yeah it's not the best way and yeah it takes 100 milliseconds instead of 4, but who cares?

Worst case scenario, something custom is written, and yeah it's not the best way and yeah it takes 100 milliseconds instead of 4, but who cares? The person who has to try to understand what the hell is going on and how to add new features after the original developer has moved on to other things probably cares quite a lot. The difference between a good programmer and a mediocre programmer is not that one can solve th…

And the difference between a good organization and a mediocre one is if a crappy custom solution is caught during code review.

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

#459

Post by JDiculous » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 6:44 PM UTC

Yes, hiring is ridiculous at big tech companies that everybody wants to work for. Asking a ton of CS questions is justified if the job is actually CS heavy, but most front end jobs aren't. The dentist analogy is spot on.

My recommendation is to apply to smaller, lesser known companies. Much much less bullshit and time wasting. There are enough jobs out there that you don't have to deal with this bullshit.

Time spent on learning extraneous knowledge solely for the purpose of passing interviews for jobs that don't actually utilize such knowledge is a massive waste of society's resources.

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

#460

Post by sinker » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 6:45 PM UTC

adultSwim wrote: post #343

tachion wrote: post #170

After reading author's post I've a feeling that its not the programming skills that the author has issues with, but instead the attitude, stress durability, expectations to the world around him. True, hiring can be broken, it often is, but as with everything, the persistence usually allows us to find the proper company with proper hiring process. He's getting frustrated pretty quickly, complains when is asked to perf…

I understand some of the authors sentiments. Still, they come off as entitled. Perhaps OP should try avoiding recruiters and big sexy firms. They report having a positive interview experience but were disappointed for being passed over. "How is this possible — I have received emails from people all over the world, who praise and give me thanks for the work I’ve done on my open-source projects and tutorials (#humblebr…

How is this possible — I have received emails from people all over the world, who praise and give me thanks for the work I’ve done on my open-source projects and tutorials (#humblebrag)

Did he say that this should immediately qualify him for any job? No, his point was that although he has real-world projects used by hundreds of devs, this gives him barely any credence at all in interviews. Is it so "entitled" for him to expect that his work should speak on some of his behalf?