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The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

jarednelsen.dev

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Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#481

Post by mattrp »

waylandsmithers wrote: post #373
alexpetralia wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest I never understood this logic. Clearly a firm's skill at interviewing might diverge from their ability to mentor, innovate, have a great engineering culture and so on? Sure - perhaps it's slightly less likely, but it's not at all obvious that interviewing skill and company excellence are 100% convergent.

This was definitely true at a past job which happened to be a fantastic place to work. The HR recruiting team was well-liked by the executives and run by a founding member of the company (so had a lot of power and autonomy). But they absolutely tormented us with things like not telling us a candidate had canceled until right before the scheduled time (we could find their emails in the recruiting software from hours o…

I once worked at a company where hr would go for months saying there are zero candidates for x position. I finally escalated and got access to the database and there were loads of candidates. The issue was they were purposefully holding my req because they were sorting out a budget issue in another department. Even after that got resolved I literally had to go into the database, read them all, and then say this person, that person, etc..completely useless.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#482

Post by jupp0r »

A lot of the article can be explained by viewing the interview as a test. The economics of false positives vs false negatives are vastly different. Giant search company can afford to not hire great candidates. More will apply tomorrow. The cost of hiring somebody they shouldn’t have is disproportionately higher.

I’m not saying this is a good thing, but to me it does explain why interviews are so hard and why they are so disconnected from actual jobs that applicants will actually perform.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#483

Post by throwaway307349 »

gonehome wrote: post #99
ticmasta wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed with a start-up mid-acquisition by Indeed and they paid me for my take-home project. Quality move but the rest of their behaviour was utterly reprehensible. I was mad/upset at the time but I'm now grateful. Also, I had the time available to spend ~8-10 hours on a take-home project (paid or otherwise); most of the time the best candidates already have jobs and will rightfully tell you to pound sand.

I did a tedious take home assignment while employed for a different famous company - it was clear they hadn't updated the instructions (broken links, outdated documentation, changed behavior). They gave this to me with a 72hr turn around requirement on a Monday morning (which I found a little thoughtless) I got a basic implementation working with reasonable code quality (not just hacked together) which took a few hou…

The worst is when the spec seems purposely vague (which is a reasonable part of the challenge), but there’s no channel provided to ask clarifying questions. CockroachDB was like this.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#485

Post by mattrp »

outworlder wrote: post #377
_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…

They definitely did you a favor. You have demonstrated solid debugging skills and stated your case. That's usually harder to find than someone who can churn out code based on simple and well-defined specs. Because that's the easy part.

They probably assumed someone else did the debugging. People assume the worst in these situations because they haven’t bothered to learn about the person.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#486

Post by Aperocky »

artsyca wrote: post #480

The word 'dress' doesn't appear once in this thread and that's a sign of the disgusting state of affairs all in itself It used to be people took care in small gestures like wearing a pressed shirt but now all the auspices have gone awry in favour of this laughable meritocracy No wonder tests of this nature have been devised by people who haven't ever buttoned a collar and it's everyone's fault for not taking the mora…

What? I interviewed at my current location wearing a cargo short and a tshirt. It’s a trillion dollar company and we’re not failing any time soon.

Coding interviews aside, no dress requirement is one of the biggest plus and allow people to focus on the thing that matters. I have no idea where you come from that software engineering is helped by dressing up pressed shirts.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#487

Post by x3n0ph3n3 »

ip26 wrote: post #429
glofish wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Culture fit. Is the candidate likely to reject/scoff at certain tasks because they think it's below them?

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#488

Post by pansa2 »

throwaway582 wrote: post #269
throwaway5283 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely true. I work at Giant Search and Advertising Company, and joining was a huge mistake. I thought I would be working interesting technical problems with a high degree of autonomy — instead the work is extremely boring, and you get ahead by playing political games rather than by innovating. I’m one of the rare few here who managed to get through the interview without really preparing. Before joining,…

That sucks that you've had that experience, I'm sorry. I hope it's the exception and not the rule. I work on the Advertising part of Giant Search and Advertising, and my experience has been pretty great—indeed, working on interesting problems with a high degree of autonomy. I do need to persuade others of my ideas sometimes, or let them persuade me against them, but this seems like a good thing, and doesn't feel poli…

> I work on the Advertising part of Giant Search and Advertising [...] on interesting problems

Genuine question - what do you consider to be interesting problems in advertising?

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#489

Post by throwaway307349 »

reggieband wrote: post #137

> “Yes. Can you write an algorithm to find the Kth highest value in a binary tree?” I got this exact question on a phone screen with "Giant Search and Advertising Company." I got stuck on a stupid detail and botched the implementation. Once I hung up the phone I took a deep breath and fixed the algorithm in about 15 minutes. That still isn't very good since I was only given 15 minutes total at the end of the intervie…

It’s an easy question if you just do an inorder traversal and stop at the kth element, but of course that’s not optimal. To get log(n) efficiency you need to augment the tree with subtree counts.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#490

Post by bradlys »

igetspam wrote: post #452
throwaway5283 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely true. I work at Giant Search and Advertising Company, and joining was a huge mistake. I thought I would be working interesting technical problems with a high degree of autonomy — instead the work is extremely boring, and you get ahead by playing political games rather than by innovating. I’m one of the rare few here who managed to get through the interview without really preparing. Before joining,…

I worked there in the early 2000s. It was fun. Then it wasn't any more. I was much earlier in my career and when I left, having it on my resume meant a lot. Now I've done more and more interesting things. I told the FAANGs, in no unclear terms, I'm not interested. They seem to have gotten the message eventually. I like small companies. You work harder and have a lot more impact. The compensation is good too. Leave. T…

> I like small companies. You work harder and have a lot more impact. The compensation is good too. Leave. The grass is greener.

What small company is regularly paying over $300k+/yr for senior software engineers and paying over $500k/yr for staff+?

The only people I see leaving the big companies are those who already got their riches and/or bought real estate earlier. The rest of us are either tied to them or trying to get in because the real estate market dictates you must earn that income to stick around the bay.

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