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

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

#491

Post by spinlock » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 7:36 PM UTC

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…

We're not talking about fraud. You fire those people and move on. You shouldn't hamstring your recruiting process for the rest of time because of it.

BTW, why didn't you check references?

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

#492

Post by swayvil » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

r3bl wrote: post #294

swayvil wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right. His problem is that he is not persistent enough. Maybe he lacks passion.

Why does he need to be persistent? He proved that he's a decent programmer by releasing a bunch of semi-successful open source projects. He worked at Yahoo. He has 900+ days GitHub streak. That makes him passionate about building things more than a huge chunk of programmers. Not being able to implement a random algorithm on a whiteboard while applying for a front-end position has absolutely nothing to do with the lac…

append /S

Sorry, I forgot that I was talking to oompaloompas

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

#493

Post by markbnj » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 7:44 PM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #438

csixty4 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Two possible answers come to mind: the first is that in order to be licensed nurses, like doctors and lawyers, have to pass an intensive test known as "boards." The second is that licensing, certification, and recertification are functions of state government, not voluntary industry guidelines.

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

#494

Post by spinlock » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 7:45 PM UTC

unoti wrote: post #186

tobz wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not find it strange, or at least confusing, that you're arguing a point here that is predicated on studying for an interview, rather than the actual position? "This person didn't study for the interview, so what did they expect to happen?" Oh, I don't know, maybe to be asked questions directly related to the position, amongst other things.

> Do you not find it strange, or at least confusing, that you're arguing a point here that is predicated on studying for an interview, rather than the actual position? No, I don't find it strange that I want them to prepare for something they're not going to use normally, but agree it might be confusing. For the actual positions I'm hiring for, nobody in the world outside our teams understands the systems. The candid…

Microsoft is a great company to work at ... if you're an MBA.

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

#495

Post by tptacek » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 7:46 PM UTC

Morgawr wrote: post #471

tptacek wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, I didn't say BFS, did I? :) I expect they can all do BFS, because your interview process apparently requires that.

The parent was talking about BFS, it's not exactly clear to me why you're asking about Dijkstra's. The two things are entirely different and, as the parent said, it's akin to asking bubblesort vs radix sort.

My point is that they are not entirely different; both are academic, simple, basic applications of the kind of graph theory freshmen learn. Described in terms of a heap, Djikstra is barely more complicated than BFS.

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

#496

Post by tptacek » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 7:49 PM UTC

educar wrote: post #475

tptacek wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having a hard time responding to this. More and more, whole applications are being delivered in clientside Javascript using Angular or React or whatever. Are you suggesting that there are two "kinds" of front-end developers, the kind that knows how the DOM APIs work and the kind that can implement the rest of the application and domain logic in Javascript?

I am suggesting the frontend developers developing using angular/react code do not require to implement graph search algorithms. What algorithms have you seen in practice in web frontends? I have seen nothing even minor, not even binary search or bublle sort.

I really don't know what to say to this. What kinds of applications do you work on? If what you do is primarily CRUD front-end stuff, then sure, I suppose you can get by without really understanding how to write general-purpose code. But pretty much anything past simple CRUD is going to start implicating simple data structures pretty quickly.

I can cite examples from the front-end I'm working on right now, but that wouldn't sound like a fair example (it's an AVR debugger). But all sophisticated applications are complicated in their own ways, and most of them require developers who can actually, you know, program.

Even if all you're doing is CRUD, how much computer science is embedded in even a straightforward framework like React? "Lots", is I think the answer.

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

#497

Post by Morgawr » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 7:50 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #495

Morgawr wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent was talking about BFS, it's not exactly clear to me why you're asking about Dijkstra's. The two things are entirely different and, as the parent said, it's akin to asking bubblesort vs radix sort.

My point is that they are not entirely different; both are academic, simple, basic applications of the kind of graph theory freshmen learn. Described in terms of a heap, Djikstra is barely more complicated than BFS.

BFS is far from academic though, it's a very common tree/graph traversal algorithm when you want to traverse in-order, like propagation of events in a UI, or printing contents of a nested data structure for debugging purposes, or searching for the top-most element in a tree that meets your criteria so you can insert a new child subtree (very common operation in nested GUI). Hell, it's not even such an alien concept for a web/frontend developer...

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

#498

Post by jjn2009 » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 7:55 PM UTC

Grishnakh wrote: post #449

halis wrote: post #375

I interviewed with Netflix for a front-end JavaScript position a few years ago. I had two technical phone screens. One with the engineering manager and another with a senior engineer on their team. Those went smoothly so I was asked to fly out to Los Gatos, CA. On-site I was supposed to talk first with the senior engineer I had already interviewed with over the phone. He was out sick so they changed at the last minut…

I wonder if he didn't like you because you didn't look like a hipster.... I'm totally serious: I really wonder how many of these baffling interview experiences where seemingly highly-qualified candidates get turned down is really about non-technical and non-work-related factors, but no one wants to actually admit it. How much of it is due to personal biases by the interviewers, who may discriminate against people for…

Netflix has a very strong focus on culture so you are likely correct, although it doesn't sound like he got to the part where they actually quiz you on their Netflix culture slide deck they likely did not continue for this reason.

There is some merit to trying to maintain culture if they have some formula for what works there and they want to maintain it but an engineer could pretty easily think something along the lines of "he's not hipster enough" and then make a case that they don't fit the culture but really not care about netflix's corporate ideas about culture.

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

#499

Post by dimino » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 7:56 PM UTC

Morgawr wrote: post #488

dimino wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I should rephrase. I've been programming for ~8 years and I've never been presented with a problem that insisted I know what BFS was explicitly. It is intuitive, which even further pushes the question "Why do I need to know this to be an effective programmer"?

You don't need to know BFS, you need to show that you can come up with a BFS implementation if you need to do so. You can always say "wait, remind me again, which one was BFS?" and the interviewer can certainly tell you at least what the conditions are. Maybe he might think a bit less of you (although I personally wouldn't) because BFS is a really really common name in the jargon of a programmer, but still it's bette…

Yeah, I think presenting the actual problem rather than a jargon test is a better way of determining a programmer's competency, but even then I'd prefer to ask questions specific to the problem domain, like if you're a streaming company ask about compression algorithms.

My favorite questions are when companies ask actual problems they're having and try to get the interviewee to suggest solutions and/or implementations.

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

#500

Post by scotty79 » Wed, Apr 27, 2016, 7:57 PM UTC

clueless123 wrote: post #95

What kills me is when you go to the trouble of interviewing , do ok, don't get the job and then... get called to interview for the exact same job 1 year later! I mean.. something must be wrong on a (recognizable name) company that does not fill a position for 1+ year..

I got a job a year later. Interview was very different. Company was growing. It was same position but they were hiring for that position constantly and over this year I think at least 10 people were hired for this position. At least that was the rate at which they hired when I was finally working there and participated in interviews as senior dev. (no algo puzzles, the only trick questions were about strange things one encounters when doing JS).