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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#491

Post by wodenokoto »

vector_spaces wrote: post #484

I had an interview with a YC company last year. I went through -- not exaggerating -- 8 interviews, almost all of which aside from the initial phone screen were an hour or more in length. 2 of them were technical interviews. I had finally gotten to the take home project, naturally a project in Ruby on Rails despite the fact that I haven't written a lick of Ruby in my life. Anyway, I was rejected after this step. To b…

How far in the process were you before you found out you had to code Ruby on Rails and present it?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#492

Post by roland35 »

rwmj wrote: post #433
ladberg wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Design mistakes maybe, but syntax errors are just not representative of any real debugging experience IMO.

I think some of this is filtering out bullshitters. In a previous job I used to interview a lot of unfiltered candidates. What we did was sit them down at a Linux command line and ask them to show us the files in the directory, open a file for editing and that kind of thing. A surprising number of people who claimed years of Linux experience had clearly never used the command line at all.

I've tried questions like this (super basic but can quickly filter out people who know nothing), but sometimes the candidate seems insulted! I try to quickly move on to a harder question.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#493

Post by baobabKoodaa »

rplnt wrote: post #330
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually this one might make sense, depending on the code and the position you applied for.

e.g. a compiler But yeah, I think I've seen questions like that for an intern positions. It's basically a "have you ever seen this language?" to weed out people quickly.

> It's basically a "have you ever seen this language?" to weed out people quickly.

It's not that. People who constantly use multiple languages in an IDE will not be able to point out most syntax errors outside the IDE. So it's not a "have you ever seen this language" filter.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#494

Post by wesleywt »

Not a "tech" job, but I found that the best hires were people who worked on contract for a few months. They did not necessarily have the skills when they started, but you could see drive, diligence and competence in those few months. This attitude needs to be maintained every day and cannot be faked as easily as you can an interview. A bonus is that they get paid for their time while getting valuable job experience.

It might only work for low-level entrants. For higher positions you are hiring the person for their experience, not on how well they can jump through arbitrary hoops.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#495

Post by roland35 »

kamaal wrote: post #353
yobbo wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is disrespectful, but it is a proxy test for how many hours you have spent reading and writing code in that language.

A while back Indian companies were notoriously famous for giving questions from Let us C, from Yashwant Kanitkar . The questions go like, What is the output of the expression below? int i = 10; ****++&&*+p; Followed by a myriad of options. Including things like Syntax error . Not sure how this measures language proficiency.

Ooof... I have done a few double pointers in my day *, but anything beyond that seems like bad practice!

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#496

Post by pawelwentpawel »

AJRF wrote: post #469
XorNot wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I'm pretty sure FAANG hiring is just a random walk. Every now again someone happens to have looked at all the questions they ask recently for that particular interview cycle (or avoid the trap ones like that) and that person gets hired (and then put on the ad targeting team or whatever).

Geohotz had a good rant about this once - the kind of people who need to cram leetcodes and memorize algorithms are not the kinds of people who Google wants to pass these interviews. Makes a lot of sense, you could solve all these questions without knowing specific algorithms as long as you are good at problem solving - which is, I assume, the intent of the process. Obviously it doesn't always work like that.

I went through a marathon of interviews for one FAANG company (8 in total - coding screen, 4x in first round, 3x in second round). I did enough preparation to remember quite a couple of the Leetcode solutions by heart. I was pretty much a code printer if I got one of those, not much thinking involved anymore. I reckon it was clearly visible that I've seen a similar question before which is unavoidable if you've done enough prep.

While it's probably not what an interviewer is looking for, having the most common solutions memorised gives you an advantage of time. A coding interview usually consists of two challenges. If you get stuck on the first one and take too much time to answer it, you won't have enough time to go through the second one.

To avoid the code printer perception you can always go through an explanation what alternative solutions could be applied to the given problem, what their complexities would be and why the one presented is the best.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#497

Post by higeorge13 »

epicureanideal wrote: post #354
elmolino89 wrote: post #333

I am fine that up to the ~3 interviews covering the different aspects (say HR person checking the general personality, IT guy for i.e. Linux sysadmin knowledge mini-test, the team manager). In 2020 after the Covid started, I got into the endless spiral of I believe 6 interviews spaced over a month or so, then the long wait and getting shorter contract with same salary but different from the advert job title. With the…

> HR person checking the general personality I would say that's the worst person to do the personality check. Instead, engineers the hire would actually work with should probably do the personality check. Often HR is either a bureaucrat with a non-technical degree, or an inexperienced young "internal recruiter" with a non-technical degree and a pleasant appearance meant to attract responses on LinkedIn. Neither of th…

Exactly this! They are probably the most incompetent people included in the hiring process, and yet they will take part in the decision making with their ‘magic’ personality judgement and culture fit skills, always making the wrongest decision ever. I had candidates rejected by HR because they were too charming, too lively, too , to find them later employed in way better companies and roles. Well done HR, now you have your culture and team fit, for a team and culture you are not even managing.

Ah and your professionalism stops as soon as you hire someone. The rest of candidates might be left without a response even in their 3rd reminder. I guess it’s tough to even setup the auto email notification in the ATS tool you are using.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#498

Post by ookdatnog »

MattGaiser wrote: post #63
LAC-Tech wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a hundred times over. I still remember in 2020 multiple places asking me "I see you've used .NET core, what *version* have you used?". I had a kind of career crisis/breakdown, where I realised no one gave a shit about anything except my utility as a walking set of tech keywords. Accepting that it wasn't working for me was one of the best things I've done for my career.

> where I realised no one gave a shit about anything except my utility as a walking set of tech keywords. I am genuinely asking. Why is this objectionable? Why do people find it so horrible that their labour is a commodity? To me that just tells me I should treat my labour like a merchant treats his goods. Always be checking the market to ensure you have something worth selling and while you might sign long term deal…

In short, employers have some degree of power over you, and if you perceive people who wield power over you as wielding that power arbitrarily, that is nearly universally experienced as frustrating.

In GP's case, the arbitrariness originates from their potential employer not taking the effort to really evaluate GP's relevant skills in software engineering, but instead resorting to lazily ticking boxes on a checklist. And what's on the checklist isn't even particularly relevant.

What I imagine this does to GP's view of the world (based on what it would do to mine) is: "I believe I am competent because I've built up a set of subtle skills in software engineering over many years, and this is what I take pride in. But from an employment point of view, this is wasted time: I should instead have focused on optimizing the checklist (and I only found this out after years in the industry)."

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#499

Post by bfung »

billytetrud wrote: post #212
bfung wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being on the hiring end, it’s less out of incompetence and more of not enough time, and open source code is low signal that the candidate can actually solve problems. If I submit some “open source” code as some proof that I can code, how do you know I didn’t copy the code from somewhere? Also, writing code for the sake of writing code doesn’t tell a hiring manager if the person can take requirements and translate tha…

> how do you know I didn’t copy the code from somewhere? You can ask your candidate to explain the code... Is that not obvious? > writing code for the sake of writing code doesn’t tell a hiring manager if the person can take requirements and translate that to an automated process Kind of sounds like you don't know what open source software is. > excuse my language, shit out code for the sake of appearing productive I…

> You can ask your candidate to explain the code... Is that not obvious?

Asking about projects is the obvious thing, but only substantial and interesting projects really provide any interview value. Yet another Todo app doesn’t fit that criteria. Neither is another scaffolded crud app.

A PR to fix a bug in a semi-popular library is worth. But saying “I have a lot of repos” is def not.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#500

Post by radiator »

lrem wrote: post #434
janoc wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Famously even if you know the answer pretty well, say because you were the original creator of the thing, but answer in a way that they can't link to the answer key, you still fail. Which is the most ridiculous part of it. You are being examined and evaluated over trivia in a subject that the examiner likely has no idea about and where there are only 1-2 possible "correct" answers. That's like sending a janitor to "…

What alternative would be more efficient and acceptable? A typical team of 6-8 replaces two persons per year. The number of resumes per opening is measured in thousands.

If the applicant has graduated from a university, technical school, whatever, then look at the records from their exams there. Also taking into account the average level of the university, technical school in question.
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