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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

#501

Post by hinkley »

neilk wrote: post #378
paxys wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah! Reminds me of https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 . Cynical answer though — Google does not want people like you. They don't want to hire entrepreneurs or inventors. They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.

I don’t think there’s any intention to it at all. Unless one takes extraordinary steps to examine what brings truly brings value, most people interview for clones of themselves. Or worse: their idealized self-image. Google started off with very mathy people, and highly competitive people, and interviewing this way has always worked for them, so why change? Some people have done internal studies showing how wildly cou…

most groups don’t change until it is obvious to most of them that what is going on is not working.

When most people stop returning Google’s phone calls, so that positions go infilled, then they’ll start talking about change. Right now there’s still enough supply that they don’t have to do anything,

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#502

Post by itronitron »

Frost1x wrote: post #368
eyegor wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having helped non-cs managers hire for technical roles, I feel your pain. Usually I start getting worn down around candidate 5-10 for in person interviews, and stop looking for colleague grade employees and more for "yeah, I could train them". Nowadays I've tried to tailor my interviewing style more in that vein; I ask for their approaches to problems I don't expect them to be able to solve alone, and then try to gui…

What qualifies as a 'colleague grade' peer? Do they need to know your specific set of technology choices and be able to solve problems specific to your business during an interview that has essentially developed as a skill by those working with your group for a long period? Technology is so diverse anymore and so dependent on specific sets of technologies a business chose mixed with internal work tailored around a sp…

Probably, I think 'colleague grade' peer refers to candidates that have worked on the same problems with the same technologies and arrived at the same solutions as the people working at the company.

I agree that there is definitely a bit/lot of tunnel-vision that happens within companies where they don't realize how much cumulative knowledge is just specific to the particular evolutionary path of their development team.

IMHO, so much of success is based on ability to learn that it would be better for candidates to be evaluated on their ability to acquire new skills or integrate new knowledge.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#503

Post by itronitron »

bobbytran wrote: post #280
samkater wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also other trends that, thankfully in my experience, have not yet made their way to tech. I suspect it is only a matter of time, though... A lot of non-technical positions I have seen and heard about (including non entry-level positions) require a video of the candidate to describe themselves and why they would be a good fit for the position. That just sounds awful to me.

One company said I had to make a video of myself..and then the final interview would be singing a song of my choice in front of the entire company through video conferencing. This was for a software engineer position. I didn't even bother going on the interview. I feel like the purpose was to see what they could get you to do.

I want to interview at this company just so I can rick-roll them during the song singing part.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#504

Post by nutjob2 »

glofish wrote: post #257
minimaxir wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, that's not an appropriate question for a data scientist . Maybe it's better for a data engineer or a SRE.

Basically you are saying that you cannot think of a way of doing this, other than the most inefficient way --> hiring a new person This answer would make you fail the interview :-)

The question is ambiguous and misleading or just simply nonsensical.

This sort of thing is sadly common in interviews, where the interviewer some arbitrary answer in mind and expects you to read his mind, which is possible only some of the time.

By definition you can't sort an infinite list. You've conveniently turned the question, in your mind, into something like "how do you efficiently maintain an ordered list of incoming items?"

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#505

Post by vecter »

ticmasta wrote: post #84
parsimo2010 wrote: post #33

Comedian Daniel Tosh had a bit about people that claimed to be smart, it's just that they were just bad at taking tests. He said, "oh, so you struggle with the part where we find out what you actually know?" I hear a lot of complaints about the "typical" software engineering hiring process, and it usually comes from the people that don't do well within the current system. Could the process be improved? Almost certain…

Unless your job is coding novel algorithm implementations under strict deadlines without a computer, how does answering this question in a job interview prove or disprove your efficacy in the actual position? It only proves you're good at interviewing, which, if you think about it, is not a desirable skill in your new hire 6-12 months down the road.

I see it as an IQ test. Official IQ tests are illegal for hiring of course. So they use algorithms instead. Not justifying it, but that’s the only logical answer I can think of.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#507

Post by NhanH »

overgard wrote: post #230

Hiring and interviewing are incredibly broken, I totally agree... And the algorithm puzzles are basically silly and don't tell you any relevant things, like how pleasant would this person be to work with, how conscientious are they, etc. But. Usually interviewers are asking these questions to see how you think, not because they expect you to get it exactly right. And so verbalizing your thought process is how you pro…

It's incredibly hard, and would take years for anyone to come up with any algorithm from first principle. Which means that any test of algorithm is a test of knowledge, rather than "how you think" or "being able to reason about subtle behavior in system" etc. You looks good if you already have the knowledge, and you will look like a clown otherwise. That is okay if you also realize that the breadth of CS fundamentals are incredibly broad and everyone only knows a subset of it (ask as many simple things as you can).

My deadlines are measured in months, weeks and in the minimum, days. There is practically no cases where it is in hours, and absolutely no case where it would be 30 minutes. I (We?) have trained myself to work and deal with deadlines/pressures of those standard time frame, which means that if I have only a day to deadline left, my technical mind shut down and it is now thinking about the business to see what should be best done next.

I believe people would feel more pressure at the risk of failing an interview than the risk of their company's product having a downtime

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#508

Post by leet_thow »

What I've noticed about interviews is that there are a lot of generally unhappy and insecure people out there. People, especially in the Bay Area, are under the thumb at home and work and have a lot of debt and stressful family lives. Social comparison is an instinctual response in such instances and extreme bias is commonplace.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#509

Post by xvilka »

_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…

Haha, this mirrors my experience - once I was asked to write some embedded hardware driver, which required to run it under the RTOS in emulator, which they failed to run. They failed to run a simple qemu! I even provided them a shellscript to copy and run the required stuff. Surprisingly, I was hired nevertheless, because code "made sense", but still. I can imagine it's ubiquitous nowadays. Too many incompetent people decide on how to choose among competent people.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#510

Post by defen »

ummonk wrote: post #144
throwlaplace wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having just recently (in the last 2 weeks) completed >100 problems on leetcode i can affirmatively tell you that it's not actually that difficult to game this system. i read elements of programming interviews (took about a month of a couple of hours a day) and then just blitzgrieged leetcode. this was all in prep for a FAANG internship tech screen i had yesterday. it went well (not perfect but well). but it is true t…

The people complaining are usually the ones who can't just prep for algorithmic interviews with a couple hours a day of effort for a month. Which makes the algorithmic interview a relatively good filter - ability to learn something difficult quickly is a very important skill at high performance software companies.

Speaking as a parent, the idea of having “a couple hours of free time per day for a month” to learn difficult new material is laughable, and it has nothing to do with intellectual ability.
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