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Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

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

#511

Post by st3v3r »

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…

How come every time someone expresses frustration in a blog post, everyone assumes it's their attitude that's to blame? That the frustration they expressed in the blog post is the same attitude that they showed during the interviews?

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

#512

Post by brazzledazzle »

hvoiiita wrote: post #453
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.

While it's hardly fair I have to agree. I'm acquainted with a few and they are generally cool people but part of the brony identity does seem to be tied directly to the stigma against them. I wonder if feeling like they have to hide it makes them more resistant to hiding it?

It's such a silly thing, but humans are animals and we have annoying or shitty things like pack/tribe mentalities.

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

#513

Post by Grishnakh »

zerr wrote: post #249
swayvil wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to meet a professional plumber who is female, and I've met a lot of plumbers (I'm in construction). Just saying, it's jarring.

It's common e.g. in Poland, where men left for work in UK, Germany.

Are you saying there's a large glut of hot, single women in Poland? Hmmm.... I wonder if there's any companies there hiring software engineers.

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

#514

Post by lsiebert »

sickbeard wrote: post #70
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 think hiring is really steered to avoid hiring idiots. After all it's the interviewer that will have to answer if they hire someone who can't do the job. So all questions are very technical/random and difficult. Most of these people just lookup stuff from textbooks and fling them at interviewees. It eliminates the top and bottom contenders while catching mostly people who just came out of school (or ridicilously sm…

Hiring interviews often contain shibboleths that serve as cultural markers. It's a way to exclude people who are different while claiming that hiring is a meritocracy.

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

#515

Post by vonmoltke »

markbnj wrote: post #493
vonmoltke wrote: post #438

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? 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.

> the first is that in order to be licensed nurses, like doctors and lawyers, have to pass an intensive test known as "boards."

Board certification is not a legal requirement in any jurisdiction I am aware of. The licensure tests and board certifications are separate, and the former is generally taken very close to when the doctor, lawyer, or nurse graduates from their program and completes their internship period.

> The second is that licensing, certification, and recertification are functions of state government, not voluntary industry guidelines.

Yes and no. State governments decide what they will recognize, but industry provides the training. Some of the shit that counts as "continuing education" for the medical profession is little better than what you get at DeVry for programmers.

That said, at least these professions have strong professional associations that birddog state licensing boards to keep the bullshit out. My original comment, in fact, was motivated by IEEE and ACM's attempts to do the same for software engineers and the way the industry seems to be laughing at their efforts.

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

#516

Post by _vn5r »

b0p1x wrote: post #510
yownie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring IS broken, unfortunately everyone isn't realizing it simultaneously, so half of us end up speaking about it to the other half who are already employed and feel the need to justify their employment. Since these discussions never happen out of CS / IT circles they very rarely propogate upwards to changing company practices unless the CTO/CEO happens to read HN. You're just further contributing to the rigged scen…

I run a small company and I absolutely refuse to have an HR department. We're still small enough that this is fairly easy to work around. My recent hires are all just people I met at events. I'm told by people outside the company that they're all very happy workers. We do not do technical interviews. We talk casually about past work and what people want to achieve. After hiring we usually find out they have a differe…

That does sound like a nice play to work. How do I get in touch?

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

#517

Post by Xyik »

jmathai wrote: post #414
Xyik wrote: post #407

No offense, but not knowing BFS is kind of a red flag, even if its for a front-end position. It's the most basic graph / tree traversal algorithm there is. And you when you work with the DOM on a daily basis and use libraries that traverse for you its a good idea to have a basic understanding of whats going on under the hood. It's like saying you're a good programmer but not understanding basic concepts about memory…

It's really not a red flag. Not knowing or having BFS memorized does not indicate that one can't implement it relatively quickly by refreshing oneself on the algorithms. Unless, of course, you mean if all academic papers and material that describe BFS suddenly vanished and you had to come up with a solution yourself in 30 minutes with someone looking over your back. In that case, I agree, it's a red flag for whatever…

Where do you draw the line then? You can google and stack-overflow answers to pretty much any technical interview question that has a non-subjective answer.

BFS is not much more than a loop, a queue and a set to keep track of state (which nodes to visit next and which nodes have been visited). I can't think of many algorithms simpler than that to ask outside of things like fizz-buzz.

If you are arguing for whether algorithms are an effective way to gauge a candidate's skill then you should state that.

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

#518

Post by mankash666 »

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…

The hubris in this response is unbelievably high! Have you ever considered that YOU can also be systemically decimated in an interview designed around your weaknesses?

Heck, what if I picked 5 problems from a national level math-Olympiad. You've surey studied high school math right? Should be able to solve them in the 5 hour interview I invite you to!

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

#519

Post by riotdash »

If what you say is true, move to Europe. What you just described is absolutely insane process and especially for a front-end developer.

Having worked in Germany, UK, Finland and Sweden (iOS developer, backend developer, embedded software engineer) longest interview I ever faced was following:

1h culture/attitude interview aka getting to know you etc. (...week after...) 1.5h tech interview (face-2-face at the office, no disrespectful phone screening bullshit) where I answer basic question about iOS platform, show some apps I have created, some basic server/backend questions (push notifications, parse) (...1 day after...) Homework (REST API which does some math equation things)

And that was a LONG one. Usually it's like this: 1h getting to know you + 1h tech => hired/not hired and sure as hell no whiteboard coding algorithms that you'll never use.

The kind of interviews you went through might be given for people applying for positions such as Lead Software Architect, Senior Algorithm Developer, CPU Instruction Set Engineer etc.

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

#520

Post by wdewind »

Apocryphon wrote: post #462
wdewind wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting post, a lot I agree with, but I think if you aren't working on bridges or things that can kill people when they go wrong credentialing would probably be a negative.

Software is eating the world, right? There's already a lot of code that could kill people. Or work on bridges.

Yeah, totally fair point. Similarly there's a lot of code that pretty definitely isn't being depended on in life or death situations.
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