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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#531

Post by Bayart »

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.

I wonder how many Indians partake in the IOCCC [1].

[1]: https://www.ioccc.org/

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#532

Post by tchalla »

bborud wrote: post #506
ladberg wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similarly bad Google experience that I've talked about before[0] but will copy here: I was asked to do a task that eventually boiled down to a topological sort, and I thought the question consisted of recognizing that the answer was a topological sort and moving on because it was over the phone. However, that was not the case. The interviewer wanted me to code it all out over Google Docs, but I didn't remembe…

I worked at Google and did a fair share of interviews. Two observations: When you have 3 interviews per week for a prolonged period, you, as an interviewer, are not going to do a stellar job every time. What's worse: you will develop a routine and it becomes very easy to give candidates that do not fit your routine a lower grade. It takes effort on the interviewers part to recognize talent that perhaps doesn't fit yo…

> The only piece of advice I found useful from the interview training was this: this is the candidate's big day. For you it is a chore, for them it is their big chance. Keep that in mind and respect it. I kept telling myself this for every interview - and some days I felt really terrible because I wasn't properly prepared.

Thank you for being kind and respectful.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#533

Post by naruvimama »

yobbo wrote: post #338
trinovantes wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once had an in-person interview where they gave me a sheet of printed code and asked me to point out the syntax errors. Some interviewers are absolutely insane.

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

I usually write python code, I stick to pythonic styles, consistency and good practices.

If there is an error, I can quickly figure out what that is and what I should do to fix it. I would know why the error occurred.

Beyond that deliberate interview practice is the only way to get a lot of interview questions right.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#534

Post by cedilla »

GistNoesis wrote: post #284
Nition wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet if they ask you for an answer to a quirky question like "why are manhole covers round?", they expect a clever answer like "they can't fall in", rather than a pedestrian answer like "well, probably they just started making them that shape for some simple production reason, and then everyone else just kinda of did the same thing because it worked."

It's just an invitation to discuss curves of constant width, like the Reuleaux triangle, that has indeed been made into a man-hole cover.

Lots of man-hole covers are rectangular though. Turns out it isn't very important at all to have manhole covers that don't fall in. They are quite heavy and don't roll around on their own, so having them fall somewhere really is of minor concern.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#535

Post by unishark »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #461
pjmlp wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just check the Android code, specially the early versions looked like "C dev (not even C++) tries to create a Java based framework". And the NDK clearly is anything but modern C or C++.

Google is famous for having a C++ implementation that eschews a lot of what makes C++ powerful. I’ve heard it referred to as “C+-“.

Well there might be a defense of that one.

"Data-oriented programming" (to distinguish from object-oriented) is largely C-style C++ that is written for performance rather than reusablility/abstractness/whatever. In the embedded programming world where performance is paramount, a lot of people have low opinions of many C++ features. One could also never completely trust compilers to implement everything correctly.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#536

Post by jack_riminton »

thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #512
torginus wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cruel and inhuman, but if you're Google, there's some cold rationality behind this. I think the process goes for them like this: There's 100 people applying for any given position, 10 of which might be good hires. It's reasonable from their point of view to subject the interviewees to a process that culls 83 bad ones, and 7 good ones so that only 10 people need to be interviewed by expensive on-staff engineers,…

The rationality doesn't reflect the reality of Google being unable to innovate and continually competing with itself. Will another engineer from the same cohort who knows the same trivia and has the same education be able to shake things up? What happens to the 3 that get rejected, do they try again later and filter through? Or do they tire of the process, give up, and work for competitors?

When you're in such a dominant position they don't care about people being able to shake things up

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#537

Post by tchalla »

vidarh wrote: post #462
silisili wrote: post #119

My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances. My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again. I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm…

My experience with Google (in the UK) was an interviewer who asked a very similar question, among a number where he was clearly unprepared to deal with answers that weren't 100% as expected, and asked questions that had basically no relevance to the role. The experience was so bad that afterward I sent a lengthy email to the recruiter thanking her but pointing out I expected to fail the interview because the intervie…

> In the end I declined, as the first interviewer would have been one of the people I'd have managed, and I just did not want to deal with a team with a person like that,

Oh, I can totally empathise with you because I've been there. I applied for a position which was the head of a team and a future direct asked me esoteric statistical questions from his PhD thesis. I did quite well to answer most of them but he wasn't impressed.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#538

Post by cheschire »

TGImemegen wrote: post #503
ladberg wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similarly bad Google experience that I've talked about before[0] but will copy here: I was asked to do a task that eventually boiled down to a topological sort, and I thought the question consisted of recognizing that the answer was a topological sort and moving on because it was over the phone. However, that was not the case. The interviewer wanted me to code it all out over Google Docs, but I didn't remembe…

Googler here. At some stage of the interview process, we have to check whether you're able to code, there's no way around it if you're applying for a coding position. So yes, we'll have you code the solution to a problem. Of course in the real world we'd use a library or look up the algorithm on stack overflow like everyone else. Good for you if you came up with a workable algorithm for the problem quickly. But that'…

There’s enough counter anecdotes here on HN when this topic comes up that the wording of your post comes off as tone deaf. You actually seem to believe every interviewer at Google behaves like you, for the same reasons, to the same standards.

“We do NOT”

“You messed up”

“let me be very clear”

“whether you’re able to code”

These types of statements come off as patronizing. If your whole process sounded like this, and if you somehow actually do represent a majority of Google interviewers, then it’s no wonder so many folks have a distaste for the experience.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#539

Post by sdevonoes »

incrudible wrote: post #528
silisili wrote: post #119

My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances. My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again. I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm…

Their process may simply be optimized for their particular purposes. Google doesn't need more engineers, but there's a certain kind of hire they don't want to pass up on. No company really needs a genius rockstar coder that's going to quit after two years to become competition. That's why the inode question makes sense. It's a stupid question that deserves a stupid answer. If you're the kind of person that actually g…

Google wants soldiers, and they can get them.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#540

Post by tssva »

emptyfile wrote: post #410
Nition wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet if they ask you for an answer to a quirky question like "why are manhole covers round?", they expect a clever answer like "they can't fall in", rather than a pedestrian answer like "well, probably they just started making them that shape for some simple production reason, and then everyone else just kinda of did the same thing because it worked."

What? Manhole covers aren't round. Silly americans. http://lh4.ggpht.com/_LWPSf1_ugFI/TA4tx-22QRI/AAAAAAAAFx0/T1...

They aren't even all round in the US. Where I live there is a high and rapidly growing number of data centers. In fact there is currently another large data center campus being built for the company famous for asking this question. Among other things this means installation of fiber optic cabling along the roads leading to the data centers. This in turn means the installation of a large number of manholes to service the cables. All the covers for these manholes are rectangular.
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