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The worst job interview I ever had

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Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#531

Post by mkoryak »

dpark wrote: post #457
mkoryak wrote: post #361

Back when I was younger and interviewing candidates for a startup where I was one of the oldest engineers my favorite "fit" question used to be "tell me your favorite 4 letter word". I never actually based my decision on that one, only the technical questions. This is an example of where I (probably) contributed to making some people feel uncomfortable and I wouldn't do it now.

> tell me your favorite 4 letter word Stop

If you answered that, my past self would have appreciated your answer and maybe even stopped. I mostly got things like: "code", "cash", "love" and one time a "fart"

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#532

Post by dpark »

mkoryak wrote: post #531
dpark wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tell me your favorite 4 letter word Stop

If you answered that, my past self would have appreciated your answer and maybe even stopped. I mostly got things like: "code", "cash", "love" and one time a "fart"

I am glad you stopped asking that question. We all make mistakes and learn from them.

An I correct in assuming the “4 letter word” was intended to make the candidate think of curse words? I’m curious what the intent of this question was if it didn’t feed into your hire decision.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#533

Post by mrguyorama »

LoulouMonkey wrote: post #239

As we're all sharing some bizarre experiences we've had, I feel I have to chip in. I had 2 very weird interviews with the same FAANG company, before actually joining the company in 2021. Anyway, we're in 2011 and my career in tech has just started. I hear back from a recruiter regarding a role I've applied for, and to be considered for this position it is mandatory to be fluent in French. Which shouldn't be a problem…

Seeing as the entire point of FAANG having offices in Dublin at that point in time was a tax evasion strategy, they probably didn't give a shit about hiring or actual employees.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#534

Post by [deleted] »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #463
JCTheDenthog wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's a problem with tech hiring and nobody wants to talk about it because most people are unaware. And those who are aware and bring it up often get accused of racism when they do, making it difficult to spread awareness of this awful practice.

The funny thing is I am considered a minority, but apparently not the “right kind” of minority. I think outside of being accused of racism I suspect some people anticipate HR level retaliation as well.

[deleted]

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#535

Post by ViktorRay »

JCTheDenthog wrote: post #444
giancarlostoro wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having said that, talking to a relative, I found out that this style of "interviewing" is often done when they already have someone for the position, but need to show (for compliance reasons, or otherwise) that they tried finding candidates, and only their preferred one qualified. Or they only want candidates from a specific country to apply which is seemingly the case. I've heard from very talented and capable dev…

>There's a problem with tech hiring and nobody wants to talk about it because most people are unaware. And those who are aware and bring it up often get accused of racism when they do, making it difficult to spread awareness of this awful practice.

Which countries are you all talking about?

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#536

Post by Balgair »

The worst I ever had was a dream to others, possibly.

The way I knew that I was not going to work there is they had a net $72,000 401k matching - the maximum allowed.[0]

Suffice to say, if that is what they have to do to keep folks on, it's gotta be some really crazy stuff going on in there.

[0] I remember it being 25% at the time, but the IRS says that it's a set dollar amount these days, so I will go with that.

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#537

Post by mrguyorama »

kbelder wrote: post #52
stuxnet79 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard this term and used it myself but wasn't aware of the etymology. Funny enough, I've only ever heard 'crack team' used in a professional context. If 'cooked' diffuses to corporate at the same rate then I'm very much looking forward to 'cooking the ops' during standup in 2035 :P

"Crack team" long predates video games and even crack cocaine. I think it is related to the phrase "get cracking", i.e., "get working", but I wasn't able to find a clear etymological line. One possibility is it refers to gunfire, but I wonder if it refers to harvesting, cracking corn, etc.

Oxford claims "Crack Shot" to refer to an expert marksman goes all the way back to 1841.

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/crack-shot_n?tl=true

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#538

Post by jimmy2times »

eternauta3k wrote: post #494
nkozyra wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand I understand this fairly deeply. I started doing "ML" ~ 20 years ago building classifiers people would laugh at today and even at the time barely impressed people when they were 95% correct. I moved into NLP and built NERs that missed 2-10% of named entities per document routinely. Best of breed approaches and models rarely fared better. Learned the cornerstones in school for ML; linear regression, AN…

An acquaintance who works at FAANG says he still builds non-LLM ML systems because of the cost of running LLMs at that scale

Exactly. Besides cost, domain-specific models (which can still be very large) encode our biases (i.e., our knowledge about the domain) in their architecture. Because of that, we have ways to calibrate their accuracy trade-offs over an in-domain sample.

For LLMs, there is a disconnect between the perceived domain (anything a human can think and verbalize) and actual domain (word sequence prediction). We only know how to sample from the latter, not the former.

This "silver bullet" idea sounds a lot like "free lunch". There has been a lowering of the bar for ML practices to make way for this onslaught of prototype-level productivity. Teams that used to do their best to run uncorrelated evals are now having the prompt engineers manually inspect ~100 model outputs before launch.

People were shocked by the accuracy of n-gram models and user interaction data to "read their mind" and complete their searches. Now we're obviously all impressed by the emerging abilities of LLMs (integrated with lots of business logic by the LLM providers). Hopefully in time we'll get desensitized a bit and have the right mental model when using these tools.

P.S. I love your username :)

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#539

Post by bcantrill »

nekusar wrote: post #489

Ive had a few stinkers of interviews. One when I was 19 was for a 3rd shift stocker at a "family business". Guy straight up asks "Are you married?". Sure, its illegal to ask. Not like a jobless 19 year old could do anything. Ive had a few jobs claim "pay band was from x to y. And surprise it was x-20000 to y-50000. One interview (an HN company) did the interviews. Got back round 2, seemed interesting. The "third roun…

Sorry to hear that you viewed it as a "litany of crap", but if it's of any solace, if you had slopped it, the result would not have been immediately different -- but you would be marked in our system in such a way that subsequent applications would also be disqualified.

It sounds like we're not a fit for you either, though, so maybe just as well!

Re: The worst job interview I ever had

#540

Post by telmop »

TrackerFF wrote: post #302
telmop wrote: post #297

I've had quite a few too: * The most recent one: I was doing an "AI assisted coding interview". The problem itself was simple. I gathered clear specs, I explained what I planned to do. I was supposed to use AI so I wrote down the main function signatures I expected (the API boundary) and wrote in the prompt what I wanted Claude to do. I wrote no code myself other than editing the output. When I got rejected, I was to…

Regarding the first you posted, it sounds very much like a "feature" sweatshop. Meaning that they have some product with customers, and will implement absolutely every single request they get from customers - and really just want prompt engineers that will ship out updates as quick as possible. IME, there's been a rise of those for the past 1-2 years. They not only embrace AI/slop coding, it is a core part of their b…

Unfortunately I fear this is going to become the standard in our industry. Everyone will be forced to rely on AI to "ship faster", to trade learning for short term speed.
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