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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

#541

Post by serge2k »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #347
unoti wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why go through the ridiculous process of finding average developers who by luck (or some homework) happen to solve the problems you throw at them perfectly? Never underestimate the value of hard work, preparation, and a can-do attitude. It eclipses natural talent every time.

The hardest workers with the most successful can-do attitudes will simply reject your company if you ask them to do bullshit like algorithm trivia or HackerRank tests. Such trivia is the opposite of useful hard work; preparation for it truly wastes time that could be better spent on other things; a can-do attitude would imply rejecting or ignoring requests to do such things. As a result, the people who actually do ta…

or they already learned it because they worked hard during school and they work hard to keep themselves current.

I think the concerns people have about the efficacy of this interview style is valid, but extending it to the point where you start to make claims about how people who can pass them aren't as good is ridiculous.

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

#542

Post by dclowd9901 »

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…

"But they do expect you to be able to reason from a problem statement to something approximating a solution."

In under 45 minutes? Are you really concerned with their ability to even naively solve an algorithmic problem in that time frame? I would think not. No, this is not only flawed, but it's so deeply flawed (and easily exploitable), that you're not even interviewing for skill set anymore, simply either 1) someone's luck for having been exposed to the problem before or 2) their ability to remember things they don't use day to day.

Congratulations, you're hiring lucky people or idiot savants.

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

#544

Post by kragniz »

jerich wrote: post #403
limaoscarjuliet wrote: post #282

I am a VP at a medium size company and I do plenty of interviews. I usually talk about what people are interested in and then ask one question: "You are in front of PC/Mac/Mobile screen, type www.cnn.com into browser, and press enter. A fraction of a second images show up on the screen... How? What happened? Tell me all you can from key press interrupts to underwater fiber cables". This question never failed me. It a…

Wow. What a great question! I found that I was sitting here answering it to myself. After starting down a rabbit-hole on how the browser would probably need to do some GPU initialization, I realized how much fun I'd have talking through this with someone in an interview. "Let's see, I guess the wifi radio is going to have to do an RSSI measurement..." It actually gave me goosebumps when I realized that I was so caugh…

https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when

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

#545

Post by to3m »

beeboop wrote: post #152
jmaley wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider a scenario where the developer is required to write a custom directory tree. Each row contains a caret and a checkbox. When either of these are clicked, you'll need to perform some sort of tree traversal to ensure integrity of the view -- for example, checking the checkbox on a row may require that all children as selected too. Additionally, you may need an upward traversal to the root to ensure the parents…

From a front-end developer perspective, I would google "navigation tree jquery", download some library that does this for me, and be done with it. If all children of a checkbox need to also be selected, that's like a single like of jQuery. Worst case scenario, something custom is written, and yeah it's not the best way and yeah it takes 100 milliseconds instead of 4, but who cares?

4ms vs 100ms is instant response vs detectable delay...

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

#546

Post by k__ »

Don't get hired then. Just freelance and be done with it.

I as a developer can't understand why anyone skilled wants to be employed.

I was employed for about 7 years and now I'm a freelancer. I don't have to discuss with my customers that I want to work from home, I just do it. I get more money than before, I spend less for health insurance and taxes, I start working when I want and not when some manager wants me in the office. And job security seems a bit odd considering that everyone is searching for devs and the demand seems to increase every year.

And the best thing is, I don't need to do dumb interviews anymore. When I freelance people just ask me for solutions and give me money for them. When I look for employment for doing exact the same stuff I do as a freelancer, suddenly they want to know the weirdest stuff and ask me to do dumb tests.

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

#547

Post by hexagonc »

Morgawr wrote: post #430
tptacek wrote: post #379

I'm torn. On the one hand: the interview processes this post describes are hilariously broken. Stand up at a whiteboard and implement breadth-first search from memory! You know, like no programmer at their desk staring at their editor ever does. I think "that's the one where you use a queue, right?" is a fully valid and complete answer to that dumb question. I also think you're within your rights to demand that your…

To be honest I was a bit taken aback by the author not being able to implement a BFS. It's a fairly standard and really simple algorithm and it's probably one of the most common ones to actually implement because of a need in your day-to-day work. What do you do if you have a nested data structure (like a tree) and want to print it in order? You write a simple BFS on it. It's not even a question where you need prior…

I would agree with you if the author had complained about depth-first search as opposed to breadth-first search. Any decent developer should be able to understand and reason through depth-first search but I wouldn't expect breadth-first search to show up doing front-end web development. In my own side-projects, which involve much more complicated algorithms than anything I've implemented in my day job, breadth-first search has only really come up in one context that wasn't explicitly AI related, and that was a grammar parser. In every other case that I needed to search something, it was depth-first search that I was using. If you're given the whole tree at the beginning, I think most developers would probably start with depth-first search, even if they didn't know the name of the algorithm they were using.

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

#548

Post by dclowd9901 »

cousin_it wrote: post #456
simula67 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't interview well. Technology for me is exciting because of its potential to bring happiness to people. If someone tells me that the product I am working on has a security issue because it does not follow some the security portions of the RFC correctly, I will be delighted to read it carefully, study arcane encoding algorthms etc and implement code that brings up the compliance to an acceptable level. If you ask…

For what it's worth, if you were interviewing for a security job and couldn't solve the longest increasing subsequence problem within a minute, I would probably say "no hire". All security folks I know can solve such problems in their sleep, and it seems really important for the job. Or at least you'd have to show your algorithmic skills in some other way, without relying on "business" rhetoric. Does that sound reaso…

This is a false correlation. What is it about longest increasing subsequence that is relevant to security? If you can't explain, then it has no relevance and means nothing.

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

#549

Post by adam_mckenna »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #122
ts330 wrote: post #26

Considering that it's our fellow programmers doing the interviewing, I'd say we're failing ourselves here. I'd wager that in almost all cases, those doing interviews have had zero training on effectively recruiting anyone (let alone other developers). An effective interview requires preparation - and I bet the majority of developers do this right between saying " fuck , have they arrived already?" and starting the in…

I guess the take-home lesson here is that programmers have no idea what makes a good programmer and how to screen for one. So they fall back to the basics, CS 101.

Programmers in general? Probably do. The programmer who has free time to do phone screens? Less likely.

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

#550

Post by blakeyrat »

falcolas wrote: post #131
paddy_m wrote: post #113

I hired Sahat as an intern three years ago while he was an undergrad. It was one of the best hiring decisions I have ever made. He was productive immediately and our (small) team felt the loss when he went back to school. This guy is good and gets stuff done, ask people who have worked with him. I wish Sahat had reached out to more of his network before responding to random recruiters. Tech interviews as Sahat experi…

> I wish Sahat had reached out to more of his network before responding to random recruiters. Has his network moved forward in what they do? I've found with my own network that so many of them are in the same (or equivalent) spots they were when I left to advance my career. Not precisely positions of power which I can take advantage of for the next step forward in my career.

I don't understand this. You don't have to be a Director to nominate someone for the open Director position. At least, not at any company I've worked for... is that a "thing"?
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