I turned my interview task for Google into a startup • Hacker News Board

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#551

Post by rightbyte » Thu, May 16, 2019, 9:00 PM UTC

nmcfarl wrote: post #193

nerdjon wrote: post #155

Some companies do technical interview great, but there are a couple things that I have noticed that always make me question if I actually want to work somewhere: - Being sent to a website to do a take home coding exercise, with a checkbox basically saying "I won't use the internet, stack overflow, or similar". I get that you need to test my knowledge, but shouldn't you care more that I know how to search for my probl…

Once I had a half day exercise that went even further - they provided the computer, removing the internet, but also removing all of the normal module documentation, and for good measure forbidding you from using any documentation from any source. There were a lot of compilererrors on the way to a solution for that one.

Unless you were using standard C with the standard lib that's madness. If it were C it would only be stupid.

I remember the handwriting examans on University. But it was never any real full lenght programs.

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#552

Post by Afton » Thu, May 16, 2019, 9:01 PM UTC

zymhan wrote: post #510

Afton wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminder that you want to avoid the suing not just for the risk of actual loss, but for the cost of defense.

This is true. But in this specific case, it is unlikely a single person, especially one in the position of interviewing for a lower level job, would have enough money to rival the company in a lawsuit or cause them severe financial pain. Usually it's the opposite situation that is financially ruinous.

The point isn't that the lawsuit is going to ruin the company. It's that the lawsuit is going to cost the company money in almost every case where it happens, no matter how frivolous the lawsuit. The smart choice for the company is to limit risk factors for having to face a lawsuit.

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#553

Post by nimonian » Thu, May 16, 2019, 9:06 PM UTC

antt wrote: post #540

Alex3917 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You download a list of every street address in San Francisco, pick two at random, and write one line of code to get Google Maps to tell you how long it takes to drive between them. Where exactly is the complexity?

> Where exactly is the complexity? In understanding the question. At any rate, you still haven't replied to my job offer. I need you to do two weeks of free work for me.

You sound incredibly incompetent if you think the task is hard to understand.

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#554

Post by bluntfang » Thu, May 16, 2019, 9:12 PM UTC

Zenbit_UX wrote: post #98

dnaismith wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did this at my company. A developer at the level that that developer was applying for would do a task that took them 2-4 hours. We then gave the interviewee four days to complete the task with a recommended time of 2 days. We also always made sure to include the weekend in the time they had to complete the task as we know during the week time is precious.

I'm interviewing with 6 companies simultaneously and like you they all think they're deserving of free labor. I'd wager your company must have the worst devs, those who have little self respect and zero other prospects. Do you not understand that you're requesting free labor from an applicant? Did you forget the purpose isn't to have the sickest challenge ever but to evaluate someone's code/ingenuity?

>the purpose isn't to have the sickest challenge ever but to evaluate someone's code/ingenuity?

This rings so true for me re: the last shop I was at. People got off giving "hard" problems and watching dev suffer and then giving high praise for the ones that could take the heat. That place was really toxic.

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#555

Post by Supermighty » Thu, May 16, 2019, 9:12 PM UTC

conanbatt wrote: post #166

rdez6173 wrote: post #104

I am a software engineer and I was once asked during an interview at a large hedge fund to pick a side and debate why war is justified. When I pressed them about the relevance, they indicated that they often have heated debates on all manner of topics, so they wanted to see my thought process. I enjoy solving complex problems, but socio-ethical problems are way outside of my wheelhouse. I politely indicated that I di…

What a "culture fit" filter that looks like

Usually it's just an interviewer's gut feeling. I don't believe there is a formal set of criteria that is used as a filter.

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#556

Post by nimonian » Thu, May 16, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

fhbdukfrh wrote: post #514

kelnos wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home assignments are probably not yet the norm, but are becoming more common. There's been a lot of backlash toward whiteboard coding, but most companies still want some sort of concrete work product. I would expect a reasonable home assignment would take no more than a couple hours to complete. If a company gave me something as time-consuming as Uber's, I'd say no thanks. Otherwise, I'd prefer a home assignment over…

Our current assessment is about 4 hours and i think that's too long. When i was hired I remember multiple points where i seriously considered giving up. O can't help but think how many good people we lose to an excessive applicant process

Serious question, are you not also concerned about the poor quality of worker you might take on with a less rigorous process? I think I'd accept a few false negatives to avoid the hassle of false positives (in the UK at least, where employment law protects employees above all else and people can be very hard to get rid of if they want to be).

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#557

Post by dnr » Thu, May 16, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

djhaskin987 wrote: post #140

Is HN truly this bad of a bubble that everyone thinks interview tests are normal? The last time I had to do a test it was on site and I was just out of college. Most interviews just talk about the challenges of the team, my past work on similar problems, and how I solved them. I've been on the other side of the table too. It's usually easy to tell if the applicant is a quack or if they are skilled by how they talk ab…

I wish it were so, but it's not. I usually start interviews with 5-10 minutes of talking about a previous project of the candidate, digging in to see how sophisticated the work was, how they solved problems, etc. I've had plenty of examples where someone bullshitted well enough to pretty much convince me that they knew what they were talking about, only to have it become clear in the more hands-on part of the interview that they couldn't possibly. I admit I'm not a great interviewer, so perhaps a really good interviewer could tease those things out, but I maintain that it's not always easy.

I think the usual situation is that the candidate was on a team where some impressive work was being done by others, understood it enough to talk about it in detail, but didn't actually do any of the challenging work themselves and couldn't work at that level consistently.

I'd like to think most people aren't actively lying or bullshitting, but it's easy enough to implicitly take credit for work done by a team when you're trying to sound impressive.

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#558

Post by josh2600 » Thu, May 16, 2019, 9:26 PM UTC

devit wrote: post #352

josh2600 wrote: post #78

Someone on my team once asked an iOS engineer to add a button to a codebase during an onsite interview. That is actually a horrible test to complete in 45 minutes if the codebase is large (and particularly hard if it’s not super well maintained because even just familiarizing yourself with the codebase can take a great deal of time). It’s one of those things that sounds easy but really, really isn’t possible to do in…

It seems totally possible to do it in less than 10 minutes as long as: 1. The button doesn't have to do anything 2. You give them a fast computer with an IDE loaded with the project 3. The developer is familiar with the language, UI framework and IDE 4. You aren't doing anything crazy and uncommon like using a non-standard UI toolkit or using an ad-hoc source code preprocessor 5. The project can be built and run with…

Let's say that the project is a very large, somewhat famous public open source piece of software that has been coded on by many, many different people with different coding styles.

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#559

Post by antt » Thu, May 16, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

nimonian wrote: post #553

antt wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where exactly is the complexity? In understanding the question. At any rate, you still haven't replied to my job offer. I need you to do two weeks of free work for me.

You sound incredibly incompetent if you think the task is hard to understand.

Op missed the part where they need to batch run their solution 200 times over and pick the quickest root. Like always ignorance begets confidence. That's not even talking about part 2 which you need to completely refactor the solution from the previous problem.

You sound like the type of engineer I get hired to replace at three times the rate when the project is on fire because they didn't understand the spec.

Re: I turned my interview task for Google into a startup

#560

Post by josh2600 » Thu, May 16, 2019, 9:33 PM UTC

gjm11 wrote: post #451

josh2600 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, adding a button to a codebase is an awful test. If someone made it to an onsite and you don’t know whether they can add a button in swift, something failed in your screening process. If you’re testing how someone navigates a codebase, you can just look at it with them, and let them drive the chat. If you’re testing an engineer for a serious job, do an algorithms test. If you’re testing an engineer for a specifi…

The murder question sounds quite interesting, but I'm not sure I understand it. You have n people (initially n=13) in a circle, firing shots that are fatal with probability p (here we apparently fix p=1/6, but I guess that for large n the final answer doesn't depend on p provided it's neither 0 nor 1?), and then 1 fires at 2, then 2 (if alive) or 3 (if not) fires at 3/4, and so on. And you're person 1 (this isn't sta…

Ok, I talked to the engineer. I got it mostly right but everyone shoots to the right as soon as the lights go out.

The question is "what's the probability you die?".

Edit: You can also challenge people to think about the problem where everyone fires at exactly the same time OR random order since people have different reaction times.

Edit 2: "The probability p(n) that a permutation of n things is a derangement -- which tends to 1/e as n->oo -- satisfies the recurrence relation p(n) = [(n-1)p(n-1)+p(n-2)]/n; is it possible that the correct statement of the problem here leads to that same recurrence?" <--- My engineer says that derangements are the correct key to the convergence.