The dystopian world of software engineering interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#581

Post by Aeolun » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 12:30 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #393

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. What's amazing, these incredibly bright people that are being subjected to torture.... Wait, wouldn't the incredibly bright tell you to take your process and shove it? Very large online retailer is 100% this.

The incredibly secure would tell you to take your process and shove it. I'm not sure to what degree "bright" and "secure" correlate. I suspect that they may do so eventually, but I think many bright young people are still insecure with respect to jobs and employment.

I’m very much enjoying interviews now that I’m secure :D it’s amazing how straightforward you can be if you don’t really need a job.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#582

Post by Aeolun » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 12:35 PM UTC

scottlocklin wrote: post #316

overgard wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the need to nitpick your example. > does the candidate want to code it up or understands that they could do: cut | sort| head Piping together commands is undoubtedly programming, just in ancient shell script. So in a sense you're really testing for bash expertise. Which is maybe really relevant to you but I wouldn't say you're really "avoiding" coding by knowing to use those commands together, you just decided…

Dude, do you even data science? Not knowing Unix tools like cut and sort is a hard fail on a senior individual contributor in data science role, as is using sqlite which totally doesn't scale the way sort and cut does. Separates sheep from goats in data science land. You should really learn them if you're in the field and work with reasonably big data sets. Frankly you should learn them if you work with data at all,…

I’m not sure if I should be horrified or not. Both by the fact this happens, and by the fact that you seem proud of it.

Learning sort and cut takes literally takes all of 10 minutes, so if it makes you pass over an otherwise qualified candidate you have your priorities completely backwards.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#583

Post by monoideism » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 12:36 PM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #551

monoideism wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I hear, but then I see comments from folks like User5283 above. I have the impression it may be changing into something much more similar to a typical corporation after years of avoiding that fate.

Beware though, that he or she used a throwaway. Comments can be made by anyone, also a marketing company contracted by oracle who still want talent and have to shame competitors with better image. (but the comment did seem legit and it is obvious for posting that anonymous)

Yeah, I agree we should be cautious. But it does comport with what I've heard recently from actual Google employees, or (more often) ex-Googlers.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#584

Post by Aeolun » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 12:40 PM UTC

SkyPuncher wrote: post #387

overgard wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the need to nitpick your example. > does the candidate want to code it up or understands that they could do: cut | sort| head Piping together commands is undoubtedly programming, just in ancient shell script. So in a sense you're really testing for bash expertise. Which is maybe really relevant to you but I wouldn't say you're really "avoiding" coding by knowing to use those commands together, you just decided…

> I am 34 and an experienced coder and I literally have no stories about sorting, and I've never once wanted to sort a CSV file on the terminal. I'm a bit younger, but have done this dozens and dozens of times. ---- A lot of one off processes are way easier to handle with a bunch of terminal commands and pipes.

Only if you do them often enough that you don’t forget the flags each time.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#585

Post by ai_ja_nai » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 12:51 PM UTC

This horror story would be enough to quit the entire FAANG game:

"At one particular ‘top’ tech company the process is that when a candidate goes through an interview he or she has a packet compiled about their interview performance. The packet then goes to a committee whose job it is to impartially review the packet to make a hiring decision. At one point a particular committee got so critical that they rejected every packet for several months. When HR caught wind of this they decided to set up a test. They sent the committee a new round of packets and once again the committee rejected them all. HR then called them all into a meeting and explained that they packets they had just reviewed were in fact the hiring committee member’s own packets from when they interviewed for that company. They had unknowingly rejected themselves! How could anyone pass that bar?"

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#586

Post by roland35 » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 12:53 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #246

bllguo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well adding the visual element just introduces another source of bias.. and even if we set that aside, depending on the position it may be selecting for an irrelevant skill cover letters are terrible anyway. the signal to noise ratio there must be comical.

what are better recruitment ideas replacing cover letters ? (honest question)

I have seen some companies askna few "short answer" style questions as part of the application, which I liked!

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#587

Post by Infinitesimus » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 1:05 PM UTC

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #85

The evolution of the software engineering interview is a consequence of people gaming the metric. As the author points out, once the cat got out of the bag, the problems became increasingly challenging. The real consequence is for wages. By making interviews a ceremonious practice where even engineers with years of experience need to spend a month Leetcoding, you severely restrict the talent pool. It discourages poac…

> You can make 85-90% of a FANG salary, at a company that asks Leetcode easy's

Depends on which FANG. And G/F with their refreshers means the gap will widen significantly year over year

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#588

Post by arthev » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 1:06 PM UTC

huffmsa wrote: post #556

ideal0227 wrote: post #90

When my classmates were preparing interview coding questions, I was working on a mini TCP implementation and a toy kernel. AWS rejected me since I failed to write prefect code to traverse a tree in level order. Google did not even give me an interview since I told the campus recruiter I have not prepared for the coding questions. Then I ended up with an internship at CoreOS and created etcd. I am glad that they did n…

> Can you regurgitate the answer to this already solved problem? No, but I can write a storage solution that works even when your dummy engineers are actively melting down servers. Ah, the difference between "computer science" and "software engineering".

To quote Hamming: """In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it."""

It follows that regurgitating answers to already solved problems is good engineering :)

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#589

Post by Infinitesimus » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 1:13 PM UTC

_martamoreno_ wrote: post #175

Bad example really. There are many companies where you don't need to know this stuff, Google is not one of them. You want that 350k a year, but you don't know the basics about computer science to find the k-th highest element in a BST, well doh. What can I say... To be honest, this is really a super simple question and I would be stunned if this was anything but a warmup for you, like the interviewer giving you a sim…

> To be honest, this is really a super simple question and I would be stunned if this was anything but a warmup for you, like the interviewer giving you a simple question to get you into focus.

> Back in the days, Google was asking to insert an element in a Red-Black-Tree. Well, this is a clusterfuck and far too specialized. But questions like those were rightfully banned.

Our blindspots are pretty funny. I can assure you that many people thought Red Black trees were easy enough and if you had a hard time, their advice would be:

> Just rethink what you really want. FAANG is not for everyone

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#590

Post by wojciii » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 1:19 PM UTC

hogFeast wrote: post #426

coconut_crab wrote: post #52

> There is a cottage industry springing up around passing interviews This, a million times. I was told to practice solving dynamic programming problems to prepare for the interview[1]. Looking around the web I found out that people spending months solving thousands of dynamic programming problems, just for getting a job. This strongly reminds me of the rote learning I had to do in order to get into university, which…

Just speculation but I think a big part of this is that it is often quite difficult to lay off staff. The issue isn't that you assess employees poorly...it is very hard to be right based on knowing someone for a couple of hours...but that it is so hard to get rid of someone if you are wrong. Would you marry someone after meeting for as long as the interview? That is the decision for a lot of companies. I think that i…

To fire people in DK is possible but I would not call it easy. It takes money - for example if the person worked at the same company for 3 years, it takes 4 months salary if the person was hired using a standard contract which follows a law called "funktionærloven" written to create rules between company and employees.