The dystopian world of software engineering interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#591

Post by ProZsolt » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 1:21 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #403

bllguo wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I had answers. I don't - I just know that cover letters aren't it. I've been on both sides of hiring at this point. On the applicant side, I have never seen any indication that anyone has ever read my cover letters. Writing them is a chore. And though my sample size is very limited, I have never had success with bespoke cover letters/cold emails/etc.; the time has always been better spent on reaching more peop…

Often I think all these (cover letters are not the only artefact) are just postural items to see who's gonna make the effort no matter what use it has. A kind of faith leap.

I would do it for one or two companies. If you can be hired by the first company of your choice, you don't really need it.

What about providing a proper job description? Without it your company is a "maybe", till I talk to an engineer who can describe the job properly. Would it make sense to write a cover letter after that?!

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#592

Post by gbrown » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 1:27 PM UTC

hardlianotion wrote: post #574

htfu wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though what's a bit silly here is that all the information you need is right there in the two words "inverse square", it's only the word "law" tacked on that made you (presumably) assume there had to be more to the concept. You'd assume a competent enough interviewer wouldn't be so rigid and at least hint that you shouldn't overthink it...

One needs a little domain knowledge for "inverse square" to be informative. It is a simple-minded interviewer that wouldn't just explain the concept. Unless you are hiring someone that is supposed to understand some maths, that is.

What does it mean to implement it in code though? What kind of data should it consume - n-dimensional coordinates, distance matrices, some sort of power level to calculate falloff? If it’s as described, it’s way too vague. Inverse square laws show up all over.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#593

Post by holografix » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 1:31 PM UTC

Sincere question: What are you all doing accepting these multi-hour, multi-day take away free consulting gigs?

Say NO to this bullshit. Establish a deadline and clear guidelines and expectations:

1. I will not be doing any take away work at all.

2. You will explain how my GitHub repo, resumé, previous experience is insufficient to qualify me for the job in 100 words or more.

3. You will sign an NDA for whatever solution I created to whatever problem you task me with. You do not own my solution’s IP and may not share it outside of the people involved in my hiring process without my consent. 4. In the case where I fail the test you will explain in 100 words or more why my solution was unacceptable. 5. In the case my solution doesn’t compile/run you will allow me 3 attempts/1hour to provide you a solution and/or give me a Dockerfile representing the env where my solution will be tested.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#594

Post by blaufast » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #124

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…

Wow. I don't have as prolific a tale as that, but I'm in the looking stage right now and the idea of cramming for a test I haven't taken in 12 years annoys the hell out of me. I've done some pretty interesting things in biotech in my career, things that required learning about motion control, digital imaging, signal processing, and biology... but if I want a job as a web dev I apparently need to memorize how to imple…

Having worked at cutting edge biotech,startups and FAANG I wholeheartedly defend the interview process, and believe you would too if you ever switched over for a while

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#595

Post by blotter_paper » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 1:35 PM UTC

holografix wrote: post #593

Sincere question: What are you all doing accepting these multi-hour, multi-day take away free consulting gigs? Say NO to this bullshit. Establish a deadline and clear guidelines and expectations: 1. I will not be doing any take away work at all. 2. You will explain how my GitHub repo, resumé, previous experience is insufficient to qualify me for the job in 100 words or more. 3. You will sign an NDA for whatever solut…

Have you ever established these guidelines and expectations with a potential employer and subsequently been hired by that employer?

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#596

Post by fsniper » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

peferron wrote: post #541

fsniper wrote: post #421

Not exactly a comment for the piece, but for overall comments going around. I am really shocked with people's understanding of situations. Like one great example of a different interview process which totally seems like working for the interviewer and his/her interviewees is bashed for not being good for their tastes without even getting the rationale. Or expecting people to spend 6 months on preparation for intervie…

> expecting people to spend 6 months on preparation for interviews considered normal or totally acceptable You're expected to be able to solve a certain set of problems. Whether you don't prepare at all, spend 6 months, or spend 6 years is up to you. Oh, and everything you need to prep is available in cheap books and websites. That's immensely superior to being required to spend 5 years and thousands of dollars in co…

Please look around, here you can find hundreds or thousands of people probably never used advanced algorithms for their lifetime except once or twice for their interviews. And you can see some who uses these daily who never implement them out of their heads but with intuition, preparation, effort, books and research. Oh and don't get me started that they all are compansated for.

Which type do you think these interview methods are optimized for?

These methods are waste of money, time, brains for both parties.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#597

Post by busterarm » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:03 PM UTC

pansa2 wrote: post #488

throwaway582 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sucks that you've had that experience, I'm sorry. I hope it's the exception and not the rule. I work on the Advertising part of Giant Search and Advertising, and my experience has been pretty great—indeed, working on interesting problems with a high degree of autonomy. I do need to persuade others of my ideas sometimes, or let them persuade me against them, but this seems like a good thing, and doesn't feel poli…

> I work on the Advertising part of Giant Search and Advertising [...] on interesting problems Genuine question - what do you consider to be interesting problems in advertising?

Having worked on the spend side of things and at high stakes (9 figure budgets), targeting and how to improve it is extremely intellectually stimulating. More than anything else I've done in my career, even. This is especially true when you have constraints, like being in a regulated industry such as legal marketing.

The only problem is that it's hard to command a salary commensurate with how good you are at it unless you're in business for yourself AND the one spending the money.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#598

Post by benmmurphy » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:07 PM UTC

mixmastamyk wrote: post #390

glofish wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting how negative your reaction is. Also how far off target all that anger is. I am not selecting for a tribe, I am selecting for a job. The questions are loaded, of course. Among the many duties, the jobs do require processing large files, sometimes with cut, Python or C. I want the candidate to use the most appropriate tool as needed. I'd rather not have people implement functionality that already exists in…

I had to read a few times to figure out what “column-oriented” meant before figuring it out. May have not have been able to do it under pressure in an interview. If you’d said “ordered by column” I’d have understood much more quickly. i.e. Be careful with your phrasing. That is a bias in itself.

I would assume column oriented would mean the data would be formatted something like:

    R1C1,R2C1,R3C1
    R1C2,R2C2,R3C2

So values that have the same column are clustered together. Whereas normally in a file values that have the same row are clustered together. This is what column-oriented usually means when you are referring to databases.

I guess this is not what the questioner meant because they referred to using cut | sort | head as a solution. Though, I don't understand why head would be at the end of either problems solution so maybe I'm missing something. head could be a useful way of peeling out the column you want in the column-oriented problem.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#599

Post by b0rsuk » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:09 PM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #279

A few months ago I interviewed with Major CDN Company for a front-end dev position. They sent me a take-home React/NextJS project stub with dependencies and such already defined, and instructions to finish building out the full app. "Perfect!", I thought. No stage pressure, plenty of opportunities for going an extra mile. They encouraged me to get creative and I did; it met all the requirements and then some. I proud…

I think the situation was unwinnable. You've exposed their incompetence. Rightly or wrongly, most people can't stand being criticized. If there's a solution to that one it's a diplomatic one, not a technical one.

Be similarly wary to point out bugs in code reviewer's code. Unless you have a healthy professional atmosphere and multiple reviewers, your best course is to manipulate the reviewer into "coming up" with the idea for the bugfix from your ticket.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#600

Post by ddevault » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 2:11 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #192

ddevault wrote: post #64

I think Giant Search and Advertising should make the interview more difficult, then more difficult still, then cease hiring entirely, then atrophy employees until they die and/or are legislated out of existence. You - yes, you, HN reader who already works at one of these companies - are ethically responsible for the actions of your employer. When you're the one on the front lines helping realize their dystopian dream…

> Don't work for FAANG. What did Netflix do? And don't we like Apple now? They ship crypto to billions that annoys the government's spyware programs.

Netflix is the better of the bunch, but they still develop and support DRM (Digital Restrictions Management).

Apple is awful, they have a long and storied history of anti-competitive and anti-consumer behavior. Pay-to-play developer ecosystem, walled gardens of applications, proprietary connectors just for the sake of being proprietary, armies of lawyers finding creative new ways to evade taxes...