61–70 of 206 posts
I'm coming to the realization that there's almost no point in spending time on a lot of the things that I love about being a developer: learning new languages, studying best practices for your tech stack, reading software engineering books, becoming involved in tech communities, keeping up with the latest trends. Interviewers don't value any of that beyond lip service. The only thing worth spending time on is leetcod…
This was my take on interviewing with Amazon at one point a long while ago. The initial interview itself was pretty straight forward, but it seemed like every answer I gave was "wrong" because the interviewer was looking for key phrases instead of understanding of the concepts. We talked about hashing, and when he asked if I knew what hashing was I said sure, its a one-way function to create a unique identifier. He a…
I don't take crap like this from interviewers. One time an interviewer asked me "how would you go about counting the ridges of a US quarter?" I rattled off some ideas about counting the ridges in an arc and then multiplying to get total ridges but the interviewer kept prodding and eventually ended the question and said he was looking for me to say "google it" (I didn't realize it was a known, fixed number). I just ro…
This was my take on interviewing with Amazon at one point a long while ago. The initial interview itself was pretty straight forward, but it seemed like every answer I gave was "wrong" because the interviewer was looking for key phrases instead of understanding of the concepts. We talked about hashing, and when he asked if I knew what hashing was I said sure, its a one-way function to create a unique identifier. He a…
One thing that shocked me in discussions is that apparently interviewing incoming candidates at FAANGs has now become a mandatory performance review objective.
This is going to produce a lot of interviewers who really don't know what they are doing and don't care.
I don't know what idiot came up with this brain-damaged scheme to totally sabotage interviewing and what moron actually propagated it between companies, but I hope they die a horrible, slow, painful death.
Man. I interviewed somewhere last week for a Scala position, advertising myself as a functional programmer. In the interview, they asked me, "What's the difference between fold left and fold right?" I said "Um, one of them starts on the left side of the data structure, one of them starts on the right. I never remember which is which." They said essentially: "okay. The answer I was looking for was that fold right is n…
I had the strangest technical interview recently. I didn't get an offer, but in every case where that's happened before it's been obvious to me where my deficiencies lie (which I then use to improve in that area). This time I learnt nothing. It was six individual one-to-one interviews, back to back. The first five were an ego trip for me . I was able to do everything perfectly it seems: read code, write code, talk ab…
Same thing, they came back and said no and I really have a hard time imagining why other than the interviewer not being familiar with Rust - but - hey, don't tell me it's fine to use then!
That to say, rejection feedback is almost always useless.
Ego Trip is the right phrase. A lot of the traditional algorithms puzzler interviews amount to the material being covered in an adversarial, closed-book fashion for the interviewee, after the interviewer has themselves gotten to master the material in a "at your leisure" fashion with an open book. I wouldn't mind getting asked nasty questions about red-black trees or Krushkal vs Prim or something if I knew the person…
Well, here's the thing about that, though... somebody does eventually pass these interviews. It may be a tough blow to your own ego to realize that you actually weren't the best candidate out there, or that somebody more qualified than you would be willing to accept a position that you yourself are just qualified enough for, but probing the competence of the candidate is entirely the point of a job interview. This is doubly important for a technical position where a false positive is orders of magnitude more damaging than a false negative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like my Google interview. By the end I had absolutely no interest in working there. Such a toxic environment. The guy they had take me to lunch also seemed completely miserable. Dunno if that was representative of Google or big companies in general but it turned me off forever.
I don't think this is representative. I did about 20+ technical interviews at Google/Facebook over the last 2 years. Overall, the interviewers were competent. Sometimes you could tell that they didn't really enjoy interviewing people but it was ok. I only had one interviewer I'd consider bad (gave confused advice to lead me to his solution), but maybe it was just a personality mismatch. I had better experience with m…
That seems like a huge number of interviews. Are you counting each interviewer as a distinct interview? Even then, that seems like a lot for 2 years!
Man. I interviewed somewhere last week for a Scala position, advertising myself as a functional programmer. In the interview, they asked me, "What's the difference between fold left and fold right?" I said "Um, one of them starts on the left side of the data structure, one of them starts on the right. I never remember which is which." They said essentially: "okay. The answer I was looking for was that fold right is n…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't take crap like this from interviewers. One time an interviewer asked me "how would you go about counting the ridges of a US quarter?" I rattled off some ideas about counting the ridges in an arc and then multiplying to get total ridges but the interviewer kept prodding and eventually ended the question and said he was looking for me to say "google it" (I didn't realize it was a known, fixed number). I just ro…
The tradeoff with this approach, if you fail to build a good rapport with the interviewer, you'll get labeled as not a good culture fit. Calling them out for a dumb question or critiquing the expectation of an 'expected answer' is not going to get you the job.