yep asking something like thats an instant hard no from me.
WTF with high school questions?
61–70 of 238 posts
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#62Why do recruiters have such trouble with such a simple task like gauging a candidate's real skills? Seriously. Here is how to do it. I'm looking for a React Developer, I ask the following simple questions: 1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in. (if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it) 2. With $givenTechnologyStack, how do you usually solve state managem…
I suspect that you are overconfident and will get fooled by someone who knows the culture well and isn’t so great at coding.
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#63This is dumb. If you don't want to apply, don't. If you think something is no one else's business, don't tell them. But don't cry when they discard your application because they think it IS relevant, because shockingly you don't personally have a monopoly on truth...
Personally, I'm thankful the author made a blog post about this. I can now safely skip Canonical on my next job hunt, so that's time well saved.
Having proven conclusively that no job at this company could possibly be worth the desperately painful application process, we now just need to eliminate 100mil more companies one by one...
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#64A common situation in my country is that quite a few high school math teachers are psychotic sadists -- maybe a few of the hardest-working students will clear the bar for the equivalent of an A or B. Sometimes the students with "the most potential" will have average (or worse) grades because the teacher prepares special, harder exams to push them harder. High school is usually an unrepresentative mess, I'd to love le…
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Re: WTF with high school questions?
#65DE Shaw has a similar set of ridiculous questions on their swe application. If I remember correctly they wanted SAT scores and transcripts for both highschool and university. For someone 10+ years out of school. It was bonkers. I noped out of there before the recruiter could finish their sales-pitch. I never want to work at a place that puts any weight on test scores from decades ago. It's performative gatekeeping.
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#66Related: This was the first step in the interview process at Canonical – I withdrew (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678
Based on the process, Canonical is the choosiest beggar I've bothered to apply to in the tech world.
It was quite obvious to me I would be rejected, as the form is much more focused on "things that look good on paper" rather than "what this person can do", e.g. asking for your GPA.
This presumably reflects the internal culture which leads to a history of user-hostile decisions: snap, Unity, that Amazon fiasco. They probably looked good on paper.
I'm only salty because I think people with atypical profiles like mine could truly make their software better and more adapted to today's FLOSS world. Oh well, guess I'll just keep working on maximizing someone's profits.
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#67Shopify has an initial round with recruiter called "Life Story interview". You basically start from the beginning, talking about your high school experience, what did you like there and what did you study, your childhood hobbies ...
I wouldn't be too upset with that if it was time bounded to 2 minutes within a standard 30 min recruiter call.
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#68This is dumb. If you don't want to apply, don't. If you think something is no one else's business, don't tell them. But don't cry when they discard your application because they think it IS relevant, because shockingly you don't personally have a monopoly on truth...
Canonical makes infrastructure that I (and a significant slice of the world economy) depend on. If they want to significantly bias their application pool to people who are willing to tolerate that question, then I'm a bit concerned that I've invested years and years building on a decaying foundation, and now I have to investigate.
Wait until you find out about the application process for literally every large company you have ever used...
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#69Related: This was the first step in the interview process at Canonical – I withdrew (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678
I wonder if the real test is to get a candidate who will do something like "I took a look at the interview questions and determined that most of them aren't a productive use of time for either of us, here's why. Now, here's a short description of why you should hire me and what I'll bring to the company." Like looking for someone who can cut through the bureaucracy.
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#70Why do recruiters have such trouble with such a simple task like gauging a candidate's real skills? Seriously. Here is how to do it. I'm looking for a React Developer, I ask the following simple questions: 1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in. (if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it) 2. With $givenTechnologyStack, how do you usually solve state managem…
> 1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in. (if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it)
YMMY, but I was once interviewed in this style days after Elon mentioned it's his go-to style of interviewing.
Was easily the worst, most pointless interview of my life.
As with everything, it probably depends on the person. A good interviewer can do almost anything and come away with a good signal. A bad interviewer can do the same thing and come away with noise.
The process is less important, I think.