Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry • Hacker News Board

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#611

Post by hunterloftis » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 5:16 AM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #606

pklausler wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring does need to avoid hiring idiots, but I've found that it's more effective to ask easy questions. Seriously. People who can't program a digital computer have just as much trouble, and there's less opportunity to fake it. Easy questions produce better signals.

I was asked once during an interview to describe a specific problem that I enjoyed solving. And I was told to go in as much depth as I could during the timeslot. I thought that was a great question. It got me talking about something I cared about, knew very well, and showed my normal thought process and development process outside of an interview. It also gave the interviewer plenty of things to ask about, to "quiz"…

I've been asked a similar question which would have been perfect for this author.

I had recently published a (terrible, but also terribly fun to write) JavaScript physics engine, which the interviewer saw on GitHub. He began with, "how does it work?" and then continued with probing questions, getting deeper and deeper into the various problems I solved while developing the library, especially focusing on tradeoffs between various choices.

By opening the discussion on "my turf," he put me at ease in the conversation, but by driving the interview with very technical questions, he also got the answers he needed about my technical ability.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#612

Post by aagha » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 5:17 AM UTC

dclowd9901 wrote: post #542

sagichmal wrote: post #11

Hiring isn't broken, dude. You just don't interview well, and you seem antagonistic even to the idea that your cachet and skills, insofar as they exist, aren't useful to the market. That's a problem -- for you. Interviews exist because employers need a way to quantify and qualify your ability. Typical computer science problems are a (flawed, but concrete) way of doing that. No reasonable interviewer expects you to re…

"But they do expect you to be able to reason from a problem statement to something approximating a solution." In under 45 minutes? Are you really concerned with their ability to even naively solve an algorithmic problem in that time frame? I would think not. No, this is not only flawed, but it's so deeply flawed (and easily exploitable), that you're not even interviewing for skill set anymore, simply either 1) someon…

My friend recently got a job at a fund when her now boss asked her, "what are some of the more recent innovations in the Haswell chip set that might be advantageous to a fund". She had literally just read an article about this--out of pure coincidence--the day before, and she was able to recall it when the question was asked.

She was offered the job on the spot.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#613

Post by fullshark » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 5:26 AM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #604

fullshark wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not an either/or situation. Hiring could improve obviously but the current process of generic white board problems is effective if imperfect. It's just really hard to decipher one's ability when everyone puts technical experience on their resume because they took an online class or read a book on some thing once.

But don't many thousands of lines of code for personal and professional projects written over many years count for anything?

1. It gets your foot in the door and gets you an interview.

2. It likely gives you valuable experience to answer white board questions.

I don't think it's a perfect process but it weeds out fakers/resume padders. Also a lot of companies arent looking for specialists but want broad skills to handle a variety of problems cause the problems 5 years from now could be very different for the company.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#614

Post by hunterloftis » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 5:32 AM UTC

educar wrote: post #425

tptacek wrote: post #379

I'm torn. On the one hand: the interview processes this post describes are hilariously broken. Stand up at a whiteboard and implement breadth-first search from memory! You know, like no programmer at their desk staring at their editor ever does. I think "that's the one where you use a queue, right?" is a fully valid and complete answer to that dumb question. I also think you're within your rights to demand that your…

Maybe your idea of a front end developer differs from mine. I don't agree that front end developers need to code BFS. They just need to know that graphs can be searched, that should be it. Frontend devs can do many tasks that systems engineers (who can supposedly whip out algorithms in their sleep) cannot do: - Make pages render properly in all popular browsers - Make responsive UIs - Align text of variable length in…

> All this has nothing to do with said algos. I really think that people who don't understand this should not be interviewing frontend engineers.

React, Angular, Ember, etc, are all basically just giant tree diffing algorithms. The DOM is a tree. Understanding how to manipulate trees is important. Memorizing algorithms, less so, but it's absurd to suggest that front-end developers should get a pass on being able to code generalized solutions to problems.

More and more, "front end" is coming to mean "the whole application," and the difficulty is moving away from the gritty individual DOM manipulations and into writing structured algorithms to process large sets of application data and wrangle state, which you then throw into your deterministic renderer of choice.

It sounds like when you say "front end developer," you might really mean, "person who is comfortable with HTML and CSS." In that case, sure, that has nothing to do with algorithms, but that person is also not a software developer.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#615

Post by aagha » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 5:34 AM UTC

sagichmal wrote: post #11

Hiring isn't broken, dude. You just don't interview well, and you seem antagonistic even to the idea that your cachet and skills, insofar as they exist, aren't useful to the market. That's a problem -- for you. Interviews exist because employers need a way to quantify and qualify your ability. Typical computer science problems are a (flawed, but concrete) way of doing that. No reasonable interviewer expects you to re…

Are you frickin' kidding me?

If you think that AT LEAST one part of the hiring "process" isn't broken, you're living in lala land.

Lets just pick one: recruiters. You're telling me that every single tech recruiter you've come across is excellent at what they do, an amazing and decent human being and has amazing communication skills?!

(Generally/Most of the time) Recruiters don't--and yes, they should--care about candidates. They're interested in pocketing their cut of the candidates salary, so as soon as the company says they're not interested in the candidate, the recruiter is done. Most people don't get call-backs even informing them that they're out of the running, much less a reason as to why they weren't deemed qualified.

Recruiters--especially tech recruiters are NOTORIOUS for being bottom-dwelling scum. I actually know a few good recruiters, but they are--by far--in the minority.

The fact that you don't recognize this indicates that you've either had extraordinary/atypical results, or aren't very familiar with the "process". Dude.

Edit: spelling, puncturation

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#616

Post by sarchila » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 5:55 AM UTC

ljw1001 wrote: post #578

sagichmal wrote: post #11

Hiring isn't broken, dude. You just don't interview well, and you seem antagonistic even to the idea that your cachet and skills, insofar as they exist, aren't useful to the market. That's a problem -- for you. Interviews exist because employers need a way to quantify and qualify your ability. Typical computer science problems are a (flawed, but concrete) way of doing that. No reasonable interviewer expects you to re…

Hiring is broken if it weeds out people who don't interview well, rather than people who don't code well.

It's also broken if it simply selects for people who can only code well - with little-to-no insight into how well they collaborate and work with a team.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#617

Post by _9vpl » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 5:55 AM UTC

brazzledazzle wrote: post #509

maxsilver wrote: post #272

What frustrates me about this is not even these questions, specifically, but which companies seem to use them. If Google wants to ask crazy algorithm questions, that's at least sort-of reasonable. There's at least a hypothetical chance your work will involve that knowledge. But I've interviewed at companies who's entire tech stack is a simple CRUD web app, or a simple RESTful mobile app, who's so-called "big data" is…

I've learned that a lot of people need to lie to themselves sometimes to feel confident. If everyone was honest with themselves about how utterly average and relatively unimportant they are they'd probably be much less productive. And in case someone feels I'm looking down my nose, I consider myself positively average. A tiny part of me hopes/wishes that I'm not, but the rest knows better.

Much of the advice around startups is actually centered around the idea of "fooling yourself" or "faking it 'til you make it" or other strategies of positive thinking. Working on a startup is a rollercoaster of emotions and using these strategies can be helpful. Real wisdom may be found in knowing when to fool (lie to) yourself and when not to.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#618

Post by hunterloftis » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 6:04 AM UTC

stegosaurus wrote: post #4

Is it even just hiring? Every employer I've worked for has made the experience farcical. If not at the start, then over time. You interview for one job, and eventually end up doing something else. A full time career that doesn't pay enough to buy a home. And they say software developers are overpaid. I think the end-game for me is to just go camping with a laptop or something. I'll code for fun, rather than trying to…

> A full time career that doesn't pay enough to buy a home. And they say software developers are overpaid.

The average salary for a "software developer" job posting in my city (Charlotte, NC) is $101k. The average income in Charlotte is $53k. The median home value is $167k. 60% of the value of a home in a year is pretty good.

I've also lived in Sydney, Mannheim, San Francisco, and Seattle, and I noticed similar economics in each of these places (where the salary of software developers tended to be quite high relative to the average income). Do you perhaps live somewhere with a very different trend?

Sources:

- http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=software+developer&l1=charlo...

- http://www.bestplaces.net/economy/city/north_carolina/charlo...

- http://www.zillow.com/charlotte-nc/home-values/

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#619

Post by bayonetz » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 6:25 AM UTC

hunterloftis wrote: post #611

Klathmon wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was asked once during an interview to describe a specific problem that I enjoyed solving. And I was told to go in as much depth as I could during the timeslot. I thought that was a great question. It got me talking about something I cared about, knew very well, and showed my normal thought process and development process outside of an interview. It also gave the interviewer plenty of things to ask about, to "quiz"…

I've been asked a similar question which would have been perfect for this author. I had recently published a (terrible, but also terribly fun to write) JavaScript physics engine, which the interviewer saw on GitHub. He began with, "how does it work?" and then continued with probing questions, getting deeper and deeper into the various problems I solved while developing the library, especially focusing on tradeoffs be…

This is a great approach. I do this with candidates I interview. I ask for a sample they are proud of and then I just probe away. Has worked very well.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#620

Post by bogomipz » Thu, Apr 28, 2016, 7:23 AM UTC

dryajov wrote: post #335

Honestly, I believe the industry is cannibalizing it self, and this sort of practices is pushing out more and more creative and capable people. When I have to make a choice of whether to practice my algorithms or work on my open source project, is when things are going to start blowing up. This industry is built by people with passion and dedication, some of the most powerful and defining projects were built by indiv…

Good points. I know how I want to spend my time - working on something creative not "training up" for a potential interview. Companies only started doing the "throw the CLRS book at them" style interviews when they found out that was Google was doing. I'm sure Google has their own reasons for that. However why would a smallish start up want to emulate what works for a company that has 65K employees? This whole training up for Google/FB/MS/AWS style interviews has actually given rise to a cottage industry that has sprouted up around helping you train - "Cracking the Coding interview"/Hacker Rank etc. I would rather hire someone that:

A) Has good experience

B) Has the ability to reason about problem domains even if they can't scribble out a perfect implementation with all edge cases considered on a white board in under 30 minutes.

C) Has good interpersonal skills.