Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

jarednelsen.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

611–620 of 851 posts

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#611

Post by busterarm »

_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 remember once interviewing for a startup my friend was working at because I wanted to work with said friend. It was mainly a PHP/Laravel job, but I didn't care. I had a high opinion of said friend and stacks are just tools to me -- you can do good work in just about anything.

Go in for the in-person interview which goes extremely well, but talking to their two most senior engineers it seemed like they had just recently learned what OOP is and "drunk the Kool Aid". I found this extremely odd given that this was well into the 2010s already.

They gave me a take-home exercise which was basically to implement some feature with Laravel using established best practices. I turn in something that's clean, documented, with tests, using the documented best practices (like literally from the Laravel docs), and extremely performant (would scale to a high volume of requests). Functional style though, broken out into 1-3 line functions that only do one thing -- similar to what you'd expect from a Rubyist.

Rejected and they told my friend that I don't know how to code. My friend knew better and got a new job himself a month later and I went on to much better things.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#612

Post by jwmoz »

I have no desire to work at those kind of companies nor do I expect I would pass their tests.

I've had a successful and well paid career as a contractor in London and highly advise others to check the scene out.

Some of the best contracts I worked on were just casual interviews, I didn't even write any code.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#613

Post by Ill_ban_myself »

blueboo wrote: post #565
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…

Two questions. How long do you think it would’ve taken you to prepare and ace these kinds of coding interview questions? (I bet less than 100 hours.) But I’m more interested in the following: what interview process do you think would have correctly (and reliably) evaluated someone with your profile?

A company that cannot come up with a better more interesting process isn’t somewhere I want to work.

How about making the questions broad enough for every candidate to have some input and evaluate them on what they choose to focus on? Something like, “How would you design an ATM?”

There should never be a right answer to an interview question, just a candidate that solves problems in a way that fills a gap in your company.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#614

Post by ddalex »

phkahler wrote: post #191
paxys wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah! Reminds me of https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 . Cynical answer though — Google does not want people like you. They don't want to hire entrepreneurs or inventors. They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.

>> They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for. Somehow I doubt that. Can anyone who actually works at google comment on what it's like? Do people come to you with specific requirement and expect you to crank out code like the interview problems? I've never worked somewhere where the software folks were actually just coding machines.

Working at Google. My opinion is my own, etc etc

What you get told is What needs to be accomplished, but not How, if that makes sense.

E.G. IF you choose to accept this challenge, this platform is running at XX% availability and we need to run it at YY% availability. HOW you get to do that, it's up to you.

Some folks don't accept these challenges and they go and find and fix their own interesting problems. But that's harder because you have to get buy-in from managers in order to get resources for that.

There is space and need for everyone.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#615

Post by crimsonalucard »

kortilla wrote: post #228
kohtatsu wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False; Google wants everyone like them to keep them away from the competition. Edit: it's unfair to single Google out. It's unfortunately the correct game theory and impossible to regulate.

That’s a lie they tell employees to make them feel good about themselves. If they actually cared about keeping competent engineers away from competitors, their interview process would be tuned to look for engineering skills, not leetcode.

Straight from the horses mouth I once asked Gayle Lackman on quora: does their exist engineers who no matter how hard they study can NEVER make it through the google interview process? She said yes.

She said that this is because Google optimizes their interviews for IQ. Not just raw knowledge.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#616

Post by vander_elst »

glofish wrote: post #202
mattmanser wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A column orientated file? What format? Excel? CSV? What is cut, sort or head? Are you only accepting Linux candidates then, a tiny percentage of users? This sort of utter nonsense question, heavily loaded to your "standard" experience, which is anything but, is even worse than the questions cited in the article. All you're doing is filtering for people who are in your tribe, who followed the same path as you and thin…

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…

Come on man ` cut -d "," ` I like the question and how you think about the rabbit hole, but you need to sharpen your knife A LOT before being able to ask such questions, you need to be prepared for all the kinds of answers, which might be right even if you don't have a clue about what the candidate is talking about...

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#617

Post by sigotirandolas »

It's funny that the other day I was reading about the door policies of some top-tier Berlin nightclubs and it seems that the underlying processes are similar. The bouncers there do a "door interview" designed to not only filter likely bottom of the barrel (too drunk/high, tourists) but you also need to know arbitrary and often unwritten codes (e.g. the name of the event, line-up, dress code, physical appearance) which is a proxy for showing you've put in some amount of effort and "know the rules". It doesn't seem to help much to possess the real values they desire (actually not causing problems once inside, actually enjoying the music, actually contributing to the party's atmosphere) because they simply can't screen those quickly enough.

In both cases this seems to be the market solution to the problem of having limited capacity, high demand, necessarily short interviewing/screening processes, high cost for admitting sub-par candidates but low reward for admitting good candidates. And in both cases it seems most dislike the process for being ripe for arbitrariness and routinely turning away good candidates and "there ought to be a better way" but the process seems to have evolved naturally and doesn't seem to go away despite there apparently being no major barrier for using a better process should it exist.

Just a random though.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#618

Post by ptr »

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.

Me too, I thought a “column oriented” file was a file where the data for column #1 comes before #2; ie, structure of arrays rather than array of structures. “cut” doesn’t work with that afaik. I’m not sure I’d ask for clarification here (as to me, this is what “column oriented” means), and probably fail the interview.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#619

Post by z3t4 »

whack wrote: post #301
LordFast wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience as both a 50+ hiring manager and as a candidate tells me that we are collectively living in an illusion of whacked up expectations. Yes, it's super hard to hire good people, but most of the time it's because "good enough" isn't good enough anymore, and while we may think our company is a 9 and we deserve 9s, we are probably more of a 4 based on what people are actually working on. Yes, interviews suck,…

> we are collectively living in an illusion of whacked up expectations. Yes, it's super hard to hire good people, but most of the time it's because "good enough" isn't good enough anymore, and while we may think our company is a 9 and we deserve 9s, we are probably more of a 4 based on what people are actually working on. You're essentially implying that companies like FAANG can get by just fine, even if they hired "…

If you could choose between solving hunger, curing cancer, colonizing other planets, or working for a rent seeking ad buisness, the latter would have to pay a lot more for you to work there.
Post reply on HN