621–630 of 969 posts
I think he took his website offline. You can see read cached version here, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:53TICuY...
In case you missed it: G-Wan is a software he is selling, which supposedly is twice or fourt times faster than everything, including nginx and varnish cache.
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> At what point do we start taking reports like these seriously My guess is when the number of applications per position actually drops far enough that the false negative rate starts to hurt. Until then, an interview processed optimized for avoiding false positives at all costs will persist. Totally makes sense for a company worth hundreds of billions though, can you imagine if they had a few more bad hires sneak in?…
In my (albeit anecdotal) experience, incompetence is the norm rather than an outlier in BigCo SV land. Frankly, if you are more qualified for a position, chances are you will be rejected because your interviewers will fear for their own job security. I've always found that type of logic strange, though. Wouldn't you want someone who was better than you currently are on your team? Wouldn't you be able to learn from th…
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Well, general interviewing (unrelated to tech) contains various amounts of "are you lying on your resume" type questions. If someone walks in with a breakdown of 10 years dev, 5 years management, they should be able to at least comfortably answer system/coding type questions. As in, if you do something every day for 10 years, you don't forget all of it in 5. I had a candidate in a few months ago that was interviewing…
My kick-out questions: "Could you write out what an HTTP request and response looks like on the board?" I'm really surprised at how many people can't do this. If you've spent five years developing web, surely you've had to look at raw requests, either debugging using netcat or with wireshark or just looking at the information in the Chrome/Firefox debugger? "What's the difference between a GET and a POST request?" "W…
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How can you not know what MVC stands for? It's pretty much a buzzword!
Not all programming/engineering circles use the same buzzwords. For five years my mobile development groups used the concept without the acronym.
Hell, someone could be able to define MVC and explain how you would use it, but have no idea how to actually implement something using it for a given programming language.
I'm not going to go into specifics (I like my job and want to keep it), but the versions of these questions quoted in the blog, especially where the questions seem stupid and wrong, are not on accurate representation of actual SRE prescreen questions. It's possible that the recruiter somehow garbled them, or perhaps the blog's author is misremembering them after a stressful and frustrating conversation. But if you re…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, general interviewing (unrelated to tech) contains various amounts of "are you lying on your resume" type questions. If someone walks in with a breakdown of 10 years dev, 5 years management, they should be able to at least comfortably answer system/coding type questions. As in, if you do something every day for 10 years, you don't forget all of it in 5. I had a candidate in a few months ago that was interviewing…
My kick-out questions: "Could you write out what an HTTP request and response looks like on the board?" I'm really surprised at how many people can't do this. If you've spent five years developing web, surely you've had to look at raw requests, either debugging using netcat or with wireshark or just looking at the information in the Chrome/Firefox debugger? "What's the difference between a GET and a POST request?" "W…
I'm reminded of a story about Einstein in the 1930s. The fad at the time was to have a "skills test" which was supposed to place you perfectly according to your results. Einstein took the test, and did terribly . Everyone was shocked, and asked him what was going on. His response was "The questions tested memorization. Why would I remember what the capital of North Dakota is? I can look that up in a book!" Perhaps un…
The problem with simple "skills tests" is they lack depth, and of necessity due to time, always will. The problem with performance tests is the opposite: they may take too long to reach a conclusion in human terms, during which time significant money is lost.
Recruiters seem like a great candidate for replacement by AI. [edit: and I should add, most middle managers too]
I assume they have a massive list of questions (for various positions and have a minimum cut off - 7/10 I'm assuming as a few of my friends who got 6/10 and were not moved forward) and are asked to all applicants without consideration of experience/skill/previous work as well explained by Max Howell[0]).
[0] https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
I'm not going to go into specifics (I like my job and want to keep it), but the versions of these questions quoted in the blog, especially where the questions seem stupid and wrong, are not on accurate representation of actual SRE prescreen questions. It's possible that the recruiter somehow garbled them, or perhaps the blog's author is misremembering them after a stressful and frustrating conversation. But if you re…
Well I had the first call with a recruiter this Monday about a Google SRE-TPM role, and I got the exact same questions – granted, presented as a warm up.
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> "The problem with Google's interview methods is that they all select for a very specific type of programmer: heavily math oriented, deep knowledge of obscure Computer Science theory" I'd be marginally okay with it if the interviews actually selected for this sort of engineer! I've seen multiple people who fit this description to a T who flunked the process, hard. If the goal here is "pick the hyper-mathy, deep-CS t…
Off-topic pet peeve but why is "OK" now apparently spelled "okay" these days? (especially in bandwidth-limited situations such as SMS or IM). OK is not short for "Okay", OK?