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The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

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Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#631

Post by tom_ »

vander_elst wrote: post #616
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…

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...

But that is exactly why you can't use cut in general for parsing CSVs - the usual CSV syntax includes quoted fields, in which commas don't separate the values. But cut only examines the input charwise:

    % echo 'a,"b,c",d' | cut -f 1-3 -d ","
    a,"b,c"
I don't think there's a good solution to this using standard tools, but I'm sure there are various CSV packages available. (Which I've never used! - I'm just familiar with this problem from seeing people try to work with CSV data in code using exactly the char-by-char approach taken by cut.)

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#632

Post by phkahler »

peterebailey wrote: post #201
phkahler wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

Gathering and defining requirements is very much a part of the job. It is entirely unsustainable to rely on others to tell you what to implement in Google.

>> Gathering and defining requirements is very much a part of the job. It is entirely unsustainable to rely on others to tell you what to implement in Google.

It's like that everywhere. Nobody comes to you with complete requirements. People/customers come with problems they need solved. Sometimes an outline of a specific solution is specified, but there's always a lot of detail missing.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#633

Post by arp242 »

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 "…

Just because some companies think they need to pay that much doesn't actually make it the case.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#634

Post by Carpetsmoker »

rtikulit wrote: post #609
glofish wrote: post #45

In my personal experience, having interviewed dozens of candidates (data science), I believe that asking "easy" and "simple" questions is the most effective way to probe the problem-solving skills of a candidate. Fun and interesting solutions to easy questions are hallmarks of great individuals. The question would go like this: Suppose I have a column-oriented file and I want to print out a column in a reverse-sorted…

Around 1990 I had to do some interviewing and I used this kind of intentionally underspecified simple problem to weed people out. (It seemed radical at the time.) Did they realize the problem was underspecified? Did they try to elicit the underlying “why”? Did they collaborate with me to complete the spec? Were they able to restate the spec coherently? Could they articulate a workable implementation in some technolog…

Different people are good at different stuff. In my experience the best teams are those with a diverging skill set: Alice may be really good at asking these kind of "why" questions, whereas Bob is really good at quickly implementing things from a spec, and Chris may be very good at databases, etc.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#635

Post by jvanderbot »

jophde wrote: post #459
jvanderbot wrote: post #12

I think this person was not rejected for their coding. They were passed over for an MS or PhD with similar skills. It is necessary to do well on coding interviews, but not sufficient. optimizing for coding interviews is the wrong approach.

Wrong crushing the code interview is all that really matters.

Well, maybe I've had different experiences.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#636

Post by [deleted] »

TwoBit wrote: post #515
monoideism wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and I explained to the interviewer who was two years out of college Yeah, that one's easy. Young coder sees a competent, experienced dev and tries to sabotage your interview out of fear you'll show up and make a fool of him. It's possible he was just that arrogant, but it sounds suspicious. Based on my experience, devs who are 2 years out of college, regardless of how well they understand algos and data structures,…

Naw, I just shadowed a new young interviewer and he asked a similar question that was unreasonable. As a recent grad he legitimately didn't recognize that the interviewee wouldn't necessarily know this one specific thing. We discussed it and he's going to try again next time with a more reasonable question.

[deleted]

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#637

Post by arp242 »

heartbeats wrote: post #181
gonehome wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Europe (and the UK) undervalue software engineers. At least in the UK this seems like a cultural thing where management is high status/high value and engineers are low status/low value. I think the US generally gets this right (at least in silicon valley), but it could partly be because the US has some extremely valuable software companies that operate on a global stage that aren't really present elsewhere. R…

There's only really one place that can have these big tech companies, and that is the US. What technology companies of note do the UK have? It's just stupid nonsense like "writing spreadsheets for the local government" and minor web development. In tech, it really is US vs. ROW

You mean the kind of big companies that repeatedly break the law, engage in unethical behaviour, and put growth above all else? Yeah. Only the US has those. Congratulations.

Plenty of tech companies in Europe either way; you just don't know about them. Do you think Europe is some poor underdeveloped continent with uneducated people who can only "write spreadsheets?" What a patronizing comment.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#638

Post by thedance »

ajross wrote: post #477
thedance wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it up to the interviewer to ask a useful question? This is exactly how I would find the kth item of a search tree. I don’t feel like that is refusal to engage. Is the question is more like “describe various approaches to the designs of search trees and their iterators, and discuss the time/space complexity of a few examples” then that’s a different question.

But... demonstrating the ability to write subtle code is a useful question. "Describing" or "discussing" algorithms isn't the same thing at all. I mean, I can't speak to the thinking of the original interviewer, but this is what I'm looking for with that sort of question. And I don't see how a binary tree is a bad choice. Again, it's something that everyone sees in school, so it doesn't require a ton of description i…

I really can’t more strenuously disagree. At Giant Search writing “subtle” code is very strongly discouraged. The very last thing I want is candidates with a penchant toward subtlety.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#639

Post by eropple »

probably_wrong wrote: post #535
bradlys wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like small companies. You work harder and have a lot more impact. The compensation is good too. Leave. The grass is greener. What small company is regularly paying over $300k+/yr for senior software engineers and paying over $500k/yr for staff+? The only people I see leaving the big companies are those who already got their riches and/or bought real estate earlier. The rest of us are either tied to them or trying…

> the real estate market dictates you must earn that income to stick around the bay. Well, there's your problem right there. There are plenty of smaller tech hubs around the world.

Many of them don't feel particularly smaller, either. I've had literally no desire to move to San Francisco; senior+ jobs here in Boston pay more than enough to comfortably pay a mortgage somewhere nice.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#640

Post by 99_00 »

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…

So everyone got what they wanted?

You did the project you wanted.

AWS and Google got the code they wanted.

Your friends for the jobs they wanted.

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