The rise of never-ending job interviews

- It's unclear what they're trying to judge. Do they want to know if someone understands filesystems on an intimate level? Do they want to know if someone knows how hardlinks work? Do they want to know if someone knows what fstat returns? Are they trying to trick someone since an inode in many contexts is just a number? This is an unnecessary level of uncertainty for a question and encourages random tangents which may not be the answer the interviewer is looking for or cares about.

- Someone who has studied google's standard questions which this apparently may be one of [1] would be able to answer this without understanding the implications, what does that tell you about the candidate?

- If you want the candidate to go into a tangent about filesystems in order to figure out how well they understand them, this is as mentioned before a really stupidly open ended question.

- If someone did understand you were talking about inodes, they may be of the opinion that the inode contains a reference to the file's contents and as such contains the file contents. In the case of a directory this means that an inode "contains" the file names of files in that directory. This makes the question a leading question which is trying to lead to what would be a wrong answer from that person's point of view. How do you answer a leading question when you disagree with what it's trying to lead you to?

If you want to determine if someone understands filesystems on an intimate level. I think my question would be far better at elucidating that.

If you want to understand if someone knows how hardlinks work, I can't come up with a question off the top of my head but I doubt that "what is not in an inode" is anywhere close to the best one.

If you want to trick someone, go ahead, this is a good question. Likewise if you want to screen for people who have googled "Google SRE Interview Questions" and memorised the answers.

[1] http://www.gwan.com/blog/20160405.html ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701272 )

Regarding the above reference:

I've spoken to someone who interviewed for an SRE position and she said the questions were very similar to an early phone interview she had. She said the interviewer did not know what they were talking about and were just going off an answer sheet. So I don't think the interview in this case is representative of one for a Director of Engineering but is representative of an early screening interview for SRE. In which case anything BUT the expected answer to the question "What is not in an inode" would be considered incorrect.

But a clever candidate assesses "is this a good employer?". Even during the hiring process.

Whilst it was dragging, I do feel they were both adequate processes for me to learn about the companies and the role, and for them to get to know me and my fit for the team. I ended up learning quite a lot about myself, too, and got useful feedback out of the process.

It also was during the pandemic where organisations where finding their feet with remote hiring; I reckon in a pre-pandemic session, they would've been compressed into sessions together.

The scheduling, and comms about it weren't always amazing, but that's down to the recruiters rather than the hiring team, imho.

Once a req is approved then it goes out to the team to disperse as well as hr. Some roles get handed off to the critical search team if the hiring manager pushes hard enough. But that doesn’t really matter.

We get flooded with candidates. Almost every one of them could probably do the job so we have to figure out who could do it best through the interview process. I personally never ask stupid gotcha puzzle questions because those annoy me as much as they do most folks here. I ask people to talk about their experience as it relates to the role. Usually this means I ask about how they solved a truly difficult problem at work, what made it difficult and how they were able to overcome it. Then I like to get into the technical stuff of what they implemented and why. Mostly I just like letting people who are proud of something they’ve done get a chance to talk about it.

Anyway we’re supposed to score people based on these arbitrary metrics like longevity (how long we think they will stay) and communication ability (this is very, very close to being racist…draw your own conclusions).

I never score people. Managers ask me why and I say because I don’t interview spreadsheets.

Anyway I’m one of usually 4 interviews. I interview by myself and the rest are all panel interviews. And once you finish the last panel that’s the last you hear from us unless you get an offer. I hate it.