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The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

jarednelsen.dev

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Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#671

Post by abvdasker »

mLuby wrote: post #308

> 23 interviews and I didn’t get a single offer That's… an unusually consistent signal. Suggests to me that either this person is getting into the wrong interviews (eg junior interviewing for senior role—though they say that's not the case), or more likely there's some hidden variable, like a bad reference, bad BO, really noticeable "culture" misfit, or other "red flag". Regardless, the general points are spot on; it…

You could be right. But given the highly random and variable nature of interviewing, the author could be the 1 in 100 competent engineer who does get rejected 23 times in a row.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#672

Post by erikerikson »

cryptozeus wrote: post #72

“When I was asked to write an image filtration algorithm I spent the first 15 minutes just to understand the question. I ran out of time. ” I have been through few of these, I just assume that there are people out there who can understand and code up the question asked within 15 min. Those are the people this company is looking for. Not you and me.

It's a form of "guess the teacher's answer". I was once observer to a committee that rejected a candidate that came up with a more efficient and correct answer than the interviewer was looking for. I couldn't argue against it because I had recommended the candidate.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#673

Post by ideal0227 »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #668
ideal0227 wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for educating me about BFS. I am major in computer science, and published paper in top conference. Tree traversal is trivial for me. So I guess I have decent CS background and knowledge? Writing bug free and perfect code is not equal to simply solve the problem. If you have prepared coding interviews (especially for new grad and internship), you should understand it is less about knowledge but more about pract…

A published paper in a top conference only happens through political connections in undergrad it is not a marker for your IQ which is what a company like google tests for. The interview is not just about writing bug free code it is 100% about solving a problem you haven't seen before. Google specifically tells their interviewers to avoid "canned" problems that are already all over the internet. >If the interview is k…

> Google specifically tells their interviewers to avoid "canned" problems that are already all over the internet.

They did a pretty poor job on this already. And it adds one more requirements, the ability to pretend that you have never practiced a similar question before :P.

> Leetcode isn't about memorization. Leetcode is training data used to optimize your neural net to solve problems it hasn't seen before.

Oh. Thanks. Glad that Human brain does not need that much data like today's neural net.

And there are millions of ways to improve problem solving than repeating BSF/DFS/DP templates on Leetcode questions.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#674

Post by ozim »

austincheney wrote: post #411
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.

You could have saved a lot of space just saying button pressers . This is most large companies and why I am burnt out on writing software professionally. The reasoning for this is the commoditization of software hiring. The idea is to target the median of the bell curve, to lower risks and costs associated with hiring. This targets the greatest quantity of developers in a moment, but it also means the people who play…

Now connect the dots with: How much customers are willing to pay for software developer work?

They don't want to pay anything. They don't deserve best software written by best developers. Take for example GIT, which is extraordinary piece of software, saves a lot of problems and time. If it was not free, most software shops would just keep copies of folders with dates or whatever insane ways they had (SVN is for me insane way as well :) and big paid VCS were popular at big co's. not even one became close to "industry standard" as GIT).

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#675

Post by crimsonalucard »

ideal0227 wrote: post #673
crimsonalucard wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A published paper in a top conference only happens through political connections in undergrad it is not a marker for your IQ which is what a company like google tests for. The interview is not just about writing bug free code it is 100% about solving a problem you haven't seen before. Google specifically tells their interviewers to avoid "canned" problems that are already all over the internet. >If the interview is k…

> Google specifically tells their interviewers to avoid "canned" problems that are already all over the internet. They did a pretty poor job on this already. And it adds one more requirements, the ability to pretend that you have never practiced a similar question before :P. > Leetcode isn't about memorization. Leetcode is training data used to optimize your neural net to solve problems it hasn't seen before. Oh. Tha…

>They did a pretty poor job on this already. And it adds one more requirements, the ability to pretend that you have never practiced a similar question before :P.

This is solved by throwing multiple interview questions at the person that are all novel and not derived from the internet. The probability of ALL questions being seened before is very low.

>And there are millions of ways to improve problem solving than repeating BSF/DFS/DP templates on Leetcode questions.

So? Doesn't change the effectiveness of leetcode in passing an interview and displaying your ability to learn and solve novel problems. If you have other ways of passing those interviews outside of leetcode, that's great. Use it.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#676

Post by erikerikson »

abvdasker wrote: post #671
mLuby wrote: post #308

> 23 interviews and I didn’t get a single offer That's… an unusually consistent signal. Suggests to me that either this person is getting into the wrong interviews (eg junior interviewing for senior role—though they say that's not the case), or more likely there's some hidden variable, like a bad reference, bad BO, really noticeable "culture" misfit, or other "red flag". Regardless, the general points are spot on; it…

You could be right. But given the highly random and variable nature of interviewing, the author could be the 1 in 100 competent engineer who does get rejected 23 times in a row.

Competent and interviews well can be disjoint sets. I've worked with lots of people from FAANG and helped many of them level up. There are psychological suggestibility and willingness to be slavish to your career heuristics that can silently filter.

These days I ask if they're open to a four day work week as a proxy for their stance towards the data supporting associated productivity and work life balance optimizations. Smart managers exist and this has been an excellent filter mechanism in their interviews for my attention.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#677

Post by runawaybottle »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #371
allovernow wrote: post #11

In my admittedly limited experience, there's one way to avoid such nonsensical interviews - run away from bureaucracy. Seek smaller organizations (startups in particular) and if you're lucky enough to have a minimally cross-disciplinary background, you can seek out niche organizations where you'll interview with technical specialists who'll ask reasonable questions that are actually related to your work and your inte…

What? Startups are the worst at cargo cult interviews, they think they need to copy the big ones when they often don’t.

We live in a copy-cat world, it’s endemic in every facet of our society. Look at the NBA, every team now shoots 3s because it worked well for the Golden State Warriors, even when they don’t have the same type of team where that strategy makes sense.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#678

Post by smueller1234 »

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.

Google's big enough that no one person could possibly speak confidently for all of engineering in this regard.

For what it's worth, this doesn't match my experience at all. In the area I work in (SRE in technical infrastructure, but the same seems to be true for our dev partners), I see a lot of expectation for bottom up ownership. I could totally understand if somebody with a different mindset and perspective (I'm a manager, so I can see pretty clearly what's valued at evaluation time) arrived at a different conclusion.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#679

Post by runawaybottle »

Rury wrote: post #448
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... it's super hard to hire good people, but most of the time it's because "good enough" isn't good enough anymore So much this. When hiring in this field, people seem to expect candidates to know anything and everything software wise, yet reality is software is more complicated than it ever has been. The problem isn't alone to this field however, i…

This will be a bit of a tangent, but I think that level of specialization in the medical field exists because their jobs are mission critical. You can kill someone if you don’t handle your part right. The advent of the fullstack developer as the norm is because most of us are not doing critical things.

Companies need to be honest about the reality of their product. You’re building a straight forward web app most of the time, you know? You might not need that Stanford CS grad. If companies feel the ‘need’ it, it’s just aggrandizement and a very bad trend for this industry.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#680

Post by gambiting »

monoideism wrote: post #450
ampdepolymerase wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds terrible, can you elaborate?

I've read from blog posts and even from conversations that companies require acquihires, particularly non-founder employees, to go through an interview process. It may be shortened, but they still often have to do the typical algorithmic interviews. I'll see if I can find one of the blog posts I've read about the process. Note: to be clear, I'm describing the process for acquihires, not founders just wanting to sell…

Is that a uniquely American thing? I'm 100% certain that even if the company I work for was acquired, my current contract would still apply. So I would need to be given at least 3 months notice, and couldn't be discharged without a good reason - failing some internal interview wouldn't be such a reason.
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