The rise of never-ending job interviews

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

laumars wrote: post #345

peakaboo wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so stupid, all of it. They try to come up with random questions that doesn't mean anything if the candidate remembers the answer at that point in time. I've read about Linux inodes. I know what they do. In fact I even have had Linux systems where I get inode related error messages because the partition had too many small files on it. But given that question, in that situation, I would likely not know what they e…

I’ve written a few Linux file systems and I’m not even sure I’d have answered that question correctly. I’ve also failed job interviews where I was told there was no coding expected in the face to face and then got given a piece of paper and asked to solve 3 theoretical problems in SQL on paper while 3 interviewers watched. 10 years prior I’d worked for several years on Oracle middleware so I knew SQL inside and and o…

Post by eloisius » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

laurent92 wrote: post #582

bb88 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's funny is that I specifically remember a conference where some library that a google employee wrote was terrible. The one google developer talking about it, disavowed any responsibility of it. Whatever metrics that google is using in their interviews have probably become worthless in the past decade as people game the system.

In my startup I interviewed a 48 years old senior Java programmer with excellent resume, who took 1hr to write a String.contains(), it only worked for the requested 4 letters, didn’t work if a letter was repeated twice, and didn’t work with Chinese characters. At least it had the JUnit. I asked an employee to do it too and he made his code pass the JUnit in 6 minutes. The candidate hated the interview, claiming it wa…

Post by rubicon33 » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

throwawayboise wrote: post #667

ladberg wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similarly bad Google experience that I've talked about before[0] but will copy here: I was asked to do a task that eventually boiled down to a topological sort, and I thought the question consisted of recognizing that the answer was a topological sort and moving on because it was over the phone. However, that was not the case. The interviewer wanted me to code it all out over Google Docs, but I didn't remembe…

I've never written a sort from scratch since my college days, over 30 years ago. Also never had a job interview that asked me do to so, or any other coding questions. I'm planning more for retirement than a next job at this point, but I shake my head at what my younger colleagues need to go through these days for the opportunity to write JavaScript with IDEs that do most of the work for you.

Post by diogenescynic » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 1:34 PM UTC

Post by ptx » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 1:36 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #344

anchpop wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Apprenticeships solved this problem in the past (and of course created many others). Actually it’s almost a fun little exercise in economics. Basically there’s two types of efficiency, investment efficiency and allocative efficiency. (There may also be other types I don’t know about.) Investment efficiency means people are incentivized to make positive-expected-value investments. Think about how people are incen…

So, in this hypothetical, the sector-wide union is preventing individuals who learn to create an additional $50K/yr in value from realizing the increase in pay which would otherwise accrue to them?