Interviewing in Silicon Valley • Hacker News Board

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#71

Post by bane » Tue, May 07, 2013, 2:59 PM UTC

dionidium wrote: post #64

tptacek wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good comment. Some nits I'd like to pick: * Companies aren't required to provide a level playing field to applicants. I think you've alluded here to discrimination against protected classes; that is, you're suggesting that someone could get an unnecessarily hard interview and use it as evidence that they were constructively rejected for their race or gender. That could happen, but most companies probably us…

That could happen, but most companies probably use the same terrible interview for everyone but their friends, which, while unethical, is lawful. Wait, why is it unethical? It's frustrating and inconvenient and sucks for everyone but their friends. But, unethical? On what grounds? I don't have an obligation to give strangers the same favors I give my friends, do I?

You have an obligation not to waste people's time, especially if you are putting up the facade that they might actually be in the running. The modern interview process can take weeks or even months to get through. If you're just going to hire your friends, can you give the other candidates those weeks or months of their lives back?

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#72

Post by jwoah12 » Tue, May 07, 2013, 3:08 PM UTC

Kurtz79 wrote: post #49

balloot wrote: post #18

I despise interviewing for software positions. Engineers love to treat interviews like some kind of hazing. They're gonna make you quiver and sweat and if you can still solve their stupid brainteaser maybe they'll give you the honor of working with them. Problem being, this has basically nothing to do with how good you'll be at the job. I spend 0% of a normal day with someone I don't know staring me down and judging…

I actually enjoyed the few times I was asked to do a small project, and I think it's much better way of evaluating someone, if done right. First off it's a sign of commitment from the candidate : as small as the project can be, it will require on his/her part to invest more hours than the one/two of a live technical interview. Second, it's much closer to what your real job will entail : being given a task, committing…

I believe this is exactly how it should be done. I don't think it very likely that someone could cheat on the project and then still be able to speak intelligently about the solution.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#73

Post by dotpavan » Tue, May 07, 2013, 3:09 PM UTC

dionidium wrote: post #64

tptacek wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good comment. Some nits I'd like to pick: * Companies aren't required to provide a level playing field to applicants. I think you've alluded here to discrimination against protected classes; that is, you're suggesting that someone could get an unnecessarily hard interview and use it as evidence that they were constructively rejected for their race or gender. That could happen, but most companies probably us…

That could happen, but most companies probably use the same terrible interview for everyone but their friends, which, while unethical, is lawful. Wait, why is it unethical? It's frustrating and inconvenient and sucks for everyone but their friends. But, unethical? On what grounds? I don't have an obligation to give strangers the same favors I give my friends, do I?

The whole premise of interviewing and opening to the pool of candidates is to evaluate and give every applicant a fair chance after passing a minimum bar. If the whole point was to favor or employ someone (pre-decided or friend), then why this facade?

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#74

Post by jcarpio » Tue, May 07, 2013, 3:17 PM UTC

>>Almost always, communication is done over email with a recruiter, and the average response time is several hours to a day.

How about trying a different method? Instead of emailing a recruiter (or the company), try calling. This is signaling that you're more serious than someone who's just following up with an email (think of the volume of the candidate pool you're in) and distinguishes yourself. Even better, at the end of the interview you could plant the seed for a follow up, like "It's been great meeting you, blah, blah, blah…I'd like to check in with with you next Tuesday (or whatever) at 10am with a brief phone call, as I've got other positions to consider and I know you've got other candidates…"

>>They then emailed me asking if I’d like to stop by their office for a few hours for an on-site interview. I responded after a couple days…

then later the OP says

>>larger companies, such as Facebook, Amazon, or Apple, are very expedient with scheduling and setting things up, and keeping the loop. This is extremely to their advantage.

Time is of the essence, but I understand you might have been busy. Probably not too busy for a quick follow up email to set up the interview. And, if you don't hear back anyway, be tenacious and call them.

>>A friend told me that I should take the strategy of sending email after email until they give me some sort of response. (“Stop sending us damn emails. We don’t want you.”) I’ve not really done this, but I’ve done more than what I think I am responsible for doing…

Responsible for doing? A different way of thinking about it would be to think about being responsible to yourself, not them. You want the job; are you doing everything you can to get this job? See stuff by Ramit Sethi for interview tips.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#75

Post by bane » Tue, May 07, 2013, 3:22 PM UTC

Followup: (I can't edit my old post anymore), it's informative to actually read lots and lots of after-interview writeups where the candidate had an overall negative experience. Consistent problems emerge:

Glassdoor is awesome for this:

Some SV-companies with higher than average negative experience ratings:

http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Zynga-Interview-Questions...

Lots of "after the interview I appeared to have been dropped into a black hole since nobody's told me if I've moved on or not".

http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Palantir-Technologies-Int...

Unbelievably disorganized hiring process by the sounds of it. Numerous, detailed reviews of interviewers simply not showing up, poor communication with the recruiting staff, etc. Weird cult-like experiences. It sounds like a cattle call. I actually couldn't find a company with a higher negative experience score.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/eBay-Interview-Questions-...

Unbelievably poor communication. Amateurish interviews. No follow up from the recruiters, candidates are simply left in limbo.

There's a fair number of obviously bad candidates who were miffed. But there's tons and tons of people who were probably good candidates, but were simply jerked around for weeks on end. In some cases, the company's own internal processes are so broken they couldn't even conduct the interviews correctly.

Some with more positive ratings:

http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Facebook-Interview-Questi...

http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Interview-Question...

http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Amazon-com-Interview-Ques...

http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Microsoft-Interview-Quest...

See the difference in the candidate responses? You're doing something right if people get rejected but say they had a positive interview experience.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#76

Post by danielweber » Tue, May 07, 2013, 3:23 PM UTC

jmaskell wrote: post #29

The urgency to interview, followed by the abrupt halt in communication isn't something that is unique to Silicon Valley or engineering positions. I had it a lot in London a couple of months ago for mostly product jobs. It's incredibly unprofessional / downright rude - especially when so much pressure is put on to get you through the interview process quickly. It also means that I now have a negative opinion of a numb…

'pg says that VC companies never say no to a company.

I think this is just the "shit rolls downhill" version. Companies don't want to ever say no to a candidate. They can always come back to you later.

But, really, if anyone should know how much the "never say no" routine sucks, it's the companies hunting for VC.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#77

Post by spaghetti » Tue, May 07, 2013, 3:27 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #51

I agree with this article that communication with companies is getting absurdly poor. With all these communications channels available, why is it so hard to send a quick email? Don't have time because of too many candidates? Maybe you shouldn't have more candidates than you have time to handle. I've reached a point in my career where I'm not interested in engineering positions anymore (a great motivator has been to a…

I like to partition companies with products that gain traction into two groups. In the first group are technically mediodcre founders who cobbled together a product that's almost unmaintainable. The second group consists of relatively experienced founders who cobbled together a product that's maintainable.

The two groups use distinct interview styles. Since the group with nearly unmaintainable code has many more members than the latter we see their interview style far more often. This is the familiar all-day brain teaser and relentless quizzing interview style. This interview style makes sense for these companies because they need warm bodies to throw at legacy codebases. The quality to seek in employees is perseverance and obedience. And this familiar interview style tests for just that.

The second group of companies uses the more thoughtful interview style. The founders value insight, creativity, and experience more than obedience. Hence their interview style focuses on these qualities.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#78

Post by danielweber » Tue, May 07, 2013, 3:27 PM UTC

throwaway1979 wrote: post #62

I wonder what would happen if perspective job seekers just say that they won't do coding questions in interviews? Moreover, if they insist that interviews can't be longer than 1 hour total, with a maximum of 1 phone screen. Oh .. to top that off, candidates insist they get told their fate within a week or less by email. If only ...

Then they'll find someone who will.

As a candidate, I like coding questions. There are certain jobs where coding questions are usually not worth it ("we need someone to code up this website in PHP"), but I'm not looking for those jobs.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#79

Post by danielweber » Tue, May 07, 2013, 3:31 PM UTC

reikonomusha wrote: post #15

dsowers wrote: post #10

Here's the lesson: Don't play the game. Don't spend all of your time studying coding puzzles to answer questions correctly to people who are unlikely to hire you anyway. It's just a ridiculous waste of an intelligent mind. Spend your time building something interesting that actually helps the world. Build fun and interesting projects with this time. These projects might give you a career or a job that is smart enough…

It might not be advantageous to spend all of one's personal time figuring out coding puzzles, but I wouldn't be ignorant of the fact they will be brought up. Unless you develop an open source project which gets love from thousands of people and becomes very popular, few companies are going to use just that as a basis for hiring you. Unfortunately, this also conflicts with the fact most people do need to make a living…

Yeah, the "be an open source coder to get a job" really doesn't scale. It already feels like I'm in a maze when I look for a tool to solve a certain problem, and have to wade through a bunch of projects that it takes a while to evaluate. The search costs are huge.

You probably aren't making the world any better by adding yet another open source project to it. If we want people to do this to get jobs, we are encouraging them to help drown us.

Re: Interviewing in Silicon Valley

#80

Post by steven2012 » Tue, May 07, 2013, 3:33 PM UTC

I've been interviewing a lot of candidates over the last couple of months and I also despise trivia question interviews. The approach I've been taking is using a FizzBuzz type of question, but a bit more complex. I couldn't believe the number of candidates that have trouble with things like manipulating two arrays, which I feel is a basic level of expectation for a programmer. If I spend all hour on this relatively simple question, they are a "no" from me. About 10% of the interviewers pass this problem quickly enough to warrant the second question I ask. Frankly, I'm shocked at how under-prepared people are for whiteboard questions, regardless of how stupid it is. You would expect that by now, people would know to expect them.

The second question is something that is hard, but I tell them upfront that I don't know the answer to the question, to put them at ease, and that I want to work with them together on the question. I also ask for pseudo-code, I don't care about syntax. I think this usually gives me a lot of insight into how good the candidate is. I had one recent candidate that wasn't a spectacular coder (he had bugs in his code and he couldn't see them until I almost had to point it out to him), but he had this intuitive ability to zero-in on the most efficient algorithm for both questions that I asked. I felt he was good enough to be hired.

However, some other members of the team, while agreeing with my technical assessment, rejected him because of culture fit. He was a bit aloof and kind of weird. Some of the team felt like he might not be pleasant to work with, so they thought it was better to be safe than sorry. So sure, technical chops matter, but so does personality.