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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

#701

Post by blub »

busterarm wrote: post #611
_bxg1 wrote: post #279

A few months ago I interviewed with Major CDN Company for a front-end dev position. They sent me a take-home React/NextJS project stub with dependencies and such already defined, and instructions to finish building out the full app. "Perfect!", I thought. No stage pressure, plenty of opportunities for going an extra mile. They encouraged me to get creative and I did; it met all the requirements and then some. I proud…

I remember once interviewing for a startup my friend was working at because I wanted to work with said friend. It was mainly a PHP/Laravel job, but I didn't care. I had a high opinion of said friend and stacks are just tools to me -- you can do good work in just about anything. Go in for the in-person interview which goes extremely well, but talking to their two most senior engineers it seemed like they had just rece…

" Functional style though, broken out into 1-3 line functions that only do one thing -- similar to what you'd expect from a Rubyist."

I'm pretty laid back generally and I'm willing to overlook many things, but I think this is one of those where I'd vote against hiring, since I'd never want to maintain such code. Following the logic of algorithms would be for instance really hard because of having to jump around all the time.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#702

Post by shaan1 »

paxys wrote: post #115
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…

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.

Makes perfect sense. Thats when you know you need to short the stock in the LONG RUN. Because all they know is taking orders from someone and running it. This is the same with all companies. If Mark Zuckerberg steps down from Facebook, you can pretty much know, it's going to go down.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#703

Post by Redoubts »

blueboo wrote: post #565
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…

Two questions. How long do you think it would’ve taken you to prepare and ace these kinds of coding interview questions? (I bet less than 100 hours.) But I’m more interested in the following: what interview process do you think would have correctly (and reliably) evaluated someone with your profile?

Personally I appreciate the questions that are

1) open ended design questions 2) here's some broken code, fix everything 3) probe depth of understanding of tools/language

I always feel the Algo whiteboard questions feel like a "did you take the same DS class I did" round.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#704

Post by BubRoss »

mattrp wrote: post #485
outworlder wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely did you a favor. You have demonstrated solid debugging skills and stated your case. That's usually harder to find than someone who can churn out code based on simple and well-defined specs. Because that's the easy part.

They probably assumed someone else did the debugging. People assume the worst in these situations because they haven’t bothered to learn about the person.

Why would they assume that?

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#705

Post by blub »

scottlocklin wrote: post #653
Aeolun wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure if I should be horrified or not. Both by the fact this happens, and by the fact that you seem proud of it. Learning sort and cut takes literally takes all of 10 minutes, so if it makes you pass over an otherwise qualified candidate you have your priorities completely backwards.

Feel free to be horrified: a data scientist who doesn't understand where and why to use unix command line tools for data preparation and ETL is about as useful to me as one who doesn't understand the conditions where a t-test breaks down or what a ROC curve is. Generally speaking, people like this have never actually dealt with large data sets, never dealt with issues involved with installing "unapproved software" on…

I think that the people not being impressed by cut and sort are approaching this from the Linux end of things, where those tools are nothing special at all. I guess we kind of expected that the data science wizards would be using fancier tools.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#706

Post by blub »

glofish wrote: post #299
overgard wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the need to nitpick your example. > does the candidate want to code it up or understands that they could do: cut | sort| head Piping together commands is undoubtedly programming, just in ancient shell script. So in a sense you're really testing for bash expertise. Which is maybe really relevant to you but I wouldn't say you're really "avoiding" coding by knowing to use those commands together, you just decided…

sqlite answer - excellent, that is exactly what I am looking for, things people did, potential solutions let me understand the candidate's real background - not the buzzwords what is not well received is the judgmental tone, passing judgment about me for things you cannot possibly know, no need for that either, simple questions also irritate some, very important to weed those people out too, I expect you would fail t…

I do believe overgard was just making a point and not expecting a job offer from you. I find these "I'd never hire you" comments so obnoxious... At least you could tell us where you work and your name so we could ask for another interviewer if we ever apply there :-)

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#707

Post by fishmaster »

blub wrote: post #701
busterarm wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember once interviewing for a startup my friend was working at because I wanted to work with said friend. It was mainly a PHP/Laravel job, but I didn't care. I had a high opinion of said friend and stacks are just tools to me -- you can do good work in just about anything. Go in for the in-person interview which goes extremely well, but talking to their two most senior engineers it seemed like they had just rece…

" Functional style though, broken out into 1-3 line functions that only do one thing -- similar to what you'd expect from a Rubyist." I'm pretty laid back generally and I'm willing to overlook many things, but I think this is one of those where I'd vote against hiring, since I'd never want to maintain such code. Following the logic of algorithms would be for instance really hard because of having to jump around all t…

I, too, would rather maintain spaghetti code contained in thousands of huge classes all over the code base.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#708

Post by blub »

thrav wrote: post #628
sigotirandolas wrote: post #617

It's funny that the other day I was reading about the door policies of some top-tier Berlin nightclubs and it seems that the underlying processes are similar. The bouncers there do a "door interview" designed to not only filter likely bottom of the barrel (too drunk/high, tourists) but you also need to know arbitrary and often unwritten codes (e.g. the name of the event, line-up, dress code, physical appearance) whic…

I’ve been to that club. The internet descriptions are overblown. When I got all up in my head and attempted to follow all of the advice, I got turned away. I felt like I was wearing a costume and trying to be someone I wasn’t, and that was probably obvious to them. When I went back years later and just went as myself, my wife and I were immediately welcomed in without much questioning. For those wondering, this is no…

If you didn't have female company the first time around, it's very likely that this tipped the balance on your second visit. Clubs are notorious for this.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#709

Post by jonex »

vecter wrote: post #505
ticmasta wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless your job is coding novel algorithm implementations under strict deadlines without a computer, how does answering this question in a job interview prove or disprove your efficacy in the actual position? It only proves you're good at interviewing, which, if you think about it, is not a desirable skill in your new hire 6-12 months down the road.

I see it as an IQ test. Official IQ tests are illegal for hiring of course. So they use algorithms instead. Not justifying it, but that’s the only logical answer I can think of.

Had to look this up, since I hadn't heard of IQ tests being illegal. It seems to me that a domain specific IQ test should be perfectly fine to use.

AFAICT the origin of this is a case from the 70s [1] where it was ruled against the use of IQ tests at a particular company. The reason was that the IQ test did not reflect an actual business need, but it made it harder for black people to qualify.

So making an intelligence test that actually relates to the work at hand, such as testing the ability to design algorithms as a programmer or the ability to comprehend text for a journalist, seems like more than just a workaround, it's a way to actually follow the intent of the ruling.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#710

Post by wutbrodo »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #454
wutbrodo wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what every bitter HN comment on the topic forgets. If Larry Page could sit down and talk to each candidate, I'm sure he'd be able to properly assess these kinds of corner cases. The challenge isn't being able to do that at an individual level; it's being able to do it in a way that's somewhat consistent and scalable across tens of thousands of interviewers and millions of candidates. Any large system is going…

There must be people who'd want to specialize in that, though, if it's possible. It sounds like a fun job.

That's still waving away the difficulty of taking an entity's goal and losslessly/consistently distributing it into thousands of individuals. It's just not a possible task.
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