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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

#711

Post by wutbrodo »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #460
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…

> assessing whether someone will be a good employee for the next few years based on a few short meetings is really hard Predicting the future is very difficult, and therefore probably not what interviews are designed to optimise for. Interviews probably optimise for something like: The candidate seemed like a reasonable choice at the time / cover-your-arse scenario.

Predicting the future is what you're trying to do when hiring, for which interviews are a specific tool.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#712

Post by lowbloodsugar »

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…

I hope the message that people take away from this anecdote is that "even the best people don't always pass an interview at AWS first time". But if someone is interested in the benefits AWS has to offer, try again. I interviewed three times before getting hired there, and I am the happiest I have ever been. I work with great people, on high-stakes, challenging problems that match my strengths, and we work 40 hour weeks, including time for beer. I have enough time outside work to learn new things (this year some basic FPGA programming). And skiing is 90 minutes away.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#713

Post by taeric »

chillacy wrote: post #695
taeric wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, then what are they succeeding at? If engineering hasn't helped them not kill most of their products, what is it helping do? And again, it is more than just social. ChomeOS? Even still a thing? How is android wear doing nowadays? Again, I'm not claiming they are bad at engineering. I honestly don't feel qualified to judge. But I don't know that they are qualified to judge success of new hire, either. Their main s…

> I'm not claiming they are bad at engineering Nope, you're actually claiming that they're bad at product. Maybe you can question their product management or marketing hires? Their most successful product is still search, followed by android and youtube. Their stock is up 300% in the past 5 years.

I'm questioning if they really know what good engineering is. I'm not saying they are bad at it. Those are two different claims

That they are the default entry to the web is their main asset. Agreed. Their search is good enough, and they are good at monetizing the top boxes of their search results. Really good.

That said, most of their engineering hires are not working on that. And they have a string of unfocused attempts at entering markets that smacks of not having a good sense of how to use engineering in a field. Basically, of they can't recreate the field, they give up. Rather quickly. That isn't engineering. That is just brash spending of money.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#714

Post by m0zg »

northern-lights wrote: post #685
m0zg wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm bad at taking tests. I'm also bad at playing guitar when someone is looking or even when recording myself (and pretty good when playing without anyone looking). I get anxious and self-conscious and that gets in the way of good public performance. This does not translate to public speaking - I'm pretty good at that, and I'm not afraid of audiences of just about any size - my largest so far was ~1K people. I someho…

You just described me haha. In my Google phone screen, I fumbled around on solving an easy-moderate problem - so much so that when it ended, I felt that there was no way even I would hire me. And once it ended, I wrote the code for it in probably 10 minutes. Also, arranging it so that it was the first in the loop did not help either. The only good thing about the process was that the recruiter was nice about the whol…

More than once the solutions to failed interview problems came to me on the way back to the parking lot.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#715

Post by blub »

fishmaster wrote: post #707
blub wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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.

Speak for yourself most esteemed master of fish. Plenty of code bases are thankfully neither spaghetti nor ravioli.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#716

Post by taeric »

chillacy wrote: post #696
BlueTemplar wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has been pretty good at social. With the community around gReader. Which they killed to make space forfor Google+. How did it fare, already?

Was it poor engineering which killed gReader or a strategy decision to go for G+ back when social was a big buzzword?

Why not both? It was a poor usage of engineering effort to try and recreate a field, instead of leveraging some assets and building on what they actually had.

It isn't like reader died alone. They had buzz going, which did a decent job of linking reader and Gmail. That is solid engineering. Instead, they have constantly tried to recreate Gmail to kill it. Wave? Plus? Inbox? I'm sure there are others.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#717

Post by commandlinefan »

abledon wrote: post #287
_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…

unlucky! The buddha said we are promised two certain things in life: suffering and death. Everything else is a bonus.

Ben Franklin paraphrased: “the only things that are certain are death and taxes”.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#718

Post by whalabi »

Aeolun wrote: post #582
scottlocklin wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, do you even data science? Not knowing Unix tools like cut and sort is a hard fail on a senior individual contributor in data science role, as is using sqlite which totally doesn't scale the way sort and cut does. Separates sheep from goats in data science land. You should really learn them if you're in the field and work with reasonably big data sets. Frankly you should learn them if you work with data at all,…

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.

So I think this is a perfect example of what happens in tech interviews.

OP is using knowledge of a specific technology as a heuristic for "has experience in role x"

But this always makes me wonder, couldn't you see that experience from a resume? If the candidate filled a data science role at somewhere reputable for 3 years, and you verify that they successfully filled that role, why rely on that heuristic?

As you say testing for the specific technology, when it can be learnt in 10 minutes, does not seem logical.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#719

Post by jonex »

Redoubts wrote: post #703
blueboo wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1 is included in at least Google interviews. 3 requires that you hire for a specific tool/language use, most programmers are able to learn new tools and languages in the time time periods that are hired for.

I'd like to do more of 2, understanding, debugging, fixing and refactoring code is, in my experience, more of the day to day work than writing entirely new code. I don't know why this is not typically part of interviewing, maybe there's some reason it doesn't work? It would be interesting to see a more comprehensive evaluation of this approach.

Re: The dystopian world of software engineering interviews

#720

Post by demosito666 »

heartbeats wrote: post #190
paxys wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple way of saying this - companies are optimizing for filtering out bad candidates, at the expense of sometimes filtering out good candidates. Because the cost of hiring the wrong person is a LOT higher than missing out on the right one.

> Because the cost of hiring the wrong person is a LOT higher than missing out on the right one. Why can't anyone come up with a good solution for this? A "we'll hire you for a month and see how it goes" kind of deal?

I don't know about US, but where I live they hire you with 1-3 months "trial period" during which the company can fire you any time if you turned out unfit for the job. This is exactly your proposal.
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