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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#711

Post by rsynnott »

lrem wrote: post #299
silisili wrote: post #119

My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances. My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again. I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm…

Now, the inode question is part of the pre-screen. That's normally _before_ you get put on phone with any engineers. How the heck did you get it in "round 3 or 4"? Was your process started from scratch for some reason? The question is meant to be asked by a sourcer - a contractor whose list of requirements does not include being answer themselves any of the questions they ask. Famously even if you know the answer pre…

Wait, seriously? That's an absurd screening question.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#712

Post by bigbillheck »

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…

I don't do interviews in my current job (mostly because the pandemic really did a number on hiring) but in my previous job the only coding question I asked was what I thought was a fairly simple string problem. They could assume ascii, use any language they wanted, and make any other assumptions to simplify the problem.

My then-co-workers liked to ask harder algorithmic questions but I wanted to give the candidates a little bit of a break with something easier.

It didn't always work, but at least I tried.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#713

Post by IshKebab »

pnt12 wrote: post #632
gorpomon wrote: post #608

On my team, I inherited an interview process with 7 steps. It's a long one for sure, and it's not a process I can change. But as a hiring manager I mitigate issues brought up in this article by doing a few really easy things: 1. On my first chat with a candidate, I layout the entire interview process. I acknowledge that it is long and I preemptively thank them for going through the process and say that we value their…

I'd really appreciate a letter with feedback after a lengthy interviewing process, I think that's really valuable. However, I don't think I'd value it after more than 3 interviews. Candidates are applying after work hours and there's a time / energy limit to how many processes they can take at a time. After a given point, you're wasting not hours but possibly months of their life.

I didn't really realise it until I was on the other end, but if you don't get any feedback you can totally ask for it and there's a decent chance you'll get some.

But I agree, it's usually pretty obvious if you just weren't good enough, or you had a bad day, or they just didn't like you for some random reason.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#714

Post by CoolGuySteve »

woofie11 wrote: post #643
crispyambulance wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The experiences that people describe here just confirm something that many of us has learned a long time ago: NOBODY HAS "FIGURED OUT" HIRING ! Not Google, not Apple, no one. Sure, some places (and individual interviewers) are better at it than others. But at the end of the day, hiring is a deeply subjective process with lots of error and uncertainty built into it's nature. The subjectivity is intrinsic. Places like…

Pretend there's a Programming Quotient (PQ) which is like IQ. Let's say Google would like candidates with PQ>130 with 95% confidence. Google has an error with std. div. of 15 points in measurement of PQ in jobs interviews. Google then needs to set the hiring bar at 160 PQ in order to get those candidates. This: - screens most qualified candidates out; but - most candidates who do screen in are qualified Statistics wo…

I’ve used Google’s software. I’m not sure they’re all that great.

Someone just released a product that offloads Chrome to the cloud. Gmail has a very long loading screen. Hangouts was replaced by something like 4 incompatible apps. Android phones are significantly less power efficient than iPhones. YouTube copyright notices are trivial to game. Etc

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#715

Post by marcosdumay »

woofie11 wrote: post #643
crispyambulance wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The experiences that people describe here just confirm something that many of us has learned a long time ago: NOBODY HAS "FIGURED OUT" HIRING ! Not Google, not Apple, no one. Sure, some places (and individual interviewers) are better at it than others. But at the end of the day, hiring is a deeply subjective process with lots of error and uncertainty built into it's nature. The subjectivity is intrinsic. Places like…

Pretend there's a Programming Quotient (PQ) which is like IQ. Let's say Google would like candidates with PQ>130 with 95% confidence. Google has an error with std. div. of 15 points in measurement of PQ in jobs interviews. Google then needs to set the hiring bar at 160 PQ in order to get those candidates. This: - screens most qualified candidates out; but - most candidates who do screen in are qualified Statistics wo…

Except that the measurement error is very clearly fat-tailed, and the std.div. is clearly much larger than one std.div of competence of the population.

Place the bar high enough and you will get more and more people far into the tail, and less and less people that actually fit your bar.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#716

Post by Lio »

cainxinth wrote: post #597
lordnacho wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At this point I'm pretty sure FAANG hiring is just a random walk. Every now again someone happens to have looked at all the questions they ask recently for that particular interview cycle (or avoid the trap ones like that) and that person gets hired (and then put on the ad targeting team or whatever). This might actually be part of the retention strategy. If everyone who works at FAANG knows that they're somewhat l…

You’re forgetting that it’s easier to get a FAANG job once you’ve already had one. They love to poach each other’s people.

If that's true it's at least is a change from the "no poaching" agreements that used to exist.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#717

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

cptaj wrote: post #641
Waterluvian wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be a random walk but I think the goal is to convince whoever gets hired that they’re special and talented and elite members of their discipline.

You think they're doing this to make you feel... good?

Well they do pay a bit more than 15 dollars an hour. Hard to not feel good about that.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#718

Post by sumtechguy »

Akronymus wrote: post #307
wyclif wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google interviewers must hate Einstein. He said, "Never memorize something that you can look up."

If you need to look up something enough times, it'll stick anyways. But still, don't go out of your way to memorize something.

That one of my rules I always give to junior devs. Just read the docs again for what you are doing. You may perfectly 'know' them but sometimes there is an extra 'oh if you are doing this do this other thing too'. Or worse the call is similar to some other call but does something slightly weird. Does not come up often but has caught me out a few times. Never hurts to re-read it. You mostly can get away with it but sometimes...

A more human anecdote for example I have movies I know I have seen dozens of times. Yet my recall of what happened in them is not as good as it used to be as the last time I watched them was a few years ago.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#719

Post by lawn »

ladberg wrote: post #226
silisili wrote: post #119

My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances. My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again. I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm…

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 had a similar experience interviewing years ago for Google, although I can't remember the algorithm they wanted me to implement.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#720

Post by rsynnott »

mrb wrote: post #303
silisili wrote: post #119

My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances. My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again. I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm…

As an ex-Googler who interviewed 100+ candidates (mix of phone & onsite interviews) I can tell you that there is a great variance across the company groups in the quality of questions we ask. And the reason is simple: it's up to the interviewer to choose his questions. Questions aren't standardized. I took great pride in the fact that my questions were unique. I designed them myself, about 30: some quick knowledge te…

> I took great pride in the fact that my questions were unique. I designed them myself, about 30

... Is this part of the process? Questions made up by random person? That sounds absolutely ridiculous if you want any sort of consistency.

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