The rise of never-ending job interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#741

Post by devmacrile » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 2:10 PM UTC

xvector wrote: post #457

jd115 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed for a software engineering position with Goldman once (in London). The process spanned several weeks of phone interviews with people in the UK and US (I lost track of the count), followed by a full day of back-to-back interviews on-site with 12 different people - some via video conference with New York. Questions were extremely diverse, both wide and deep. Early on in the process I decided to look at th…

The software industry interview process is such a disaster. The worst part of every job I've ever had (including FAANG) is hitting the LeetCode grind when I want to leave. It's so fucking worthless. Just a giant waste of time. This entire fucking industry has its head up its ass. I can't think of a single other high-paying profession that pulls this shit.

Yeah the process always struck me as just as much a barrier to exit as a barrier to entry (maybe even more so).

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#742

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 2:10 PM UTC

emptyfile wrote: post #410

Nition wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet if they ask you for an answer to a quirky question like "why are manhole covers round?", they expect a clever answer like "they can't fall in", rather than a pedestrian answer like "well, probably they just started making them that shape for some simple production reason, and then everyone else just kinda of did the same thing because it worked."

What? Manhole covers aren't round. Silly americans. http://lh4.ggpht.com/_LWPSf1_ugFI/TA4tx-22QRI/AAAAAAAAFx0/T1...

[deleted]

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#743

Post by eplanit » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 2:10 PM UTC

These stories reinforce my decision to go into consulting so long ago. People hire me because they can't get stuff done, and they need it done now. We're not getting married, and I'll be gone as soon as the project/mission is accomplished. And, no BS coding tests.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#744

Post by res0nat0r » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 2:10 PM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #264

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…

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).

I've mentioned before but at my previous FAANG gig everyone only looked at the resumes they were assigned to interview like 15 minutes before the interview time was scheduled down the hall / building somewhere.

No one knew who they were interviewing or what was on the resume until they glanced at it while walking to the interview room. I suspect all interviews and the process are just made up as folks go along, and half the time you get a gig or not mostly based on if one of the people you talk to is in a good mood or not.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#745

Post by anoonmoose » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 2:11 PM UTC

taude wrote: post #732

rubicon33 wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liken it to what lawyers go through with the bar here in CA. It's gatekeeping. Just like I don't think the CA bar should have a pass rate in the 20% range, I don't think coding interviews should ask riddles that are nearly impossible to solve on the fly unless you get lucky and memorized THAT riddle in your studying.

Is there a shortage of attorneys in California?

many people including myself believe that availability of legal services is broadly lacking in the US. not necessarily a shortage of attorneys, but a shortage of attorneys that can do work for anything but top-quintile clients. artificially restricting who is and isn't allowed to perform certain jobs often has that sort of effect.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#746

Post by ghaff » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 2:11 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #642

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…

Or you hire people you know. Which isn't perfect, has it's own set of problems, and doesn't scale. But I can't really complain given it's how I've gotten every job (just a few) after grad school and my interviews have been mostly perfunctory.

>The good news is, it's a very open network.

I'll accept the statement. But I will say that hiring from a network is at least a very different thing from hiring through a grueling set of often artificial interview hoops. It requires a potential candidate to have genuinely interacted at a higher than superficial level with a lot of people in a professional capacity. Which may not be harder than "leet code" but is certainly very different.

And yes, all the big companies have referral programs but that's mostly just a very rough first pass as a lot of referrals are basically I'm connected with this candidate on linked in. Referral bonus please.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#747

Post by commandlinefan » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 2:12 PM UTC

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…

> more books to study

Curious if you happen to remember what any of those books were.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#748

Post by sumtechguy » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

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…

Just a rejection letter is something, and in a reasonable amount of time. Many times I would just hear nothing. No response at all. Just a simple 'no thank you' is better than what many get from most companies. It is amazing how many companies do not do this one thing. They just leave people hanging. I had one dude who thought to finally send a 'no' letter. It was 2 years later. That should have been closed out ages ago.

Thank you for doing that sort of thing. It really helps.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#749

Post by d0gsg0w00f » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

buro9 wrote: post #593

Ah Amazon... 14 interviews, an additional 5 hour technical test, spanning a total of 3+ months. Only to be informed at the end that I was too technical for the role they had in mind but they were offering me a Senior Principal SDE role instead. By the time we got to the end of the process I'd already concluded that the hiring process was a reflection of their internal decision making and that this was not a company (…

I honestly think this is a product of large corporations being essentially incapable of firing bad resources. Companies are terrified of litigation and bad PR so the only control mechanism is the interview process.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#750

Post by kwertyoowiyop » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

sdevonoes wrote: post #568

AJRF wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geohotz had a good rant about this once - the kind of people who need to cram leetcodes and memorize algorithms are not the kinds of people who Google wants to pass these interviews. Makes a lot of sense, you could solve all these questions without knowing specific algorithms as long as you are good at problem solving - which is, I assume, the intent of the process. Obviously it doesn't always work like that.

> the kind of people who need to cram leetcodes and memorize algorithms are not the kinds of people who Google wants to pass these interviews. I thought it was exactly those who Google wants to pass. Anecdote: ex-colleague of mine who is not specially bright studied 3 months how to "crack the coding interview" and got a job at Google. His knowledge about algorithms and data structures was like mine: I know what a tre…

I’m trying to think of how many tree structures I’ve encountered in all the projects I’ve ever programmed on, in my entire career. Maybe one or two?