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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#791

Post by usefulcat »

mox1 wrote: post #771
endtime wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standard disclaimer: everything below is my own opinion based on my personal experience, and I'm not speaking on behalf of my employer. > I thought I was done, then the interviewer said she would go go copy my code and compile it after the interview to see if I was right, which blew my mind. I've been interviewing at Google for nine years and have never done this. I generally don't think it's fair to ding a candidate…

How would you feel if you were going to a job as a writer, and the interviewee asked you to put a story, poem, etc. down on a napkin, with a crayon? Like thats how I would feel writing code into freakin google docs during a job interview...with Google. Tie 1 arm behind by back as the synax goes wonky, I'm fighting the spacing, etc. etc. Or put mario Andretti into a ford focus, then test his lap times, with 0 warning.…

On one hand, I can appreciate that it's unpleasant to be put on the spot. Or being forced to use crappy tools. Nobody likes that.

That said, if a person is being considered for a coding job, wouldn't that person want to demonstrate their coding abilities? I mean, assuming they're actually good at coding?

In interviews, I much prefer a concrete problem to an abstract one, and coding problems are typically far more concrete than most other subjects covered in SW dev interviews.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#792

Post by yawnxyz »

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…

we must have had the same interviewer! It boggles my mind how this helps their business case / bottom line. And I was applying as a UX designer lol.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#793

Post by flavius29663 »

mox1 wrote: post #771
endtime wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standard disclaimer: everything below is my own opinion based on my personal experience, and I'm not speaking on behalf of my employer. > I thought I was done, then the interviewer said she would go go copy my code and compile it after the interview to see if I was right, which blew my mind. I've been interviewing at Google for nine years and have never done this. I generally don't think it's fair to ding a candidate…

How would you feel if you were going to a job as a writer, and the interviewee asked you to put a story, poem, etc. down on a napkin, with a crayon? Like thats how I would feel writing code into freakin google docs during a job interview...with Google. Tie 1 arm behind by back as the synax goes wonky, I'm fighting the spacing, etc. etc. Or put mario Andretti into a ford focus, then test his lap times, with 0 warning.…

> mario Andretti

If you're a world champion, you would probably enjoy an exercise like this.

This lady pilot sure did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KiC03_wVjc

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#794

Post by jnwatson »

mattkrause wrote: post #604
laurent92 wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But which is more likely? 1. The candidate was a complete and utter fraud and their previous (and apparently well-regarded) employers were too stupid or negligent to notice this, wasting literally millions of dollars (48-21 * $100,000+). 2. Something about the interview failed to let this person demonstrate the skills that had kept them employed for two decades. Maybe their mind went blank under pressure, or at the e…

The second is certainly more likely, but I'd wager the likelihood of the first is greater than 10%. I've encountered my share.

There are so many "developers" just faking it, I can certainly understand using a test that would reject 90% of the good candidates if it could reject 99% of the bad ones.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#796

Post by czep »

endtime wrote: post #760
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…

Standard disclaimer: everything below is my own opinion based on my personal experience, and I'm not speaking on behalf of my employer. > I thought I was done, then the interviewer said she would go go copy my code and compile it after the interview to see if I was right, which blew my mind. I've been interviewing at Google for nine years and have never done this. I generally don't think it's fair to ding a candidate…

> It levels the playing field a bit, in the sense that code is more objective than an interviewer's notes

Except that writing code in a Google doc on the phone doesn't in any way resemble the real "playing field". I grant that it's level in that everyone faces the same constraints, but to write code in a gdoc with red squiggly lines underneath every keyword, automatic capitalization after a dot, and variable width font? How does that give you any kind of useful assessment? It's like handing a butter knife and some twine to a doctor and saying "here, show me how you'd stitch up this wound".

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#797

Post by mattkrause »

BossingAround wrote: post #631
laurent92 wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What was the goal of the question? Why did you want the person to implement a contains method? Did you really want to verify they understood String implementation in Java? And if the candidate was able to do this in 6 minutes, what would you have thought? "Great, let's hire"? In my humble opinion, the question is a waste of time either way. You'll get much further trying to probe what the candidate does know rather t…

Beating up on this example some more:

Multi-lingual support seems really really hard, especially in six minutes. I would think most people would need to look at technical (i.e., unicode) and linguistic references to get it right.

Should does the ligature f l match itself, or the ASCII constituents 'f' and 'l'? How about combining vs. pre-composed characters? Some Chinese characters show up in other languages (Japanese, Korean) and are sometimes split between Hong Kong/Taiwan/Mainland language tags too. In fact, there's a mess of work devoted to this ("Unihan" https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode13.0.0/ch18.pdf). Having figured out what you can do, you then need to decide what you ought to do. Not being a Chinese-speaker, I have no idea which options would seem natural....

In fact, having written this all out, there's no way someone "solved" it from scratch in six minutes. It would be a great discussion question though....

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#798

Post by marcosdumay »

mongol wrote: post #511
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…

The inode question is tricky. It is certainly not something an employer should take for granted you have memorized. But the answer can be reached by reasoning, at least if you know something about filesystems and the concept of hard links. Which you probably do if you have read the "ln" man page. It is still a pretty poor question, I remember getting a similar kind of question when I passed through the (at the time,…

Almost everybody with some Linux experience knows that the file name is not stored on the inode. It's not this part that makes the question bad.

What makes the question bad is that nobody can guess what answer he wants, and anything else, as correct as it may be, will be understood as a mistake (what is evident by the OP's answers that were perfectly correct).

"What number am I thinking right now" may be a really strict question that fails your expected number of people, but it's not a good interview question.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#799

Post by axaxs »

commandlinefan wrote: post #747
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.

I have some of the correspondence but not others, for some reason. I went digging through my email and found these - this was from 2014. Most were 'Google Research' links.

“Programming Interviews Exposed: Secrets to Landing Your Next Job"

Authors: John Mongan, Noah Suojanen, and Eric Giguère (Wiley Computer Publishing)

"Programming Pearls"

Author: Jon Bentley

"Introduction to Algorithms"

Authors: Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest & Stein

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#800

Post by enumjorge »

hmsshagatsea wrote: post #783
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.

While I do agree the CA bar is tougher than it should be, a lot of the low passage rate comes from graduates of less-than-stellar schools. If you look into passage rate per school it’s naturally much better at the higher ranked universities.

Isn’t that almost the definition of gatekeeping? Make the process to enter the law profession so difficult that only students from select universities have a good chance.

Of course prospective lawyers should clear a certain level of knowledge before they are allowed to practice, but the passing rate is puzzlingly low. CA law schools, as a group l, really only prepare such a low number of their students to practice?

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