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Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

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Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#81

Post by 49531 »

Technical interviews became 10x easier when I realized that most companies aren't necessarily looking for the right answer as much as they are trying to look into your mind.

As a self taught programmer things like binary search trees and linked lists are a foreign concepts (especially as a self taught frontend developer). When I am asked to solve a problem in a way I've never encountered before, people are pretty open to explaining how the problem works.

I don't get frustrated if a problem seems arbitrary or obscure because that's typically not the point. The point is, if you're going to join my team, how do you approach a difficult problem; do you get upset? do you clam up? I don't want someone like that on my team. I'd say most people would prefer a teammate who is resourceful rather than one who only wants to solve problems they're comfortable solving.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#82

Post by truetuna »

I've had my fair share of bad interviews too. Just recently I was interviewing for a full stack position with a company that tried to get me to recite "what happens when I type google.com into my browser". I asked them where they had gotten idea from and showed them this: https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when. They decided ask me another question soon after.

Sometimes the questions aren't even related to data structures or algorithms. I'm OK with those because at least you can somewhat prepare for them. I've once had an interviewer ask me obscure questions about Netscape 6 (this was 2016 btw).

> I much prefer “homework” projects, even if they involve me working “for free”, because I feel like they ask for actual programming skills rather than the “guess the algorithm” lottery of phone screens and whiteboard coding.

Me too but when you're interviewing with 3+ companies at the same time while working at your current job, it gets difficult. There was one time where I had spend my Saturday afternoon maybe 6-8 hours completing their "homework" project. I got a call back from them a few days later for a follow up interview and they flat out didn't even bother to ask about the project I had completed for them. What was the point?

Tech interviews suck.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#83

Post by grosbisou »

Ah I interviewed with some of these companies a few months ago and had the same experience. Unlike you though I didn’t find this frustating but rather hilarious.

For example, Lifion interviewers who wanted me to write fibonacci couldn’t tell me what the sequence definition was, they ‘taught’ me that C++ classes default visibility was protected or that REST was a protocol, they didn’t like when I said they should use a relational database if mongodb lack of multi documents atomicity was such a problem. That was so mind blowing that I started writing down on my phone all the stuff they said.

I might write an article about all that too actually.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#84

Post by cmdkeen »

akadien wrote: post #39
sagichmal wrote: post #11

Hiring isn't broken, dude. You just don't interview well, and you seem antagonistic even to the idea that your cachet and skills, insofar as they exist, aren't useful to the market. That's a problem -- for you. Interviews exist because employers need a way to quantify and qualify your ability. Typical computer science problems are a (flawed, but concrete) way of doing that. No reasonable interviewer expects you to re…

> A few popular open-source projects don't necessarily speak to your talent as a programmer. If having source code and demonstrated traction for a few open source projects to review don't speak to one's talent as a programmer, then what does?

"The first round had four interviewers in the room. It was an open-ended discussion about me, my accomplishments, my projects. To be honest, I was not prepared for this interview format, so my presentation was probably all over the place"

A professional programmer, the one hired by a company to work alongside other professionals - as opposed to one working by themselves on small projects - is capable of presenting previous experiences and applying them to new problems. Unless you want to be put in the basement and handed small chunks of work to solve. It's about how you mentor juniors, resolve disagreements on how to proceed, deal with set backs and changing requirements.

Given the whole post is about how terrible the interviewing process is the above quote is the most telling, and backs up the GPs point - not being prepared to have a conversation about your previous experience when interviewing for a job is pretty bad.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#85

Post by stocktech »

yownie wrote: post #47
sagichmal wrote: post #11

Hiring isn't broken, dude. You just don't interview well, and you seem antagonistic even to the idea that your cachet and skills, insofar as they exist, aren't useful to the market. That's a problem -- for you. Interviews exist because employers need a way to quantify and qualify your ability. Typical computer science problems are a (flawed, but concrete) way of doing that. No reasonable interviewer expects you to re…

Hiring IS broken, unfortunately everyone isn't realizing it simultaneously, so half of us end up speaking about it to the other half who are already employed and feel the need to justify their employment. Since these discussions never happen out of CS / IT circles they very rarely propogate upwards to changing company practices unless the CTO/CEO happens to read HN. You're just further contributing to the rigged scen…

When the author himself describes very positive and negative interviewing experiences, yet having no success at either, I have a hard time blaming the hiring practices.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#86

Post by mkozlows »

joesmo wrote: post #32
malbs wrote: post #14

Just went through this process from the POV of employer. The risk of choosing the wrong person is so great, that it's often better to not choose anyone. If there is any doubt what-so-ever, it's better to not make a a hire, it can be too damaging to a team, manager, company. I've tried so many different "coding interview" scenarios. But I found the best one was a real task that a real staff member would be expected to…

"The risk of choosing the wrong person is so great" I assume you don't live in the US or if you do, please elaborate because in the US there are virtually no such risks with at-will employment. It's so incredibly easy to fire people in the US that such an idea is actually ridiculous, yet people keep bringing it up all the time as if it's real.

Legal barriers are not the only barriers. Many companies don't work with a quick-fire model. If you, as a hiring manager, hire a person and then fire them within a month, you're going to need to sit down with your manager and explain what happened. If you do it twice, they're going to have serious doubts about whether you're qualified to be a manager.

Plus, it's sociopathic: If someone has a job already, having them quit that job, start working for you, and then get fired and end up on the street because it didn't work out... man, that's a jerk move. The manager owes it to the new hire to be confident that they'll work out.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#87

Post by mikearagua »

kinai wrote: post #74

"I could feel my frustration rise as I am struggling to come up with a solution on a whiteboard....yep, I am definitely not going to pass this interview. I ran out of time before coming up with a working solution." Instead of standing there with nothing its better to be straight up and just say "No idea mate" and then name reasons why that is but how you'd solve it in a normal situation. It is a lot about human psych…

Funny. I'm like that too, if the interviewer isn't focused on the actual position and what I'd be doing in it and the problem solving and knowledge surrounding the actual work I'd be doing on a day to day basis, I bail because it's a bad sign to me that I'm talking to people who are way too comfortable wasting time.

But luckily I'm usually in the hiring manager's chair these days and my interviews aren't easy but they're not a stupid game.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#88

Post by jghn »

akadien wrote: post #19
tyingq wrote: post #2

>> "The first round started with introductions, followed by a coding exercise — write a maze solving algorithm. What the fuck?! Seriously?...I am not a recent college graduate anymore" I wonder if just writing a brute-force maze solver, and then explaining that you are aware better solutions exist...but that you didn't have any memorized, would have sufficed.

If you're sure you don't want the job, turn the tables and say something like "I have no clue. Can you show me?" Most likely, they don't have a clue either.

Unlikely. They have likely asked that question countless times and even if they couldn't initially they could now.

If you could go back in time to before they've ever seen it, well then yeah, I agree.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#89

Post by odonnellryan »

niemyjski wrote: post #16

Completely agree with all of your points. I think I'd do horrible in most on the spot interviews, but give me an ide with intellisense and a book of advanced algorithms and I'll complete what ever you want. I understand the most common algorithms but I don't use them hardly ever in all the work I have done over the past 10 years. Am I implementing a big data search engine, no. So why would I know all the specifics to…

Yeah. I think teaching students algo at college does one thing really well: It helps them understand runtime in association with the data structures they will use.

Gives you an intuition of the proper way to implement something before you know the big picture.

This isn't what interviews are testing: they are testing if you can implement the algo. That is rarely important.

Re: Hiring Is Broken – My interview experience in the tech industry

#90

Post by unprepare »

Scea91 wrote: post #64
yownie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring IS broken, unfortunately everyone isn't realizing it simultaneously, so half of us end up speaking about it to the other half who are already employed and feel the need to justify their employment. Since these discussions never happen out of CS / IT circles they very rarely propogate upwards to changing company practices unless the CTO/CEO happens to read HN. You're just further contributing to the rigged scen…

Hiring in CS / IT is massively more objective compared to most of other fields.

IT (By IT I'm talking about my industry, I'm an IT administrator, not programming) hiring is based a lot on certifications, certifications which are abundantly easy to scam.

You can find full exams with answers of CCNA and every Microsoft cert imaginable, I've worked for companies that incentivise certifications, and i watched coworkers use these 'tools' en masse to gain easy pay bumps and pad their resumes.

I've had two interviewers ever to ask me technical questions that actually tested my knowledge or capabilities. I look good enough on paper so usually interviews are with a couple managers and if there's a culture fit I'm in. Doesn't matter if i dont know a damn thing, if my resume says MCSE on it.

Microsoft and others further incentivise these certs by giving bonuses and breaks to companies employing certified individuals.

If you think people being hired because they passed a test they cheated on is 'more objective than other fields' then maybe i just have a warped view of how objective other fields are

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