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Noticing You're Confused

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Re: Noticing You're Confused

#81

Post by grawprog »

jonathlee wrote: post #79
mjevans wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe some people just don't do well in an interview setting that is inherently completely unlike a real day at any office? Some step before on site interviews, to save everyone effort and money overall, might help. I think unpaid small utility projects are also unfair to prospective employees. A better approach might be for the company to identify something they'd like done, which might be part of an employee's n…

I have personal experience with this type of situation. Twice we had excellent phone interviews for an onsite contractor position. Then, when the supposed person we interviewed showed up, they turned out not to be able to do the work (not an onsite interview, the actual work). One was so bad that they had no idea what a variable was.

>One was so bad that they had no idea what a variable was.

I'm curious as to how someone like that could even pass a phone interview. Even if they were cheating, they would have had to have been reading stuff verbatim to answer the interviewer's questions. How was this not at least picked up a little bit during the interview? How could someone with such a small amount of knowledge in the domain trick the interviewer enough that they raised no flags at all during the interview?

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#83

Post by binarytox1n »

rjkennedy98 wrote: post #61

I don't think this is as rare as you might imagine. When I started doing engineering interviews at our last company I was startled about how obsessive they were about doing video interviews because I hadn't ever remember doing them in previous jobs. If video resolution was bad they would simply cut the interview and ask to reschedule. When I asked why they did this, to my surprise they said they had been scammed by p…

This has happened to us many times and we now do the same for remote interviews. No video? No interview. And even then, if you do great in the video we fly you in for an in person interview just to be sure. There's clearly a market for stand-in phone interviewers. I can't imagine that jobs acquired this way ever last, but that doesn't stop people from trying.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#84

Post by GhettoMaestro »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #56
rainyMammoth wrote: post #30

> the demand for qualified engineering managers being far, far, greater than the supply. That's not really what it is. Let's rephrase it as "the demand for engineering managers that pass your completely subjective interview process which is completely unrelated to the job".

No, I think the original statement is fair. Good engineering managers, like good staff-level engineers, will generally receive multiple solicitations a week to please come work for some company or another. Notice how the author considered it "entirely believable" that the candidate would have disabled his Linkedin profile due to recruiter spam; people at the level he was claiming really can get recruited so much that…

> Good engineering managers, like good staff-level engineers, will generally receive multiple solicitations a week to please come work for some company or another.

Right. And we rightfully know most of these offers are full of shit. Newsflash: No good job is offered cold or out of the blue.

> Notice how the author considered it "entirely believable" that the candidate would have disabled his Linkedin profile due to recruiter spam; people at the level he was claiming really can get recruited so much that they need specific strategies to deal with it.

You can disable this type of spam. Nuking/disabling your LinkedIN profile is very extreme. It will make me throw a red flag on you immediately. Want to indict me? I don't care - you're not my target hire.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#85

Post by kubanczyk »

grawprog wrote: post #81
jonathlee wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have personal experience with this type of situation. Twice we had excellent phone interviews for an onsite contractor position. Then, when the supposed person we interviewed showed up, they turned out not to be able to do the work (not an onsite interview, the actual work). One was so bad that they had no idea what a variable was.

>One was so bad that they had no idea what a variable was. I'm curious as to how someone like that could even pass a phone interview. Even if they were cheating, they would have had to have been reading stuff verbatim to answer the interviewer's questions. How was this not at least picked up a little bit during the interview? How could someone with such a small amount of knowledge in the domain trick the interviewer…

By not actually making the call but assigning it to their sibling or their friend, duh. "Phone interviews", so no video.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#86

Post by coke12 »

grawprog wrote: post #81
jonathlee wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have personal experience with this type of situation. Twice we had excellent phone interviews for an onsite contractor position. Then, when the supposed person we interviewed showed up, they turned out not to be able to do the work (not an onsite interview, the actual work). One was so bad that they had no idea what a variable was.

>One was so bad that they had no idea what a variable was. I'm curious as to how someone like that could even pass a phone interview. Even if they were cheating, they would have had to have been reading stuff verbatim to answer the interviewer's questions. How was this not at least picked up a little bit during the interview? How could someone with such a small amount of knowledge in the domain trick the interviewer…

I think they're implying that someone else took the phone interview for them.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#87

Post by OJFord »

binarytox1n wrote: post #83
rjkennedy98 wrote: post #61

I don't think this is as rare as you might imagine. When I started doing engineering interviews at our last company I was startled about how obsessive they were about doing video interviews because I hadn't ever remember doing them in previous jobs. If video resolution was bad they would simply cut the interview and ask to reschedule. When I asked why they did this, to my surprise they said they had been scammed by p…

This has happened to us many times and we now do the same for remote interviews. No video? No interview. And even then, if you do great in the video we fly you in for an in person interview just to be sure. There's clearly a market for stand-in phone interviewers. I can't imagine that jobs acquired this way ever last, but that doesn't stop people from trying.

I don't know about 'ever', I can believe there are people that interview terribly (because of nerves or whatever) but would be fine in the job.

You'd need to be really sure about the nature of the role though, or else find a stand-in who is similarly skilled (and not).

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#88

Post by celticmusic »

mjevans wrote: post #75
rjkennedy98 wrote: post #61

I don't think this is as rare as you might imagine. When I started doing engineering interviews at our last company I was startled about how obsessive they were about doing video interviews because I hadn't ever remember doing them in previous jobs. If video resolution was bad they would simply cut the interview and ask to reschedule. When I asked why they did this, to my surprise they said they had been scammed by p…

Or maybe some people just don't do well in an interview setting that is inherently completely unlike a real day at any office? Some step before on site interviews, to save everyone effort and money overall, might help. I think unpaid small utility projects are also unfair to prospective employees. A better approach might be for the company to identify something they'd like done, which might be part of an employee's n…

> Or maybe some people just don't do well in an interview setting that is inherently completely unlike a real day at any office?

I once had an interview where I sent in a solution to a small program they asked me to write (had to do with golfing).

During the interview they sat me down in front of a computer and asked me to re-implement a part of it, which I did so gladly.

I realized later that my re-implementation wasn't the same as my original implementation, but they both worked. It was more 6 of one, half dozen of the other, sort of thing.

But the thing is, during the rest of the interview I seriously got the impression they thought I was lying to them. I've often wondered if that difference in implementation was why.

But I'm of the opinion that technical people shouldn't really be too involved in the yes/no decision of the interview process. I've seen too many instances of people coming to conclusions that just didn't make sense. I once had feedback that they felt I would be anti-social because when asked about an open floor plan I told them as long as I had headphones it wouldn't be too much of an issue.

I remember one guy was convinced I was devops because I described a system I built and implemented that got deployed across datacenters around the world, and I explained how we did it. When it was done, he started asking me about unit tests, and I remember going to the whiteboard, pointing at a few of the circles and telling him "we had unit tests around this, and this, and this".

At the end I reiterated that I had a degree in CS & Math and had worked as a software developer for coming on 20 years. I did this because he kept making comments about devops. And yet, when it was done, the feedback is that they weren't looking for devops.

The worst part to me is that what I described was the system architecture and how we were able to do this successfully. I'm not even sure I spoke about deployment much at all.

I've had several wtf moments like this in my career, and it's caused me to be a lot more bullish on interviewers. Everyone who interviews seems to think they have some secret sauce that allows them some mythical insight into a person over an hour interview. And they're all wrong.

Business people are actually easier to deal with in my experience because they're willing to accept when there's a misunderstanding and you attempt to explain yourself more fully. Most technical people seem to judge you for it and ignore any attempt to follow up.

Anyway, this is long winded, but my point is that I agree with you 100%. I don't think most people who interview quite realize just how bad they are at it, nor how overly judgemental they are. I'm glad it worked out for the author of this article, but the indications he claimed to see (the lack of a linked in profile, for example) are not actually indications of anything. They got lucky, but they're going to take their sample of 1 and be overly judgemental with everyone in the future.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#89

Post by Darkphibre »

celticmusic wrote: post #88
mjevans wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe some people just don't do well in an interview setting that is inherently completely unlike a real day at any office? Some step before on site interviews, to save everyone effort and money overall, might help. I think unpaid small utility projects are also unfair to prospective employees. A better approach might be for the company to identify something they'd like done, which might be part of an employee's n…

> Or maybe some people just don't do well in an interview setting that is inherently completely unlike a real day at any office? I once had an interview where I sent in a solution to a small program they asked me to write (had to do with golfing). During the interview they sat me down in front of a computer and asked me to re-implement a part of it, which I did so gladly. I realized later that my re-implementation wa…

Craziest interview was for a job that I wrote the description for, yet was apparently unqualified to fill. -.-

I like my job, and I'm visible enough to have had several poaching attempts (one or two I regret turning down, my would-be peers have all retired after a few years and 8-digits happier). Anyways, one studio tried to lure me away by having me interview for 'whatever my dream job was.'

This intrigued me. I wrote up a 2-page job description. Was quite clear I'd moved into Data Science and my Solution Architect days were a few years behind me. Passed the 10-person panel interview with flying colors. And the Data Science / Management tiers. Lunch interview no problem. Then... came the low-level C++ interviews. I did OK, but clearly was rusty.

And then the architecture interview. They laid out an identical topology to one I've given talks on having architected, and asked me where might be problems. I highlighted the number one concern (ensuring the data was logged with accurate ingress/egress timings so we could be measuring real funnel progress), and went down several esoteric paths that telemetry could be corrupted / unreliable / provide faulty analysis. At the end I could tell they weren't convinced. I circled back, and... "Well, this is based on a real thing we rolled out, and we were measuring the time-to-receipt on the first layer, not the delays in payload aggregation before relaying the buffer through the rest of the system, so latencies seemed low but throughput was unacceptable. We'd hoped you would have picked up on that."

It was the very first thing I pointed out. But they didn't hear me when I stated the obvious up front. I'll own that feedback: Make sure I'm heard and understood.

At any rate, someone else was hired for the job I defined. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#90

Post by mikedilger »

I had an interviewee who was answering questions quite well but kind of shrugging me off when I dug deeper. Then I asked a question I hadn't asked before and he actually complained that the question wasn't fair because he didn't get a chance to study for that question. I recommended against. The hiring manager, to my suprise, let him go "study" and come back for more questions. The whole team being on to this, we asked very different questions the second time around and he failed miserably. We all recommended against. Again to my suprise, the hiring manager decided he liked him and hired him. After a re-org and under a new manager, it took about six months IIRC to legally get rid of the guy. Nice guy - wrong fit.
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