81–90 of 253 posts
This blog post is pretty self congratulatory. We get it, employer bad -> employee good.
The fact of the matter is, they are investing in you. It often costs more to hire frequent replacements than one long-standing employee.
I’ve been places 9 months, 6 MONTHS, this question drives me up the walls. At the back of my head, I never once thought, “I don’t deserve to be asked this”.
#10 is a measurement of ability to mentally model and estimate problems. Relevant to engineering ability. #8 measures self-awareness. Many people can answer this question with "I know I could be much better at X and I am working on it" which is what it's about.
According to recruiter and many answer here it appears people are spending days at job throwing numbers to the wall.
Can anyone explain what these numbers with massive uncertainty are used for and why go tough all that effort if you still have to go back to sources and references to fix up the estimate anyway?
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Do recruiters have up-to-date information on the number of piano tuners in NYC? How do they verify the answer?
It's never about guessing a correct answer. Eg. if I guess NYC population is 10M, with every 100th household having a piano, I can guess there are 100k pianos in NYC. If each of them needs tuning once every two years, that's 50k tunes each year. That's roughly 1k tunes each week, which, if a tuner can do 2 a day (5 work days per week), is 100 tuners. And then it'd be worth comparing to tuning of venue pianos which ar…
It's like the Drake equation - it doesn't matter what factors you choose (you can always come up with more) or what values you assign them (you can't know what most of them would be anyway). It's meaningless as a whole. And also irrelevant to software development or most anything else; at best it would be only very loosely relevant to managing a piano tuning company.
9. Trying to understand persons motivation for the job. For culture fit, for position, etc. Not a'ways 'i love it and that's my sole interest in life' is a 'good' answer. Some companies/position are looking for cold professional approach, financial interest may be interpreted as less problematic and stable. Depends.
8, 7. To see how the candidate see himself, usually entry point for more questions and soft skills evaluation. Also gives you an idea what person in front of you sees as good and bad, and if he fits the manager/team. And people do tell their real weaknesses. Surprisingly, people tell A LOT on interviews.
6. Pretty obvious - direction of development, some want to grow to be in a managing positions, some interested in tech side only, position/company may provide support for this or no.
5. Also hate it, but used to see how motivated person is and again - how he sees his strengths.
4. Asked if person really jumps from job to job or, say, stayed in company 10 years. In first case - it's suspicious and question gives the chance for candidate to explain themselves. For people who worked in one place for a long time - let's see if we are the company that provides same benefits or not.
Last three is stupid and may be illegal.
But in general - questions are just entry points and a way to start a discussion about the things you wanna know. It's not stupid if you understand why do you ask it and not looking for just an answer.
Also his solutions for those who get this questions... Being passive aggressive rarely helps. You are in conversation with someone - speak, express your frustration, explain why. Facepalm, exhale and look deeply in the eye after being asked about why do you canned so many jobs - that's a great answer I guess, explains a lot, but just understand, that you are an asshole in this situation.
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No, you're not wrong, and are even downplaying how seriously disruptive a serial job hopper is to a company. I have without regrets red-flagged numerous well-qualified candidates who were an obvious flight risk at the companies I have worked at, which were always smallish. Now that big tech is contracting its ranks somewhat, this behavior is going to be even more suspect, because they will not have that refuge so eas…
If you want people to stay, pay them more in tune with what they're worth and they will. This isn't brain surgery.
4. Why do you change jobs so often (so rarely)? How does that matter? If I am a match for the company in terms of qualifications and personal qualities, how will my job history and reflection help? I changed jobs every year or so. Is that “often” or “rarely”? What’s wrong with changing jobs frequently? It is actually important to ask this of a candidate who seems to frequently change jobs. A hiring manager may not wa…
Agreed. You changed twice last year and you have good reasons, fine. You changed every 6 months for the last 10 years and it is always the others fault? Either you've been really unlucky and I am sorry for you or the blame is not on the others and you may want to ask yourself some existential questions. Interviews are here to determine if the place is a good fit, on both sides.
Some things are just damn too easy to spot without even trying, and this one of them. Have a great story to explain why you are actually wont leave when meeting first frustrating item at your work.
Also, everything is being evaluated, including how you react to uncomfortable questions. Parents snarky response would be a nogo on itself, regardless of subject.
That is a terrible list. Many of those questions are perfectly fine. 10 - Fermi problems. Good to get an indication of a candidate's problem solving skills. 9,8,7,6 - The candidates's motivation, weaknesses, strengths, plans. What's wrong with that? Evidently, you have to modulate the answers somewhat, but the extent to which you do that well is indicative of your understanding of the job requirements, the competitio…
I actually disagree on 10, I just estimated the population of New York then looked it up and was off by an order of magnitude. Good chance I'd do worse in an interview situation than sitting at home. A few more estimates with errors of this size and we've learned what? I have a poor grasp of US census data? Unless this is a realistic approximation of the kind of thing your doing with this job, the time in the intervi…
So they don't fall in. Next question.
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I'll just second this based on my experience with software engineers. Most places I've worked your looking at at least 6 months before someone is starting to get enough familiarity with everything involved in the internal ecosystem (both technical and non) to really be productive and probably a year before they're starting to reach the productivity of their peers. So if someone leaves at 2 years you've probably gotte…
I've contributed significant changes in my first 3 months at most jobs. Lack of fit (eg with your manager) can become too much at 5 months.
It's not a terrible list, but #10 and #4 are fine, IMHO.
#10 is not only fine, but ought to be mandatory. How can you expect anyone ever to "engineer" something if they are not capable of making (and refining) rough estimates? Sure, often you just have to measure. But I'd much rather work with the person who can get an order-of-magnitude estimate from a 10 minute measure than the person who gets a reasonably accurate estimate but only after taking half a day to set up the…
> All these riddles are aimed to reveal the person’s creative nature.
They aren't riddles, nor do they require creativity. Fermi questions exercise a basic skill: estimation.
Bread and butter.