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

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#811

Post by spookthesunset » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 3:32 PM UTC

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.…

I mean tabs don’t work like a normal editor. And it wraps lines. And the default font is not monospaced.

If you are gonna require a candidate to write compilable code at least use one of the many tools designed explicitly for coding interviews.

I think I’d rather use straight notepad than google docs.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#812

Post by spookthesunset » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 3:34 PM UTC

neemeizdabest wrote: post #789

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…

Google interview process is designed around how badly you want to work there not what are your skills i.e practising solving bunch of leetcode puzzles on whiteboard and speaking out loud is all it takes to get through the interview process. It just takes some time to prepare.

I think that is basically it. I think many of these FAANG companies interviews are more of a hazing than an actual assessment. Everybody who works there had to go through that interview… if you want to be part of the pack, you too must endure it.

When viewed in that light it actually doesn’t seem quite as bad.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#813

Post by kevstev » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 3:35 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #798

mongol wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 str…

My first linux install was Redhat 5.2 bought at a bookstore in ~1997. I have not always been a primary linux user, but I have been using it in some capacity for over 20 years now- though as a means to an end primarily- in the bad old days I mucked around with drivers and X configs and have even recompiled a custom kernel on occasion. Never once has it come up that the filename is not stored in the inode.

I am actually just curious as to why this would ever even be a thing you come across unless dealing with filesystems directly?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#814

Post by vdomingos » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 3:35 PM UTC

rcarmo wrote: post #342

I’m usually OK with doing more than three calls after a recruiter call (which are ideally with a hiring manager, peer manager, and a prospective peer), but that is usually because I quite like getting a feel for company culture. More than that is just silly and contrived (although I usually end up talking to a VP or similar these days on account of my seniority). There are usually three major red flags that make me s…

Hear, Hear! For me it's when they put junior people doing interviews to senior roles. I get the point - not enough resources, culture check, etc - but at a certain level we're not even talking the same language or even working experience.

On the other hand, any Amazon interview has tons of people :)

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#815

Post by clint » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 3:35 PM UTC

discmonkey wrote: post #727

Having recently won the google hiring lottery, I wanted to add my experience total length of time ~ 7 months emails sent/received ~ 50 phone calls ~ 20 technical interviews: 7 (1 with screen with recruiter, 6 with engineers) team match interviews: 3 (for me at least these were real interviews, in that I "flunked" the first 2, and decided to take the 3rd one very seriously before getting an offer) Before getting hirin…

sounds like a literal nightmare, and your prize is... working at Google? No thanks!

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#816

Post by neutronicus » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 3:36 PM UTC

throwawayboise wrote: post #667

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…

I've never written a sort from scratch since my college days, over 30 years ago. Also never had a job interview that asked me do to so, or any other coding questions. I'm planning more for retirement than a next job at this point, but I shake my head at what my younger colleagues need to go through these days for the opportunity to write JavaScript with IDEs that do most of the work for you.

I do my own Graph algorithm implementations sometimes

Especially when I'm not sure the Graph approach is the right one, it's easier than either

1. Getting the Boost.Graph in the source tree to actually compile

2. Dealing with the bureaucracy of getting some, other, Graph library requiring feats of compilation possible for mere mortals into the source tree

This is, however, not something I do from memory - much like the ancestor comment I see the relevant skill as closer to recognizing positive-weight Shortest Path and knowing you want Dijkstra than being able to write Dijkstra without wifi

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#817

Post by thweroi23434 » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 3:38 PM UTC

tchalla wrote: post #537

vidarh wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with Google (in the UK) was an interviewer who asked a very similar question, among a number where he was clearly unprepared to deal with answers that weren't 100% as expected, and asked questions that had basically no relevance to the role. The experience was so bad that afterward I sent a lengthy email to the recruiter thanking her but pointing out I expected to fail the interview because the intervie…

> In the end I declined, as the first interviewer would have been one of the people I'd have managed, and I just did not want to deal with a team with a person like that, Oh, I can totally empathise with you because I've been there. I applied for a position which was the head of a team and a future direct asked me esoteric statistical questions from his PhD thesis. I did quite well to answer most of them but he wasn'…

I was once asked to prove that K-means is not NP-hard in 1-d ?!

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#818

Post by pram » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 3:39 PM UTC

tchalla wrote: post #537

vidarh wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with Google (in the UK) was an interviewer who asked a very similar question, among a number where he was clearly unprepared to deal with answers that weren't 100% as expected, and asked questions that had basically no relevance to the role. The experience was so bad that afterward I sent a lengthy email to the recruiter thanking her but pointing out I expected to fail the interview because the intervie…

> In the end I declined, as the first interviewer would have been one of the people I'd have managed, and I just did not want to deal with a team with a person like that, Oh, I can totally empathise with you because I've been there. I applied for a position which was the head of a team and a future direct asked me esoteric statistical questions from his PhD thesis. I did quite well to answer most of them but he wasn'…

I love when you can tell an interview question is someones very personal pet issue that no one on earth could reasonably care about.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#819

Post by eh9 » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

I get so jealous of my mechanical/structural engineering friends who's interviews usually span one or two rounds, and they're never asked for anything resembling spec work.

Hiring should never take more than a day or two of interviews.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#820

Post by mrits » Mon, Aug 02, 2021, 3:47 PM UTC

neilv wrote: post #323

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 entire question was: What's not in a Linux inode? Were they considering you as an experienced developer of a Unix/Posix filesystem, who would almost certainly know what an inode is? Or were they considering you as someone who had been using a Unix so long and extensively that you had a chance of once having had to configure an older filesystem for huge numbers of inodes. Or a chance that, for some rare reason,…

technically the filename can be in the inode. Just depends on the filename.