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Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

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Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

#821

Post by tluyben2 »

decafninja wrote: post #686
tluyben2 wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if that is FAANG or US but nah; I recommend people and people recommend me to large corps and the interview is pleasant banter and nothing else. If I see a whiteboard I would walk out anyway; what is this, grade school? If my resume and references do not help then I have no interest working for you.

I'm sure there are still companies like that out there, but getting fewer and fewer. My current company (bank, non-tech) hired like that when I joined 5+ years ago. At most you would have gotten some language or framework trivia questions. Fast forward to today, and interviews are now all leetcode on whiteboard - just like a FAANG, albeit easier with lower standards. My direct manager and half my team is in London, s…

Maybe time to look for my pension then! But no, I do not have the same experience; when I recommend someone (always seniors though; you sound like one), they do not have to do that. Another way to avoid (in recent experience) is to apply for positions as an agency (so a consultancy company which might be a one person company but looks like a pro outfit, website wise), work for 3 months (none of our people ever got interviewed: they trust us to have done that) and then apply for a job. Skip all the hiring bollocks as you already worked there and with the team etc. Again, not speaking for FAANGs.

Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

#823

Post by tchaffee »

xwolfi wrote: post #799
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #115

I conducted a couple hundred interviews for my first FAANG employer, and I was constantly amazed at the percentage of candidates with years of Microsoft or Facebook experience on the resumes who apparently did not know how to program. I always thought, 'huh, guess I know why they quit after 3 years, amazing that they all lasted this long." Then I interviewed for another company and utterly bombed. It became suddenly…

What some of us do now is at home exercises with no deadline and setup the interview to do a code review of it after it's given back. It gives so many advantages: - people will have some fun trying to solve a real issue / build a little software - they will show how good they are at stack overflow, general methodology, cleanliness, test coverage, deployment and even git (how many we see who can't even gitignore their…

I recently did one of these where I was paid at half the hourly rate of the job offer. There was an initial unpaid assignment that was difficult but totally related to most engineers' day to day work. That took less than 30 minutes. Anyone who passed that got the paid assignment which took a few hours.

Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

#824

Post by BeetleB »

benburleson wrote: post #280
chpmrc wrote: post #138

It seems pretty obvious to me that this kind of interviews are simply there to assess how much you want to work for a certain company. As in: would you be willing to study for months, go through mock interviews, read books, test your skills etc. to have a shot at working for us? Even though the majority of that stuff will likely have zero impact on your day to day work? That's all there is, really. I've had no proble…

Amazon is the king of assessing how much you want to work for the company. The recruiter will place a huge emphasis on nailing their Leadership Principles, and coming up with stories from your work to demonstrate you embody the Principles. They will even tell you that specific interviewers have specific LPs they will probe on, but in the actual interview they ask very veiled questions and you're supposed to know that…

I'm pretty sick of Amazon recruiters.

They often initiate contact. I respond. And they don't respond back.

Even worse is when they do. Several times in the past year I had a back and forth with some recruiters, did an online and/or phone screen, and they said "OK, you've passed all the screens, and we're ready to schedule you for an on-site. You'll get a call to schedule it." I never get the call and the recruiter stops responding.

Then the next recruiter that talks to me asks "I see you were ready for an on site but didn't have any. What happened - did you withdraw?"

My response has always been "You tell me. The recruiter stopped responding to me."

This is always followed by profuse apologies. And then it happens again.

A friend of mine suggested I tell them "Can you ask the previous recruiter, and once you find out put it on my account?"

A few days ago I got this message from an Amazon recruiter (his first contact with me). After the initial introductions on who he is, etc:

---------------

Good Afternoon, I hope that this message finds you well and with an opened mind. My name is * and I am a Recruiter with Amazon’s Worldwide Operations – HR team We have an immediate need for a Software Development Engineer (SDE) with Amazon. Your background looks like a really good fit. I'd like to see if the role aligns with your next career move.

We currently have multiple locations; Seattle, Washington and REMOTE, we will provide relocation assistance if applicable.

I have included a link to the full job descriptions to give you more details on the team and position.

If you would like to move forward in the interview process, please provide answers to the intake questions down below and I’ll follow up with you on next steps. If you have an up to date resume please send that as well.

(1) The best phone number AND email to contact you?

(2) Do you have any pending offers at this time and, if yes, what the deadlines are?

(3) Do you need, or will you need in the future, any immigration-related support or sponsorship from Amazon in order to begin or continue employment with Amazon and when does your sponsorship expire?

(4) Are you open to relocation?

(5) What are your salary requirements(range)?

(6)What coding language do you have the most experience with?

(7)Do you have experience using Cloud Platforms(AWS, MS Azure, Google Cloud)?

(8) Have you recently been in contact with someone at Amazon?

(9) Is most of your experience Back-End or Front-end and what Percentage?

(10) Do you have experience with System Design and how many years?

(11) Scale 1-5(5 being the best) how comfortable are you with Data Structures and Algorithms

For some reason if you are happily employed but know of someone with a similar skill set please send them my information.

Thanks

---------------

So let me guess: I'll spend the time responding to all his questions, and never hear from him again. Sorry, not bothering.

Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

#826

Post by ornornor »

xwolfi wrote: post #801
ccajas wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People easily identify that white-boarding interviews suck for more than just the interviewee. And yet any time a solution is proposed that involves doing something other than putting the candidate in a room in front of a whiteboard for an hour, it's shot down. Most people take issue with the repetition of similar tests and evaluations for multiple companies. If A, B, and C were considered different stages of a tec…

Heh, another thing is variable salary on a test period. Like how I was recruited out of uni, on a 6 month cheap internship barely paying a rent, with 0 commitment from the company to keep me. Long enough to evaluate me, see me contribute, teach me part of the sytem, not long enough to "exploit" me. We could scale this to 3 months on 80% salary (whatever the company is comfortable spending on throwaway) with the full…

Isn’t that exactly what probation is for, although for full salary? To evaluate the new employee and lay them off if they don’t meet the requirements? Disagree with the discounted salary, if 20% for three months is going to break the bank, the company probably won’t be around much longer anyway.

Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

#827

Post by twicetwice »

fuzzythinker wrote: post #815
twicetwice wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to give advice on gaming the system—I'm sorry if I came across that way. The point I was trying to make was much closer to your first line—that the current interviewing system rewards confidence and communication skills, and that debate helped me build those. Ironically, I wish I had communicated that better :) Also, I agree that there are drawbacks to doing debate. For one, there's a certain "debate kid…

Thank you for clarifying and confirming my other fear of undesired debate mentality. FYI, it's a good idea to edit your HN profile. When you write good comments, people may check it.

Thank you for the feedback—genuinely. I always appreciate feedback given in good faith.

What kind of edits do you have in mind? I somewhat-deliberately kept my profile vague, but I'm definitely open to suggestions on how to improve it.

Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

#828

Post by perl4ever »

OliverJones wrote: post #551
koheripbal wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One trend I've noticed that is markedly different from when I started programming in 1998, is how dependent we've become to program via Google/StackExchange searches. I'm not sure I know how to write anything from scratch anymore, because I just search/read/alter/test. The breadth of what I work on is 100x wider than it used to be, and so I've become absolutely dependent on quickly reading docs, copying code found on…

I've been doing this for a LOOONG time. Early on, the core skill for a programmer was intensive in-depth knowledge of the language being used. We all talked a good game about what we called "reusable software," but yeah. Talk. Now things are TOTALLY different. Doing a good job requires extensive, encyclopedic, knowledge of what's out there, how well it works, and how to integrate it. npm, nuget, maven, anaconda, we a…

>Doing a good job requires extensive, encyclopedic, knowledge of what's out there

I wouldn't say that. What I feel like I've accumulated in knowledge over time is I can look at a new problem and without having the solution/encyclopedic knowledge, I can know in my gut that (a) there is a solution, and (b) the solution I'm looking at is not the solution.

Merely being able to look up things on the internet without these two things means you will either give up too early or settle on the wrong solution.

This is the most succinct way I can describe what I think >a decade of experience is worth compared to being fresh out of college.

Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

#829

Post by tchaffee »

jarjoura wrote: post #600
tornato7 wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have rejected candidates for that. When you're hiring for a startup it's absolutely vital to have people who believe in the mission and the product and not just doing the bare minimum for a paycheck. If that's all you want, go work for the government, or Facebook.

Facebook has the same vital requirement that you believe in its mission. You wouldn't make it past the screening stage if you didn't care about that.

Its mission to sell advertising? People on both sides are lying when this question gets asked and answered.
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